my so-called life

letting go is always like a slow death. you "rip" a part of who you are so that it can become a part of who you have once been.

it doesn’t mean forgetting. It only means that you are allowing yourself to grow out of who you once were in order to be the person you were meant to be. we have to change. we have to grow up. that is what life is all about.

i believe we fall in love for a reason. that reason sometimes doesn’t translate into a "happy ever after." maybe it was good enough that you had "once upon a time" with that person.

you fall in love for the first time with your best friend. it doesn’t work out. maybe its because you were just meant to be that. the best of friends.

you stay in a relationship with a man you were once attracted to. but once the attraction fades, you have no other choice but to end it.

you fall in love with an ideal. and you commit to a man whom you think embodied that ideal. but when reality shows its face to you, you cannot help but sever ties.

that is what life is about.

more often than not, we fall for these "once upon a time" people so we could be the people we were meant to be.. the right kind of person for the one God has planned for us.

so its okay to let go. even better to transcend the pain that the end of a love affair would bring coz it leads you to where you are supposed to be.

post a comment for me on this one. a friend of mine wrote an article on this a few years back and i have selected portions of it to start the ball rolling. let me know what you think.

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To end a relationship is like committing murder.  It could be the cruelest thing you can do to a person.  It is death personified.

I know it is painful when someone you care for will leave you; when someone you love walks out of your life. I had experienced and suffered the feeling firsthand. It is tremendously heartbreaking. A sickening feeling of betrayal, of agonizing over broken hopes and shattered dreams.

But I never realized how much painful it is to leave somebody; to leave someone who for better or for worse had become an important part of my life.

At least, when you are the one being left behind, you have only to deal with your own wounded feelings, your broken expectations and your shattered pride. You would not have to face your conscience; you would not have to confront your sense of values, you would not have to scrutinize your orientation of what is right or wrong.

The one consolation of being wronged in a failed relationship is that you can blame the other person for it.  Whatever the reason it did not work out the way you want it to be, at least, it was not your fault. That it was not you who caused the ties to be severed, that your hands were not stained by the bitter blood of guilt. At least, as time would pass, you can make peace with yourself; and someday realize that somehow, what happened was for the best. — by NZL Nov1999

these were musings i wrote a few years back. come to think of it, the question still remains valid today..

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As members of the female sex, we have always been taught by our mothers and grandmothers that in relationships, we play a passive role.  Filipino society has all the more compounded this theory by stipulating that women must wait for the lover to woo them and to always play the game of courtship with a demure hand. This “secret” rule, so they say, has withstood the test of time and has allegedly been the way to snagging a husband. Men must play the hunter, and we women, must mysteriously prolong the chase, mimicking the primeval role of hunter and prey.

Most males opine that the chase seems to be essential as it sets the theme of the whole male-female relationship. The courtship must be prolonged to enhance the thrill and perhaps see the value of one’s object of affection.  Most relationships that are based on whirlwind courtships never seem to last as the fun is sucked out of a relationship much like water after the plug has been removed from the tub.

But in this day and age, when the recurring themes in literature and media and issue advocacy revolve around women empowerment, must a Filipina still play it coy?

what happens when you wake up one day and you realize that this image you have of your life could be shattered as easily as glass?

we live comfortably content on what is familiar to us that at times, we even take that reality for granted. its familiarity to us is like second skin that we hardly notice it. But when it is lost to us, we feel it profoundly. some would say, they are never the same after their comfortable reality has been shattered.

what do you do when you realize that your reality has been shattered like glass? do you weep while you frantically put the pieces back together? do you get angry and blame someone for it? or are you like some people out there, still "in denial" that the glass is broken, still projecting an image so that the world would not know your brokennes?

are you strong enough to accept that broken reality and try to create something new out something that’s broken? are you hopeful that out of a broken reality, something beautiful can still come out of it? Is that, if at all, possible?