My Blue Heaven

Being A Creator

I’ve been contemplating the concept of creativity lately. My theme for 2019 is Create. One of my ways of being (ie how I most want to show up in the world – a concept I learned in The Holiday Council) for both last year and this year is “creative”. Thinking back, I have always had the urge to create and to express myself through my creations. It could be writing a blog, creating a video blog, making music, dancing, taking photos for my instagram.. there’s always been something.

But in the most recent years, I feel like I’ve lost a bit of that personal touch. Perhaps I simply turned inward for some time, as I delved into the last 3-4 years of personal development and growth. Perhaps it was that I was swept up, along with the rest of the internet, in the whole social media persona game. Only presenting my very best curated self to the world. And being real somehow became scary. What did I have to offer that was relevant or worthwhile in today’s competitive information-overloaded world, where everyone and their pet has a blog/insta/snapchat/twitter? I’d like to recapture the charm of my old blog posts, but does anyone in the blogosphere really care about what I ate or how my workout went anymore? It’s hard to compete with “Top 5 Ways To Live Your Best Life” (or insert any other topic of self-improvement / life hack / body sculpting / career coaching etc) type of blogs out there. But perhaps it’s not about competing at all. Creating is simply about courageously offering what only you can offer. As Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, “Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?”

Serendipitously, whilst chewing on the self-doubt that crept its way into my mind, I discovered a mention on twitter from 2 months ago which I’d completely missed.

Apparently, my anecdotal personal creations and overwhelming desire to share my life with the world-wide-web inspired someone and changed their life for the better 9 years ago. Wow. That was an emotional moment for me. Especially when they told me I make the world a better place. Nobody has ever said that to me before – whether about my online creations or in real life!

Well.. if that isn’t a sign from the universe that my creations matter to someone..

I guess I have the answer to my doubts. I guess I will keep being a creator.. both because of the positive effect it can have on someone’s life and because it is inherently part of who I am. We are all creators deep down.

Blog Revival?

Been reading through my old blog posts from early-mid 2000s recently and they make me smile and reminisce. They’ve also inspired me somewhat. I’m feeling the urge to blog again. But I don’t want my posts to be polished, overly edited in that “journalism” way. I don’t want to feel pressured to write something deep and meaningful. I want them to be like my old blog posts – authentic, quirky, conversational, real.. a snapshot into my life at that moment, on that day.

I’ve attempted to revive my blogging habit a few times over the years but they’ve always fizzled out. Let’s see if this attempt sticks. The internet is a very different beast these days. I kinda miss the old days. There was a lot of charm in the blogosphere back then. An innocence and childlike wonder in sharing one’s life on the internet and just seeing if it connects or resonates with someone.

Ok so, in the spirit of old blogging days. Tonight I watched Alita with my partner and his friend. Interesting movie. I’m totally not an anime/manga watcher/reader so I went in with zero expectations. I do like all things sci-fi and fantasy so it was enjoyable for me but… I just found the ending a bit.. unsatisfying.

Well, it’s late. Bedfordshire for me.

A Letter To The Past

I wrote a letter to my past self during a self development online course I did last year called The Joy Equation. This letter was our homework exercise for the first week “Develop Fierce Self Love”, which focused on cultivating a strong sense of self-worth, developing inner resilience and practice kindness towards yourself without an agenda of improvement. It was truly an eye opening week for me, opening me to some pretty deep soul searching down memory lane. One big AHA moment was the realisation that my high school experiences when I was 14 (lasting 2 years) lead me to form a certain belief about myself that simply was not true.. it was where I lost my sense of worthiness. And it was a belief that rooted itself deep within me, forming much of who I am today – and though my adult mind knows it is not true, changing it is not easy and is a work in progress. The task was to write a letter to my past self – showering her with understanding, forgiveness and hope.

…

I am enough – My Manifesto

I am enough

I am radiant and delight in experiencing life’s journey to the full. I wholeheartedly give love and crave being loved. I long for authentic, meaningful, intimate connections. I am kind, genuine and sensitive. I am also insecure and needy. I am still enough.

I can be quite reserved and shy, and maybe it makes me come across as unfriendly. But I can also be completely uninhibitedly silly around those I trust. I let people in with my whole heart once I trust them. I am playful, witty, affectionate and sometimes downright childish. I am afraid of confrontation and conflict. I am still enough.

I am a woman. The divine feminine, emotional, sensual. I love feeling beautiful, sexy and strong. I am indulgent, sometimes vain and attention seeking. I am also highly logical, geeky, slightly Type A and I love to plan. I can be controlling, overthink things and a perfectionist. I love with an open heart even if I am hurting. I am messy, usually running late and have a terrible tendency to hoard stuff. I am still enough.

I am intelligent, hard working, driven and push myself to do my best if I am passionate about what I am doing. I believe I can do anything I truly set out to achieve. I am capable and I am badass. But if I am unstimulated I lack self control and easily become bored and unmotivated. I too often procrastinate boring “adulting” tasks. I can be overly critical and judgemental – of both myself and others. Yet I am still enough.

I accept that practicing joy and gratitude when things don’t go well is never going to be easy. I too often compare myself with others or seek external validation. I accept that sometimes I feel so isolated, depressed and lonely that I don’t know what to do with myself. I accept that life is messy and painful, sometimes as the result of my own big mistakes, and I am going to inevitably feel sadness and regret as a part of learning and growing. I also know that I can find peace and centering in healthy activities like yoga & meditation, and I am grateful for emotional release in artistic expressions like playing piano, dance and aerial arts. I also accept that sometimes I just need to distract myself with some netflix, a glass of wine or indulge in a pampering massage. I am still enough.

I am obsessed with good coffee, good food, yoga, doing physically challenging things in general, journalling and my gorgeous kitty cat Miss Ella. I love feeling the warm summer sun on my skin and swimming in the sea. I am an Aussie beach babe at heart. I am a city girl too. I love deep soul baring conversations. I love travelling and exploring this wonderfully beautifully diverse world around us. I love just being at home, cooking a delicious meal and snuggling with my man. I am warm, present, introspective, joyfully appreciating, soul searching, loving and living. I am an introverted, artistic ISFP in love with the world around me – it’s taste, touch, smell and sound.

And I am enough.

(Inspired by a blog post written by the amazing & inspiring Molly Mahar, founder of Stratejoy.com, whose courses & encouragement has helped me over the past 6 or so months get through one of the most difficult phases of my life.)

They Weren’t There

You breathed infinity into my world
And time was lost up in a cloud and in a whirl.
We dug a hole in the cool grey earth and lay there for the night.
Then you said, “wait for me we’ll fly the wind,
We’ll grow old and you’ll be stronger without him” but oh,
Now my world is at your feet. I was lost and I was found,
But I was alive and now I’ve drowned.
So now I will be waiting for the world to hear my song
So they can tell me I was wrong…

But they weren’t there beneath your stare,
And they weren’t stripped ’till they were bare
Of any bindings from the world outside that room.
And they weren’t taken by the hand and led through fields
Of naked land where any pre-conceived ideas were blown away…
So I couldn’t say “no”.

Now playing: “They Weren’t THere” – Missy Higgins

Any Day Now

How long, how long, how long will we take to come undone?
If you know the answer tell me now and I’ll write up a calendar for our count down.
‘Cos what if what we see is all, is all we’ve got?

Say you’ve kept some fire aside to set light to me some surprising night.
And say you’ve locked some fire away to set light to me some surprising day,
To me some surprising day… any day now.

Missy Higgins – “Any Day Now”

Ruminations

(Warning: melancholy ruminations ahead)

People have sometimes wondered, have even mentioned to me in the past that I come across a bit reserved or closed. That it’s like I’m holding back.

I’m not like that with the few people I trust and know very well (quite the opposite in fact), but I guess I’ve just had too many bad experiences with “friends”. Where I start to become comfortable with people, showing who I really am… I let my guard down, I become myself, I start to trust… and time and again (for reasons unknown to me) it’s turned people away. People that I thought were my friends. And I wonder if people will ever like me for who I am. Or if there is simply something wrong with me. It’s an experience I’ve had since I was a child. I remember very well the first time it happened. I was 11 and in my final year of primary school. For reasons still unknown to me, my friends turned against me and I was alone. I thought to myself – well that’s fine, I’m leaving here soon to go to high school, I can leave all this behind and start fresh. But it happened again. This time I was 14. I remember the day it happened. All too well. It was worse this time – for 2 years I was “friendless” at school. Do you have any idea how this affects your self-confidence at that tender age? I don’t think I’ve ever fully recovered from it (ha.. obviously not judging from this blog post). And again I don’t know what I did wrong. Why it happened.

This never really happened to such extremes again – I guess because as people grow older they become a bit more aware of socially correct behaviour and less peer pressure minded, and also I eventually learnt to put up a barrier. A version of myself that was safe.. that people seemed to like. Though it took a while for me to develop this, working through many insecurities along the way. And I must admit, I have long lost my trust in “friendships”. It’s funny many girls lose trust in guys. I lose trust in… people. But strange enough, my romantic relationships are fine!

Anyway.. back to the present. Even now, sometimes, I have seen “the change” in people, a subtle change in their behaviour towards me. And I still experience disappointment when I let my guard down. Gosh I make it sound like I’m hiding a monster inside but it’s not the case at all. At least I hope not (ha see I can even joke about it a bit now)! It’s a lot more subtle now, to the point where I am not even sure if I am being overly sensitive and imagining it.

This post wasn’t meant to be all about my demons from the past. But I guess the memories were stirred by recent experiences in my life. My feeling/dread that maybe some things will never change no matter how old we grow. That maybe I will never be able to be myself with all my friends. Should I even call them friend’s if this is the case? And that perhaps I’m in for a long and lonely existence. Maybe it’s partly self inflicting. Maybe it’s a vicious circle? I thought I had broken out of it for a few glorious months during my last few months in Sydney. They were the happiest months of my life. But since coming to London, that all evaporated. What I do know, is that most people I know would be quite surprised by all these.. thoughts.. of mine. Maybe they just have the wrong girl.

So the floodgates open but nothing comes out
I’m feeling no relief in my head, just doubt
But my heart keeps telling me ‘hold your ground
You’ll never learn a thing if you bail out now’

Yet hold me against the light
And do you see any bullet inside?
Wouldn’t find one if you magnified
Because you’ve got the wrong girl

Missy Higgins – “The Wrong Girl”

Hope

First there was innocence, hope
But then came disappointment and hurt
Sadness, loneliness and depression followed
Eventually turning into anger, resentment
And finally bitterness
But yet, behind all the protective layers
There still hides that little girl with hurt innocent eyes
Looking out at the world
In hope

Bloggers Paradox : Version 2010

Every so often I get reminded of the importance of keeping my online persona separate from my real life person. And its becoming increasingly harder in this highly social-media-obsessed age where many people simply do not understand this concept. For them, facebook and twitter is synonymous with other normal social activities like txting your mates. But a few years or more ago, when terminology such as “tweeting” were not mainstream nor common place, it was actually quite the norm for us online bloggers and vloggers to keep a bit of a “low profile” on our online activities in our “real life”. Of course we interacted with fellow bloggers/vloggers/tweeters in the blogosphere but when it came to friends or colleagues from real life, it was as if our online persona’s did not exist. Like we had secret identities. Hence the choice of username was quite important as it was a representation of one’s identity. (Facebook had to go and fubar that idea out the window with their standard of using your real first and last name in your profile.. now ppl even sign up to twitter with their real names. Fools.)

I remember the days of regularly tweeting in secret, knowing that most people around me I interacted with on a regular basis had no idea about this cool little thing called twitter (and before that, it was blogging) which I used to blip (or blog) out random brain farts about anything and everything in my life to strangers-yet-somehow-friends from all over the world, and gain insight in return as I tuned in to their thoughts. It was refreshing. There was a liberating level of honesty gained by anonymity. I’m not talking honesty as in, here’s my address, my personal details, my bank details etc. But honesty in thought and emotion. What I “really” thought about something and how I felt personally. Sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly in a way that people rarely seem to share about in real life (or if they do, they do so foolishly – lamebook is a perfect exhibition of that). Particularly when it comes to the bad and the ugly. 😉

So before I get too carried away with nostalgia, where am I going with all this? Is this about the blogger’s paradox once again? I have visited this issue over and over again.. way back in 2003 and 2004 I blogged about this paradox. It hasn’t really been too much an issue the past few years, but maybe I have been lulled into a sense false security. I am aware that I have broken my own cardinal rule left, right and center. (This being, never to share anything identified by my username with people I meet in real life.) And with everyone around me being blatantly open about their online presences, it’s quite hard to maintain that kind of discipline. It’s all too tempting to want to share my creations, be it video or text, with people I meet IRL. Afterall, I am quite proud of some of them. But I am glad that I have held back sometimes. And I am reminded again of the importance in holding back, even when you feel that you trust a person, you never know. Because this is what I am discovering currently in a certain situation with a certain friend. I thought this person was trustworthy but now I am discovering she is not quite as.. reliable a friend.. as I thought. And I am quite glad I did not share my “online persona” with her. I am glad I have kept that line between online and offline. Yes it’s more work and maintenance, but I think its worth it and I think, for now, I need to remain disciplined.

(Edit: I just realised my last blog post was in January. Really.. how does 6 months go by just like that..)

Happy (Belated) New Year

Hm… 6 months no blog. Oops. Bad Kazzart! Well I wanted to continue with my tradition of writing a happy new year blog post. Granted this one is somewhat belated, but hey, better late than never right? 🙂

So.. Happy 2010 one and all! Hope people are having a good start to the year. Actually (if anyone is still reading this blog) I’d be very interested to hear about your new years resolutions. I’ve been giving mine a great deal of thought and I’m not sure I’ve come to a concrete resolution yet. Maybe by the end of this blog post I’ll have a better idea?

One thing I am sure of is the general idea of what I want this year. My focus for 2010 will be on quality of life. To prioritise my life so that I don’t end up ignoring what is important to me because I’m spending so much time on things that creep and take over my life. For example, last year I ended up working late much too often and that had a negative impact on my health and body – I was tired and sick a lot, and I never had time to exercise (which is really important for my back problems), either because I was too busy, or too tired, or sick. Well, enough of that!! I’m not getting any younger, having just turned 31 (argh!!), and I refuse to give in to age. I refuse to settle for a mediocre life with mediocre health & mediocre fitness. I refuse to spend most of the year trying to combat my colds and/or combat the pain in my back! (Actually I’ve become quite good at back pain and cold management now).

To help me flesh out my idea of having a better quality life, I recently purchased a book called Brilliant Life: How to live a brilliant, balanced life. I’ve only just started reading it, but will report back on it when I’ve read more.

For now, my idea of having a better quality of life includes achieving some (hopefully all!) of the following:

• No more workaholic Kazz! More focus on personal activities (the things I actually love), less focus on work.
• Get fit, get healthy.. stay fit, stay healthy! This includes regular yoga, cardio/training, and swimming at the gym. I know I can’t do it all straight away, but the plan is to gradually increase my workouts from once to twice to three times a week.
• Dance more often with more variety – keeping up my samba and salsa, getting back into hiphop and jazz and hopefully lambada (if my back/neck issue gets fixed by improving my fitness)! Of course I can’t do it all every week, but over the first month I hope to attend a good selection of different dance classes to start, and then I’m sure I will settle into a regular pattern of those which I enjoy and benefit from most, interjecting them every now and then with something different to keep me on my toes (so to speak ;))!
• Get back into playing piano – and then later this year, start some sort of music project (either by myself or with other musicians)
• Sleep earlier on work nights – VERY IMPORTANT! I can’t function if I don’t get enough sleep which renders the 3 previous points incapacitated
• Make vlogs again – I have been looking over some of my old video blogs and the creativity I put into them. I realised, I don’t want to stop being creative! I enjoy it and I take pride in my creations. So my youtube viewers should be happy with this one. 😉 But yes, I want to continue to create videos.. especially now I have a shiny new 16:9 digital camera to play with.
• Nuture and develop the few female friendships I have. I don’t have many friends in London, and I realise now that it is unrealistic to expect the same wide circle of friends that I had in Sydney, seeing as I spent 20 years of my life growing up there. So my aim instead will be to nuture the rare friendships I *have* made here – at the moment there are 2 or 3 girls with whom I plan to make sure I spend time with and get to know better. Maybe even organise a regular girls night out with the 4 of us. Oooh.. maybe even a girlie club of sorts.. à la Jane Austen Book Club.

All of these should be made easier now by the simple fact that I have just moved in with the boyf. Yep big news! We did it the first weekend after NY. I’ve now moved into a house recently purchased by my boyfriend, in central London. This will make my life SO much easier – no more going back and forth between my place and his, splitting my time, packing overnight bags.. no more daily commute from the outskirts of London. I’m now much closer to work, to my dance classes and to the salsa nights we attend. 🙂 Of course it’s not gonna be all smooth sailing – we have a myriad of home rennovations to complete – we’re re-doing the kitchen and bathroom, we have to furnish the living room and tennants room (we’re renting one room out). I’m up to my eyebrows in home improvements right now. Learning all sorts about kitchen laminate work tops, cabinets, where the boiler can and can’t go, the inordinate cost of modern bathroom sinks and ceiling halogen spotlights etc etc etc. So that is the main reason it’s been a slow start to 2010 for us. But believe you me, I WILL achieve what I want this year!

This is Kazzart, signing out. See ya’s in the blogosphere. 🙂