I feel like recently I am blossoming more into a flower. Especially with my new Pleats Mama cherry blossom bag. Sakura is carrying her new sakura bag and dressed in sakura colours today. 😀 Well, I wore my cream pleats blouse from Uniqlo with my pink linen shorts from Muji today. Oh I picked my black merino wool cardigan from Sezane as well. So it definitely matches the bag colours that I got. You can see a photo of the bag in here. I matched it with my VCA Sweet Alhambra necklace in rose gold and it is a perfect addition to the entire outfit. 🙂 I’m definitely blossoming well and beautifully! I took a selfie of my outfit of the day and all of my friends (probably biased haha) praised my outfit choice. Whee!

Okay, except for Alex who commented that I look like an auntie who is going to wet market to buy vegetables (all in Chinese). Rude! -.-

I used to be a dehydrated flower but now that I am refocusing everything on myself, I’m definitely blossoming well. A flower needs water to grow well. The same for grass too. I should always focus on myself and direct the water to myself to grow well.

That reminded me of something that a friend told me. My real Chinese name can be translated to Japanese name “Reika”. I just checked and whoa, Google translate did translate it accurately.

YJ*: Sakura actually fits you well because hua means flower
Me: yessssssss
Me: not bad, you are smart
Me: your PhD has come in handy hahahahaha
YJ: also btw your Chinese name can pass as a Japanese name
Me: eh is it???
YJ: yes
YJ: rei ka

* Not going to put the name of my friend because he is listed as a public figure on Google and I don’t want my blog to appear when his students googled for his name…

It was an old conversation but as I am blogging about blossoming more into a flower, I decided to google about “rei ka”. Apparently it means “beautiful, lovely, flower, petal”.

Perfecto lah. All these glowing up is actually inline with my name. *acts out a pretty pose* I’m vain and I’m not even going to deny it. Hahaha. 😀 If I knew my Chinese name can be translated to such a beautiful Japanese name, I would have called myself Reika instead of Sakura. Lol…

No idea why no one ever told me about “Reika” name… Not even my friends, who knew both Chinese and Japanese. I am not exactly sure how to write it in Japanese characters though and my friend didn’t type it for me. Luckily I got a Japanese mentor and I have my 1-1 meeting with him tomorrow so I will definitely ask him about it. Otherwise, I have to ask my Japanese violin teacher this Sunday during my violin class. If I like how the characters looks like, then I might add it into my online name. Haha.

On a side note, will I recommend anyone to buy Pleats Mama bag? Probably no. I already see some design and quality issues on my first day of use. To be honest, I haven’t had a bag brand which I do not complain, except Hermes. LOL. I also have complaints about my Hermes bags but Hermes after sales is always able to address every single concern I have. So no complaints about it. No wonder I have the most number of bags from this brand so far. I don’t think I ever bought so many bags from a single brand/shop before in my life…

I recently watched this podcast on YouTube which explained pretty well about gaslighting. I highly recommend everyone to watch this podcast as it really explains really well about gaslighting.

DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. I realised it happened to me as I was in my healing phase. Sylvia’s example was really classic and I can relate to it really well. Like the gaslighter will deny what he did, then attack you back before proclaiming himself as the victim and put you as the offender. If only I did my self-work and understand all these way earlier, I would not have wasted so many years. Oh well. At least I realised it much later.

Real narcissist will not heal. You are not in public service and you are not a social worker, so just run. Anger is a self-protection mechanism from danger, indeed.

This is a call for you ladies to understand the basics of gaslighting and be able to identify when you are in such situations. Don’t just walk away, run away immediately!

Recently I started watching some of the real estate related videos and there’s 1 part of the video that really hits me.

“Buying a property is not just investment centric or own-stay centric. It is also psychology centric. When you owns an asset, it trains you to save because now you have a responsibility… A home also has psychological factors because the moment you start to own a home, you need to maintain it. You need to pay property tax, monthly conservancy or MCST, electrical bills, Internet bills and stuff like that. That will give you like an internal, healthy motivation to be hardworking because you now have a responsibility.”

Wow, like just wow. Can any property owners relate to it?