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April 15, 2005
On the Mend?
Maybe this comes with age, but it seems as though I have fallen in love with bread once again. Had bread (or rather buns stuffed with meat, kaya and other fillings) for breakfast and had almost the same combination again for dinner.
The session was quite fun today, but I could not help noticing the changes involving the people. It made me wonder if I was the one being stuck back in time for having not changed or that they were moving on with life at a much faster pace. However, after telling them about the eventful (but somewhat anxious and lonesome) weekend that I experienced, the group surprised me a little by doing something about it. Perhaps I am being harsh here, but when I told an earlier group about this on Wednesday, all I got were a comment here, a remark there and a guffaw for all my efforts in self-deprecating humour (which I used sparingly while talking about the scare). Maybe it was an inappropriate moment to talk about my weekend scare to them while they were having their dinner right smack in the middle of a food centre.
So, I was pretty touched when the second group did that thing. I could have shed a tear or two out of gratitude on the spot, just because they cared (when I had shut out most around me). Then again, I am an adult male and adult males would rather shed blood than to cry (following a popular Chinese saying). However, the words “let there be a lesson which D W could learn from this” resonated in my mind over and over again during the remainder of the evening.
Yes, life is precious. Yes, there are many things I have yet to do or experience in this life. The sad thing is in their mind, I am the quiet, aloof, weird but relatively harmless bloke, and not the depressive, suicidal and whining human.
On the other hand, my gaffer’s gaffer at work seemed to be taking my flippant remarks a little more seriously recently. It started with me telling him almost nonchalantly that I was depressed on a few occasions. Then, I upgraded the remark, involuntarily, to “I am suicidal”. It prompted him to throw in a few choice words along the lines of “whatever it is, it shall pass” and invited me to have a chat in his cubicle, which I refused politely. Then, during times when I was a little restless, I would hop on over to another colleague’s cubicle for a short chat. Most of the time, we would have a little harmless banter with each other, but recently, I have been making remarks to her about the direness of my situation, using simple analogies. Things came to a head today when I kept telling her to donate more “white money” for my funeral.
If I were to simply load off 90% of the stuff which have been bugging me, I would most likely break down emotionally. Yet, because of the wall I have erected around me, to protect others from my (probably senseless and mostly unbeneficial) whines and to protect myself, I will either load off a little or two by turning them into bits and pieces of self-deprecating humour (also known as my “Joke of the Day” series) or just keep mum about it.
I guess my philosophy is simply “When things go bad, I blame myself and I hurt myself”.
Posted by D W at April 15, 2005 12:53 AM