"If you're going through Hell, keep going.": sheep

About Me.

Background

My name is Michael Rivera and I am a Filipino-Chinese, 18-year-old student living in Canterbury, but originally from Hong Kong. My parents divorced when I was two, and when I grew up, there were two sides of me: the wild, outdoorsy, gutsy side, and the conservative, intellectual, scholarly side. I spent two years living beside a beach in the countryside. It was then that I learned how to swim, how to fish and how to ride a bike. I love the outdoors, especially when having barbecues and hiking. Outside of that time, my more studious side of me reads, writes, and has a great interest in a broad range of subjects including: television and film, travel, anthropology, human cultures, linguistics, food and drink, psychology, philosophy, literature, forensics, Greco-Roman mythology, European history and politics, South American culture and geology. My deepest love goes to, well, my best friend. But the love that exists just a tiny fraction below that amount of love goes to television series, beautiful beaches, lime margaritas, and books considered classics.

Feel free to e-mail me if you have anything you want to share, suggest, criticize, inquire or comment on! :D

E-mail: scylla.michael.charybdis@gmail.com

(Click this sentence to see my complete profile.)

Friday, December 12, 2008

19 - Leave me alone.

What is it about getting other people to understand how we feel that is so important? Why does every single person find themselves, every now and then, in a position where somebody just doesn't understand how we can see things differently to them? What is it about pushing our views on to others that is so satisfying, gratifying, amazingly pleasing?

This is something that I've been thinking about lately because it seems like no matter what I try to do, I can't seem to be able to step in another person's shoes, per se, and make them feel assured because I'm there - to listen, to comprehend and to care. All I can do is try to give them what they want to hear, or show them what they want to see, but do I really know what it's like to be them?

No.

And it's not possible to do so ever. And I feel so damn useless when someone gets disappointed by me, when they think that I'm wrong about the way I see things and when they think that I'm the one that's not accustomed to thinking the way they think, the way it's 'right' to think.

It pains me because I don't go around telling people that they should change the way they are. I don't see why people want me to listen and want my sound advice, if they're not willing to do the same. It seems like no matter how many times I tell people to try and understand me, they go off telling me that I live in my own little world, that I'm self-centered and my views are just so different from the norm as if that's a bad thing. It's my uniqueness that carries me through life. I don't want to be another sheep. How dare somebody tell me that I need to change when it's essentially this character, my judgment and personality, that attracts them to me to ask for advice in the first place.

Why do I always have to be the one that understands you? Why do I always have to be the one that has to change? Is it really so hard for you to accept my quirks and my habits? Is it really so hard for you to understand? Is it really so hard for you to change?

I never ask these questions. You are who you are and you get to be whoever you want to be. Leave me alone. I like living in my own little world. It is what makes me independent, it is what makes me interesting and it is what makes me special.

Leave me the Hell alone.