36 - Life stories are meant to be told slowly.

Over the course of the past week, I have had a lot of thoughts on what to post on this blog but I haven't had the time to do it because of school. It's a shame, really, because now my mind is drawing a blank and I suppose it's just a result of using too much of my brainpower doing schoolwork. (Boy, I miss those holidays.)

So, as I sit here, cross-legged and hunchbacked on the end of my bed with my laptop, I'm thinking about my life (as I always do) and it feels like my life has stretched on forever. I know I will repeat this statement some other time. I know when I turn sixty, I will think to myself, Seventeen-year-old Michael, boy, you really had no idea how long life could be. But right now, I think I have the right to say that and think that. I feel I've had it longer than most seventeen-year-old people, and to me, these seventeen years feel like they've been going on forever. (I'm still not sure what I want to talk about in this post.)

Yes, seventeen years has been a long time. You see, that's just the thing. Where do I even begin to decide what to post about in this one? Who says one episode of my life deserves to be shared more than another episode? There are just so many episodes to choose from, so many of them interesting for readers and close to my heart.

I remember this one blogger whom I met when I first launched 'Do you hate it too?'. She was a girl, fifteen, with a somewhat dark and mysterious display picture. What struck me as odd and interesting about her was the way in which she laid out her entire life in bullet-point form in a single post. In that one entry, she stated that she had crappy parents, gotten pregnant, self-harmed, taken drugs and moved from place to place. I knew she was looking for answers by saying all that. I knew she was looking for someone to listen, maybe even to help. But to get help we need to know how to ask for it.

You see, I could do that. I could lay out my life in a single post. I'll do you one better: I can sum up my entire life into this paragraph: I was born in 1991 and my parents got divorced in 1993. I spent a year in Canada with my mom's family, then one year on the beach with my dad. Then I moved to my maternal grandparents' apartment, where I currently reside. I was clever and happy in primary school, and during that time, my mom brought me on many travels while my dad got remarried and had three daughters. I entered high school in 2002. I got suspended for theft in 2003. Someone pushed me out of the bisexual closet in 2004. I got expelled for theft in 2005. I was half an hour away from committing suicide on June 17, 2005. I entered a new school (the school I go to now) and there, I found friends and myself. My dad got divorced again and I won't forgive him. I like reading, watching television and blogging. Now, I'm clever and happy, just like in primary school, but even more so. I go to university soon.

You see that? You see how easy that was?

But where is the emotion? Where is the complexity in these issues? It just isn't there. And that's why I think that people need to learn how to stop moaning, complaining and throwing words like 'drugs', 'divorce' and 'suicide' around like they don't mean anything deep. Surely, they are the words you use to refer to these events, and I'm not discounting the fact that these things didn't make a huge impact on your life, but those words don't make up your life and they do not define you.

I take my blogging seriously and I know things need to be told slowly for people to welcome you, accept you and want to hear about you if you have a personal blog. I wonder if that girl still reads my blogs because I haven't seen her post anything or leave comments at all since the end of last October. But I hope she knows now that she can't expect people to listen if she overwhelms readers like that. Those who have been following my blogs for some time know what I'm like. People who know me in real-life know that 'bisexual', '17', 'teenager' and 'Asian' don't and cannot describe me well enough.

Those words are understatements of what it truly feels like to be those things. And it's about time some people learned that the true value of people's stories are in the ideas they put forward about their thoughts and feelings, that their life story's value does not lie in the bland words people assign to life-changing experiences. Otherwise, I would comprise a bunch of labels, like 'that boy with the divorced parents', 'the kid that got expelled', or 'that dumb blogger with that hate blog'.

So, anyway. That looks like a post so let's end it there. I look forward to learning more about all of your lives slowly and I will continue to take my time in introducing you to mine.