How Do You Manifest Closeness in Life?
The ways you treat things you love manifest the ways you treat everything important in your life
Recently I fell in love with organizing my bookshelf and applying adhesive book covers on some of my favorites. I started to “un-dogear” many of them — I used to use dog-ears as bookmarks for quick access to pages that had content I resonated with. Ironically, I rarely re-read books because there are many new books I want to read and I am a slow reader, both in my native language and English. I never seemed to find a time to re-appreciate the wisdom I found in these favorites. To deepen the irony, the dog ears gave me a false sense that I had internalized the wisdom when I bent the corners of those pages, so I didn’t feel a strong urge to slow down and read the sentences again. However, if I happened to take the time and re-read the lines, I often discovered that I had forgotten almost everything!
Let go of my shame for fine things
After I started practicing self-love and self-care, I noticed that I finally embraced my natural tendency of seeking solace in beautiful and elegant things. I used to think such taste was a weakness because I associated it with my failed career as a concept artist as well as being a “girl” growing up among boys.
Fortunately, in the past few months, I finally was able to step back from the dense emotional fog and recognized that: the taste I naturally have is 180-degree opposite to what the Gaming industry requested when I was a concept artist. My healing journey so far also has taught me that the “soft and gentle” side of me is precisely what will help me heal, not the “warrior” side which I had unnaturally held on to my detriment for too long.
As a result, I naturally started wanting to make my environment closer and closer to how I pictured my dream home would look. That includes — you guessed it — well-preserved books, respected wisdom.
Different ways of manifesting and achieving closeness
This self-discovery, or maybe more of a self-recognition, in my natural taste for fine things fundamentally changed the tone of my relationships with objects I enjoy and appreciate. I, or the “warrior” side of me, used to believe that, to truly bond with something and absorb its essence, I needed to “make it mine” through rough-handling and marking, so it has MY marks on it everywhere. That way, it holds the memories and interactions with me physically. Only then, I could truly be one with it.
As I was “un-dog-earring” my books, I suddenly realized that such a way was exactly how I had handled my close relationships too. A former acquaintance put it best:
“I thought I had to drag them through hell with me to prove they truly love me.”
Turns out that’s the fast track to losing the closeness we so desperately desired — from the internalization of the wisdom in a book, to the vulnerability between two people who care about each other.
On a deeper level, that was also how I had handled my relationship with myself — wearing pain like a badge, which turns into seeking more pain for an unhealthy sense of higher accomplishment.
Pain and roughness became a source of food to the insatiable demon called “ego” inside me, and I wondered why I was so miserable and didn’t know how to be happy.
Cultivate a new and nourishing world for my ego
Will I be now forever free of my ego’s grip? No, and that’s not the goal either. The goal is to be happy. Happiness to me means balance, peace, and being present. It has nothing to do with getting rid of what I feel proud about myself. In fact, it has a lot to do with what I feel proud about myself.
In that line of thought, maybe I could say that part of the goal is cultivating things that I am proud of to be those that are healthy, soothing, nourishing, and enriching — so I will hopefully be forever free of those that are not.
