Adult Money.

By now, I'd become accustomed to the slight upward shift in countenance whenever people first learn that I am a lawyer, 6th year in practice.

 "Isn't it really long hours, fast-paced and demanding?"

 Yes, yes it is. Believe me, I could write a whole book on the toll it takes on you in every aspect of your life.

Why am I still in it for the long run? I don't know. Along with the the dignified sense that you're a learned member of society, the creative methods you have to employ to become a professional problem-solver, the different ways you narrate your Client's story to a curious Judge, the inevitable end result of your Client now becoming your enemy when it's time to ask for fees, the doing (and undoing) of multiple drafts before you come up with the perfect end product with a resounding sense of content in your chest where no words could do the feeling justice (pun unintended), the ever expanding vocabulary you have to accumulate to reflect a persuasive argument, the corporate coloured blazers, the office lunches and dinners with equal part pseudo laughs and awe, and maybe planning meetings centered around the checklist of cafes serving different coffees and burnt cheesecakes you have to tick off before you retire from the professional life for good, ... you get the idea. 

Sure there's the stress. 

Is my hair dropping in chunks, and simultaneously threatening to turn completely white? Yes. 

Am I the chunkiest weight I have been in life? Also yes. 

Is there a light to the end of this tunnel? We don't know.

But also, every once in a while, there is the fact that you are woken up by your natural body clock on a Saturday morning, no passive-aggressive boyfriend (or girlfriend) to stress over, and wonder whether they feel prioritised enough, no crying baby or eager husband demanding what little residues of body battery you have left, and no ailing relatives to look after and stress over the medical bills you would have to foot because they didn't "believe" in insurance. It makes no difference whether you checked your phone all day , but not in a depressive reclusive, psychopathic way but in a way that feels thoroughly liberating. You take a deeper breath than usual, and for the first time in a long time, truly, truly experience the air slowly fill your lungs. What a feeling it is to be alive. Today , particularly.

Your Garmin watch, which , not too long ago, felt like an unnecessary, bougie purchase, alerts you that your sleep was slightly less than ideal but it was enough recharge to take on the day. You dry out your fresh laundry on the balcony of the 41st floor, low-key wondering if it would feel the same in your own place. A waft of laundry perfume (something you didn't even know existed until recently) fills the air. It almost distracts you from the fact that in approximately one year, you would be paying off a housing loan which has a tenure for longer than you've walked earth. 

The morning sun rays are gentle, not intrusive , inviting hope that maybe today will be soft. You put on a long white dress and your signature red lipstick. Your skin is doing much better from getting good rest and being fed with modest amounts of skincare , which , not too long ago, felt like an avoidable expense and a byproduct of capitalism's chokehold grip. So, you do not have any foundation or concealer on. Plus, it's good to let the skin breathe once in a while. You water your balcony plants which gives you the illusion that you're perfectly capable of caring for another life form outside yourself.

It feels like a day to have a good, hearty brunch. A sense of entitlement creeps in. You worked hard for this. You know most of the day would be spent aggressively punching on keys to meet this one work deadline , so you decide on extravagance. You take a slow drive to your office , a Spotify playlist dissecting a verse of the Genesis chapter in the Bible lingering in the background. 15 minutes in, you find a parking close by. 

You walk past a french bistro that you've passed by most of your two years in Bangsar but never walked into because the mere appearance of it means you'd be burning a huge hole in your (e) wallet. But , fuck it. Work hard , play hard. Your eyes scan the menu and land on the most pretentious sounding item. Barramundi in almond butter with ratatouille. You pair it with an overpriced iced coffee. 

Aha. That's it. That's the order that's going to make any of these long hours feel justified.

As you take in the checkerboard tiling, the warm yellow lighting you've now associated with French dining, and pick up on all the Parisian references in the 10 steps it takes to get to your seat, you look around and see an Indian man trying to impress his chinese girlfriend by taking her to this "new place he found online". Beside you, a young man scans the menu for a good while. Shortly after another effeminate man walks in and takes a seat across him. You're seated alone, taking yourself out on a solo date. Coherent thoughts are flowing seamlessly in your head, so you start typing in your notes app. Your soft grin is reciprocated by the waiters' own, eager to see if there is something further they can do for you. 

You contemplate whether to book a Pilates class over the weekend, or wait out the luteal phase when your body feels so goddamn weak. As your fingers graze the fully booked schedule, you can't help but admire your freshly done cat-eye gel manicure. You asked for nails resembling the galaxy, some part motivated by the need to feel like you've got the whole world in your hands. Freshly threaded eyebrows, not a single stray hair visible on your moisturised skin, your head held high from sheer joy, so much so your mild double chin (born out of a sedentary lifestyle) almost disappears. You savour the meal before you, contemplating whether to compliment the French owner in his native language, a skill you only acquired because you couldn't silence a five-year itch to learn French formally, so you signed up to do just that, in a French school run by the French embassy. 

Just 5 years ago, you never imagined you'd become a Pilates girl. You never thought you'd buy your own car with the fear of driving and whatnot. You never thought you'd see the day where you'd pay obscene amounts of money for someone to beautify your nails. You never would have thought you'd learn bachata, formally learn French before you even mastered your own mother tongue, or even live out of your parents' home in exchange for one day owning YOUR house. But it is what it is. 

You realise that, you've became the template, white collar, Bangsar babe.

The divine brunch, now ended, brings about the realisation that it is time to work in the office for the next 7 hours. 

Ah, sweet, sweet capitalism. If you can't beat it, join it, amirite? 

What is grief?

 

Someone once told me, in less refined terms, that I’d sat with grief for so long, over so many unresolvable issues in life, where ‘acceptance’ was the only way forward, that I have now developed some ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ with the feeling of grief. So, now, subconsciously, I seek out situations that lead me to it. Maybe I wouldn’t even know what to DO, with a life free from grief. After all, when you sit with grief for so long, it becomes part of your personality. So, I, subconsciously, in my day to days, feed it. Breathe it to life.

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Why would ANYONE do that, to themselves, …one might ask? It would be easy to summarise it as “you think too much”. Maybe. If this were the price to pay for having a depth that expands like nebulae in an infinite universe, to be able to write with a profoundness that leaves readers with goosebumps, maybe, just maybe, I’ll take it.

Source: https://pixabay.com/gifs/galaxy-universe-cosmos-sky-3468/

How does one feed grief? Grief is nourished in the music you let play in the background, the words you read, the online content you consume, the people you surround yourself with, the type of conversations you have with yourself, the compromises you make that chip away too much from an authentic living.

Grief is apathy. It takes away your willpower to fight for people to stay in your life. “Oh, you think this connection is too one-sided? You don’t really feel like we know what’s going on in each other’s’ lives anymore? You think we have grown into wholly incompatible people as adults? Well, okay then. I hope you find someone who does it for you.” Poof, goes another 15-year friendship out the window. It is not even motivated by spite, it’s motivated from an increasing need for detachment from everything which matters because you know, all too well, that what goes up must come down. Everything has an expiry date. 

It’s like being in the midst of the longest free-fall of your life, constantly just WAITING for the moment things go “thud”.  EVEN IN THE MIDST OF EXPERIENCING GOOD TIMES.

Source: https://makeagif.com/gif/evanescence-bring-me-to-life-HHiseS

Grief is narcissistic. It takes away your ability to ‘lose the argument, not the person’. You just stop associating with those you know are going to see that giant glow of a red button that says ‘TRIGGER’ and press it with full force. But you forget, it’s only human, that the people you love, or even strangers, are going to gloss over that button whether they intend to or not. The world does not, and cannot operate around what your triggers are like a game of minesweeper.

 To some level, you are subconsciously, belatedly, “punishing” the person you just met for all the previous people who could have exercised better thought process over their words and decisions, which have now unfortunately altered you in a somewhat negative and permanent way. As you are doing it, you realise that this is not the way to go about interacting with people. But you just can’t stop. Deep down, you know. You owe yourself a duty to heal and fix yourself through your acquired knowledge of human interaction, and get back out in the game again to make someone’s day around you a little better than before you met them. But you’re already too worn out.  

Grief is erratic. Prolonged exposure to grief causes a learnt numbness, that you would do anything to make yourself feel a little more alive. Some resort to drugs. Shopping. Food. Sex. Gambling. Whatever it takes to feel a dopamine hit. It may create an erratic, impulsivity, that, to the outside world, makes you look so spontaneous, like you have retained your youth when others have let it slip away. So you let life happen to you, instead of you taking life by the horns, since everything you’ve tried to manage, control, structure, had plans of its own anyway that deviated so far from anything that you could have imagined. So, you just don’t ‘play with life’ anymore, like the sour grapes theory.

Source: https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/patrick-bateman-american-psycho-christian-gif-5104406

Marinating in grief takes the foundations, bases, the ground-zeros of someone’s life and pushes it one whole mile below that.  It strips you off everything you ever attached happiness to, like lying down on warm sand, then realizing that you’re fucked because it was quick sand, but making no attempts to get out of it anyway because maybe you’ve just resigned to this fate.

So, because of that, Grief is arrogant. It feeds you with a mistaken belief that ‘NOBODY’ could survive the things you go through, the thoughts in your head, the choices you had to make in the crossroads that you had to take, that it’s almost offensive (?) that someone else is going through what they term as grief. You forget, that, someone who drowns in 6 feet of water is just as dead as someone who drowns in 20 feet of water. You believe that it’s human nature to nourish and create a safe space. Not to destroy or belittle. …And yet.

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Maybe this grief, now attached like a cancer, manifested in romantic interests who kept me a hidden like a dirty secret, then replaced me in weeks and some, even days (!) when I was prepared to take my whole world and spread it like a red carpet so their feet are padded from anything less than bliss. It’s slowly losing the ability to offer a kind of love that makes a beggar feel and walk like a millionaire.

Maybe, grief is hyperfixating on the one thing I could fix and have control over, i.e my career, (which to be fair is the only thing which has loved me back). Yet knowing at the end of the day that a job is just a means of making money, a man-made currency that cannot bury you.

Maybe, grief is losing a constant, but also having no willpower to fight for that connection to stay in my life because what I could offer into that person’s life pales in comparison to the interactions they could be having with others who more align with where they are in their life right now.

Maybe, grief is a sudden unexplained loss/disappearance of a pet I raised from when it took its first steps in this world, which, despite not being able to say a word to me, and running away from cuddles or sitting down with me, I know deep down loved me just as much as I loved it.

Maybe, grief is the increased isolation I feel from all that was supposed to be familiar, my childhood, parents. The age gap, language barriers, and differences are hyper imposed in my memory rather than all that makes us similar.

I go back to a textbook definition of love as found from a Bible verse:-

1 Corinthians 13:4-8

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

 

I would have come across this verse many, many times in my lifetime. But today, it’s become crystal clear that grief is, (and risks turning you into) the opposite of love. And, quite heartbreakingly, grief is born out of the absence of love. Just look at the examples I wrote about immediately above.

 

 But here’s the kicker. Maybe, if grief can take this much hold over a person, and if it’s only an emotion that one spent too much time with after all, just imagine what cultivating a culture of sustained joy and love again can do.

With that , I am entering into 2025 with a different lens. The goal is simple. To cultivate love and joy above all.