Category Archives: memories

The beginning of the end

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A year ago.

My new shrink says I should process this trauma properly and she’s going to help me with that.

Yes, she called it trauma.

And I’ve been running away from the trauma by rushing through the process of recovery. She says I need to confront this trauma because it will be a cycle that will keep on bogging me down all the time. It’s the reason I couldn’t write and just stare at the ceiling when I get triggered. It’s like one step forward, two steps back. Just like when I discovered about him and that girl. I was back to zero.

She said alcohol is not the answer and medicating myself with alcohol to numb myself and make me fall asleep is dangerous because 1) it’s a depressant and 2) I have a history of alcoholism in the family.

Since August, when I hit rock-bottom, I’ve been under her care and gave me the right antidepressant and anti-anxiety meds. It has helped me so much because I’ve been in denial that I have trauma. Those months that I wasn’t sleeping… That I wake up every 30 mins. Then every hour. It was only when I had Covid that I felt I had really been sleeping, like I was making up for the months I hadn’t had any peaceful sleep.

I also get triggered by every little thing connected to him or that girl whom I started to hate. I have unfollowed her in all social media platforms even though we’re friends. You see, it’s just like a soldier with PTSD going nuts when he hears a loud bang, thinking it’s gunfire.

It doesn’t help that I carry the weight of the world as a single mom, during a global pandemic, and I’ve been carrying my entire team and all the stresses that came with it because of bad leadership. So I’ve been sweeping this trauma under the rug so I can juggle the stress at work and as a single parent. But all these three stressors compete all the time, hence, my bad stress management.

I just realized now that I am rushing my Covid recovery. Twin I and I biked from our apartment to UP this evening but we were just barely inside the campus when I got very dizzy and my vision became wavy. I thought I was going to collapse. I was hyperventilating. We stopped for a moment to steady myself and catch my breath and then we slowly made our way back home. I’m still weak.

Resting. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I am not yet fine. I’m still sick. I still have long Covid symptoms. Right after a hot shower, I went straight to bed. Twin A checked on me and found me hot to touch like I have a fever. I still have a headache as I type this on my phone.

Why am I rushing my recovery? Because I’ve regained the weight I lost when I was really sick with Covid. I feel ugly that I am back to being fat. And upon deeper analysis, it’s because I’ve always thought that my being fat has contributed to the many reasons why he used and left me. He exploited my insecurity. And that’s the reason why he went after a journalist who was stick-thin and very young.

I need to be kinder to myself. It seems like I haven’t accepted the fact that I’ve been used; that every cell in my body is rejecting that thought but it is what it is. I have to accept that and I shouldn’t blame myself for what happened. There’s some kind of disconnect between what I’ve been trying to tell myself and what I am really feeling deep down. I have to work on that.

I need to work on my PTSD, if indeed this is PTSD.

(My old shrink–literally old–just diagnosed that I’m co-dependent that’s why I got stuck in an abusive marriage with someone with a narcissistic personality disorder but she refused to work on my annulment case. Now the Supreme Court ruled that psychological incapacity in annulment cases need not be medically certified by a psychiatrist and that term is just limited to the legal definition. So I dropped that old psych, good riddance. This new psych is for my therapy because I want to heal. And heal soon.)

According to the American Psychiatric Association, the symptoms of PTSD fall into four categories. Specific symptoms can vary in severity.

  1. Intrusion: Intrusive thoughts such as repeated, involuntary memories; distressing dreams; or flashbacks of the traumatic event. Flashbacks may be so vivid that people feel they are re-living the traumatic experience or seeing it before their eyes.
  2. Avoidance: Avoiding reminders of the traumatic event may include avoiding people, places, activities, objects and situations that may trigger distressing memories. People may try to avoid remembering or thinking about the traumatic event. They may resist talking about what happened or how they feel about it.
  3. Alterations in cognition and mood: Inability to remember important aspects of the traumatic event, negative thoughts and feelings leading to ongoing and distorted beliefs about oneself or others (e.g., ā€œI am bad,ā€ ā€œNo one can be trustedā€); distorted thoughts about the cause or consequences of the event leading to wrongly blaming self or other; ongoing fear, horror, anger, guilt or shame; much less interest in activities previously enjoyed; feeling detached or estranged from others; or being unable to exprience positive emotions (a void of happiness or satisfation).
  4. Alterations in arousal and reactivity: Arousal and reactive symptoms may include being irritable and having angry outbursts; behaving recklessly or in a self-destructive way; being overly watchful of one’s surroundings in a suspecting way; being easily startled; or having problems concentrating or sleeping.

Digging through memories

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Traffic was terrible yesterday; it’s as if the whole world descended on South Luzon Expressway. I left at 4 pm and arrived at 7:30 pm. I was just in time for the live broadcast of our talk show, where I wore a gorilla mask before my high school friends revealed that I’m the newest co-host.

Halloween selfie. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

The episode is a Halloween special and of course I’ve had a lot of those scary stories of my own. Two of our viewers last night were primary witnesses to my scariest story, which even freaked out my co-hosts. “You know,” one of my co-hosts and friend said, “we’ve known you for decades and we don’t have any freaking idea about this side of you. If we only knew that you were one entire horror movie, we wouldn’t have gotten you as our vocalist.” It was in jest but I could feel he got freaked out.

This is why I don’t like horror movies. I’ve lived through them.

Anyway, I was asked by some of our high school classmates to contribute to the photo gallery that we will be using for the homecoming. So I rummaged through my boxes in my old room and scanned some of them.

Then I found some treasures.

Mommy and kitty. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Here’s our mommy cat, Puppy (yes, that’s the name we gave her) and her kitten, Kulet. They’re so lovely.

Our pets. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Our cats by the old computer. My dogs. I suddenly missed them. I wasn’t joking when I told my kids that at one point we had four dogs, three cats, and a tankful of fish.

I also unearthed short stories I wrote and some drawings from high school that survived.

Charcoal drawing by CallMeCreation.com
Splotches, watercolor, by CallMeCreation.com
House of Cards, Mongol pencil, as interpreted by CallMeCreation.com
Dancing under the moon, Mongol pencil by CallMeCreation.com
In Paris, watercolor by CallMeCreation.com
By the Cafe, watercolor, by CallMeCreation.com

I’ve almost forgotten that I used to draw and do watercolors. I should revisit this one of these days.

Rut

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woman in white shirt showing frustration
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I’m in a writer’s rut. I can’t bring myself to write this week and I have one analysis piece that I need to publish before the month ends (like tomorrow!!!) and another feature that is awaited by my interviewees. Productivity is half although my editing is still sharp; it’s just that I can’t write.

I need to get out tomorrow or else I will suffer from writer’s block. I will just sleep this off again. I need to be in a coffee shop for a change of scenery. Bo’s Coffee near my house probably and then I can transfer to Starbucks on the other side of the village much later.

I was like this in 2014 then after my gall bladder surgery, I resigned and signed on with my current company.

I can’t seem to put my finger in it why I’m having these productivity meltdowns more often. The seven-year-itch probably? Or lockdown burnout? I don’t know but I gotta cure this fast.

Vegetarian. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I don’t think I’ve had pork for more than a week now. I’ve been going vegetarian most days and like this one, I’ve had string beans in coconut milk and a fancy egg drop soup with leeks for dinner. I need to have more calorie-deficit days to make up for the food I consumed in my mom’s house when she ordered a lot of stuff to celebrate my birthday last Sunday.

Meanwhile, a few minutes ago my househelp asked me about Dekada ’70 (The ’70s), a novel by Lualhati Bautista. I told her it’s a fictional story of the Bartolome family set against a real historical backdrop–during Martial Law. I told her do not watch the movie, it’s better to read the book because the movie was watered down. She said she tried looking for it at National Bookstore because it’s an assigned reading for her Philippine Literature class. Right there and then, I bought the book off Shopee and within minutes I told her the vendor should be sending the pocketbook by Saturday.

I was delighted that her teacher is progressive enough to make her students read this.

I read this in high school and I think I wrote a paper about it for my Filipino class. It was one of the biggest eye-openers for me and since then I started researching about what really happened in those times. I read more books about it since it was a dark time for Philippine journalism as well. Of course, Martial Law was pivotal for my family too because this has shaped the politics of my parents. My mom was a member of Kabataang Makabayan (a student activist organization) whose members were imprisoned, tortured, and killed during that time. My father’s activism came in later but until his dying day, he was still affiliated with the reformist leftist groups (the breakaway from the the Maoist group of Jose Maria Sison).

We also did the Martial Law project for my former TV network and I was supposed to interview then Bangko Sentral Deputy Governor Diwa Gunigundo for this project but some personal matters took over and the interview did not push through. I hope I can do it soon for a special project. Anyway, Gov Diwa was imprisoned during Martial law when he was the editor-in-chief of The Philippine Collegian–the student paper of the University of the Philippines Diliman that openly criticized Ferdinand Marcos when nobody in mainstream media dared. My mom said even non-UP people were grabbing copies of Kule (Philippine Collegian’s nickname) when Diwa was EIC because “it was the only one publishing the truth at that time; everything published by others was propaganda and lies.” When Diwa and I once chatted, I told him he probably knew my uncle, my father’s cousin, Nick Atienza, who was also imprisoned at that same time at Fort Bonifacio (which is ironically the posh BGC now) and was the secretary-general of Kabataang Makabayan at that time. Diwa was shocked. He shook his head. “Nick was just three cells from me. I could hear them (military) torturing him every night, bashing his head like a troso (lumber) against his cell wall. It’s a miracle that he lived through that. Nick suffered the most horrible torture ever known among the Martial Law detainees who had lived,” Diwa said.

Nick Atienza had trouble walking for the rest of his life because of the shrapnel still embedded in his legs. My parents recommended to him my father’s orthopedic surgeon to help him with his problems. When my dad’s doctor learned who Nick was and how he obtained his injuries, he waived his professional fees. Since Nick was also a faculty member at UP, he probably had other fees discounted as well because he was treated at UP-PGH.

So I had a teacher for my Social Science 2 (Great Political Theories) in college who proclaimed that it’s not true that Ferdinand Marcos committed the crimes that people had thrown at him and there were no human rights violations during that time. I barked at my teacher and told her, “So what can you say about an uncle of mine who was tortured at Fort Bonifacio?” I always had heated debates with this teacher who always cited The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, justifying Marcos’ actions during his 21-year rule (“the end justifies the means”). She failed me because she was just too annoyed that I challenged her lies. When she did that to me, I went straight to the department chairman and complained. Instead of taking the removal exams, because I didn’t want to deal with her anymore, I took again that class under a different teacher. That cost me my cum laude. I was running for honors then.

I was expecting my parents to berate me for failing. But my father said: It’s better to fail than to accept lies being fed to you. It’s better to stand up for what you believe what is right.

And this has been my guiding principle ever since.

Why I blog

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business coffee composition computer
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Why do I blog when this is not even public and not indexed by search engines? Why do I even bother blogging anonymously?

Number one, I need an outlet to express my thoughts that I cannot share on social media. I have limited my FB engagement because it really does something to your brain, especially now that politics is so toxic and divisive. I maintain my Twitter because it is my source of fast news. I use Instagram for shallowness, like following hashtags like #workspaces, #hobonichi #travelersnotebook, #moleskine, etc. LinkedIn is just for work and personal branding.

I have no outlet to express my thoughts and emotions, where I can talk about the mundane and inane things. I sometimes need to practice writing other than business writing. My old school journal is for the things I need to express explicitly, naming names, places, specific things, specific events. Things that aren’t for consumption of people other than me.

I am a very opinionated person and I am expressive but mostly that is about current events and politics. Or about funny things. However, I am never comfortable about airing my personal struggles and dirty linen. I always try to maintain an air of dignity and I also think about the dignity of the other party involved in my dirty laundry.

Second, my blogs are my archive of whatever. My photos, my voice, my record of my daily life. For my kids. When I depart this universe, they will have something to come back to, to hear my voice in my writing and actual audio recording. So that when they miss me, they can still feel that I am with them, just somewhere, taking my grand vacation.

I started keeping journals since I was 10–their age right now. Because I was a diligent journal writer, I became I professional writer. I started publishing in high school–in a nationally circulated magazine in Filipino. I don’t know if Liwayway is still around but I was a published Filipino writer at first but I had always been a bilingual literary writer. I remember writing in one of my journals in high school that I keep journals for my future children. So they will understand how I went through adolescence, that I went through what they are going through. The insecurities, the heartbreaks, the self-doubts…all those raging emotions that a typical teenager go through. At the back of my mind I knew I will have daughters. I don’t know…it was just a gut feel. Even at 15 years old.

fashion woman notebook pen
Photo by Negative Space on Pexels.com

Then I started blogging in 2002-2003. I used Geocities to create my website and learned HTML codes to build it from scratch. I wrote about my travels. It was hard to keep up with it because building pages with just HTML codes is tedious. Because of the skills I learned from blogging then, I was able to build websites for our online store using Joomla. Then the WYSIWYG blogging tools came into being. I started with Blog-city, then Blogger, Blogspot, Multiply, then settled with WordPress. I remember in 2003-2005, my co-workers and I were reading each other’s blogs because all of us were just ranting about our editor whom we codenamed “Virgin Doll”. We called ourselves by our blog names like Luthien (me), Styar and Crimsonarrows. Then we got into different paths but we still kept in touch via our blogs. Then the rise of social media took over our blogging so that is that.

I couldn’t recover now my old blogs because the hosts became defunct. I tried saving some of the contents of my old blogs via TheWayBackMachine but most were irrecoverable. It’s really unfortunate because I need to use some of the contents for my annulment case.

Tracking my personal growth is easier too as I get to read entries from 10 years ago or older. It was a struggle to blog when I was still with my newspaper then because my life then was super competitive so all my free time was devoted to learning my business–reading books about investing, the stock market, reading all my magazine subscriptions to help me understand global events. When I woke up it’s about news–watching cable news and business channels–and before going to bed it was still news (magazines). When I got into broadcast/online, I found it easier to blog because Internet connection was easier due to the availability of my own mobile internet connection whereas when I was in the newspaper business, the only time I get to go online for personal reasons is when I got home and most of the time my brain was already fried and would rather vege out infront of the screen to watch my anime.

After my breakup with J, I had been blogging religiously for my sanity. I needed to let this all out. I needed to talk to myself by writing about myself for myself. It’s like the exercise that we had during a writing workshop I attended at the Philippine High School for the Arts–the stream of consciousness exercise, which is a literary device employed by writers, like it’s having a monologue to yourself. Aside from developing your own voice, stream of consciousness clears away the cobwebs that clutter a writer’s brain and help it organize the mind for more important writing tasks at hand. As I told my students, a good writer can already organize an outline of her piece in her brain; how to line up the facts, how the story/article will flow and how it will it arrive at the thesis of the piece. A really good writer knows how to edit and re-edit herself, keeping it to the simplest understandable form and being direct to the point. A good writer never stops editing her piece until it goes to the printing press.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, said one becomes an expert after devoting 10,000 hours to that specific task. The successful people have the advantages/resources to have these 10,000 hours. So I am privileged enough to be able to devote time to writing other things so I can practice my craft and not waste my free moments scrolling through social media. I must constantly write, edit, and re-edit my entries so I will not lose my “voice”, how I process my thoughts, how I can write quickly without any outline in my head.

Practice, practice, practice. Read, read, read.

Blogging also helps me write even though my heart is breaking into a million pieces. Writing through tears and pain. It’s very cerebral work and it’s hard to deliver if your mind has already shut down. No one really cares if a writer/journalist is hurting so she still has to write and deliver work. Writing despite all these debilitating circumstances helps a writer conquer emotions and plod along. It also helps in the numbing process.

This is why I still keep on paying for my web hosting year in and year out. It’s all worth the money.

Buying online courses

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I bought Skillshare and Domestika subscriptions so that my girls would have something else to do. My daughter, Twin A, is showing interest in drawing so I will give her access to Skillshare while her twin prefers Domestika. They’re cheap–each doesn’t cost more than PHP 1,500 a year. Plus I can also have access to both when I want to learn new skills as well.

Twin A’s interpretation of a power pole and lines against the sunset. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

If there are things that my parents didn’t deny us/scrimp on, these are art/music lessons and books. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up because my parents were strictly academic people employed by a state university, with only a few consultancy jobs because my father said their foremost priority should be their research and teaching. Devoting more time to consultancy jobs is a form of cheating/corruption because you’re using the government’s time to enrich yourself. Well, most of the time their consultancy jobs are pro bono because the NGO work they were doing were for the poor.

Anyway, I digress. So my parents made sure we were well-rounded individuals who had access to or some form of training in the arts. My brother and older sister enrolled in drawing classes and piano lessons but they didn’t stick to it. My mom bought electric keyboards because of those piano lessons. When they saw I was displaying much interest in piano, they enrolled me in piano lessons and I stuck with it for a few years. Later, they bought us an upright piano and I was the one who mostly used it. I could spend three hours playing it. We asked for books, they bought us books. When my mom went abroad for work, she would scour the bookstores for copies of books that we didn’t have here in the Philippines.

I am doing the same to my kids. When they asked for ukeleles, I didn’t think twice about buying them those. They’re still playing the instruments, but it’s Twin I who wants to take advanced lessons in it. I will enroll her if she’s still up to it after having that access to Domestika.

They’re still doing their Kumon and next year I will enroll them in review classes to prepare them for entrance exams to Quezon City Science High School and UP high schools in Diliman and Los BaƱos. I am not going to force them to take the Philippine Science High School (a.k.a Pisay) exam because there is a lot of pressure there but if they want, they can take it. My brother and older sister took the exams and passed (can’t remember though if my older sister went through the second screening though because she wasn’t keen on going there anyway). My brother had a slot in Philippine Science High School but he later decided not to enroll there because he had most of his friends enroll in UP. When it was my turn, I didn’t bother taking the Pisay exam because I didn’t want to go there because I knew early on that I will not pursue a science course in college so it was a waste of time. Plus my math grades weren’t stellar so I had a math tutor to help me pull up my grades to keep me in the honors’ list.

What I wish for my kids is to have the chance to have more exposure to sports and the arts because later on in life they may decide to pursue careers that may not be science-based at all. Like me. But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t learn the hard sciences. In fact in my undergrad years, half of the courses I took were sciences because I was a science communication/journalism major. My grades in my biology courses were mostly 1.0 or 1.25 (1.0 being the highest and 5.0 the failing mark). I quit one course (environmental science) because it was only my mom teaching that subject that semester and I certainly didn’t want her to be my professor! I had to change course (botany) at the last minute. I wanted to enroll in an environmental microbiology course but it may turn out that my mom may be the only one teaching that again. So instead I took some forestry subjects. I initially wanted to pursue environmental journalism but there was no such thing in this country and only developed countries have that (my target was to be a photo journalist for National Geographic). 25 years on, we still don’t have that.

So back to lessons, offline and online. I may be cheap on other things (like cars, housing, and furnishings) but I will not scrimp on education.

DIY

Despite spending the rest of Sunday mostly sleeping, I was able to shoehorn some DIY projects today. I was able to finally change the curtain rod brackets after three years of living here. I used to use the hooks left by the previous tenant. I removed those and patched up the holes those hooks left behind with some white wall putty.

Alloy curtain rod brackets I bought from Lazada. They feel sturdy enough and they have some heft to them. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

And drilling holes into the walls made of solid concrete left me exhausted.

All adults should have power drills. This is the most useful tool I bought for myself for my DIYs. And yep, that white stuff on my fingers was the wall putty. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Finally, I was able to finish installing the brackets and lengthen the area where my curtains can go.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I should finish the second batch of katcha/muslin curtains I’m sewing by hand so I can change these because these are already full of holes. Courtesy of my cats.

Because I was too exhausted to do any real cooking. I settled for mandu and Kikoman with chili oil, instant yakisoba, spicy fishcakes, and seaweed for dinner.

Light dinner. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

My worst enemy

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It’s my mind. I’m on my 9th day confined here in this box. The previous days I have more hours sleeping than awake. However, I have more waking hours now but I can’t spend too much time scrolling through my phone or staying at my computer because it gives me headaches.

So there are moments I just spend staring at the ceiling and walls. And remember.

A few days ago I discovered some stuff that J left behind that I should send back to him. I could just burn them but I have no means to do that here unless I want to burn the whole apartment compound down. I needed to purge him from my life. For my peace. I needed to do this exercise, this act of purging. It’s like this is with finality: I’m done grieving over you. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I don’t want to remember you, just like when you erased me and pretended I didn’t exist.

I don’t want to die with this bitterness hanging over me. How he treated me like I was just a servant, a sugar mommy, and how I just accepted a small nugget of affection, which I thought was love. In his eyes, if something was wrong it was always my fault. Everything was my fault. I get blamed for so many things even when I tried my very best.

Having lived through Covid gives me a new perspective. Choose people who choose you. I now realize many people love me. They kept sending me food and medicines. They’ve been sending me help. One friend even offered to look after my kids if I’m taken away by the LGU.

I don’t have to beg. I don’t have to fight so hard for it. Love that is not freely given is not worth fighting for. This person, J, is not even worth fighting for. That person is not worth remembering.

For months I’ve grieved for somebody who didn’t even grieve for me. Who never regretted hurting me. I nearly went out of my mind because of somebody who was not even nice to me.

I asked this here one time: if I no longer exist in memory, do I no longer exist? Now I flip it: Yes, if he doesn’t exist in my memory, then he no longer exists. He does not deserve to occupy precious space in my head and heart and I must make more space for more beautiful memories with people who genuinely love me and who would fight for me until the end.