Category: Overdays

A senior calligrapher I met thinks that women are not naturally disciplined to do calligraphy. Grit, he believed, was something that came naturally to males. Females were more inclined to not push the pen and quit before they put the strokes together, females were more inclined to take shortcuts.

Of course he’s wrong. Some of the most featured calligraphers here are female. One of them would sit in a cafe while waiting to pick up her kid in preschool and do nothing but work on flowerbombs and pressure and texture exercises, another introduced to me to an unusually sunny side to making mistakes, “It’s fun to figure it out.”

I’m in the process of unfucking my apartment now.

It’s unfucking, not decluttering, because this is the longest I’ve been in one place. And for too long a time, I have let my place go to fuck – that was part panic, unaddressed grief, and carrying the sins of my Mother’s hoarding tendencies before she passed from cancer. In this unfucking, beyond finally buying and using a vacuum cleaner (two different things!), I found my notebooks, pen, and ink hoard. I finally flushed out my pen. I cringed as I saw that parts of my Prera pen went to rust, but was relieved when it could still write.

The reason why I write here so often is 1) I’ve wasted way too much money on a domain I do not use and 2) journaling has become part of my “wind down” routine. I’m really reconnecting with pens in prolonged lockdown. It isn’t just a “platform sneakers” phase, and I’m past trying to make it part of my branding or whatever. The writing gigs I do get are the things I can’t put into this site anyway, which is the nature of copyediting and freelance writing.

So yes, journaling. Where before I wanted to be a calligrapher, I’m finding that maybe it isn’t that per se. I’m a doodler. I like keeping journals. And after some years of figuring out note taking exercises for tutees with processing challenges, I finally used them for myself.

A sudden flashback to this odd, seemingly innocuous moment as a young child:

Grade 4. I was in a Montessori school which had an open-work approach. Instead of having subjects blocked off, the general idea was that we had some lectures but we were meant to discover as went along. It wasn’t like traditional school where we had separate notebooks for each subject, so my classmates got into drawing borders for their notes. Some had dots between the lines, others had curves.

It made sense to me then to draw my borders. I had a math lesson that involved triangles, so I ended up drawing trees.

I was also a messy kid who was overwhelmed and confused with school, so word got back to my Mom about my lack of focus. When Mom sat me down for homework, she made me erase the borders between my notes.

This must be what race car drivers feel when they are made to drive like ordinary people in SUVs – they watch out for stop lights, they share the road, they aren’t focused on the finish line.

Before the plague, my mind was racing. I worried about two hundred trillion things every day. I said it was because I was a Gemini. I got on medication after being diagnosed with depression, and for the first time in my life, I felt my mind slow down. This must be what race car drivers feel when they are made to drive like ordinary people in SUVs – they watch out for stop lights, they share the road, they aren’t focused on the finish line.

My base programming was to juggle those million things I haven’t done, that the allies and enemies wanted to see.

Lockdown happened on March 2020, and I could feel my brain confused by the lack of productivity.

Soon deadlines came in. Training started. Gigs picked up. I was lucky, I was in an industry that could allowed me some semblance of a warm-up into the so-called new normal. But then I realized that my brain ITCHED. It was hard to do anything by myself for more than 5 minutes at a time.

I went back to my shrink. I answered some questions.

At age 36, I was diagnosed as ADD. It was no longer a joke or a throwaway comment from a frustrated parent or coworker.

2021 amidst the great Unfuckening

I lost a quarter of my income because of covid. I couldn’t afford to see a shrink. I wasn’t suicidal enough to see a shrink. Dysthmia is strange, it’s like a wilted flower that’s take it or leave it about water and sunlight. I had enough self esteem to identify with mental wellness posts on instagram, enough self-awareness to recognize that I needed something like an occupational therapist to sort out my predisposition to mess. Luckily, there’s an app for that.

On very bad brain days, I’m overstimulated and glued to my screen until 3am. It was getting harder to disconnect. I didn’t have the physical exhaustion of regular face to face work. Online work sometimes made me bring problems to bed, so even when I slept, it wasn’t restful.

Back to paper journals I went. To get me used to fully disconnecting, I had to journal. I had notebooks, pens, and ink to use anyway. One of the last few conversations I had with a good friend pre-covid recommended I looked up Fritzpearl, which led me to the world of meditative doodling. I started collaging when I got into kpop, to make use of the trinkets that came with the albums.

My personal notes are not linear. I doodle in between. But that’s what a personal paper journal is for after all. It is not instagrammable, nor am I out to reproduce whatever “art” is found in it.

Nostalgia has 20/20 vision. Raising kids then is different from how those my age want their children to grow up. Non-linear thinking was something I figured out as a teacher, not from my Mom. My teacher then, knowing the pains it takes to keep a classroom together and meet whatever insitutional quotas there were, didn’t see an opportunity in me learning from doodles.

I’m taking that back now.

Sometimes, my thoughts come in squares. Other times, it comes in bullet points. Some times I want to wrap them in washi tape. Sometimes, it isn’t supposed to be linear. It isn’t supposed to make sense.

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)

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:

Continue reading “Small Wins”

I don’t drink as much, I can’t fill up my days with as many shenanigans as I like, but I can be more honest and I’ve become more certain of what is worth my time and energy and what isn’t. While I still have hang-ups of my own, honestly, I loved entering my 30s and starting from a place where it was no longer about fulfilling the definitions I set for myself.

It was just 30, and I let it happen without protest. It’s not about getting my first literary award, completing an MA, or even my first million pesos. It is about making a plan and sticking to it, even when it’s as mundane as wanting a choco-butternut donut and actually getting one on the way. It’s about consistently telling your nearest and dearest that you love them even if you can’t see them, and finally seeing them beyond that chat video app.

Ease into your thirties. Embrace your mortality and let it surprise you. Be shocked, be amazed…or just scoff and carry on.