Another therapy blog.....

It's 4 AM and as usual I can sleep. Out of the blue, a thought crossed my mind, "Is there anything I miss from my childhood?" I found it quite sad when I realized that I don't remember much about being a kid. I probably blocked out most of my memories because a lot of them were not very pleasant. But then, how come I don't even remember the time my mother and my sister took me to the zoo or the park? I have some memories of the various times I spent in the hospital, but other than that, I don't remember much.

I guess life for me really began when I was in High School. That's when I started to find out who I really was. I found people who could understand me and accept me without requiring me to conform to society's random standards. In first year, I was just a mediocre student who never stood out from the crowd. In second year, my teachers discovered I could write. It was then that a lot of people began pushing me to develop that particular talent. That gave me the confidence to think that I was meant to do something with my life other than just coasting along aimlessly. So in third year, I decided to join the school paper. I saved all the copies of all the stuff I wrote back then and when I read them recently, I found myself laughing. I was a terrible writer, but at least I never took myself so seriously anyway. Too bad I never got a copy of our High School yearbook. I edited half of the stuff written there.

Other than all the work I did for the school paper. I also remember the lunch breaks I used to spend with my High School barkada. We would just sit there and try to catch up on our assignments then out of the blue, we would find ourselves laughing our hearts out! We just had this weird sense of humor and our own world that not everyone could relate to. By fourth year, we had so much responsibilities with our different organizations, having lunch together would become a luxury. But that never really changed the bond we had.

Sometimes I also remember the high school dances my barkada and I went to. We had so many misadventures with guys that it is still a constant source of laughter when we talk about it during our annual get-together. We would sometimes play practical jokes on the guys we knew and they would get really mad at us afterwards. But in the end, they would forgive us and remain our friends. We were such good girls then that none of us really had a boyfriend at that time or got into any sort of trouble in school.

College turned out to be really interesting. I enrolled in Philosophy based on gut feel. I had no specific goals in mind. All I knew was that I was just interested in the subject matter. I completely forgot about any writing ambitions I had and accidentally ended up becoming an athlete. That was just soooo far out and weird. It made my life really fun though.

College was so important for me because that's when I learned to go for my goals without any hesitation. I followed my heart all the time regardless of the consequences. I finished my course even though everyone thought it was useless. I joined a church choir even if I didn't have a great singing voice. I represented my school in tournaments even if I had really weak lungs.

Occasionally, I still visit my former school. I find myself reminiscing about the days I would eat the same thing for lunch every single day- inihaw pork chop, rice, langka with coconut milk and Coke. At that time, I could get all of that for about P/ 45. I also fondly remember the times I would go cloud watching with my friends. We'd just lie in the middle of the Ateneo field and look up at the sky. Since Quezon City is so polluted, we never saw stars. So we would just look at the clouds and imagine what kind of things we were seeing. It's probably the dorkiest and stupidest thing anyone could do in college, but hey, those were the nights I found most peaceful.

My working life has been a roller coaster ride. I found myself at the worst time of life there and also experienced extreme heights in my career I never expected to reach. If there should be one time of my life I would like to erase, it would probably the ages between 22-23. I hated that time. Within the same month, I lost my boyfriend and my Mom became seriously ill. I became drunk half of the time. I had a series of rebound relationships with the worst sort of guys. Plus I completely messed up my finances. Probably the stupidest thing I ever did was to jeopardize my career by falling in love with a good-for-nothing colleague.

Thank God I managed to crawl out of the hole I dug myself into. My career skyrocketed when I turned 24. But then, if you've read my earlier posts, you know that I burned out at 25. Everything was just going too fast, I finally decided to pull the breaks and just give myself room to breathe.

Do I miss anything from my previous career? Not much. I spent most of my life in the office. I was on call 24/7, during my holidays, during my sick leaves and even when a parent was already dying. I changed my character in order to suit someone else's requirements. Plus, I basically had to forget that I had any principles. This post clearly does reflect any love for my old life.

I can tell you now that's it not easy beginning a new life. It's hard to find out who you really are and what you are meant to be if you find yourself buried in a lot of mud. It was a difficult process of trying to pull myself out of depression and rediscovering the old version of me after a lot of bad things happened in the last year.

I think I'm almost 3/4 into that journey of finding my old happy self. The first big step I made was when I realized that what would make me happy was already right in front of me. I mistakenly thought that finally having money would make me happy. I was dead wrong. I used to think being single is really scary until I realized that compromising is an even more fucked-up state of being. Most important of all, I'm beginning to dream again of the life I originally wanted 5 years ago. It's going to take me sometime to get there, but I'll get there no matter what obstacles come along the way.