Die for you

I love this song by Weeknd. That's all. I will never die for anyone...I hope. It is so stupid to promise someone to die for them, especially an object of pure romantic interest, usually one we have no stroy with yet. Neither do I support dying for children or parents. I don't support dying all together. True, I am very cynical about death. I need to discuss this matter at a therapy session, I know, but probably this is because I saw the face of death too early in my life. I was 11 when my beloved aunt started to die literally in front of my eyes. Luckily, they sent me home that very moment, but still. And just a year later my cousin died in front of my eyes. They did not send me home in time this time. Vice versa, they had called us because we lived the nearest to them. I was 15 when my classmate died. before that I had always thought she was the luckiest girl on Earth- her father always used to take her to school (me too, at times), she could score high at tests without studying, she was slim and popular. But incidentally and accidentally, literally and figuratively, I became the lucky one in an instant. The very instant her mother told me "Thanks God, my daughter is dead now, and does not suffer from exams, like you do". I felt the luckiest girl on Earth. Death is inevitable, but sometimes predictble. I don't imply astrolgical predictions, no. When I was a teenager, many of my family members died accidentally, without warning. My immunity to death became savage. And those recent years people around me started to die with a prior warning - cancer is such a thing. And also, 13 years ago I finally acknowledged the fact that I have a weird quality of feeling death and pregnancy. I am besties with death now. I smell it, I hear it, I feel it. It comes with a warning. It gives me time to adapt. And guess what? I will never die for anyone! I'd rather focus on the people I'd live for! Merry Christmas!

New Year Resolutions

January 1, 2025 . .11 am .downtown Yerevan .me..and my flat white a beautiful Christmas tree with angel toys on them, a Russian couple with a kiddo trying to capture a shot near the tree to send to the "babooshka" and a handsome foreigner in crocs and sweatpants leaving the cafe...a group of Armenian middle aged men savoring their proseccos outdoors, sitting right the other side of the window from me... Here I am with my headache and heartache, with all the achievements of the previous year and my endless fear of expectations It is starting from today that a lot of people will start going to the gym and dieting, and it is from today that a lot of people will make the resolution to quit smoking and/or sugar, marry or divorce throughout the year, and it is today that I am starting my new ritual of New Year Yerevan morning drive to finally have a chance to enjoy the ride. New Year resolutions do not work... unless you have made them earlier or later than January 1 midnight. As I was enjoying my chill drive downtown today in the morning and finally having an opportunity to see my city without the hustle and noise and traffic jams, I felt overjoyed. So it occured to me that maybe this is the clue to happiness - doing very basic, regular things at times when noone does them, at times when everyone is drunk and asleep. So this is what it means to win in life - to go against the flow, the flow is sleeping, you are living. The flow is living, you are sleeping. At the end of the day, everything happens unexpectedly, as expected. And people who promised to stay are pushed away by ourselves because we had evaluated it all wrong, and random encounters tend to lead to commitments. Russian migrants come and go, while locals stay and care. We ceaselessly plan and hope, but rush away the moment the dream comes true. We want that guy to talk to us, and hate him the moment he approaches. We want to have kids, and are flushed with hysteria the moment it is confirmed we actually conceived. Baristas make the perfect hearts on our coffees and bloggers break our hearts with narcissistic disorders. Family matters, but what our closest kins say hurts and hits at least expected times and in the darkest and farthest corners of our soul. And then it passes. It all flies away. So what is it that stays? Nothing. Not even our muscle soreness after a chain of leg days.

What if I don't quit

I have always been a quitter. If there was a line at the cashier's, I would quit. I would go to the other line. When there was no place in the restaurant, I would never wait, I would go to another restaurant. If a student did not perform at the lesson once or twice, I would quit working with them. When the beauty salon overchanged me once, I would definitely go try another one. If a man did not impress me at the first date, I would never go to the second one with him. The list is endless. But last week it hit me that I might not quit. I might stay, and ignore the "flaws", and see what happened. And I tried. It turned out that "my" line moves faster than the neighbhoring lines, according to Murhpy's law. It turned out that had I just waited for literally two minutes, three tables would be vacant and available for me to choose. It turned out that the student simply was going through stuff with his family matters and needed literally two days to be back on track. It turned out the beauty salon administrator made a mere mistake without realizing. It turned out the man had simple had a hard day at work. So maybe it's hight time I stopped quitting ;-)

Things my mother failed to teach me

My mother never taught me the art of feminine manipulation, maybe becasue she herself had never mastered it. Or maybe she thought I might want to learn my life lessons myself. My mother never taught me how to put myself first. Just the opposite. She taught me how to jeopartizze my self-esteem and behave well and conveninet for the members of my extended family. I have overcome all the expectations, and grown into an all-loving cutie with a character. My mother never taught be to be picky. I grew up into a convenient member of society- with loads of empathy and o big open heart. My mother failed to teach me to say no. Even when I wholeheartedly felt no. Thanks God we are all in therapy nowadays and we constantly work to forive our moms who have sacrificed their priorities to nurture us and teach us how to sacrifice our priorities for the illusional sake of our children. Until one day, hopefully, someone will break the chain!

No need for language knowledge

If you are a person who has ever had an opportunity to be tourist wondering the streets of an unfamiliar land with no language knowledge, you might understand how it feels to ask at a cafe if you can use the toilets in June in Tunis, Tunisia. So I walked downstairs, and before I could realize I had arrived at my destination an Arabic woman in warm clothes and with a floor cleaning equipment welcomed me into the toilets. As I headed towards the cabin she checked out if they were clean and handed me a peace of toilet paper she had carefully torn for me. When we were washing our hands we saw there was no soap, she apologized and quickly fixed that. As I thanked her for the careful approach, she told me thanks in return and sent me kisses. I replied the same way. She said my mom reminded her of her own mom and came to kiss my mom on the arm around the shoulder. Then she turned her head and I noticed tears in her eyes. I went and hugged her from behind and put my head on her shoulder from behind and tapped on her back. We had a silent moment of understanding and compassion, empathy and togetherness. And I finally left the restroom. In peace of heart. In harmony with my human self. And with a clear understanding that people need to language to understand each other when the heart speaks to a heart- even if the minds thing in Tunisian and Armenian respectively.

The boring art of stupid small habits

Everyone wants to be productive, successful, wealthy, healthy, you name it. People want to take radical steps towards their long-awaited goals. We don't want to eat one less candy a day, no. That's a slow torture. We would rather cut out the sweats all together! And fruits! Fruits contain sugar! They are baaad! very bad! We don't want to wake up fifteen minutes earlier. We read or heard about the 5 AM club. Robin Sharma, here we come! Yesterday(and the many yesterdays before it)I woke up at 9, rolled in bed till 10, got swollowed by social media, and then eventually got up around noon. But I read this book /heard this podcast/ heard this lecture (check which one applies to you) and will set my alarm at 5 am sharp from now on. Well, we all know how these end! Early! Recently I finally got to reading the Atomic Habits by James Clear. Not that Mark Manson (love of my life) has not been raving about the small habits and how important they are, but I guess we need the "right" amount of "dropping" information onto our grey thick mass vessel in the skull in order to finally get to seeing it. It feels boring, indeed, to take the tiny small steps, but in accumulation those are the bigest changes I have ever applied in my life - from my favourite forever-valid nutritional disorders to relationship and work, and OCD, yes. The bicycle has been invented long ago. If we want to wake-up easily, full of energy,happy, and EARLY, we need to go to bed early, with no gadgets, no anger, no alcohol, no late meals, no caffeine, and you know the rest. If we want to get care from the people around us, however primitive it looks, we got to give it first. It's all so boring and trivial and basic and primitive that I feel embarrassed to enumerate them. But they work! The boring art of stupid small habits works! Blissfully!

Open thy heart

I have been high maintenance for thirthy- three years. I always expected people to match my standards - be optimistic, have good manners, be honest, have dignity, be punctual, be literate and well-educated, know English (wink, wink), know the difference between green tea and black tea (fermentation degree), be a respectful driver (not jumping in front of me unannounced) - the list is virtually endless- and what I ended up with was OCD and rolled eyes every time someone didn't match my high expectations. And then something cracked. Was it during psycholoigical therapy? Was it at astrological lessons? Not sure. But what came out of that crack was totally new to me- authentic empathy and sincere understanding that people all come from their childhood, which does not have to be that good, in fact. People are not illiterate because they chose to. Education was merely not top priority in the families. People do not lie because they want to? It takes a lot of courage and self-wealth to tell the truth at hard times and always. And the vast majority just lacks these qualities or is on the way of developing them. People are not bad drivers out of disrespect. Simply, their anxiety makes them so irritated that road rage is their best friend. For many, driving is the only opportunity to express aggresion. People do not come late to lessons and meetings because they intend to make you wait impatiently. They just can't feel the time very well, allocate it with poor time management skills. We don't blame people with low intellect for being stupid. They are just under-nourished. The same is true for not very kind people. They are under-loved and under-cared for. It was in Mel Robbin's recent podcast that I was reminded about the power of opening one's heart. And guess what? Opening one's heart quickly makes one's heart more loveable and appreciated and cherished. And incidentally, people started to be punctual, and everyone arround me accidentally seems to have a lot of patience and appreciation. I also admitted to myself and one student that quitting relationships of various types was my escape from the fear of being hurt. Let me hurt first, so that I am not hurt. But then it stroke me that quitting is easy, staying is hard. And in order to stay all I needed to do was ... to open my heaert!