Chapter One: A Messy Start (~jinghan)

I’m sitting in my room surrounded by stuff. Okay, perhaps that was a bit of a messy and in-descriptive start to this blog entry, but it seems to reflect what the prelude to semester one has been like for me.

Let me clarify myself: I’m sitting in my room, and had the intention of cleaning it, but only got up to the dismantling everything from it’s original position part. How it all happened all started with me going to my boyfriend’s place in Adelaide, having a petty disagreement about the stylistic decisions regarding my wardrobe, being rather jealous of his new apartment that he gets all to himself for a semester, being inspired by the tidy feeling of populating a new and previously empty place and deciding that I would come home and completely clean out my room and wardrobe.

Its 7:45pm when my plane arrived back in Melbourne. The plane should have been here at 7:20pm. It is pouring with rain as we drive home. My parents are debating funeral plans. I am feeling oddly distant from my boyfriend despite having just spent all day and everyday of seven days with him… or perhaps it’s because of that. I get home and I start pulling things from my shelves and piling them on the floor, hoping that my love of rearranging my room will kick in soon. It doesn’t.

I’m left with is a sense of horrible selfishness and fear and stress. The funeral is in two days, and I haven’t helped my parents much, I haven’t even written my speech, and my beautiful harp that was going to save me from having to talk too much has broken two strings and who knows how many more will break unexpectedly. It all descends into emotional mayhem when I get online and find that I can’t even talk to any of my friends to clear my mind and emotions because they are all out to dinner with each other. I feel left out, even though I’m pretty sure I was the one who declined the invitation.

I sit in my room surrounded by stuff. Orientation week is imminent but I feel more disorientated than ever.

I find myself sending out messages to everyone and anyone I had ever talked to in the past when I’ve been going through something rough. People I’ve barely talked to for a year. “Hey, how are you? I’m feeling kinda crap at the moment, do you have time to talk?” But somehow it’s the friend I’ve only known for a year and have never talked to about crazy emotional matters that makes me sit down write my speech and finally return to a sense of calm and control.

Despite the stress that endured right until the very minute before the service, everything goes okay, and it’s a beautiful ceremony. I come home to my messy room, feeling like all that sadness, fear and stress is behind me. Now that one thing is done maybe I can finish cleaning my room as well.

I decide to start with my filing cabnet. In a folder labelled “temporary files*” I find a sheet of paper with words scrawled on it in grey-lead.

Building Strong Relationships

Show a genuine interest in others

• inquire about them and their interests
• people don’t care how much you know they care how much you care
• empathy: seek first to understand and then to be understood

Make others feel important

• appreciate other’s work, recognise their efforts by being specific
• praise their performance (in public)

Exercise Diplomacy

• never ever ever criticise, condemn or complain
• focus on their strengths and not their limitations
• practice “good bad good”

Complete with corny underlines and catch phrases, it’s notes I took in a leadership seminar last year that I could never bring myself to throw out. Despite the corniness of the way it was written out, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of truth. In a way they were all things I already knew, but it was a comforting reminder of what life is really about: people. Holidays had made me somewhat out of touch with various friends, it was time to find myself again by finding other people.

I get online and find myself talking to people that I haven’t talked to for a long time. Reconnecting with old high school friends who have new and different lives. Finding it a comfort to listen to friend’s worried rather than offloading mine onto them. Also, I find that the people who were each individual friends to me last year are now friends with each other. And it felt like coming home to a place that’s safe and secure.

…even though my room is still a mess.

*they’re never as “temporary” as I intend them to be. Actually some of this stuff has been in here for years…