I open my paper dry eyes to another brand new day in a brand new year. The pain in my head and my back is gone, thankfully. The bed is warm and comfortable, unlike New Year’s Eve when I lay sweating and feverish and the heat from my body felt intense but artificial. The flu had lasted a total of four days. On the first day I woke up nose all itchy and runny more like an allergy at play from some pesky dust mites or wrongly consumed food. Later at full force, there would be nothing playful about it which confined me in bed like a corpse to a coffin, my physical world at once shrunk within the four corners of my blanket. The aches were the worst. I felt like there was a big bruise at the back of my head and someone was kneading away at it, trying to make me feel better but actually killing me. There’s more of the same shit in smaller knots all over my shoulders and back. I was quite dizzy all the time and had only a quarter of my usual energy level.
What a way to start the year. Being there in bed, unfit and somewhat discarded by the active physical world, I had many thoughts slipping in and out of my head as I lolled between the borders of wake and sleep. Different parts of my life would creep up on me and I see them like selected scenes from a movie, people and voices. Those were not comedic or heart warming scenarios. It’s an unsettling world in there, behind my closed eyelids.
I’ve come to realise that life is full of battles to be faced alone because oftentimes, our greatest enemy is really ourselves. In this day and age we’re more spiritual and philosophical, and we pride ourselves on being our best rival, but this does not guarantee that we wouldn’t hurt ourselves crazy playing the role of our greatest critic. It’s me I don’t like to be stuck with sometimes, me, so brutally honest to myself, that my wrath, envy and pride could strut brazenly in their naked glory. And that morbid, masochistic mind that made me witness over and over, words that I wished I never said, expressions I wish I have never seen and that uncontrollable frustration that made me want to tear my skin apart and with my bare fingernails.
I jumped from one random torturous thought to another, slicing through time and space, physically turning my face away when I could no longer bear the anguish, but what good would that do since those were but intangible thoughts in the first place?
I wonder if I am alone in having thoughts like that. Irksome matters that give so much dread and gloom.
Anyhow, I think I was purging all the sickness from my body and soul before the Chinese New Year. And I am glad. Because for a moment I did not know how I was going to react to this influx of negativity. I lugged it around for a while even after I recovered from the flu, easily accustomed to its weight. But in the end, I did the most over stated, under rated thing, I high-fived with the self-help section at the bookshop and shifted my point of view.
I’m not sure how it happened and when exactly but I would like to think that 2008 has matured me and like a little piece of cheese or a glass of wine, I am better. I manage detractors better because I manage my mind better. It is still a little bizarre to me, this managing my mind thing. I liken it to the fifth day of the new year, a fresh Monday when I was given back my health, I felt like I was wearing a new piece of skin and I had to get used to flexing my fingers and toes. It is almost unbelievable that such dexterity could return after the spate of warfare with the flu virus. I thought things like optimism belonged to people of a different make, but hey, I was only discriminating against myself... so there, happy New Year. May it only get better.
