Recovery in Plague Era
Content Warning: Trauma, mental illness, references to suicide.
2018.
My condition has my name in it: dysthymia, chronic mild depression. When you break it down by the syllable – dys – thy – mia – it sounds like This Thy Mia.
My Mom passed away in 2010. I was the first child and had worked so hard to keep everything together only to find that I’ve always been worn and weary, cracked even. It got to the point where it had become too-obvious that I no longer had the energy to take care of myself. I almost wished that my depression was the stuff that is usually talked about: doom, gloom, and suicide ideation.
It was weird to have snapped when I did.
“Why now?” My partner wondered, “Why now when you’ve started exercising and eating better? When you’ve started to like working again?”
I wish I knew.
This we’ve unpacked so far: the jokes were truer than I thought, I had grown up too quickly and given too-big shoes to wear. Mom tried her best, but she was on her own, and she never really knew what it meant to break things down into chunks.
Flashback to a locked entry from January 31, 2020:
My Mom used to insist that my sister and I were test tube babies. One of her more unstable friends would undo that elaborate lie during what was supposed to be a friendly catch up social event in my late twenties. I was stunned, asked Mom about it, and she still stuck to her story. Mom was a terrible liar, and I accept that my family’s estrangement was likely seeded from her frantic attempts to save face.
It was late in life that I got to appreciate the paradox of her lying out of love. In a way, it is true. She raised and loved us by herself, why should That Man, the one who wanted to be called Dad, share credit? I respect That Man, mind. I have good memories of him, but like I always say — we were our best when we didn’t expect much out of each other.
My worst times growing up were in vying to fill in the blanks of the definition of family. I lament over how my childhood would have been made So Much Easier if Gilmore Girls were a 90s show.
It’s 2020. There’s even bigger and louder noise over the expanding concept of families. Let there be other definitions.
May 2020, I think
A twitter meme asked what my favorite place in the world is. The living room in Skyland, our apartment in Makati where we spent the last few years as a family, came to mind.
In one of those days in lockdown where I could do little else but despair, I imagined being in lockdown with my family.
My sister, who slept often because she preferred to live in her dreams where she could be anything she wanted to be.
My Mom, who never knew how to talk about her feelings.
We who never knew how to talk unless it was to get something done their way. A family who never really knew how to listen to each other.
February 26, 2021, with Anne over Google Meet.
“If you could talk to your old self, what would you tell her?”
“I’d give the much younger me a hug,” I said, “She needed to be a kid but no one told her that. But I don’t know if I could really talk to the 20-something me who should have known better.”
(More when I feel like it)
Small Wins
I get a lot of compliments on how I seem to have “made it” as an independent woman. They’re nice to hear, but I get really embarassed by them knowing the mess of my apartment and state of finances. At this time last year I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through Christmas. Now, at least I know I can get by for the next half a year or so.
I am better at accepting how things can fall apart. While I wish I can make it into a sweet-sounding listicle for other people to do the same, you never really know how you deal until you have to.
Just a look back at some of the highlights of the year:
[Portfolio] Fanfiction in the Classroom: Field Notes from a Fanfic Author turned Educator
I am still in utter disbelief that I had a basis for writing this. Fan fiction was like admitting that we read a novel’s “good parts” over and over again, and it’s a rabbit hole from there once you find it. I found a teacher’s lesson plan about fan fiction to a sheltered 7th grader and I genuinely freaked out. Hence, this article.
Also, the baby I spawned five years ago with my dearest friends and a former editor of mine is undergoing a site relaunch. Where once we had this tiny idea of making a female-oriented gaming magazine has now borne teeth. We’re still talking games, but we’re hunkering down to the real talk in an era where it’s not “just a game”. From Girls Got Game (GGG), We are now Play Without Apology (PWOA).
Copyedits by Noey Pico, Graphics by Lee Flores.
First published on Play Without Apology.
Click the pages to read the article.
[Portfolio] Let’s Get It On: A List of Good Eats You Can Get from Metro Manila’s Motels
First published on Pepper on August 1, 2014. I am often asked if I had to actually stay in those places to do this piece. No, but I know even admitting that will only lead to more nagging doubt, wouldn’t it? Hehe! But I hope you had as much fun reading this as I did writing it. Scaled down to PG-13 from an R-13 raunchy draft thanks to editing by Pamela Cortez.
Click the pdf below to turn the pages.
Summer 2017: Doing More
I was recently scandalized by two other people before who made awful well-meaning jokes about not being able to earn off teaching. I knew that teaching would not pay as well as corporate, and it won’t allow me to be a stereotypical millennial by way of traveling wherever or buying really nice things, but it would at least keep the roof over my head and food on the table.
It took over a year to get me to the pay grade competitive to my previous corporate jobs, but for the most part it was something I was willing to bear with. For lack of an MA or a LET, that would do…for now, anyway.
It’s ironic that teachers aren’t paid a lot when it costs so much to get an education nowadays. I can’t imagine paying to send someone to school with what I earn now. I can go on and on about my own social and political philosophies, but that’s an entry for another day with proper citations. In the end as well, philosophy can only go so far.
I just know that I have better things to do than make rich people richer, or to take orders from behind a desk. Even with the realities of of adult debt, I want to do more than my job.
So for the summer at volunteered to teach English at Young Focus, an NGO that helps in-need children of Tondo, Metro Manila. We could only achieve so much in about 4.5 hours together over a span of a month, but at the end of the day – they did it! They were given a place to make mistakes, were corrected with respect, and reminded to think beyond their own limits. In about 4.5 hours worth of lessons they made their own study plan for the language, stories, and were able to talk about themselves and the people they just met.
This is something that I hope will be a regular thing for all of us. I can hope that it won’t end there, and they keep at it. For now at least, they have an idea on how to do so. In the best case scenario, it’s something they’ll be able to pass on in the future.