Dear Seph & Shai

0 notes
Thu, 10 May 12
12:39 PM

We’d like to thank the hundreds of followers of this little column—we think most of you are Love Chic followers but for those who aren’t, we’re writing this note.
  
We’ll be merging Dear Love Chic with Love Chic starting today. It really won’t be any different; we’ll just be taking questions from http://lovechic.tumblr.com/ask from now on, and won’t be allowing Anonymous questions. For those who wish to remain anonymous, you’ll still have to reveal yourself to us (we promise you utter confidence). Just email us your story or question at lovechicmail@gmail.com with the subject “Dear Love Chic” and the pseudonym/alias you want us to hide you as. Oh, and we’ll be sharing our own random musings in between fashion and lifestyle posts.
  
We have wanted to do this before, but we were trying to separate the intimate, personal vibe of the advice column from the fun-fun/pop/everything-dandy vibe of the fashion blog. But hey, life really can’t be all pastel colors and Asian poses and smiley faces. Nobody and no blog is that perfect—let’s inject a healthy dose of reality-check with ours. Our readers have been so candid and forthcoming with us both online and in person, and we figure we’d reciprocate.
  
For starters, we have this. Thanks again and enjoy.
 
-Dear Love Chic signing off-

4 notes
Wed, 9 May 12
9:53 PM

Never pin your hopes, dreams and happiness on one person. People change. People leave. All you can control is yourself.

4 notes
Fri, 4 May 12
9:36 AM

When people lament about a failed or failing relationship, they often wrack their brains thinking of all the things they could’ve done better, should’ve done differently, would’ve done more willingly. But there’s that truth right there: they didn’t.

It’s those things, those defining moments, that challenged us at the time to make the best choices we can. Choose which quarrels were worth it, when to pursue a point, what words to say. Choose to give that hug, clasp those hands, write that letter, admit those mistakes. At each of those moments, we chose what we chose and did what we did simply because it’s what we would’ve done, even when we had the vaguest idea of the consequences. Only in retrospect does it hit us how we could’ve kept things from going the way they did.

And so they did, because we didn’t.

8 notes
Mon, 30 Apr 12
1:49 PM

I experienced having a girl hold a grudge against me for the first time when I was five. We were classmates in Prep, and I can still remember her name. Jessica. It was my first day of school ever, and of course I was excited to make new friends. It was Jessica’s third first day—she went to Nursery and Kinder.
  
Things were going great. I had my Hetty Spaghetti lunch box containing rice and Tender Juicy hotdogs with a banana for dessert, and I was sharing it with everyone, including this tiny spunky girl named Megan who would end up to be my bestfriend right up to the present. Unbeknownst to me, there was a spoken rule in school against befriending girls who were already “owned” by other girls. That day after school, I was in my school bus and spotted Jessica in hers. I waved and smiled. “Hi, Jessica!” She frowned, gave me the best smirk she could muster, and stuck her tongue at me. “‘Di kita bati. Mang-aagaw!” after which she apparently instructed a number of the other girls in class not to speak to me anymore.
 
Twenty years and dozens of (worse) girl grudges later, it still smarts to think of that day. You know that feeling. The “Did I really do something so awful as to deserve this?” feeling. The “All I really want is to make friends and get along with everyone” feeling. The only problem is, this time, it’s not just the Jessicas we have to deal with. It’s all the other girls (and some guys too) who we somehow ended up in conflict with and apparently made a vow to themselves to write us off their social lives forever.
  
Grudges suck.
  
They suck because more often than not, the source of the grudge in itself wasn’t that big of a deal to begin with. Heck, sometimes the source itself has already been forgotten but the grudge is still borne for the sake of bearing a grudge.
  
I could never quite understand that. With my guy friends, all it takes is one tap on the back, a sorry (sometimes in the form of pizza or a movie treat) and things are great again. Sometimes no words or patching up is even necessary. But whenever I tried to accomplish the same with female friends, it just comes off as insincere, insensitive, or accompanied by ulterior motives where there are none. It’s so cliché right now to say this, but yes. I find that I have more guy friends because I find it so much easier to relate with them.
  
That movie, “Mean Girls,” is the story of my life. It echoes my own high school frustrations and desperation to belong, to be approved and validated no matter what the cost. When I finally grew out of that need for acceptance, I realized it actually turned me for the worse, and that I should’ve just been myself the whole time. The movie also echoes my sincerest desire: “I wish we could all just get along.” Even the DVD’s documentary feature (yes, I own two original copies of the movie) hits home: If girls didn’t hate each other so much, we would rule the world.
  
Someday, very very soon, I hope I could reach out to many young girls out there. To tell them everything I would’ve told my five-year-old, eleven-year-old, sixteen-year-old and twenty-one-year-old selves. To let them know that for all the clichéness of the phrase, it is indeed for the best to just love yourself for who you are, to be yourself no matter how far you deviate from the current standards in the school halls you’re stuck within at present. Because life gets better. Because it’s better to experience life when you’re not lying to yourself.
  
Because the one person you wouldn’t ever want to hold a grudge against, is yourself.
  
Shai