I didn’t get any sleep last night. Like literally! I mean I’ve had ‘sleepless nights’ where you only manage to get a few hours of sleep throughout the night but last night was the first time in my life that I actually lay in bed from night till morning without any sleep. I think I managed to scrape about 10 minutes of sleep towards the end but just when I was dozing off the sunlight from my windows started creeping into my room to wake me up.

The source of the sleepless night: Anger. Anger over something that happened almost 2 years ago but only now seemed to have come back to affect me emotionally. How this thing affected me up to now still comes to a surprise to me. 

Few things in life really hurt or upset me. My motto in life has always been “It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters”, so that really gave me a new perspective in whatever I face in life. Every time something bad happens to me, I think of it very much as a challenge and that somehow gets me excited about going through it because at the end of my life, I want to have lived not necessarily a long life, but a meaningful one.

Even business-wise. While a lot of business owners I talk to are worried about the recession and how they will survive 2 years of it, I am actually excited about it because it’s the first recession I ever had to go through as an entrepreneur and when we do make it through, it’s going to be affirmation that Nuffnang is a company that has really grown up. Besides, I am not afraid of failure for I think that the lessons I will learn from then will be invaluable. You lose a little bit of money in the process, but my father always calls it “tuition fees”.

Unfortunately what kept me up last night had nothing to do with work, business, money or any of the usual stress. That is stress I perhaps have become fairly immune to and have developed a habit of always looking at the positive side of things. It had to do with someone doing something very very wrong and getting away with it scot free after all these years. 

And that’s what angers me! I believe that if you do wrong, it will one day come back to around to bite you in the ass and that is the principle of how I live my life (Do good and good will come back, do harm and harm will come back). It angers and frustrates me when justice is not served especially when there’s absolutely nothing that I can do about it. 

Fortunately after a whole night of thinking about it I’ve decided to accept what has happened and perhaps learn to forgive. I’m just writing this entry and putting all this into a bottle now… then closing it so I will never think about it and let it bother me again.

So the question I ask myself again is, having experienced far worse things how can something like that affect me so adversely. But just like Brad Pitt who played Achilles in the movie Troy, I think somehow every man even in the modern world has a weakness, an Achilles’ Heel. 

Something that really gets to him and at an extreme, is something that could possibly bring him down to his knees.

I think I’ve finally found my Achilles’ Heel.