Good day, everybody :) So a while ago I posted a thread about feeling overlooked and ignored by people who are close to me, namely my family and my friends. While many of you have given valuable advice on that thread, I feel that it is still important for me to submit this write-up.

Near the end of last month, I turned 25. Little did I know that they planned to celebrate my birthday in more ways than one! My mother threw a surprise birthday party on the day itself — she bought three ice-cream cakes, a bouquet of yellow fresh flowers because she knows that is currently my favourite colour, and shiny balloons — along with my aunt and my cousins. Even my uncle-in-law took some time from his schedule to wish me twice and to save some brownies for me from a tournament he had organised!

Initially, I wasn’t into the whole thing and even dreaded it, because I was feeling very depressed and planned to spend that day sleeping in, and I almost expressed my sentiments verbally. However, I decided that it would be a lot kinder and more considerate for me to just shut the hell up (instead of complaining about being forced to put up a façade of being all-smiles when I clearly would rather just die) the moment I observed how happy and pleased my mother seemed to be with her whole arrangement, and how my cousins seemed to be enjoying themselves: The boys were engrossed with the punching ball, while the girls indulged in making art using watercolour and practicing the piano — all of which they do not do in their own home due to a lack of resources. It would have been silly and even cruel for me to rain on other people’s parade just because a storm almost cancelled my own. In a way, taking the focus off my emotions and onto that of others helps a lot with putting the hamster to sleep instead of going on overdrive on its wheel all the time.

A few days after that, a friend of mine invited me and another girl friend on what I thought would have been a regular meetup. Again, little did I know that she and her boyfriend were taking us to his home to feed us cake! Also, I’m not very sure if this is RPW-like and/or NSFW to mention, but my friend’s boyfriend rolled a few joints and let me experiment for the first time! I am not in any way advocating any form of recreational drug usage, but being high on marijuana felt like having gravity and anti-gravity working simultaneously! It was surreal, like that meme of a puppy being tied to floating balloons. However, I don’t know if I will ever do it again, to be honest... The strain tasted quite earthy from what I can remember. Nonetheless, it was an interesting experience, and I cannot thank my friend and her boyfriend enough for helping me cross that off my bucket list — on my birth month nonetheless.

Anyway, the real point is that I felt so grateful to have friends who took the time and effort to plan something special for my belated birthday, and late at night while at that. (Luckily the next day was a public holiday!) I realised that it’s not that they stopped caring about me or have neglected me; it’s just that they have all been incredibly busy and exhausted that they might not be very keen on communicating via digital means on the daily. When we all conversed face-to-face and played Charades while laughing a lot, I felt the warm positive energy that I craved for a long time (beyond the weed, really!) and knew that nothing has really changed other than the way I had been perceiving our friendship.

The friend with the boyfriend even bought me an artsy book filled with motivational quotations written in various fonts and calligraphy to get me through tough times, and a handmade embroidered keychain in the form of red lips (because it reminded her of me and my red lipstick!).

I have been very unfair to my loved ones and I am quite glad I didn’t lash out or erupt or say anything damaging so far. It turns out that I had been having rather unwholesome thoughts about them that were not even truly founded in reality, and if only I had been a little more impatient, I could have ruined everything the way I did (or almost did) in the past when I was a lot more impulsive and a lot more tempestuous.

Lesson learnt: Meditate on your hamster (or make it meditate!), meditate on your surroundings, and shut the hell up unless you want to ruin any relationship or friendship worth having in your life, I guess?