“Mommy, why are you counting the days without a car?” Twin I asked me when she saw me drafting a blog entry the other day.

“It’s like counting days without alcohol, darling. I’m so addicted to having a car at my disposal that I already forgot how to use public transport,” I said.

So it has been 18 days since I went outside my 4-km radius. It’s like a self-imposed quarantine or something.

Meanwhile, I had been struggling with sleep again for a couple of weeks now. My hours are upside down again and this time I’m keeping London hours. I don’t know how long I will be like this but this should be fixed once I get out of my house again. Maybe when I’m in Singapore my hours will be saner.

Speaking of which, I learned that none in my cluster in our company has been coming to our office regularly so I guess I really don’t have to drop by our office and I should just go straight to our conferences. I’ll just work in my hotel if I need to. Even my deputy hasn’t been reporting to our office because there’s no strict back-to-office order for us journos. That’s some kind of relief for me since I don’t want to be hopping from one train station to another just to show my face to people I don’t really need to work with. Those who regularly report to office belong to a different cluster. Well I could try to be friendly but my schedule is just packed and I don’t even have room for that.

One of the realizations I have in my healing process is this:

I now know that I am more than enough.

I am a treasure to somebody else and I no longer want to recall that feeling I had for more than 1.5 years that I am trash, hence, I was treated like trash.

I will never allow myself to be in that position again. It destroys you.

Now that I’m ok, I am able to parse things more clearly. I am thanking God everyday that I chose this route and resisted friends’ suggestions to put myself in the market to heal. That’s not healing; it’s escaping. The problem will still persist and you’re just applying bandage upon bandage on a wound that is undergoing gangrene necrosis. In the end it will kill you. You’ll just realize that you’re already emotionally dead at age 50 and you’ve never had anything meaningful all those years.

And you wonder where has the time gone.

I have now learned to love myself and realized my real value so I don’t need another person’s validation for that. I am beautiful, intelligent, funny, caring, and dignified and I truly believe that, not just lip service to myself. Now that I’ve reached that stage, I think I would have a healthier relationship with the next person since I am not looking to become a whole person through my partner. I am already whole, with or without that partner. I don’t have to bend over and backwards just to accommodate that person and make him love me.

Just be.

And these are lessons I have already imparted to my girls this early.