For some reason, my online news readings before I went to sleep last night brought me to crocs in Cancun, Mexico and how the resorts are somewhat hush-hush about these reptiles because these would destroy its tourist appeal. How ironic that Cancun is being marketed as a beach escape when you cannot freely swim even in its shallow waters because it is teeming with saltwater crocs.
That prompted me to go back to researching about my greatest fears in the sea: crocs and sharks.
Crocs used to be found all over the Philippines. Even the creek in my hometown was host to the smaller endemic species before and even after WW2 and they swim towards Laguna Lake and then to Pasig River to Manila Bay. The biggest croc recorded was found in Laguna Lake in the town of Jala-jala.
In 1823, a huge saltwater crocodile was killed near the town of Jalajala in Laguna de Bay. It measured 27 feet from the tip of its snout to the end of its tail.Approximately weighing 2 tonnes, this giant croc was said to be as heavy as a bull hippo. Too big was its size that it actually required the help of 40 men to bring its body ashore. Upon dissecting, people were shocked to discover a body of a horse cut in 7 pieces. –Filipiknow.net
Jose Rizal, in his novel Noli Me Tangere, wrote about crocs along the banks of Pasig River.
They’re now hunted down to extinction in this area or degradation of habitats also caused the disappearance of these reptiles.
When I was in Palawan back in 2012 (or was it 2013?), I remember being paranoid about encountering crocs in the shallow waters beside Microtel in Puerto Princesa City. It used to be a mangrove area that was thinned out by developers. The endemic Philippine crocodile and the more aggressive Saltwater crocs lurk in mangroves.
I sunbathed here. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Several pounds lighter more than a decade ago.Photo by CallMeeCreation.comCloser. Photo by CallMeCreation.comLow tide. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
But that didn’t keep me from wading into the waters. But I discovered that Puerto Princesa is the last place in Palawan where you want to hang out because there are hundreds of other better beaches in the province. You can hop to several islands in one day around Honda Bay.
Diving though is not good in Puerto Princesa and nearby islands because Honda Bay has suffered from years of dynamite fishing. It is only now that the corals have started to regenerate.
I can’t remember if I was using a digital or film underwater camera. Sombrero island in Anilao had better corals and fish. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
And to further bolster my fear, the Crocodile Farm has shown me how big saltwater crocs can be—making me more paranoid.
That’s the president of the Philippines. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
But I learned that the saltwater crocs and the smaller and endemic Philippine croc are normally found in the less inhabited areas of Palawan like Balabac group of islands (nearer Malaysia) or in Mindoro. Both Palawan and Mindoro islands host rare and varied flora and fauna as they have evolved a bit differently from mainland Luzon. My ecologist mom said Palawan was connected to Borneo thus it’s more similar to the group of islands in that part of Malaysia and Indonesia than the rest of the Philippines.
Anyway, back to crocs, the Philippine croc, Crocodylus mindorensis, is named after Mindoro where it is still found today.
Mindoro waters are also shark-infested, they said. Mindoro is just a breath away from Batangas.
But then shark attacks are rare in the Philippines compared to other countries. My sisters and cousin had been surfing in Baler, Aurora before and later they were flabbergasted to learn that there are great white sharks in Aurora.
If not for my fear of these creatures, I could have been more fearless in freediving in Bohol and Palawan. But then my fears are somewhat unfounded because of the facts I stated above. What is more fearsome are the currents or riptides that have killed more divers than sharks. My sister was caught in one and she almost died when she was diving in Australia.
All this walking down the memory lane is making me yearn more for the sea.
Puerto Princesa Baywalk Pier. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
When you buy online, you get a free slim book keyboard worth PHP 7k. Free delivery via LBC. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I think I finally achieved a happy compromise. Portability with bigger screen compared to iPad mini 6 that I had been initially planning to get. I checked my sister-in-law’s iPad mini 6 that was newly purchased by my bro—it was losing charge quickly and it heats up. They had to bring it to the Apple store/reseller for possible repair. Aside from that, the screen was so small, even for watching Netflix. I want something that I could chuck in my handbag, but it should not be that small.
It was hard to satisfy my requirements. 🫥
I can hold it with one hand, like when I read daily news in bed. Photo by CallMeCreation.comNow I can read all my newspaper/magazine subscriptions away from my desktop. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
It has an 11″ screen, but it’s narrower and easier to handle than my old 10.2″ iPad 9. It’s also lighter.
It can easily be shoved into my medium-sized handbag. This is great for when I leave the house, like for a coverage or a meeting, but I’m not expecting heavy editing work in between. Or when I go out of town for leisure but I need to bring a machine for “work emergencies” without lugging my Lenovo laptop.
It can fit in my handbag! Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I have installed this with all the apps that I usually use for work like MS Outlook, Office, Teams, Zoom, etc. It can do multi-tasking without freezing (unlike my old hybrid tablet Lenovo Miix 3) or slowing down. It also has DeX, which is a special feature of Samsung tablets that can change the tab’s UI into desktop mode.
The keyboard is a little tight but serviceble and tactile.
I can use my Logitech mouse for this but it’s more cumbersone to shift machines with one mouse. Just use the damn pen! What’s the use of a touchscreen if you don’t use it?
I can draft an article here on the fly if needed. Well, I used to work a lot on the first netbook, Asus Eee PC 701 (with a 7″ screen), and used it as my main word processing machine in the field, therefore, I can live with this Samsung Tab S8 tablet/keyboard combo.
I guess some gadget reviewers were right; this is how Chromebooks should have been. Google could have just stuck with Android and optimize it for tablet/hybrid laptop instead of going for the Chromebook OS where everything is done via browser. I mean, where’s the versatility in that?
I’ve always been chasing the holy grail for journalists everywhere: a word processing machine powerful enough for our daily tasks in the field but can fit into our handbags so we can be free to literally chase people for interviews.
I remember way back in 2006, one journo pulled out her Palm (or a Handspring?) with a stand and a folding keyboard and started typing away during a press conference. I turned green with envy then because I was lugging everywhere with me my 15.4″ Toshiba laptop that weighed a ton. Anything that would help me reduce the size of my bag was welcome. Since then, I had been looking for a word processing machine that can send emails that I can bring everywhere with me.
This brought me to investigate HP’s iPaQ and Handspring Visor. I had wanted those things so badly because that meant I could leave my humongous laptop behind and just carry with me that handheld device and just connect it via infrared to a small keyboard. Of course, I couldn’t afford those things at that time (early 2000s).
So when the Eee PC came to Manila, I grabbed one (PHP 18,000 retail price in 2007) and left my Toshiba at home and turned it into a “desktop”. I finally was able to carry one bag with me in the field for the first time. 😉 The other business journos followed suit.
But the tiny keyboard caused my carpal tunnel syndrome. I had to go to an orthopedic surgeon because my hands and wrist were in so much pain. When the doctor asked how I worked, I pulled out my netbook and showed him how I typed. Bingo, he said. He told me to change my machine and prescribed to me a nerve pain medicine (Pregabalin) and a combo of Vit B complex. And oh, wrist supports when I slept. I think I did that for several months until it no longer hurt.
So my remedy for my tiny keyboard? I upgraded to a bigger netbook. I can’t go back to huge-ass laptops! Then netbooks went out of favor (they were so underpowered), so I had to search again for a middle ground: thin laptops/ultrabooks then hybrid tablet-laptops. The last one was the super underpowered Lenovo Miix 3 that eventually Twin I destroyed. I had to go back to the traditional heavy laptops.
Let’s see how this Tab S8 would fare in the field.
Let me start off by saying I needed a drink to write this down because this entails eviscerating myself.
I had a long chat over Messenger this afternoon with my friend (friendship dating back when we were 9-10 years old), about family (I know her entire family and their quirks and the generational issues) and how far we have come from where we were 2 years ago. It would be her supposed wedding anniversary tomorrow while it would be my 2nd year as a dumpee.
She told me about how her ex-husband just trashed all the things she has done for him, how she supported him when he had nothing, how she lifted him up because she loved him. However, he said he is happier without her. His insecurities led him to cheating and choosing women who would make him look good because he is superior over them vs my friend who is an overachiever.
I told her, unfortunately, the value you put in all of the things you gave him is not the same value for him–if he valued it at all. That’s how the world works, especially with narcissists, and with her ex-husband, he thought that what she did for him was an obligation and/or he was entitled to it, therefore, has zero value at all.
I told my friend, it’s just like when we adopted this niece (from a cousin) and she lived with us throughout her college life. We treated her like a sister, like a daughter. Then now she talks shit about us, especially on social media. We don’t know what we did to her to earn her hatred but at least she could have just shut up, in deference to how we treated her, right? My older sister said, apparently the value we gave to how we offered her a home and how we made an effort to make her an immediate family to us was zero for her. There are just people who are like that. I’m still hurting over that but what can I do, right?
Just the same with her ex-husband and just the same with my ex.
I remember right after J threw me off the balcony exactly two years ago from tomorrow, I had an interview with a company owner in Thailand he introduced to me. I think we set the interview in early January. That said, my interviewee enjoyed our conversation so much that we had two interview sessions. I took the opportunity to promote J as a good advisor that he should hire. He got so much boost from me—me being stupid, thinking that it was my last act of love towards somebody who I eventually discovered was screwing me over for a very long time, even from the beginning.
What a fool I was.
I thought I had forgiven him. Apparently no.
Because I dreamed about him this morning, but this time, in my dream I was in a quandary about how to kick him out of my house. We just got off the car and he was going ahead of me in some conference we were both supposed to attend. I whispered to a friend that I “still couldn’t do it, you know kicking him out,” but I know I had too because he was already treating me badly and was sucking out my light. The dream ended there.
So my dream was like an allegory of my anger that I still harbor and couldn’t still let go of. I haven’t forgiven him. I don’t want to label this as hate because I don’t want him to have that kind of power over me…because the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Oh I wish to God that I’m already indifferent but I recognize that it is a long process and it’s not easy.
If I were a horrible, vindictive human being, I could have destroyed him because we move in a world where a good reputation is the most important thing, especially if you’re after contracts and high quality networks. This is very much true if you don’t have much of a track record compared to others in the same space. But I just said to myself, I won’t stoop to that level and just let the universe do its thing. Karma comes back biting your ass, I believe.
Besides, he has already destroyed himself within my network by his own doing, dallying with that ex-reporter girl. He underestimated my network, how far my arms can reach, what my ears can hear. He can no longer use my network even if I chose to be quiet because that’s the most dignified thing to do. I just let the universe do its thing.
I was used and I realize now that was from the very beginning. I took it hook, line, and sinker. I believed what I wanted to believe and ignored the red flags. He used baits like “Will you give me a home?” schtick so that I would give him everything that I had, believing he really wanted to be with me. I accepted him for what he was and when he was at his lowest, I tried to give him the world, with all that I had. I supported him with everything—moral, financial, professional…
I recognize and experience that relationships sour and breakups happen. But what I found unacceptable to me were the deceit and the lies. The way he treated me especially in the end. And what makes this healing difficult is that I am trying to live my life quietly but things still come unraveling to me even until February-March this year, about 14-15 months after the breakup. Like, what the fuck?! What did I do to deserve this?! He just kept throwing all these curve balls on purpose. Typical narc.
All I did was to love unconditionally, but loved the wrong person. Very wrong person. Now I don’t have anything left to give to anybody and I don’t think I have the energy and love left. I realized that love is not infinite.
So healing is not linear. You go take one step forward, two steps back many times in the course of this wretched stage. At the same time you are forced to “adult”. If I were still a theater actress now, I know I would be able to bring more depth and gravity to the characters I will play because I finally know now how it is to die and come back from the dead. Well, for me that’s how the past two years felt like. I died and come back from the dead several times.
Through this past two years, I learned how invaluable professional therapy is. Not just the woo woo group therapy (those New Agey things). You know, grief messes you up and chemically, your body changes and it short-circuits you. As my doctor said, it’s trauma and left unaddressed, the short-circuiting continues. Long Covid didn’t help either. Depression and anxiety are not trivial. It’s not a sign of being weak and/or lack of faith in God. Some people are predisposed to it due to heredity, environment, and/or it’s just how they tick. I realized that I’m an empath and I absorb the slings and arrows of everything and everyone around me–that’s why I have the double whammy. Artists (even not good artists like me) are prone to such things—the twin evil named depression and anxiety. That’s where we get our mojo. That’s why I could draw better when I was down and out. I could write the most heartfelt piece when I hurt. We draw our power from our gut and as a consequence we expose our innards only to get bruised more.
J may not understand what I went through and would think that I had just been melodramatic if he only knew (so that’s why it was really better for me to be scarce and disappear), but that again boils down to how differently we valued the relationship and one another. To him, I was just a tool and a means for him to reach his goals, one step at a time; for me, he was my world—at that time. So again, he would never understand.
So in summary, the past two years had been a long difficult process. It was walking through fire barefoot. It was like having an odontectomy but local anesthesia does not work (and yes, this literally happens to me). It was like battling with a Balrog in the depths of Moria, dying and coming back as a white Maiar, bleached by pain and death.
But bouncing back as a more powerful wizard.
I have found my inner strength and a new-found love for myself. I had found my voice again.
I may not be shiny and effervescent like those big-boobed women who go bar-hopping and post their night life on social media to prove that they have attractive, “meaningful” lives. I am also not a high-powered woman executive that command thousands of people with a snap of her fingers.
I am just me.
I can be charming if I wanted to be. I am intelligent and there are no dull conversations with me, if I wanted to. But most importantly, I can offer a warm home with lots of love and care, where someone can belong and grow roots. Because anywhere with me is home—that’s the best I can give to anyone.
And J just doesn’t appreciate that. He is the wrong person.
Soon, I would just wake up and say, “Who was he again?” That’s the best indication of indifference I hope to achieve.
Here is June, my favorite Youtube cook (and resident cook at Delish). She uploaded this video of her grief a year after her mom died. This is the first time I visited her personal channel after watching a new episode of Budget Eats and learned that she and her partner and occasional food taster, Aaron, had broken up). I saw in this video how raw grief could be and how universal it was to receive messages from our loved ones in our dreams.
I sent this to my friend, B, and told her that she may find this helpful or cathartic and she doesn’t have to watch it soon. She can watch it next year. She said, she appreciates how I keep her in my thoughts.
Anyway, June talked about her scary and confusing dream about an emperor penguin attacking her, trying to protect her young from her. She dreamed about the terrifying emperor penguin around the same time her mom died.
One Sunday in July 2005, I woke up from a dream, crying. My father was in the hospital and dying. He died in front of my eyes. But I knew my dad was just downstairs in his room, but I was panicking still. I called my mom who was on a business trip in Iloilo and was also visiting my uncle—my father’s brother–and his family. I told her to come home immediately as I dreamed about dad dying. I told my sisters and my brother. I can’t remember if it was my mom or my sister who told me that we already knew he’s going to go sooner or later since only 30% of his heart muscles were functioning after his heart attack in 2000 and that the doctors only gave him a year to live and yet here he was, five years on, still fighting. No need to fret, they said.
I couldn’t get it out of my head. I left for Quezon City later that day because I had classes on Monday (grad school in UP Diliman). But before that, my dad cooked me breakfast and told me to take my medicine as I was coughing and may have an asthma attack later. I didn’t heed him. I just said I will come back Tuesday.
I was still unsettled.
I did not come back Tuesday. I told myself I will come home Thursday.
On Wednesday morning, I woke up, said goodbye to my partner (with whom I was secretly part living with on-and-off at that time) and went back to bed. I had a weird sensation of seeing myself giving my partner a hug—-this uncomfortable feeling of being watched from above.
After lingering a bit on the bed, I marched to the other room where my office was and watched the Korean drama Attic Cat on my computer as a way of procrastinating before tackling an editing job I must finish (I was a part-time editor for an English-language editing service in Hong Kong).
My brother called me on my phone. He was crying. He found my father dead on his bed; he wet his bed in his sleep.
I called up my older sister who was at work. She fell on her seat and started crying. I called up my mom, who was having breakfast with my uncle and the rest of the family. She started wailing. I told her, I told you to come home…my dream was a warning…
My brother and another uncle (who was also a professor in our university) immediately brought my dad to the funeral home. They were told that my brother may have found my dad 30 mins – 1 hr after he died since rigor mortis hasn’t really set in yet when they were fixing my dad. Or something to that effect, I couldn’t remember anymore.
My brother often had breakfast with my dad; he would drop by our house after his first class. Without fail that day, my dad cooked breakfast for my brother. However, the screen door was locked that morning when my brother knocked on the screen door. He knew my dad was inside but was not responding. He knew something was wrong. He started breaking the screen door to unlock it, used his key to open the heavy wooden front door, and saw my dad peacefully sleeping. One leg was propped up, as his usual position. But he was already cold.
A neighbor told me that she saw my dad early that morning going to church for the first mass of the day, at 5:30 am (or 6 am?). It was surprising because he normally didn’t go to church because he didn’t want people to see him sick. That’s how proud he was—he didn’t want people see him weak.
While we were waiting for my father’s body to arrive (not in the next 12 hours or so), I checked my dad’s room. He had worn his favorite red and white striped shirt that he had hung behind the bedroom door. He had in his pants’ back pocket my mom’s, my sisters’, and my handkerchiefs. I cried so hard. I think he knew he was dying that day.
A day before, he had one of his best friends visit him and they had a very long and fruitful conversation in our porch. At one point, he told his friend (which he told us) that he was ready to go as he has already settled what he needed to settle with his children…meaning he has sort of finally had some relationship with us. His only regret in life was he wasn’t able to give us material comfort because he was too proud and so fixed in his ways and refused to go with the system to become rich, he said.
I remember him telling me this, that he was being bought by one company he was fighting with because it was polluting a fishing community in Pangasinan (He was a faculty of the School of Environmental Science at that time). He said he could have taken the money and gave us a more comfortable life. But he didn’t.
So during my dad’s memorial, I told everyone and my dad, that it was ok if we weren’t rich. That we didn’t get to travel the world. That we were always short on cash when we were growing up. He shouldn’t feel guilty and regret some of his choices in life. I told everyone and my dad that he taught me–us—that integrity, dignity, and keeping our name clean are more important than any financial gain. It is the best lesson and gift that he could give us children. The lessons like fighting for your rights and fighting for people with lesser voice are worth more than gold. Living an upright life and not sponging on anybody is vital because DIGNITY is something other people couldn’t take away from you.
Every time I commit driving booboos, I remember my dad. I knew he would wring my neck. He always reminded me to check my tires (and pressure), radiator water, and engine oil before going on a long drive. I always remember him whenever I do those.
When I let my mom read my speech before the graduating students of my undergrad college, my mom told me, I am my father’s daughter. She sent my speech to my dad’s friends.
I know he is with me with my fight against our water concessionaire. My guts, pigheadedness, sense of justice, and the gumption came from him.
No, we do not get over the death of our loved ones. Even though they have hurt us at times. We just learn how to live with their absence. The grief does not go away. Your body just wraps around the grief and you grow around it.
I just discovered Haley Kalil this week and she’s funny.
I always get invited to press conferences with two tables: One for media and one for influencers and vloggers/bloggers. This is very true for presscons of consumer-facing companies like telcos and real estate. I often wondered about how do these people even keep up with making content everyday, setting up cameras and shoot themselves walking back and forth to give a false sense of, yeah, this is how I live my everyday life.
Apparently, it is a full-time job and they even have managers. I think if you are a “content creator” (a new job description I learned this year) and have your own wares to peddle like Nicolas Fairford, who has launched his own brand of tea wares, you have another revenue stream. However, for content creators who rely most of the time for sponsorships, you don’t have a choice but to lie to your viewers that you do indeed use their products—the more sponsorships, the more revenues you have. Even if their products suck. And if you are a content creator who relies mostly on ad revenues—you’re better off with your day job because Google sucks the life out of you as I read that unless you are the top 1% of xxx (can’t remember if it’s your country/market/or Youtube), you will not really make money that could pay your bills.
By the way, Haley is gorgeous. Like Cindy Crawford x Angelina Jolie gorgeous.
Grief is love holding on
This is the thing I told my friend who is grieving for her father, who died while in ICU in the US. She couldn’t fly there on short notice and it’s little use since they will be bringing his body back anyway since her parents are really based here.
I told her I have no comforting things to say because there’s nothing else in this world that can make her feel better, based on my experience. So just let grief overwhelm you, I said. Don’t pressure yourself to be ok because it’s not ok. Don’t think about how long it will take you to grieve. Don’t let other people dictate how long you will grieve, I told her.
It’s a pain that will never go away. We just learn to live with it. Nobody will understand your pain because your pain is yours alone.
B sent me a video of her last conversation with her dad while in the ICU (which was not permitted but was made possible by her sibling who slipped the phone inside the room–probably the sibling was a nurse). I told her to save it on the cloud because she will be watching it everyday for a long time. I said I saved my father’s text messages to me (hey, early 2000s!) on my phone and held on to them for years until my phone got snatched from my bag. I even lost his phone number. One time I was so overtaken with grief I sent that number a text message. It was a comfort to me, pretending that I could still message him.
“Until now, 17 years have passed, there’s still a dull pain somewhere in my chest when I remember that. I feel like crying now. It’s something that never goes away,” I told B.
“In a way, that’s comforting to know. I don’t want to forget him,” B replied.
“Grief is love holding on. You will hold on to everything,” I said.
I told B: I have a friend who messaged me out of the blue one night and asked if he was already going insane or something was really wrong with him because it was already a year since his dad died but he was still crying and grief-stricken. He quit work because he really took it hard.
I told him that no, he’s fine. He’s not yet insane. There’s no timetable for grief. I told him that I was also jobless for a year when my dad died. I decided to be a full-time graduate student so I can just coast along and grieve. I only felt the urge to go find work when I found myself scrounging for money to buy myself airtime/SMS load for my phone. “Don’t mind other people; your grief is yours alone. We hold on because that’s what we only have left now. And it’s ok.”
Then B said: This helped a lot. Salamat.
I have other thoughts about how I lived with grief after a loved one has died and grief over losing myself over someone who didn’t deserve me at all. There are many types of grief: there are those that it’s ok if we keep it for the rest of our lives (death) and there are those that we need to get out of (love and betrayal) because, I don’t know…It doesn’t feel right anymore. There may be others but on top of my head are these two that I know.
I will just write about it some other time because it would be emotionally draining but at the same time cathartic. But I’m not for it right now.
I just want to relax and watch houses that I will never have.
It’s past 2 am and we just arrived from Lasema. Why late, I don’t know. Maybe I’m trying to avoid the weekend crowd.
I picked up my cousin this morning from her house north from where I live because she wants to celebrate my birthday with me. For lunch we threw health consciousness to the wind as we grilled steaks. My cousin made Vietnamese spring rolls to balance the meal 😂.
Photo by CallMeCreation.com Home made Vietnamese spring rolls. She also made the sauce. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
We had dinner at the restaurant at the ground floor of Lasema building. The girls just wanted the dimsum and gimbap served at the jjimjilbang so we needed to do round 2 there.
Side dishes. Photo by CallMeCreation.com Photo by CallMeCreation.com Cooking myself at 55 degrees. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Why did we go to Lasema? It’s because this cousin was the one who introduced me to Lasema. She treated me to my first jjimjilbang experience for my birthday more than a decade ago.
Happy birthday to me.
What did I do during my birthday last year? I can’t remember but I think I was still confined in my room, recovering from Covid. The year before that was equally dark because I was suffering from anxiety and depression since I was already being mistreated but I still couldn’t figure it exactly or I was in denial. I remember writing I was confused why I was so unhappy. In 2019, we were in Bohol but right there I knew something was amiss. My ex was more interested in diving than being with me. I was just a means for him to get there. The supposed intimacy was just a duty and I already felt that.
Well, he just used you to be able to settle here, my cousin said. I know, I replied. He already told me that when we broke up. He said we needed each other at the time we met. He had planned to come here even before we got together, he said.
I was convenient.
But for me, it was genuine. I needed him because I needed him. Not because of anything else. I would have left my old house even without meeting him.
Ah well, this darkest episode in my life taught me how to stand up and love myself. But it would have been better if I didn’t experience him. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
So this is the first birthday in a long time I’ve had a happy birthday. I deserve this. The now. The peace. My life is benign but at least I’m not a human appliance or a meal ticket. At least I know the people around me genuinely like me and are putting up with whatever I am today because of that. I may be bitter but at least bitterness in ampalaya protects it from pests, just the same way it protects me from evil people. It’s too exhausting to be in a relationship, it really sucks the life out of me.
Forty-three. When I was a kid I thought this age is already really old. How wrong I was.
My life is just starting.
I just slept almost the whole day. My body may have been compensating from the stress that I’ve experienced the past week so now it just wants to hibernate.
My girls made banderitas that said “Happy Birthday” and they had hung it against the curtains downstairs. They had to take it down though because of the cats. But I loved that they made a lot of effort in doing that. If you have children like these, what else would you need in life, right?
While I was changing my bed sheets tonight, I thought about the possibility of someone knocking on my door. I think I would tell him, let’s see first if we really like each other. Passion fizzles out but developing genuine like for each other takes time. I just don’t want to settle so that I won’t be alone—that’s so distasteful to me now. What if he’s shallow, what are we to talk about??? That person has to meet me intellectually and our interests should align without having to exert too much effort. The problem with me before was that I pushed heaven and earth to meet their interests, to align myself with them. It shouldn’t be so—that’s why I always ended up exhausted and resentful. Just like with the girls’ dad, I pretended that we had the same values when in fact they were poles apart.
For example, I don’t think I would be able to stay with someone who does not care about my concern about the growing possibility that China will invade Taiwan this year or next—at a time when Russia just declared martial law in occupied areas of Ukraine. He doesn’t have to understand the technical aspects of what I’m writing about for my job but at least we could talk about ideas and we should not be limited to conversations about events—or worse, just about people.
Because at the end of the day, friendship and companionship are more important than sex or any other thing that comprise a romantic relationship. It makes the effort of accommodating that person in my life when I’m already settling in my ways seem worthwhile.
That person shouldn’t tear me apart and destroy my mental health; he should uplift and take care of me and not drag me down. I shouldn’t always be carrying the world so he would stay. I shouldn’t even be pushing heaven and earth so he would stay because a person worth my while will stay no matter how strong the earthquake is. That he will always choose me.
Sometimes I do get lonely because I have no one to share many things on an intellectual and spiritual level. But when I remember the anger, pain, and sheer exhaustion that I experienced whenever I accommodate a person in my life, my loneliness dissipates. It’s more painful to be with somebody who makes you feel lonely than be lonely alone.
As I told my cousin yesterday, I’m still working on loving myself, working on having a healthy view of myself.
I wrote on my IG several months ago:
This is the first and only time I will talk about this.
I encourage all people to take care of their mental health. The best thing I did for myself was to seek professional help because I was crumbling inside while maintaining my super mega facade. People were surprised to know that I was a highly functional clinically depressed person; I didn’t look like I was mentally ill. I was dealing with multiple traumas, especially after The Breakup almost two years ago.
I had enough bullshit to last me a lifetime. For years, I was alone in raising my twins and their dad thought that “babysitting” them was not his job. It didn’t even enter his mind to parent them. Raising sickly twins, being the breadwinner, and being cheated on over and over (discovering Tinder on his phone and disappearing on weekends just to find out from other people that he went to the beach with friend/s)—it’s enough to break a weaker person. Add to that is my highly stressful work as a journalist. I was suffering from anxiety attacks because I was carrying the world on my shoulders. I even thought I was having a heart attack one time I brought myself to the ER. I was smoking like a chimney.
Then I thought I got my shit together after closing that chapter. But then everything fell apart almost two years ago and I sought solace from different things to cure myself, which exacerbated my traumas. In August last year, I downed a bottle of wine by myself and was drunk posting on FB and drunk texting people—that’s when I knew I needed help.
I will soon have my last session with my therapist, I’m off my meds, I learned about my triggers, what co-dependency is, and learned that is treatable. I learned to love myself, treat myself better, untangle my messy brain, and I’m living a healthier life.
I learned that I deserve to be treated better by other people and I shouldn’t accept things just because that’s what society expected me to do. As my cousin told me, if you don’t love yourself then who will? If you don’t take care of yourself, who will? Who will take care of the twins as well?
I lost friends from suicide because they couldn’t get out of the deep, dark pit they were in. No one could understand the pain of being there. You think some people are fine but they aren’t.
I’m still working my way though all these. I’m trying to heal and I’m not imposing a strict timetable on myself… I will heal in God’s time.
