a hot shower, 2018

I set the shower heater too high earlier. 

I burned my scalp. The Dove shampoo I used already had a burnt, musky smell and the shower curtain's plastic gave off a scalding scent. Steam was already rising up the ceiling and I couldn't even care less to turn the running water off. 

This year, I realized, I burned myself way too many times I already lost count. Either I illuminated brightly or charred myself to exhaustion. Both ways, I still burned. Burned for myself, burned for others, whatever. 

Rediscovery was nice and gentle enough to come to my door and sleep beside me every night. I woke up to mostly bad news everyday, not to mention the endless battle I had with the nightmares that touched every corner of my eyelids. At four in the morning, they come and I have no other choice but to fight them myself. But rediscovery was bigger: I now know how to calm myself down. 

This may come off as an overestimation of time, but I never had a good night's sleep all year. Maybe ten months. I'm not sure. In discovering myself, I found that it's absolutely okay to be honest with yourself: I am not okay. I am insecure. I feel inadequate. And after that, the small discoveries come along. 

I have fear of heights. I easily get cold. My eyesight gets worse every month. I don't hate the yellow part of the egg as much as I did before. I have 15 moles on both my hands, and 14 all across my chest. And so many others that I was too busy relishing in that I forgot to take note. 

This year was all about enduring everything that came my way. A set of heartbreaks was hurled right on my face and I felt still for a whole moment. I knew I had to move and uproot myself from every adversity but I took pride in staying still and letting everything flow around me. I had to endure the loss, the pain, and the emptiness everyday. I turned a blind eye on everything. This seems like a prideful feat but making it this far sends me more anguish; what did I ever do to be left with no other choice than to endure?

But with discovery comes the deed of pardoning the ways of the world, and how it turned out for me. It is accepting everything that gets offered. It is in loving and giving more of yourself when one needs it. 

Here's to rediscovering myself more this 2019. Here's to never having a cold heart. Here's to forgiveness to others, and to oneself. Here's to me, for enduring. Here's to burning. 

Happy new year, Audrie. Let's love more. 

On impermanence

The last time I really wrote something for myself was almost a year ago. It’s really something  to be sad about, because I’m known as a writer. I should write. At least that’s what I'm paid to do, collegiately speaking. This considerably unbearable creative drought I’m in speaks so much about how I have poor time management skills: always lugging around, always everywhere, always online. The amount of time I've wasted online could have been useful for me to create or produce something; instead I decidedly chose to kill myself through useless scrolling and liking and refreshing. The internet is so exhausting to keep up with. So exhausting I somehow lost myself in it, forgot about the simplest goals I have.

It’s been almost three months since I lost the drive to live. Admittedly, it wasn’t that bad, as I imagined it to be when I slowly sank into depression on the third week of November. But everything happened all at once. I wasn’t watching enough films (I wasn’t checking off enough titles from this little list I wrote in my head), I wasn’t writing enough—the only writing I did was for the school publication. Heck, I wasn’t even writing, I’m merely editing the works of others. And many other personal (too personal) events that made me conclude that hey, I think I should just stop. 

But I was wrong on the “not too bad” part. It was bad—nefarious, in all aspects you should check—and it felt like I was being swallowed by own insecurities and demotivation. It’s like I wanted this to be done, but I can’t, because I’m too sad to function or even think. Some days I’ll just lie awake in my bed, stare at the window for hours on end, and cry out of nowhere. 

I’ve recently read Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection, “Ariel.” I’ve read The Bell Jar months before I started reading Ariel, so you can imagine the transitional spur of emotions I had. Reading TBJ offered a lot of space for me to think and rethink myself, how I view myself, and how I should view myself. There were a lot of goings-on in the novel itself and to dissect it per narrative renders a vast number of perspectives. In this New Yorker article I recently came across to, it was made clear that one cannot read TBJ without treating as an autobiography of some sort. I somehow disagreed, but agreed right away after some rumination. By the time I finished the whole article, I can’t help but think that TBJ must have been a call for help from Sylvia herself. But a month after its publication, she took her own life. 

With this new, realized pain I have after reading the article, I can conclude that I’ve forgotten a big (massive) part of myself after I read the novel. The months leading up to when I bought and read Ariel were gone, invisible now to the cluttered trove that is my brain (my soul). What was I doing before I read Ariel as a whole? When the only poem I knew from the collection was “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”? When “Lady Lazarus” had no certain thug, no cosmic pull, when I read it before Christmas, and regained a new stature in me? I don’t know. Beyond these titles, beyond these questions, I don’t know what happened to me.

There were waves of sadness, happiness and nothingness in those lost months, that I’m pretty sure of. I must have felt a certain kind of newness that spurred within me, but I also forgot about that, too. I remember how one line always stayed with through time, gelled in my brain with every situation I run into, fair weather or not. In my twenty years here on earth, with every interaction I faced, every heartbreak, every ecstatic moment, I always found myself crawling back to that single line. In the novel, it was associated with negativity. But with me, it always had different attachments. 

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. 

Reading the line, for me, must always come with wild imagination and reminiscing—both the good and the bad memories. Filtering these memories and putting them into categorized boxes when given the chance to reminisce, I realized (the hard way) over the years, is not very helpful. I learned that sometimes, to identify and connect with your whole being, you have to stop believing that only the good ones stay with you. And maybe, just maybe, this learned aspect I gained must have been the best lesson I got from the novel. Not the best lesson I could wring off of the story, but a conducive one, right now. 

So here comes Ariel. Reading Ariel appointed some newer, edgier sets of emotion. I regained a sense of self, somehow. And this is where the whole novel gains a new verdict from me, a rebranded closeness I should feel, a wrenching importance. Around this time, I felt so unimportant, so disregarded by everyone around me, so ignored. I felt more temporary than ever, and that ate me whole. I never fully appreciated how The Bell Jar helped me accept the fact that I’m sometimes, in many distant aspects, separated by a glass from other people, until I gave Ariel a read. Ariel gave me what I lost in The Bell Jar, during and after reading it. It’s not that The Bell didn’t have a momentous role in my life; it’s just that Ariel is, and always will be, for me, a symbolic thrust in which I should drown myself into. 

And Ariel taught me that sometimes to know yourself and your pains you really have to drown and suffocate in pain. And no matter how unimportant I must feel, today, in the future, I am calmed by the reality that everything, everyone is. 

So the time I felt stuck and dry and floating listlessly on the small spaces of my idle creativity, it was me just probing, self-questioning, thinking and sometimes praying. And it was just me preparing to move along. 

I'M NO ONE

My baby pictures matter to me as much as my life does, no matter how shitty and uneventful it is: somehow these pictures are the only tangible things that I could hold on to if the intangible ones can’t be trusted a.k.a. relationships and other principles I hold dear. 

One thing lead to another and I just found those photo albums in the dump in my grandmother’s house. Things happened and harsh words were dropped, but not by me. But whatever, my photos are there, deep in the trash along with some withered leaves and this foul liquid.

I had a really troubled (if not bad) childhood. I don’t remember something good or surprising that happened to me during that time, except for those times I pretended that things around me were doing fine. I was 4 and I was pretending to not feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied with my early life. I don’t even remember feeling full of love and excitement over things; it’s always that unspoken feeling inside me where I always expected the worse, because I thought things worked like that, at my age. 

“Everything would be better when I grow older, anyway,” I’d say to myself. But I was wrong. It’s like every woe I had as a child is slowly coming back to me and it’s only now that I got the chance to sob over it. Those feelings I repressed as a child never got away. It just grew bigger and bigger and formed this hollow void in my chest I’m forced to take care of. Otherwise I’d explode and… do unspeakable things. To myself. 

I don’t know what to with this gaping hole in me, aside from listen to the whole “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” record by Bright Eyes and cry for the next hour. It’s been going on for three days now and I don’t really mind. I could do this for a living. 

Some years ago, my maternal grandmother gave away my Barbie dolls to some kid (to a cousin I have no idea existed) because apparently she needed some toys. It hit me really hard because those dolls and I shared something when I was a little girl. Camaraderie? Secrets? I don’t know, but everyone of us was a child, too. I think we all got to a point where we kept something dear to us, something that reminded us of the past, bad or good. Even my hello kitty plushie collection was gone. I think every toy I had when I was a child is now some kid’s possession. 

I’m not the materialistic type. I never was. But knowing this piece of information and not being able to unlearn or unremember it, to know that I don’t have those anymore, sends me on a chilly and agonizing realization that I may be no one. I’m just another useless speck. And I hope you don’t ever, in your life, feel that way, because it’s scary and it eats you alive. 

Some of the pictures got ruined because of the rain; the water might have seeped through the walls and the dingy roof of this room in my grandmother’s house. And I guess that’s just the universe reminding me how insignificant I am. The people who threw it are just making a point. 

These events somehow clicked something inside me that I never felt or heard of. And every time I get reminded of how this could haunt me for the rest of my life, a piece of me just sloughs off somewhere deeper where I couldn’t find it anymore. Is it possible to lose yourself inside yourself? 

I feel like I’m in this episode of a coming-of-age drama where my character just stares at an empty space. And my head would slightly turn to the sound of the word “mother.” And I’m slowly sinking to depression and I don’t know if I should tell anyone about this. Thank god for UST’s free therapies. 

I didn’t expect for it to be like this: triggered by pictures and toys.

I’ll fight like hell to hide that I’m giving up.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ADULTHOOD

MGMT’S Time to Pretend has never made me this emotional, 10 years after its release. The first time I heard it I was a delusional 10-year-old writing stupid notes behind my school notebook, collecting J-14 and Tiger Beat magazines that had Fall Out Boy and the cast of Zooey 101 in it. The year was 2007 and I imagined myself working for Ocean Park as a dolphin trainer, but I came to realize that aquariums practically enslave sea creatures, so scratch that. I then wanted to be an astronaut but I learned that you have to be good at math and the sciences. I loved science; I was a science fiend. But I sucked at it, so scratch it again. Then I wanted to be a pilot. To simply put, everything is ironically against my interests and abilities, so I scratched that one, too. 

Weirdly, it struck me dead while I was jogging last night, my Spotify playlist on shuffle. Fate brought me to this realization, I thought. I was just thinking about how dreadful my future would be when the song came and woke me up. Are we really fated to pretend and be dead inside? The first person I thought of was my dad, who’s itching to retire from his job and stay at home instead. I can see that he’s tired (exhausted, even) of his everyday life: travelling almost 2 hours to his office, facing a laptop for more than 10 hours, roaming the office for some papers—the typical office job. And I kept thinking if he had the same thought I had last night, about pretending that life is okay as long as you’re earning enough to buy the needs and wants. 

I know that he loves his job, what he’s doing. But does it fall on the same wavelength of who he really is and what he really wanted, as a teenager? Or I’m just too much of a coward to take what’s on the table, that’s why I can’t bear to stop myself from thinking about all this? Everything and nothing is predictable, at the same time. You take this, then it will be two things for you: you’re good to go or you just made the worst decision of your life. Don’t take this and it’s the same thing. 

And Real World they’re talking about. I think part of this sudden, unconscious rambling is because I’m turning 20 in a month and a few days, officially loosing the "-teen" in my age. Whatever, I’ll always be a 19-year-old-PLUS, fumbling through…life, or whatever you call this. 

I’ve been thinking about the future since January (a.k.a. the month I started counting down the days until I turn 20). I don’t know how many times I cried about how I feel so empty about the future but I’m still holding up, but almost unbearably.

Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do? 

Get jobs at offices and wake up for the morning commute?

I promised myself that my life wouldn’t look like those corporate slaves’. I had to be rich enough to buy my dad a watch on a whim, without working for a corporation, or an office. I remember stumbling upon this journal entry, and I'm not very sure if wrote it earlier this year or last year; I had this feeling January last year, and I still brought it with me now, in 2017. Everything is blurred. Anyway, I wrote down, "Money is god and I hate it," and that sentence is just too heavy for me to look at. It's so real and unforgiving it gives me this bitter aftertaste in my mouth every time I say those words in my head.

Basically, the start of the year always mean something monumental for me: it’s either I’m scared of the future OR money. 

Strings of thought about the future are mixed up and I’m not really sure anymore of what think of it and how to make of it.

At 13, I made the decision of going to art school. Six years later and I’m nowhere near.

“Well, writing is a branch of art,” some relatives would assure me. “You should go to law school,” they said, and that’s it, make it stop. I would nod to shoo their opinions away. Preferably inside their system, keep their thoughts to themselves.

I don’t want to go to law school.

So I resorted to dreaming of going to UP Film Institute after graduating in UST. But there would always be something in my head that would hold me back—the I Don’t Know, I’m Not Sure voice. So I guess I’ll live in uncertainty; eventually I’ll stop crying at night. 

I want my life to be full of unpredictable shit, Frances Ha level, sans the desperate search for a place to live. I’ve been comfortable with the idea of living within the confines of my parents’ home (with my cute brother, whom I’m very fond of playing with) but living alone could so much for me, too. I’d have time and space to creatively grow into the person I want to be. 

Navigating my way to adulthood is not an easy feat; I think about how the future would look like for me. Would it be cinematic? Would it look like one of those coming-of-age films where the main character looks over the vast expanse of buildings and just letting everything be? Where would I end up? 

I’m sweating and scared of the future and tired of pretending that I got it, I understand, I got it all figured out, where’s my office. But I guess some things are Just Like That. The song is just a prelude to where we are headed. It’s not gonna kill us (maybe). It would be bearable on some days and just pure, scathing hell on most days. And I’d like to think that those (scant) number of bearable days can be the reason why we put up with large numbers of shit that happen to and for us. 

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I just don’t want my life to turn out into something I’d  be ashamed of in the long run: boring, dense and empty with white walls. But I guess sometimes you don’t have to pretend that you’re okay. Sometimes it’s simply just you, over there, just being. As long as you’re sustaining yourself (myself), then everything will be averagely fine, if not totally okay and perfect. 

That’s why I made a playlist that calls for help and assurance and validation. Can be terated as a cathartic cry from all the pressure I’m feeling as an almost-adult.

Everything must run its course. 

i'm so dumb, honestly

this night has been very tough on me. i cried and cried and cried about my mom and i am not okay. i will soon act as witness for a trial for my parents' annulment and i don't think i am ready. i just want this to be over soon.

it's so hard to keep up lately.