Because J has fallen in stature in my eyes, thinking about him hurts less now. Or maybe this is because I have been sleeping better that’s why I can talk like this now. Maybe if I start to become sleep-deprived again I would be back to being emotional again.
He used to be the only star in my night. Now that star has died.
Maybe I needed that jolt that I’ve experienced these past weeks to be able to realize that, hey, he isn’t really that special. And he is not a nice guy after all. I died several times over this person but he really can’t destroy me. I know who I am and what I am capable of. I may not be a CEO of a company or a high-flying executive that he could admire but I know I’m very good in what I do. I have everything that I needed. I have a home and I have love in the form of two not-so-little girls.
While he doesn’t have those.
Death of a star. He has now become a stardust.
To add to our worries, here comes another variant. We are going through the entire Greek letters while the Duterte administration is raping us wide eyes open.
To calm my frayed nerves, I ordered new cloths to make into masks for my friends’ children in appropriate kid sizes.
From Shopee. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The weekend is coming soon. Let’s see how many I can make.
This incident with J chasing the kid in my circle has slowly peeled off the blinders that has taken a hold of me for years. Maybe he wasn’t really a nice guy after all.
I remember him asking me the week we first got together if I thought he was with me because I am a journalist of xxx that would give him advantage. I said no, it didn’t enter my mind. Now, I am doubting myself and his intentions toward me then.
I’m confused. Like it shattered my core belief and everything I thought was the truth then.
Was everything a lie?
I can’t believe he could sink that loooowwww, pursuing that kid 🤦🏻♀️. I had held him in very high esteem, even during his most difficult time the last time he was in the US. I even admired him for toughing it out there. But now?
But maybe I was wrong about everything.
Maybe I fell in love with the person I thought he was and believed it. Maybe he was just like any other mercenary out there taking advantage of vulnerable people like me. And he’s still out there looking for another victim. Just like that kid.
This is giving me a headache. My emotions are in a turmoil. I don’t know what to feel. It’s as if I’m going through grief again but this time I am grieving over his death… The death of a person I thought he was.
I am sleeping better the last few nights compared to the previous weeks when I wake up almost every hour. The pain was just too much that it has completely wrecked my body clock. My body is now recuperating by sleeping every chance I get during my leave from work.
Lying on my bed before falling off to sleep, be it night or day, gave me a chance to ruminate over the things that happened recently. J’s recent behavior made me question everything about him and everything that went on between us. I probably put him too high on a pedestal that’s why I didn’t question things that I should have. Now, I am questioning whether there was some truth in the sexual harassment case against him in his last firm. When he told me about it after he was stripped off of his company phone and company laptop when he was forced to go on garden leave, I totally accepted that it was false accusation and that it was an injustice and that they just wanted him out of the company.
Now the way he pursued this kid from within my circle sounds so carnal. As one of my friends said, he is scary creepy.
It puts things in a new light that I haven’t viewed before.
Maybe his scary creepy behavior would be ok for some local woman/girl who wants to snag a foreigner boyfriend to milk or wants him as her ticket to going abroad and out of poverty.
Maybe I was too blind, gave him too much credit. Excused him too many times. I believed in him so much that I ignored everything else.
I don’t know what else to think. I wish he would leave the country soon so he could stop hurting me. This city is too small for the both of us.
I want my sleep back. I want my sanity back. I want peace. I want to stop hurting.
The world around me is collapsing; everything is on fire and yet this administration is doing nothing but politicking and ransacking the coffers. The healthcare workers are going on strike tomorrow. Our foreign debt has gone into trillions but we couldn’t see where the proceeds of those debt went to. No vaccines, no wide testing, no effective contact tracing. Those useless face shields are sources of corruption. Every corner of this administration was flagged by the state auditor.
I have to admit that the latest discovery about him chasing the kid in my circle hit me so hard like I was back to square one, like back in December-January. I had avoided him all these months and yet he is still capable of killing me several times over. How many times do I have to die?
I don’t deserve this pain. I don’t deserve this. I’ve tried so hard to claw my way back up and be normal again. But no, he pushed me back into that dark pit again. It took me days to feel a little bit myself again.
What my friends pointed out though is that with his latest antics, he sounds desperate–enough to chase shallowness (the kid) and not to mention creepy. If a much older guy goes pestering us on chat and goes personal, automatically we would think he is a dirty old man (DOM) and I’ve had my share of those kinds in my business. And J’s impulsiveness now has ruined his reputation within my circle. Even though I chose to remain silent, I can’t say the same for my friends and that girl’s friends and everybody else in my circle. They know who he was to me. We belonged in one trade organization anyway, where everyone knows everybody’s business. It also includes some of the country’s biggest publicists as affiliates.
I can’t do anything about it. He brought it upon himself.
It’s really, really painful. It put me down for a while and I got physically sick. I had to have myself checked and had to go through some tests. Well, the results of my lab tests aren’t pretty, based on the ranges as some of my numbers were out of range. I don’t know how my ECG fared so I would only know when I have my next check up.
I swear, I will be back on the saddle and will put on my running shoes again and do cross-training. I will be back to climbing mountains in no time.
I swear I will rise from this darkness. I swear you will regret everything.
An existentialist statement by Descartes that justifies one’s existence by his thinking process. This was my last drunken thought before I passed out last night. Because you know, even if the drinking session had just been online, you still have the license to quote Descartes and sing gnash at the same time when you finish one entire bottle of Italian red.
Then I woke up with a nasty headache at 4 am. I had to go to the bathroom to puke it out, which I did, then went back to sleep. It was a good wine.
Then I remembered my soliloquy…🤦🏻♀️ Well, it was a good release anyway.
Grief is love holding on. But I don’t want to hold on any longer. It has been exactly 8 fucking months today when he threw me off the balcony. But it’s still here but I don’t want this anymore. It has already shrunk me into nothing, thinking that I am not good enough despite giving everything.
But I don’t want to use other people who are showing interest in me just to validate me, to be able to move on. Where’s the dignity in that?
He is the problem, not you, friends said.
We just learned that he is after a kid in our industry, almost 15 years his junior. Her boyfriend got testy and the rest is… You could imagine what happened after. This girl’s college friends were my students (she didn’t enrol in my class though). I introduced her to J, together with other friends in the industry, during one of our industry events. They knew that we were an item but just don’t speak about it because of my annulment case. I asked her to help me pitch to her news desk coverage to events his firm staged. I also asked her to accommodate his principal for interviews a couple of weeks before he broke up with me, even though it was a tough sell because they were general news. She and the others whom I asked for favors entertained him because of me, because I am respected in our industry and some of them were my students. This kid knows my family because she hitched rides with me regularly because we both headed north after coverage. She and my daughters had selfie sessions in my car one time she hitched a ride. A friend said she tended to flaunt sources to other people to claim, yeah I’m close to such and such source that’s probably why she had entertained those video calls with J. Kinda like those questionable journos we have here who tweet pictures of them lunching with this so and so source. For clout. (But everyone in our industry think that is cheap and crass).
I just kept quiet about the breakup so my network would still entertain him. I left our LinkedIn linked so he can still use my network. Because love can make you do stupid things.
I purposely did not try to find out what happened to him after he ditched me even though I could. Because I want my dignity intact. I want to move on even though it’s so hard. I didn’t even know if he was still in the country. But I don’t know, the universe conspires and here I am learning about this.
My friends were like, gurl, this kid can’t even hold a candle to you. He is probably looking for somebody to manipulate because she is very young. Her generation is still concerned with the latest cellphone and such. She is very young and it will be like babysitting her and her friends. It’s a super downgrade, they said.
There is clearly something wrong with him, they said. A PR professional friend when she learned about this said, wow that’s so low. This industry is so small and he doesn’t know the extent of your network, thinking you wouldn’t find out. I said, he is free to pursue whoever he wants but going after a kid in my circle…I can’t wrap my head around it. And he pretends to be nice by saying let me know if I can help with the community pantry, and the kid was like, huh, what do I care about community pantries?
You know, I could have gone the other way and not keep quiet about this and tell my network not to deal with him anymore. But I just want peace so I will forever hold my tongue. The dignified thing to do. Yes, my self esteem nosedived when I learned about this. I knew he would go after younger women because my age, whether he showed it or not, was an issue for him. He thinks people in their forties are old.
It was hard dealing with this. I am back to zero again. Diminished. Making me feel like all the things I am and gave were nothing. I gave him nothing but love and kindness and yet he continues to hurt me so, even though I had purposely distanced myself.
No, my friends said. You are a complete person and when he came to your life, he was just an addition. When he left, you are still intact, nothing was lost. He needed you more than you needed him, they said.
One day all of these things they said to make me feel better will sink in but for now I will lick my wounds and figure out how to rise above this.
