It turns out nothing is wrong with me. My bad cholesterol, uric acid, and triglycerides are back to normal from their stratospheric heights in 2021 while my blood sugar (both FBS and hba1c) remains normal. My major organs are fine (unremarkable, the interpretations said). So what’s the deal with my stomach pain that knocked the wind out of me?
It’s stomach acids, not the pancreas, my attending physician said. If I respond to the drug he gave me, then it’s acids. If I don’t, then it’s likely ulcer and I need an endoscopy to ascertain it. But my GI specialist isn’t that perturbed because there is no bleeding or signs that I am at that point. He just gave me an order for the pancreas scan if I wanted to but he says it’s not needed unless I get another similar attack. I will have that scan because stomach acids cannot explain the pain that radiated to my back.
Shit! It’s really stress. It’s eating me alive.
I am really, really done for.
And you know what’s the tragic thing here? They don’t f*cking care if you die. You’re just another tool. Another cog. You are replaceable.
Just like our in-house legal counsel. He had cancer and he worked himself to death. He loved his job because he was a journalist first and then a lawyer second. He bit the bullet for us whenever we had lawsuits. And now, he is forgotten. The new management didn’t even get to know him.
I checked my house first before going to the hospital this afternoon.
This staircase will be torn down soon. Photo by CallMeCreation.com Digging deep for the expanded basefor my new industrial strength staircase.Photo by CallMeCreation.com The outside night light. Photo by CallMeCreation.com I can finally close my bathroom door as my granite countertop has been trimmed. Photo by CallMeCreation.com Finally, a proper window. Photo by CallMeCreation.com The shelves on the tapered side of the counter.For toiletries maybe? Photo by CallMeCreation.com Cabinet for toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Photo by CallMeCreation.com Bookshelves/lookout platform for my cats. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I strolled a bit to go to the jeepney stop because it’s better to take public transport than bring my car. I don’t want to fight for parking space at the hospital. The campus is teeming with students again after almost 3 years. The first semester was hybrid so it was still like a ghost town here from August to December.
The students are back for the second semester. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I decided to go back to QC early (3 pm) since traffic was light and took the mountain bypass road that I had grown to love through the years.
Faculty housing on my right. My bro didn’t move from their apartment to a three-bedroom housing unit because he didn’t want to maintain a lawn. His own townhouse now doesn’t have any lawn or garden at all. Photo by CallMeCreation.comDriving through a secondary forest. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Maybe moving back here is the right choice. My stress is not as pronounced compared to when I’m back at my apartment in QC. Maybe because I’m cooped up in there. Maybe because I’ve always been a provinciana that the knots in my whole body uncoil when I see trees.
Nah. This is just a fancy type of red grape juice from Spain. If I let it ferment in my fridge for a couple of years, I think it will become red wine. Until I get cleared by my GI specialist whom I would see on Thursday, I won’t drink any form of alcohol. But playing pretend helped me to get through today.
Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I know it’s bad to have meals in front of the computer but here I am, violating that rule.
Cold soba with tsuyu (from my Mitsukoshi stash) and kimchi for a vegetarian dinner. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I really needed a lot of help to get me focused on the task at hand today. It’s like pulling a tooth. At least I was able to push out another story today, co-written by two other colleagues. All I did today is 1) beg for the son/child of owner (COO) of a Southeast Asia conglomerate to grant me an interview but he demanded an F2F one so I need to fly to Singapore for that; 2) interview a candidate and administer tests to other candidates; 3) respond to a thousand emails. But I never got around to finishing that story today when I should have.
I am paralyzed. I can’t write anymore.
It was just like in 2014 when I quit my local news job and in 2021 when I was swimming in the depths of my depression.
I remember my therapist telling me it’s anxiety that kills my creativity so I keep pushing away tasks and procrastinate so much that I end up with too many backlogs. It’s anxiety that is keeping me from doing the very basic of things that used to be second nature to me.
I just had a chat with another bureau chief from another region and he is in the same boat: this hiring and staff shortage are killing us. It’s not our jobs to be HR managers. He was told to poach from other departments because we are freeze-hiring. And he tried some analysts for the journo gig but in the end, one analyst/journo candidate cried when he submitted his writing test. It turns out he can’t write. My colleague/fellow bureau chief said it was easier for him to rewrite the whole thing instead of editing it. It was that bad.
We are already too stretched. When I told him, “I said there’s no way I can hire the “quality” candidates they’re looking for,” he told me he almost burst out laughing in the coffee shop where he was working. Because the top people think we’re in the same league as the big media companies that candidates would make a beeline for us. Or that we can poach from them and the candidates would just come running to us and jump ship.
They’re so delusional.
It’s so taxing. I’m tired. He’s tired. All of us are.
We have lost many headcount and yet we are pressured to keep productivity and engagement at the same level. This is ridiculous.
Oh God, please me help write tomorrow. I can’t go on like this–the fight, flight, or freeze response to stress.
And then there are the nasty people who feel so entitled that they think it is imperative that we make a story about them or their company. They pester us for coverage when there are more important things to cover/more interesting things to feature/write about. Then when we can’t give them the immediate response, they turn nasty. HEY, WE DO NOT OWE YOU ANYTHING! If we do not return your correspondence in two months, that means your story is not compelling. Don’t harass us or throw us some attitude.
I remember a friend telling me about the same situation with a guy who pestered them for coverage for months. She granted that interview to shut him up after he showed an attitude. She told me no more interviews/favors to that person from now on.
X-mark, she said.
Some people can be so…
Hello! We’re not a free billboard for ads.
It’s only Tuesday but it feels like it has already been an eternity.
I could not pick up a pencil to draw. I’m drained emotionally. There’s just too much anger towards management. I just hope we can get through this desert. This is already too frustrating. We love what we do but this is just getting more ridiculous.
To relax myself. A Sting concertbefore I go to sleep. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I would like to let you know that I am reaching a breaking point in my mental health and well-being. I have suffered from pancreatitis the other night at 2 am, vomiting my way out of the pain. This is only one of the physical manifestations of the anxiety and stress that I am experiencing.
I hope people recognize that Southeast Asia is a difficult bureau to manage with 6 active/big markets and several languages that I need to be on top of. I manage different people whom I do not see (except for Kr) and do my best to keep them engaged and keep productivity up despite some of them not having any raises or promotion since joining. This aside from other admin tasks that crop up from time to time.
I am also trying to keep my personal KPIs intact and keep my editing duties as we all are understaffed. On top of this, I am trying to fill the gaps in the coverage especially with Singapore being out of action since December-January and Thailand since 2020. And yet I get hammered for doing my job, like last week when I pushed out that xx story. I did my best, but I still get the blame.
I have managed all these even when I was still deputy since most of the managerās tasks were already put on my shoulders ever since I assumed that role in 2018.
However, this hiring is already eating into the little breathing room I have. Itās ok to manage the correspondences, tests, and interviews of candidates since I am the manager and I would be the best judge if I can work with this candidate or not. However, my poaching, the trawling on the profiles of āqualityā candidates/with pedigree is not workableāit is the job of an HR talent acquisition team, as one HR head of an MNC told me. My role as a manager is to pick and approve which candidate will proceed for testing and interview and the HR talent acquisition teamās role is to acquire the candidates for screening. I do not understand why our HR cannot assist me in this regard since generally HR talent acquisition teams should treat hiring departments (in our case, editorial) as their clientsāit is their main job. If they consider Singapore a very important office and that they want top-notch hires, maybe they could lend me some assistance in this regard because I cannot do it alone.
There should be a compromise somewhere here because I cannot spend my evenings doing the candidate search when I am a solo parent and the sole income earner with no child support, who also needs to attend to the needs of my children. We were sick the last two weeks and I couldnāt even bring my children immediately to the doctor to see if they contracted pneumonia or even bring myself to the hospital for my pancreatitis because hospitalization means there would be nobody to manage the team, the edits, and everything else.
I would like to take a sick leave tomorrow just to sort out myself physically first.
Thank you.
CallMeCreation.com
I conducted my interview this afternoon with Kimchi on my desk. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
My cats knew something was wrong with me so they kept close.
I finally figured out what was wrong. It’s not the pay, it’s not the changes, it’s not the small irritants that are driving me up the wall. It’s the overwhelming work that I shouldn’t be doingthat is driving me insane. The pressure from the top had me paralyzed. I couldn’t perform a simple task like writing in the past few weeks. I am overwhelmed.
On Wed early morning, about 2 am, I woke up with this terrible pain in my upper middle abdomen. The pain was excruciating that I couldn’t breathe. It was radiating to my back. It was the same kind of pain that I felt when my gall bladder was about to get infected due to stones. I remember in 2014 I was having oily diarrhea and vomiting so that same week I had surgery to have my gall bladder removed. The attack was similar to what I felt early Wednesday. But the thing here is, I no longer have any gall bladder. It seems like it’s my pancreas and my symptoms matched with that of acute pancreatitis. I was afraid I was having a heart attack because my dad’s symptoms were the same when he had his major heart attack before I rushed him to the hospital back in 2000.
I wasn’t wearing my smart watch so I couldn’t monitor my heartbeats. I knew it was out of whack and my sweat was cold. I was drenched. The pain lasted for an hour until I vomited bile or something.
Only after that did I feel some relief from pain.
I didnāt know how I would bring myself to the hospital. I thought I was going to die.
Now looking back, this was the same thing that happened to me months before I quit my job with the local media. I tendered my resignation a month after the gall bladder surgery.
Now I realize it’s all stress. It was stress that pushed me out of that job, I guess it’s stress again that will push me out of this job again, if management will not listen to me.
I’m trying to save whatever goodwill I have left for this company and for my colleagues.
But if I can’t beat the system, then probably it’s time for me to go. I did warn them.
A colleague from another region was messaging me while we were attending one of our regional townhall meetings today, ranting to me about his line manager who doesn’t get what is happening. So he asked me what is really going on. Then that messaging spiraled down from there, to the usual rants about how incompetent the manager is…
So when it was time for Q&A, I asked the global head about travel. “During the presentation earlier, you said TRAVEL. Can you expound on this one? You mean there would be no restrictions on travel in terms of cost?”
The global head said, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about. We didn’t have cost restrictions before. We only had travel restrictions because of Covid. We encourage you to travel if there is a business case, like meeting sources, having our brand out there.”
And that colleague from another region said: Ha! So she doesn’t know that we had budget restrictions.
I wonder who was really keeping me from staying longer in Singapore, which is technically where my office is located, therefore I should be completing all the things I should set out to do whenever I’m there? Who is keeping me from going to Singapore this month so I can meet the sources that my colleague is passing on to me, interview candidates, and do more stories from there?
I have to confront my managers about this in the coming weeks. This shit can’t go on.
I will fight until I have nothing left to fight for. If they didn’t listen to me before and will not listen again to me this time, then it’s time to move on. I’ve been fighting to keep this team afloat despite the difficulties.
I will play this song over and over until I get some kind of enlightenment.
Yeah, Breaking Benjamin has been my voice of encouragement for more than 12 years now.
Some words of wisdom from my social media feeds today.
Hurrah for narcissists! May you destroy more lives in your wake.
Of course I’m being sarcastic. That’s the only thing you can do now after surviving narcissists, right? Being tongue-in-cheek about things that had killed you.
And this post deserves a near-perfect rendition of my favorite song of defiance.
Another Breaking Benjamin song, this time in acoustic.
This French street sweeper said he puts a rose on his cart that carries his cleaning tools. Why? He wants a dot of beauty in the coldness of the urban landscape. He said he chose to be a street sweeper because he wanted to be outside and be part of a community. He wrote a book about being a street sweeper and the rose he puts in his cart.
He is proud of his work.
No job is so low, only low people.
I know someone who looks down on such workers, going to the extent of calling them stupid. That person should have been marked a big X on my book at the get-go.
But you know, people who take pride in their work—whatever work that is—are worth more than company founders or managers who think they are so high and mighty but are crap in dealing with people.
I’m proud of what I do because I like it. It doesn’t matter if my publication is not as well-known as our more public counterparts. I make an impact, even if it’s very niche. I walked past a C-level boss in Singapore last November and he was waving at me when he saw my name tag during a conference. He recognized my name even if we just met for the first time. After all these years, I have been making myself visible to bosses on the other side of the globe. Especially when I crossed platforms so many times because I wanted to try something new and pushed the boundaries of what I can do.
I should shove this inside my head whenever I get those insecurity attacks, which I had last night. Self-doubt erodes the little wins I have gained slowly over the past two years. This is what happens when you just have yourself as your own cheerleader.
As my fairy gaymother always tells me, do not compare yourself to others who don’t matter. Or stop comparing yourself. Period.
Be proud of what you do.
Early morning light streaming through my curtains. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I had a very restless night so I woke up early. Had a splitting headache so I attempted to go back to sleep. To release me from anxiety caused by overthinking, I had to drag myself out of bed and my desk and go back to exercising. I’ve been a lazy ass the past few days. I haven’t even fulfilled my promise of going out to walk. Well, I did go out for a short walk to buy cold medicine for Twin A.
This yoga mat has been stewing under my bed for quite some time. About time that I dusted this offand used it.
Meanwhile, Kimchi is getting fatter like her hooman. I have been weaning her away from cat treats. I had requested my contractor to make her a plantbox outside our living area window so she can have more activities outside the house. I am also looking at cat stairs/climbing shelves that I will drill to the walls.
Kimchi sleeping on my bed while I worked. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
It’s past 9 pm and I’m currently listening to a webinar for our company about my current journalism specialization.
And about personal branding.
It’s all about the compelling story. No one will listen to you if you don’t have a story to tell.
Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Because in our world today, no one will really pay attention to you–as a job-hunter, as a potential employer, as a buyer, as a company founder doing fundraising, or an investment banker or consultant–if you do not have a good brand. I used to abhor journalists or bankers who have been doing self-promotion. I always thought that it’s about the craft, your work, or your deal that should speak for yourself.
Apparently it’s not enough.
Yes, of course you should have impeccable and high quality track record–not the half-finished this or that, not the empty/padded resume. You should have the solid background as your anchor but more than that, you should control the narrative—your narrative. You have to be an expert of something so that when you talk, they will listen.
My work week has been better than the previous one in the sense that my anxiety level has gone down. I have received two CVs already and I should do more outreach. I should also reach out to our talent acquisition team but I must get the OK of my bosses, who are still on a Lunar New Year break.
I was relaxed even if edits came flooding my mailbox. I’m happier doing this than trawling LinkedIn for possible candidates for at least three positions I’m trying to fill up before 1H23 ends. Or else the hiring window may close since majority of MNCs right now are freeze-hiring at the moment or are laying off.
The strings during the intro—it’s eargasm. Makes me want to watch Sting in March but damn, it’s sold out!
I’m looking at the concert calendar and only Sting stands out. Sting > Harry Styles. The rest are K-Pop concerts.
