“typing” the feeling
I hate typing how I feel because I know that the words I type will clearly reflect on how I feel. Sometimes I feel that I over expose myself – one point that I annoys me about myself. I express myself too honestly and I feel that this annoys people around me.. I realised that a lot of what I feel, how I react and why I do certain things revolves around my assumption of what others think of me.

To be completely honest, I realised that deep down inside, I actually do care about what people think of me. I always thought that I was confident enough in knowing who I was and what I wanted and how to get there without caring about what others think.. but little do I realised that without realising it, I have imposed on myself what others wanted me to do.

Mum wanted me to be a lawyer – so I went studied Law in Uni just to please her even though I hated it. Looking back, I was fulfilling what Mum wanted me to do. It is too complicated to draw a line on whether perhaps I did wanted to be a lawyer or if I have imposed this on myself because I felt that was what I wanted to. I don’t think I could ever clearly draw a line on knowing what it is because of the way I was raised up as a child.

My family was western in many ways but my parents were traditional Chinese in their thoughts. I feel that I have somehow been taught to understand that I have to live my life the way my parents wanted it to be to show them how much I loved them.

Confidence
If there was a test on confidence, I think I would have failed it a few times and then it would have really helped with my confidence (NOT!) I’ve never really had great confidence in myself because I’ve never been told that I have done well enough to deserve anything. I would think that my confidence would not matter much if I was doing something else, but being in this role has exposed me to the fact that I need to have confidence in God for this journey that He has called me to.

I was struggling to keep my confidence a few weeks back because I felt that every confidence I had was almost fake – it felt that it was materially given to me and then snatched away before I even had the time to understand it.It was surreal.

I realised that I have been putting my confidence in man instead of God. While I know in theory and often speak of the theory to others to put your confidence in God, I have somehow relied in man. I think the lack of a real relationship with my real father has somehow clouded my relationship with my Heavenly Father. I did not know how to to truly rely on my Heavenly Father because my earthly father has betrayed me and in the process hurt me.

I was afraid.

I have since made a number of reflection to ask God to show me who He is.(Who is my father)

I am the worst judge of myself
I have never defined what is good enough; therefore, in everything that I do, I don’t think that I might be doing enough. If I am given a report to write, I would write the report and attach an extra detailed research report (and perhaps another report) just to ensure that I have done enough of work. While most of the time I do not do that now, I sometimes still beat myself about it. I feel that I am doing so to ensure that other people have nothing to fault me in.

I judge myself to ensure that if I do get judged by others, I would not feel too bad about it because I have already done it worst to myself and therefore it’s not as bad! I detest people telling me that I have not done enough or that I am not good enough. It’s almost as if I need affirmation from others but it’s not really like that. It’s not that I need people to tell me that I’m good enough or that I’ve done the right thing.. but I have grown up in an environment (parents, relatives, teachers) that my journey was dictated by what others thought about me.