I set up this blog with the intention to share about depression and how I got over the lowest point in my life.  Then it became an online journal to document my life’s ups and downs for the past few years. I have also attempted book writing and uploaded this onto my site sometime back. This is the 6th year and I have decided once the domain is up for renewal, I will cease to renew this site.

This blog has served me well for the past few years and I am very grateful my first blog post attracted many readers from overseas. I have done no promotion and my posts are not frequent at all. Readership did fall and I feel that this blog has fulfilled one important part of my life and it is time to move on.

I have decided to move to podcast and will be channeling my energy to write fiction stories with inspiration from real life. There is only so much to write about my own life, yet I have come across many weird/colourful people in my life at work, via meet-ups, blind dates etc.

Now, I want to transform these experiences into short stories (who read long blogs now?) and use voice to tell them. I used to be a terrific storyteller and I want to pick up that skill again. With a house of my own, and work from home has become the norm here, it is high time I make use of the conducive environment and get my butt cracking on this.

This blog will continue to stay alive till end 2021 and in the meantime, I will still persist to update whenever I got inspiration to write (since I already paid for it).

I will share the podcast link once I have figured where to host for whatever readers left that still visit my blog. I hope you will join me in my next exploration in life.
 
 

I always believe that one needs to detox one’s social circle of friends from time to time. Sometimes, it is just the chemistry has ended. Sometimes, the common topics are gone and there are nothing in common to talk about. Other times, a friend may hurt you with her words/comments and she is not aware.

For me, I will choose to evaluate if this person:

• Is still in my active circle, i.e. do we have common friends and do we have chances to meet up?
• Is this person useful to me in terms of personal, work etc?

If no, then I will choose to remove this person from my life. Very often, my method is a silent block from social media.

Recently, there was an ex-colleague whom we only worked for 3 months before I left the company. Thereafter, we never met up except for two times. We were in the same line, but she always have the wrong reason why I left that role. Her memory was I disliked the boss, whereas I corrected her multiple times it was because of the portfolio that I held. She started to tell me three years ago her desire to change field. I was contemplating very hard on changing careers at that time as well. After one year of all talk and no action, I was sick of her whining and decided to block her silently but not completely.

She detected I was silent suddenly and facebook messaged me. I decided to reply after 1 -2 days. To me, the break from her was very good for my mental health. However, I no longer entertained her grouses and especially when she is now holding a job with the same shitty portfolio that I have been through before, but she used to say I was complaining for nothing (see Karma at work here).

She shared with me her frustration with her mother-in-law and the high costs of living in Singapore. She wondered why some of her friends want a monthly income of $5000 after retirement to continue their lavish lifestyle. She contemplated living in rural Japanese countryside houses that require tons of DIY maintenance.  Except her grouses with her mother-in-law, I find the rest kind of a joke because in a high standard of living city like mine, it is impossible to have $5000 to live on every month after you have retired. As for the countryside living, it is even dumber to me because clearly her husband and her are not the DIY handymen type to resolve any house issue on their own.

After I moved in to my house, I realized she will take chances to attack by criticizing my new neighbourhood as being full of criminals. Honestly, it is a 2-year-old new estate that is some distance away from another estate that is well- known to have issues. I was pretty shocked because I couldn’t believe this coming from her mouth. At the same time, she was also sharing that after she retires she will downgrade from a private apartment to a public flat. I am no dumb girl. Someone who enjoys fashion, branded bags, expensive French butter, western meals, greenery nearby, a big house and need her lasers as she is terrified of aging? Well, I think anyone will think she cannot adjust to the downgrade.
 
I don’t understand why someone wants to attack another person suddenly with this. But I do know that my house value will double in value at least once I fulfilled the minimum occupation period. So, I decided not to get into a bad squabble with her.
The final straw came when I told her about a relative badmouthing me during a funeral wake and she said she wonder if I would be a complainer when I get old. Well, she is also a whiner herself but she didn’t realise. I totally regretted sharing this with her.

I began to think about these personal attacks on me and analysed how “good” this person really is. Her career is nothing to flaunt about (she never join a well-known mnc before), she said she is in technology but when I looked at her LinkedIn profile, her companies are research institutes, electronics distributor or unknown organization (only her current company is more well-known but with a shitty portfolio and no boss to back her up). I have more exposure than her in the field we both worked in, and her husband isn’t really supporting her anyway (she supports her own parents, her husband doesn’t even pay for her personal Office365 subscription), and once she told me she wanted to do renovation so that both husband and wife have a common goal to work on.

All I want to say is, there are many opportunities for me to make personal attacks on her as well. Her greedy parents who only care about money, her lack of children and feeble excuse that she doesn’t want to have because both of them hold jobs that required extensive traveling. Well, I have come across enough couples to understand that very often married couples in Asia often don’t have children because they cannot. Unless one partner is a non-Asian, which means both parties are western in thinking. Otherwise, in Asian context, an Asian couple often will have children – be it societal pressure or in-laws pressure –but they will have. The renovation to make both her and her husband work together towards a common goal is a tell-tale sign her husband is no longer interested in her. The huge allowance she need to give to her parents and the reluctance to get a new Mac to replace her 10-year-old Mac or an Ipad tells a lot that she has a lot of expenses to keep up with, even with a 5-digit salary.

See? If I want to, I could. But I don’t want to reduce to her level. So, I decided to block her for good. I blocked her on Telegram, on Facebook and deleted her phone number.

I wish her all the best, but I am glad this time I decided to make a clean break, an easy one since we don’t meet in real life. All the best to her, but no way you are entering my life again.

Adiós.