STRAIGHT-LACED

I got a Kindle while I was in Beijing, and I've been reading much more than I did, prior to getting it. I finished reading The Hate U Give, which is set to be released as a motion picture, I'm very excited for! It is a sad story, based on very real events, about a black girl who sees her black friend being shot by a white police officer, and all the politics that happen after it. You know you see it in the news so often, but as a non-black person, usually like it affects you momentarily and then you forget about it and you're able to shut it out. Reading it as a novel, though, you really sort of immerse yourself into the feelings of a person who is living the experience, who can't escape the life they have been born into, and it's so sad, I teared every couple of chapters -- although, might not be the most accurate of benchmarks, I am very easily moved to tears. It's also written well, that despite the heaviness of the themes, I learned a lot about her specific black culture in her black neighbourhood, the pop-cultural references they make, her having to navigate being one of the only black students in a posh white school, especially given that she lives in a "ghetto". I honestly empathised with the black people she knew who fell into crime and drug-dealing, who did it because they had to, to save someone else they loved, etc. I would write an actual review, but I have no time at the moment. I currently just downloaded Educated: A Memoir and it starts off with a quote.

The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. 

— Virginia Woolf

I don't quite know what the book is about yet, but I think I'll enjoy it. It's been a very good week, I've been quite busy at work, but also doing things for myself. My colleagues have nothing but praise for my tattoo, so yay. My mother does not know of it yet, so things are still civil at home. This weekend is the first anniversary of Lush Vivocity, so it's been a year of monthly overnight stock shipments and inventories, of training sessions at 8am on Sunday mornings, of learning to care more about people and animals and the environment, of me writing captions for @lushvivocity on Instagram (I always make a disclaimer that I don't write them all the time -- depending on my shifts, so if you see a pun, it may be mine, but it may also not be). We're having a pretty special weekend ahead, with compounding sessions for bath bombs and bubble bars. I think I will have a busier year-end period ahead, 'cos of the Lush Singapore staff party, and then I'm also involved in the Christmas showcase, and Christmas at Lush is a huge deal. I really actually like Lush a lot, and given that you can find Lush in many different parts of the world, I'm hoping it's my way out of here. So far, I've been looking at North America, but we'll see where things take me.

I think it has been a long time coming, but I finally see where I am, where I can be, and am happy with it. I learned a lot of my triggers for anxiety and depression in the past two years. First it used to be my periods, because blood would make me think of the miscarriage. Then it would be delayed periods, because obviously one time, when I didn't get my period, it was because I was pregnant. Then it was falling sick, because when I met the man who got me pregnant, it was when I had just gotten better from being really ill. Then it was sex, because clearly you can only get pregnant if you're having sex (here is a life lesson for all you kiddos: pulling out is not protection! if you're a girl and you don't want to get pregnant, please be smart enough to either be on birth control, and if you're not because you grew up in a weird sex-taboo environment like I did, be sure that your partner is wearing a condom! good luck!) and I kept learning and learning, that a lot of situations had the potential to spin me out of control. But now it's been almost two years to the day I left LA (we're seven days away from it), and I think I have learned and know enough. Enough to realise that some things are triggers, and I have the ability to either be triggered by it, or compartmentalise it as a thing that happened once because I wasn't aware, but then put it aside.

I subscribed to the New York Times crossword, but a lot of it is American-contextualised, so I'm not very efficient at doing it yet, though I do think I'll get better. We all get better from somewhere.