Hurt People Hurt People

I have been hurt by many men before, but no amount of hurt I get from people could amount to the kind of hurt I receive from my own father. I guess this is where I could talk about everything as I have never spoken to anyone about this before. I've been crying for days, the first of a series of emotional breakdowns happening on a nice sunny Sunday at New World Hotel. I have been weeping uncontrollably ever since. I weep as I type down this entry. Or was it on the morning before that? I had already begun crying in church the moment I entered the sanctuary. I knew the day would already turn out different for me when I sat down and thought of the words my mom had said. I sat in an unusual spot at the back of the sanctuary, where I could cry and not get noticed by people. On a beautiful communion Sunday, all I did in church was cry. No one knew, and no one saw except Rafferty who came to ask about it.

It keeps me unfocused as well. Yesterday I had a statistics exam to study for. I studied for a few hours, but when a giant wave of sorrowful thoughts hit me, I knew I just had to drop everything and collect what was the most important at the time: myself, and the sum of energy I needed to regain. Writing this blog entry takes the time of studying for my BUSLAW2 exam, but I have to write this down, even if I had just breezed through the chapter instead of fully understanding the text. I almost cried again on my seat. Whenever I sit down and try to focus my mind on something else, only ONE image comes up: my dad.

I was never his princess, never his daddy's girl. Growing up, I knew no hero, never experienced "running into daddy's arms." He would call me every bad name, every bad quality a girl her whole life would never want to hear or be called. Ugly. Useless. Shallow. Stupid. On top of all that, he had beaten me up countless times. Compared me to cousins and siblings countless times. Wished me out of the house, threatened to disown me, threatened to stop my schooling, made me choose between being loved and hated. Of course I wanted to be loved! But thanks to him shutting me up every time I would be loud or try to express myself, I turned out the opposite in school. Everyone saw me as the quiet child, but no one knew, that deep inside, I wasn't quiet--I was angry. I was never myself to him or to my family, and he never saw the good in me. And he will never see the beautiful, skilled, witty, brilliant person I can be, all because he never chose to love me.

Essay Answers: YouthSpeak Forum 2016

How do you encourage innovative thinking?

-I encourage innovative thinking by PUSHING people to think creatively, and to START action. I use metaphors (race cars, Newton's first law of motion, etc.) to help them understand everyone's need of a push.

Give at least three issues that you would want to address in our country. Why these three issues?

-Education, Waste Management, Voter's Education - because we need to start from the bottom when trying to resolve bigger issues like corruption, pollution, poverty, and health.

What opportunities do you think the Philippines will have as a country given that it is one of the fastest growing economies in the world? How should we capitalize on these opportunities?

-Human resource -- not just in call centers, but in almost every field of industry. Because Filipinos are among the most hardworking and skillful people the world has. We have artists (name any field of art, there is at least one Filipino who excels), professionals, and even vocations we don't recognize every day. We should encourage relations with other countries and not think of this as a threat to our growing economy. Don't even think "globalization" will affect our nationalism or whatnot. It might even be the solution to all our problems.

If you will be given the chance to represent the Philippines, how would you represent the country?

-I will represent the country by teaching. I will teach Filipino and Chinese Filipino literature, because literature is my major. It's what I can teach best.

How important is our role as Generation Y millennials in this country? How can we bring about change?

-We are practical, opinionated, ambitious, career-oriented, and goal-driven. We're different from older generations who can't change or find it hard to break with tradition. We can bring about change by leading the younger generations and setting an example to them. By doing what we do best, we will be opening their eyes to opportunities and possibilities the old world was too scared of doing.

AngrrrraaaaaAH

The sound of anger.

The sound of the two of us, resisting movement. I am stuck at the year I turned sixteen, where everything began and ended with you. You made that year; you are that year.

You are my only memory of that year.

I hate the university life!

I've arrived at a phase where it's suddenly imperative to question things I do and think about where I'm headed. I have thoughts of quitting school.

I have my reasons. University life has taken a toll on my writing, and so I confronted this problem by giving the easiest solution, which is to stop going to school. So it's cowardice, you might think. Whatever. I'd rather be reading Hamlet right now and going on a voyage to Siberia, or to the mountains where bodies of water are vast and skies clear. What I need is adventure, and poetry, and soothing music. What I yearn for is a grand escape!

Business calculus is such a bore, and accounting--oh please, leave my life! I want to write and keep writing. I want to embrace language and have a majestic communion with words and sounds...to taste all of the world's flavors, to know the wonders and limits of my body and everything that forms it, to search within myself as if to dig to finally spot hidden treasure. I need something like that, more than all these rewards I get from school, more than all this information I have to learn today.

What a father said to a son: To thine own self be true. So why disobey? I hate rushing. I need a bit more time to grow, to read, to reconnect with my true person, to "redeem my passionate side" (what I used to say at 16), to have an encounter with the Divine. Not work. Not school. Just pure bliss...because I thirst for Shakespeare again, and can I just burn the thought of having to go to school, so that I could give myself time to read and do research? Annoying, crippling trimestral system! Bloody ambivalence!

But...

But you know what, guys? I think he's a great dad. He gave me throat candies when I was sick. He parked outside school when he suspected I might go out drinking with friends. He buys food before fetching us so we'd have something to eat on our way home. He has helped me with tons of projects--

--yet I demand of "affection" which he can't give, and he loves with a kind of love that shows no affection. 

hmm....

A Love-hate Relationship (essay from 6 March 2014)

(12) Exercise: “What Was That Like?” Or, How to Find a Subject

What was it like having a man hold your hand for the first time?

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A Love-hate Relationship

He still sees it as unsociability.

It happened when I was fourteen that he came to my school for the first time in years, late, and still with the same kind of crossed look on his face that ultimately looked to me the most handsome; and I felt, on that same afternoon, when I saw him at the door, that having waited for forever had never in my life felt more satisfying. I sat with my classmates, waiting, and watching different kinds of men take their seats beside a classmate. I waited in anticipation, or fear, for him to come, or not to come; and so when thirty minutes had since passed, still with the seat beside me empty, I recalled his miffed bravado the night before: “It feels taxing to go to school events like this one; I’d rather not.”

Thus, I held my own hand, the one hand against the other, cold against cold, trying, curbing an entire bucketful of blubbering inside the nutshell thing I made with two hands, both mine. At that age, I’d already mastered the art of the nutshell: “keep a really, really wide grin, and don’t cry.” I played it exceptionally well. But f*ck nutshells when he came. Right away, when I caught a glimpse of a familiar, missed face, I dropped the nutshell, dashed toward him, and flung my arms around him as to an embrace—and that, for sure, had been the most powerful thing I had ever done in my long fourteen years of perfecting the nutshell. For the whole afternoon after, I just wanted never to leave my seat. We said nothing, but that was when nothing meant everything, to me at least. If only to keep staying by him like that, I knew, rewind seven years back, that I wouldn’t have had it any other way as well.

But it also happened that day that they, my classmates, wanted to have me with them on the other side of the big room. “Come, join us.” 

I shook my head, a show of apathy at that, and remained where I was, where proximity had never felt in the least bit as comforting, and confining, as when I was seated beside him. I liked my place beside him. It was like having to choose between watching TV at home and going out to see an Il Divo concert, except that he was Il Divo, and my classmates were TV at home. “No thanks.”

Until today, he still knows it as unsociability.

“You never learn,” he would say; and I am, after all, a difficult girl.

And a difficult girl it is: on my fifteenth year, that same statement, out of a different cause, would come to me as a holler that would also come with loud, grimacing freeze-time hands on my cheek. “You. Never. Learn.” Unfreeze time and unbeknownst to all humans, it is a slap on my face. Three, actually; and I would be down on the floor receiving two more jolts of his shoe, a ruthless onslaught and a way for one to have me hanging on for dear life, clinging onto anything kind, like a kind doorknob or a kind chair, while pleading with the words, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry that I had to be the kind of girl I am... I’m sorry for being myself.”

I was always sorry for being myself. It’s funny, pathetic, and miserably unbelievable, but it seemed the only words he always liked to hear, from me, that is. Some years ago, I proffered the same kind of detachment from people. I refused to play with my cousins. Do not get the wrong idea. I’d always played with them—boring was never in my book.

I was seven, seven years before that, when my whole family went out for lunch; and I could still vividly remember that fantasy—that one moment when a man held my hand for the first time since forever. As we crossed the streets, he took me by the hand my hand, he and I, his against mine, a first nutshell, as like the kind of nutshell thing I would soon be learning to form with my own hands seven years after. But because I was still so new to the nutshell game, I had no way of holding back my tears. In my head, I gave a teary yelp: “I love you, daddy!!!”

Sitting beside him on the table that afternoon, I understood that some things were just relatively more important than playing with cousins or than being that one nutshelled, behaved little girl I was.

Post-PSI Basic

I don't post every day, right? I know that, but let me tell you something else. Today I think I have found what truly makes me happy in this world: my ikigai, my life's purpose. I exist to make people happy and help them in whatever way. I am passionate about directing people to opportunities, job openings, contests, people, and other networks that I know will bring the best out in them. I love seeing people find hope and feel hopeful and excited about life.

As I scrolled down my news feed on Facebook I saw this nice quote--my three whole days in PSI summarized in one line:

"Sometimes you just have to die a little inside in order to be reborn and rise again as a stronger and wiser version of you."

I started this as a challenge to myself first, by saying positive things to people whom I see as "difficult." The result surprised me in even tremendous ways. It's not hard to do, but that isn't the most surprising part yet. The secret and surprise is that people are not difficult. You are your own hardest professor.