On being single again after all these years

I’ve recently found myself single again after 7 years of being in a relationship. It’s been a rollercoaster ride. On one hand, the feeling of not having to answer to anyone, nor be obligated to anything is so liberating. On the other hand, I sometimes feel heartbroken, disappointed, lost, sad or just plain confused.

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[endif]I’ve tried to repress negative emotions, tried to fill up the sadness with friends, activities and distractions, but when I take away the noise, a sinking feeling, the feeling of having an uncertain and potentially lonely future grips me even worse than before. There’s no running from it, so I just allow myself to feel. The point is to experience it, but then let it go.

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[endif]Strangely, my helper who is from Sri Lanka and is around my mom’s age, cried over the break-up too. She called me sobbing and asked me why I was removing so many of my belongings from the house. She must have looked at all my photos, clothes and stuff and felt my residual sad energy in them. She even called my ex on a separate occasion and neither of us felt like we owed her an explanation. It was sweet of her to be so sensitive about it.

 Anyway, after our break-up, I relocated to one of our pre-renovated real estate projects. My temporary home is an old Chinese flat which hasn’t been touched in decades. It still has the original jalousie windows and the old small tiles on the floor. My friends who have seen the place have made comments like ‘Wow-you’re really slumming it.’ ‘This place looks like the scene of a horror movie’ or ‘My God, this place is so seventies, I feel like I’m in a room in the Hong Kong History museum!’ I don’t care. I think the place has a lot of character and I really liked the elderly couple we bought the place from.

 I've been reading Eckhart Tolle' s book "A New Earth" and it's really helping my stay 'present' and helping me separate things that matter and things that don't. It's incredible the things that the ego makes you do and feel.Anyway, a coping method I’ve adapted is to think of myself as an actress in a movie. I’m actually not me, but a spectator in my own drama. One day, I was having a particularly rotten day and my face was puffy from having cried so much. I wanted to document how I was feeling so I picked up my camera and took these self-portraits.

I now have this idea to actually turn this concept into a real photo shoot called Alone. (The upside of being sad is that it’s a great source of inspiration…)- The photo shoot will involve crazy hair, duct tape, and a straight jacket.

Anyway, sadness is just part of being human and like all things, even life itself- this too will pass.

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