Ikigai Second Part

These past few days, I am beginning to realize that I have been dealing with my insecurities by flooding my cart with stuffs... and the bigger my self-doubt, the more expensive the items I checked out. 

Before I would babble constantly about almost anything... but after my trip from the province, I decided to relearn keeping "things" in "private"...  not for fear of being judged nor criticized (because the carpers will never cease to exist) but to allow the moments to sink in... deeply... 

I would lose myself in my dreams and write them in my journal. 

In one dream, I was robbed of my laptop and phone... my means of communication to the outside world... 

In another dream, I saw two of my cousins being murdered by people I knew from the past... 

I would wake up finding myself relieved despite those unpleasant circumstances. I have let out hidden emotions of anger and frustration in my subconscious. 

Perhaps, my dreams are not as frightening as they seem to be...  maybe they are stifled voices that need to be heard... maybe I need to transform these buried emotions into words...

Perhaps, I needed that "quiet" to reflect and to seek solace, not on material things, but on the One who understands and loves me because He knows me fully... completely... and unreservedly...

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Additional reflection:

Claim God’s Love for You by Henri Nouwen

For a very long time I considered low self-esteem to be some kind of virtue. I had been warned so often against pride and conceit that I came to consider it a good thing to deprecate myself. But now I realize that the real sin is to deny God’s first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father.