Dear you back home...

Dear you back home,

Some nights, I lie down on my bed and close my eyes, and as I drift off to sleep, memories of you play in my head like I'm watching a movie, except they're more life-like. They seem so near and so real sometimes I almost think I can reach out and touch, hold, and hug you.

Then a cold draft, the whirring sound of my fan heater, and new music I discovered from new friends playing on Spotify pulls me back here, back to reality, and it hits me that it's been awhile since I left you, 7000 miles away. A very long while, actually.

It's even been a long while since we last talked. I know I might have seemed especially distant lately, but if it's any consolation, you're not the only one from home I've not spoken to in awhile. In fact, I haven't spoken to anyone back home if you don't count Facebook comments (I don't count them) in the last few weeks.

Part of me feels obliged to apologize for being such a lousy friend, daughter, sister. But another part of me knows that those who really matter won't need my apology, and they'd understand that sometimes it gets a little tough trying to live in two worlds, and sometimes detaching from one to fully focus on the other is the best way to cope, even if it is not the ideal way.

So I'm not going to apologize. I'm just going to say thank you for your kind thoughts, words, prayers, encouraging e-mails, letters, and gifts. I'm not going to promise to reply any of them before I get home, so I don't have to break any promises and because these next three months are going to fly by real quick and before I know it I'll see you in person and not have to spend so much time trying to articulate my thoughts in written words and type out all that I want to say to you.

I am also going to ask you, very humbly, for a few small favours, which I will be more than happy to return. All I ask is for you to please remember, when we do meet again, that these eight months abroad will have changed me, just as these eight months back home doing whatever it is you have been doing will have changed you, hopefully for the better. Some changes won't be better or worse. They'll just be changes, whether it's to my habits, preferences, reactions to the weather, perspectives, or ways of doing things.

Please don't expect me to remain the same because I won't expect you to have remained the same. I won't think I'm better than you just because I have had the opportunity to study abroad but it is very likely I will see things very differently because I've had that privilege. So please don't compare me to the person I used to be, because the person I used to be hadn't spent a year in a completely different culture and climate.

Please be mindful when talking about other people that even though I might have once stereotyped and judged people different from us with you, by the time I leave this international and diverse university I will likely call friends people similar to very ones we used to discriminate.

Also, please know you are still very important to me. However, there are and will be new people who are important to me, because they were present to witness a part of my life that you will only know secondhand, through my retelling of it. I will miss these people when I leave the UK as much as I missed you when I left Malaysia, and I will have inside jokes, memories, and secrets with these people that try as I may to explain to you (except the secrets because I'm a good secret-keeper :)), won't quite be the same. Please understand that doesn't make our relationship any less significant.

Finally, I hope you know that no matter how bad I may be at keeping in touch and articulating my thoughts in words (although I may be a journalist I still suck at communicating with regards to matters of the heart), you are thought of, appreciated, and loved, and even though I may not find the words to say or write to you, know that I can't wait to see and hug you in person.

If it feels like I don't want to chat with you or am disappearing every time you send me a message on Facebook, it's true. I don't want to chat over bloody Facebook. It feels so sterile, so impersonal, so cold. I want to wrap you up in a hug and shower you with kisses. I want to hear your Malaysian accent and make you laugh with my various fake sounding British / European accents.

But that won't happen till three months time, so if three months it has to be, then so be it. I'll see you soon, then. :)

All my love,
Crystal

What + if? = the power to change your life

Just before heading to church today I wrote a post about how all love stories essentially involve risk - and how risk is scary.

Imagine how timely it was to be sitting there on a Sunday morning and listening to the speaker talk about risk.

He used a quote from Letters to Juliet to illustrate this risk:

"'What' and 'If' are two words as non-threatening as words can be. But put them together side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life: What if? What if? What if?"

Uncertainty is scary. 'What if?' is scary. Because it involves not knowing how things will turn out. Which means things could turn out to be painful.

Then he talked about passion.

He said that passion is not some feel-good emotion - it involves deep, intense suffering. I looked up the word and found that it is actually derived from the Latin word for 'suffer'.

But without that risk, without that passion, that suffering... we will never know what it means to venture out into the unknown anyway, and maybe find what you were looking for, hoping for, dreaming of, chasing down.

Someone asked me how I find the time to write so much. I said my writing was the product of sleepless nights. Adam Young of Owl City has confessed the same of his music. The most talented people I know do their thing as if it's second nature but behind the scenes, off the stage, what nobody sees are the hours upon hours of pure passion poured into their crafts.

Nothing worth having comes without sacrificing something.

Everyone who has found something worth living for - has found something risking and suffering for.

The question is, what are you taking risks and putting yourself through pain for? The wrong things? Nothing?

Those things say something about what you live for.

What if you don't let yourself be defined by others and dared to let your potential shine?

What if you were more afraid of not trying than of failing?

What if you spent as much time helping others as you spend focusing on yourself?

What if?

What if you weren't afraid to make mistakes and say sorry?

What if you were brave enough to face your past?

What if you looked into the mirror every morning and saw someone worth loving?

What if?