Without your consent

I haven't been writing a lot lately, not because I didn't have any time, but because all the things I felt like writing about were sad things, angry things, useless things--things that, really, wouldn't benefit anyone reading them. I thought I'd write this anyway.

When I was younger, I was bullied by a teacher who thought I was too smart and too conceited for my own good. For four years there would be weeks on end that each school day was hell for me: full of snide remarks and insinuations, and public humiliation, and the painful disappointment of having an authority figure not only deny her approval, but even her basic respect. I'd come home unwilling to talk about it, because it's hard to talk about those things that pain you the most. It gave my mother a lot of pain, my refusal to talk, but I think that we should be able to keep to ourselves, even for just a little while, the things that bring us the greatest sadness and despair, just so we can decide how to approach them. Just so we can put up walls where they need to be put up. Just so we can deal with being bullied.

It occurred to me today that it's like history is repeating itself. I am no longer the wunderkind (is there a way to feminize the word?) who got up the nose of an old lady who took her frustrations out on an unsuspecting adolescent. I'm a twenty two year old medical student who has a degree and, I used to think, at least enough self-confidence to get me through adulthood without too many mishaps. But it's like I'm still standing in the same classroom, letting someone make me feel bad about myself. Allowing someone else that power.

My teacher was a bully, and I think she knew what she was doing, though she might deny it to herself. She never said sorry for any of it, after all--grading me differently from everyone else (and this conclusion was supported by one of the Sisters, who took it upon herself to look through my grades), humiliating me in class, writing snide remarks on my papers which were half begrudging compliment, half commentary on my supposedly huge ego ("You know *very well* that you write very well!"). And so many other things, all adding up to make the high school experience a boiling pot of misery and paralyzing self-doubt. I've forgotten most of it by now, having chosen to forget the less savory part of high school.

But I remember what being bullied feels like, and now that I'm twenty-two, you'd think I'd be safe from all that. But I think I'm not. Sometimes I think, wow, this feels familiar, what the heck is happening? My tormentors are not, I think, consciously setting themselves up as bullies. I think they're pretty satisfied with themselves, actually, morally, physically, and on any other level.

I don't know why I allow myself to be sad about the things that are said to me about my personal appearance--things hidden in jokes, things that are outright insults but that you're not supposed to take offence at since, after all, it's all in fun isn't it, and don't be so balat-sibuyas? And I know I'm guilty of making the same kinds of remarks as well, though never as directly and never as meanly, never with the intent to make someone feel so small that, through daily abuse, the fortress of their self-esteem is slowly eroded and all that's left is a mass of nerves and social anxiety. As if there weren't enough social anxiety to begin with!

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. I guess. St Josemaria's mother used to tell him to be ashamed only of sin. After all, it's only God's opinion that matters, when everything is said and done.

Bullies will see your imperfections (and may forget their own, thanks to that wonderful myopia we all have about our own flaws), but they don't see the way you pray, the things you sacrifice, the number of times you say no to your own will (and yes to God's) in one day, the things that involve your taking the harder path--they will not ever see the things that matter. They don't see you trying to overcome your painfully persistent shyness to make friends, and they don't see how you offer your work to God, daily, consciously, silently, blending in with everyone else. They won't see you crying about your mistakes and being sorry for them, and they won't ever see you getting up and struggling, despite past experiences and the prospect of few rewards, to be a genuinely better person.

It's okay, Kay. Possumus. Nulla dies sine cruce.

With death there's a funeral, or: quarter life crisis

This is a cautionary tale. I wrote this when I was in college and, looking back on it now, I can relate to the stress and melancholia and the feeling of wanting to run away, but in college I came really close. Now it's unimaginable. How can someone who loves God allow herself to be so unhappy? The answer is simple: a lack of constancy.

There are days when I just want to curl up on the couch and watch an Apocalypse. With stakes, and vampires disintegrating into powder, and Giles wiping his glasses on his shirt. (Hopefully with no Michelle Trachtenberg in her profound annoyingness.) To identify with all of that drama. I don't wish I were the Chosen One or anything as melodramatic, though I do wish I had an ex I really broke up with, rather than a couple of overgrown men who had no idea what their priorities were and who basically tossed my heart around as though it were a football, all the while without me ever getting to change my Friendster status. (It's an inexplicable ambition. It's not as though I even use friendster.) I wish I could have days that are not off days, days that are not Buffy days.

As excited as I am about thesis, most of the time I just want to effectively disappear. Disintegrate, become invisible. An option is running away. But my mom would die of a heart attack (no, she would. Really.) and my dad, of despair, and my brother, of the overwhelming happiness that I am no longer part of his life and he can have my parents' attention all to himself. I imagine myself disappearing, disintegrating into tiny unseeable balls of cells, all floating away to be part of one ecosystem or another, feeding the fungi and the algae on the edges of the sea. It's more and less than death, because with death there's a funeral, and so much black and so much fuss, and coffins are so expensive. I want to disappear, and go where they will never find me. Maybe I should try, but I don't think my conscience can handle the guilt.

I've alienated my Tahilan friends and many others from various social spheres. Mom and dad are probably the only people who really love me who I actually want to see. The feeling is deeper than loneliness but I have no word for it but loneliness.

I wonder where I'd go if I actually ran away. I wouldn't take my laptop. I'd say goodbye to it and delete all of my files except a .txt one saying I'm sorry, as classless as that is. I'd bring a pair of Crocs because they can last me through the rainy season, and my mom's old Nike jacket, and a picture of me, mom and dad, and my copy of The Fifth Elephant, and my Daily Roman Missal, and an umbrella, and a prayer card of St Josemaria. I'd bring a notebook and a pencil, and a big packet of instant soluble coffee to get me by, and some underthings and a clean shirt, and that I think would be it. I'd put it all in one of my brother's duffel bags.

I'd go somewhere very far away, somewhere with trees and sun like Alabang but with the dirty Ankh-Morporkian anonymity of Manila. Maybe I'll work in a cafe. I've always wanted to work in a coffeeshop, never a Starbucks because one day I might see someone I know. Just one of those little coffeeshops, like the ones attached to bed-and-breakfasts, where there are terracotta pots and cats sunbathing by the windows, and I can spend my breaks reading or taking really, really long walks. I don't know where I'd sleep, but I'd find a way to keep off the streets because even beggars steal from beggars.

I don't know what I'd do, because stripped of my parent's ambitions and the expectations that people have built up around me over the years, I have actually no idea what I really want.

I could be a doctor. I know that. It's within reach. Whether I get into my dream med school or not, I can still have that MD attached to my last name. But I think that maybe this will make me desperately unhappy. That maybe I'll regret it. That maybe I don't want a life with no time for science fiction and crawling around in the garden looking at fungi and the slime molds on my mom's orchid planters. If I don't become a doctor, I'll be a scientist, and while that would be lovely, I just sometimes think that maybe I don't want that, too. That maybe I should just follow what my heart really, really wants when I wake up at four in the morning and can't see the point of anything, of microfuge tubes and PCR machines and biosafety gear, when we're all going to die anyway.

I think that if I run away I can get that quiet kind of life. I think I was happiest when dreaming. Maybe when I run away I'll have time to dream again, like I used to when I'd come home from school and sit, Indian-style, on the library floor thinking of all the fabulous things I could be, all the books I could buy. When--should that be an if?--I run away I'd live quietly, by myself, and it would be lonely, but such a different kind of loneliness from the one manufactured by an unwanted isolation from the people who used to care for you. At least this time the isolation will be of my own choosing, and I can put all the people I used to love in a neat compartment, an attic box labeled "past", to be set aside and not opened for years. Maybe when I run away I'll take my violin too, and learn to play again, if maybe my landlady (if I get one) will let me practice despite the noise.

I really have dreams of wearing an apron and working somewhere quiet. A simple job no more complex than greet-the-guests take-their-orders make-some-java. When--if--when I run away maybe I can start anew, stop thinking about what everyone else wants and figure out what I want. I'd cut my hair really short because there would be no need to impress anyone, anymore, and besides I'd need to save on the shampoo. I'll I guess that after a few months I'll end up quite thin, and I wonder if that will make me any happier.

The tension between two desires

Sometimes your heart
is like a fracture,
The two ends pulling so strongly
that the bone can't be reset.

Remembering

Molly Gibson: It's the one you did a drawing of.
Roger Hamley: You remember?
Molly Gibson: Of course I remember. I remember everything you wrote in your letters. How could you think I wouldn't?

--Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, adaptation.

Fish and Bird

They bought a round for the sailor
And they heard his tale
Of a world that was so far away
And a song that we'd never heard
A song of a little bird
Who fell in love with a whale.

He said, 'You cannot live in the ocean'
And she said to him
'You never can live in the sky.'
But the ocean is filled with tears
And the sea turns into a mirror
There's a whale in the moon when it's clear
And a bird on the tide

Please don't cry.
Let me dry your eyes.

So tell me that you will wait for me.
Hold me in your arms
I promise we never will part.
I'll never sail back to the time
But I'll always pretend you're mine
Though I know that we both must part
You can live in my heart

Please don't cry
Let me dry your eyes

And tell me that you will wait for me
Hold me in your arms
I promise we never will part
I'll never sail back to the time
But I'll always pretend that you're mine
I know that we both must part
You can live in my heart

(It's a rainy day song by Tom Waits, for bad asthma-inducing, mood-depressing days like this!)

Attack of the Asthma

{Photo source}

Asthma, asthma, go away
Come again another day!

Every time we say goodbye

You know those days when everything appears to go wrong? I felt like that girl during her slump in "Just My Luck." You know the drill. You try to send a file but it's too big, your laptop runs out of charge and there's nowhere to plug it, you have to reply to about a gazillion people but you've run out of load. Your asthma attacks seem to be hardly responding to your meds.

And on the one day of the week that you didn't bring your umbrella, it rained like there was no tomorrow, both on the way to school and on the way back. And the rain came with a goodbye.

Rain often makes me sad. It always reminds me of that scene in The Parent Trap (reminding me once again that my life is a tapestry of movies with no originality), the saddest scene, when "Every Time we Say Goodbye" plays on the background.

Oh, Every time we say goodbye
I die a little.
Every time we say goodbye
I wonder why a little
Why the gods above me
Who must be in the know
Think so little of me
They allow you to go.

When you're near
There's such an air
Of spring about it.
I can hear a lark somewhere
Begin to sing about it
There's no love song finer
But how strange the change
From major to minor
Every time we say goodbye.


Yesterday I was running home in the rain, jacket over my head and over my bag, when I ran into someone in front of Robinsons Mall. I was amazed he recognized me because I was half-hidden by my jacket. He greeted me just as I was crossing to go to National bookstore, and I said hi back, and was left wondering (like Charles Ryder) how our lives, so closely intertwined once, could now intersect only in the few times a year we'd bump into each other, when there was a time we were close enough to study in Starbucks Adriatico together and we'd share things about Maria Mena and other singers. We first met when he and one of my best friends were classmates in UP Dentistry, and he was always extremely nice to me. I remember thinking how odd it was for a guy to like Maria Mena's kind of music.

I'm not writing this now because I was particularly fond of him--more like I was amazed at how we make such a big deal out of goodbyes, when in reality we say goodbye all the time, sometimes without even knowing it. If you made a friend at some class or elective you took back in college, when the semester ended, you probably wouldn't really meet each other for coffee right? I know I didn't, not really; I used to sit next to this girl called Hannah for a whole summer, and now I can't even remember her last name, her course or what we ever found to talk about. Also, I took part in summer stock theatre and fell sincerely in love with some people, but after some time we stopped communicating, too.

I thought about all this on the way home. Today I have had to say a different kind of goodbye. In a way it is an artificial sort of goodbye because we will remain friends. But there is a thread that has been cut, and has been cut forever, and it won't ever be the same.

I can let myself be sad--but I can also let myself shrug it off, as I have shrugged off a thousand other goodbyes, and know that the same wise Person behind preludes and encounters is also the same person behind epilogues and goodbyes.