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 😂.

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.

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.

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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.