jessa

Everyday Stories, Lived

Relationships

  • Living in selflessness

    I constantly have to remind myself that I am the adult now. Sometimes, I still feel like being in the in-between—the chaos between a surf and the shore—tossed and turned into places familiar and unknown. While the routine keeps me sane, not pushing the boundaries makes everyday too predictable and boring, safe but hollow. The… Read more


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  • Resisting the urge to respond immediately

    What I learned to part ways with after seeking and engaging in creative activities is the idea that “messaging somebody entitles us to receive immediate response” because we are no longer high schoolers messaging one another, tethered to our phones all day long. I have trained myself for years (since I got ahold of a… Read more


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  • Late-night musings #25

    When I was planting seeds, I never really considered how much time it would take for the seeds to grow. I was just hopeful that they will. While some promised immediate returns, others could lay silently under the earth for years and decades even when you keep watering them. I kept watering the ones that… Read more


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  • Self-centeredness and short-term thinking

    Our confrontation with mortality—or more often, our avoidance of it—shapes our relationship with time itself. When we refuse to acknowledge our finite nature, we construct an artificially narrow temporal horizon that barely extends beyond our existence. This temporal myopia manifests first as self-centeredness, as I’ve observed in my perception of time. Who has the time… Read more


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  • Being comfortable in your own skin

    Getting old and being married meant you have to accept two realities about finding comfort in being naked in front of: Read more


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  • Digital identities

    It’s easy to judge others from a distance without truly knowing them because distance creates the illusion that they are unfeeling and disconnected from our shared humanity. No wonder we are tempted to be rowdy online where our online reputation seems trivial and disposable as we hide behind our glowing screens and are shielded from… Read more


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  • We feel like drifters again

    I don’t know what went inside the mind of our little white furball when I put him in his travel backpack, along with his small black squirrel toy, and brought him outside to be carried away by a stranger to a cat-boarding house for the Christmas break. One moment, I roused him from his deep… Read more


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