20190327

As a teenager, I had difficulty picturing where I would be or what I would be doing past the age of twenty-four. It seemed, at the time, that I could live only up to that age and then just disappear. I think maybe I lived through my early twenties in a state of constant dread. Of what, precisely? I was never so sure.

The dread used to enshroud my sense of time, keeping me from planning for the future, and preventing me from enjoying the present by forcing reruns of greyscale memories. It used to consume me so completely that on particularly bad days, I could not even speak of the day after. I remember feeling as though I did not have a future, that living past twenty-four would be impossible.

My experience of time itself was so distorted that the moments of dread would pass by so agonizingly slowly such that my notion of yesterday had felt, at some point, like weeks ago. Whenever I found myself idle, the dread would weigh on me and prevent me from moving on with my thoughts. I remember considering about a thousand different ways to die, some of them self-induced, and I also remember feeling so helpless that nothing would happen.

Thinking about death and dying is still a quirk I seem to have, but back then I just could not shake it. Every other sensory stimulus was a potential cause of death, if I only harnessed them, but I rarely did. Maybe I was suicidal, but I remember only ever having attempted thrice, and survived. Most of the time it was a passive battle against continuing to live; I would seek out situations in which I would find myself vulnerable.

The idea was simple: the dread and morbid thoughts only happened when I was thinking, so I would actively avoid thinking, sometimes doing precisely what I would not have done had I thought about it properly. If I could just not think, then maybe I could not dread.

But twenty-four was a strange age. I was weaned off of the antidepressants I had been taking for at least two years prior, and I had to learn to live with the sense of dread without the chemical crutch. Maybe it was never about the antidepressants; maybe it was about how I thought about dying. Twenty-four was an age I was anticipating for many reasons, but while I was, I could not see a way out of it.

Twenty-four was a black hole, and I am not sure how I got through it. I remember making plans for when I would finally die; I remember telling people how much I love them; I remember enjoying myself despite the sense of impending doom hanging just above the crown of my head. I remember almost melting down over the the stupidest of things: getting upset over quality of service; leaking frustration over lost objects; or even just experiencing the beauty of the world.

Twenty-four was a state of precarious thinking. Think too little, and I would endanger myself; think too much, and I would paralyze myself with dread. It was also a state of precarious feeling. Feel too bad, and I would want things to end; feel too good, and I would want to end on a high note.

Maybe it was the navigating precariously between seemingly opposing states that I survived that year. Or maybe it was because those seemingly opposing states prevented me from dying.

I remember that in those moments I was on the verge of melting down, I could not help the morbid thoughts. Thoughts of the various ways I could actively kill myself were thwarted by the loss of motivation to do anything but dwell on the negative thoughts. But it stopped there: I could remember the content of the thoughts, and nominally what I felt with those thoughts, but there was nothing to push me into despair. It was dread, and it was powerful, but it was not powerful enough to push me to act on suicidal thoughts.

On the other hand there were also moments that I would find myself elated. Maybe I always found meaning in the arts; maybe I would be reading too much into my own idea of beauty. But in those moments, I would be devastated by beauty, and the thoughts of dying would come: the various ways in which I could just die in that moment, feeling the most at-peace with the world for a long time. If there were a line between experiencing bliss and dying of euphoria, I could have walked it in those moments.

Without any other factors to kill me in those moments, the dread would pull me back slowly from the line, and I would be devastated by how I had not, in that moment of splendor, died. The lines of despair and euphoria have a narrow space between them that, for the most part of twenty-four, I was navigating. Maybe I survived because as soon as I approached either line, I would trip a shut-down mechanism: losing motivation to take my own life, dread slapping me in the face whenever I felt too good.

Maybe it was a good thing that each day of twenty-four was strange; maybe on a normal day I would have enough motivation and planning to kill myself. I remember planning for my death, identifying important people in my life and drafting letters for them to find should I have died in my sleep. I remember working, not because I was motivated by life, but because I was excited at the prospect of dying. Something about knowing there is a deadline really put things into perspective for me. I just did not anticipate that the deadline was flexible.

The dread is still around though. It still takes some getting used to, but there is a sweet spot between fearing death and being excited for it that I think I can use to my advantage. Maybe not fear, nor excitement for death: maybe I have been so fixated on death that I forget about living. Maybe there is a way to live with the fact of death—neither to fear nor be excited by it, but to respect it.

Right now, though, I want neither to die nor live as though I were dying. I get these moments more often these days: moments in which I can just be.

20190129

When it comes to my emotional state, my mind has come to rationalize the semblance of a pattern of it. There are certain things I have come to expect: the general cheeriness, the intermittent despair, and maybe an outburst or two in a regular day. The pattern in the long-term includes a meltdown every few months. At this point, I may be a few months overdue for the next one.

Lately, the smallest things can turn my mood—a really good bowl of noodles to lift my spirits, or a really flat cuppa tea to dampen what would have otherwise been a fairly pleasant afternoon. And then, the irritability: for the most part, I can take pause and consider things from a more rational stance, but I still wonder about my temperance. If my composure can be affected by the most unintentional of triggers, then how can I expect myself to be in the mood for anything productive?

What makes me feel worse is when people who matter notice, and then they bring it up, and we have to talk about it. Because friends talk about pain and hurt and ruin. My intention is not to put on a strong face for them so much as to remind them that there are still good things, and I would much rather talk about the good things than dwell on the negatives, because chances are the negatives lead to a spiral of negativity—a positive feedback loop of heavy feelings that inhibit joy.

(I have developed a few new habits. Whenever someone says something to me that makes me feel moral outrage, I incite them to take action against my life. It is a marginal improvement upon the previous impulse to take action against my own life. I now fumble with the tigers’ eyes I have been given, taking comfort in the vibrations going into my ears and onto my skin. The under-the-breath profanities come and go as they please.)

Sometimes the image of skin-piercing projectiles comes to mind. There is a threshold for how deep a bullet can go before the trauma surgeon has to cut from the other side of the entry wound. Sometimes it feels like that: triggers and bullets through my emotional epidermis and lodged somewhere in the joyous meat behind a punctured feel-bone. The catch is that I am my own trauma surgeon, and the only way to fish the bullet out is to cut a way through.

Maybe I actually hate metaphors, or maybe this one works because I imagine that bullets hurt and negative thoughts hurt, and maybe there is an emotional body, but maybe not analogous to the physical one. I imagine this body to be constituted of positive energy. Maybe in form it is not like the physical body, but maybe in characteristics it can be. Bones grow back stronger than they were originally; maybe positive emotions grow back stronger than they were before because of negativity.

This is a forced metaphor. I cannot attest to its veracity outside hypothetical scenarios based on my own experience. I did not subject this metaphor to any academic rigor from any disciplines or fields of study. Maybe it is my own metaphor, applicable only to me. Maybe I am masochistic, seeking justification for the necessity of negativity.

The thing is though, I am ambivalent to pain, metaphorical or otherwise. Pain comes regardless of how much I avoid it, and I have stopped avoiding pain for a while now. The challenge for me becomes how I cope with it, and I am a mess of a person. My tendency is that there is a certain threshold of negativity in which I can no longer hold back. Small inconveniences on their own should not affect my mood, but a barrage of them in a short period set me off.

On the flipside, there are some big negatives that have come my way, and maybe my emotional self gives up, because those times, I feel as though I go on autopilot. My physical body does the living for the rest of me; I become a thing that reacts out of instinct and without emotion. It gets tiring though; I have to crash at some point.

Almost every day now, I encounter something that makes me tear up—usually because I become overwhelmed with positive thoughts. Almost every day now, I have to remind myself that maybe the time has not come yet; no matter how much leeway I give myself to cry, I find myself in a deep state of satisfaction. It is not yet time, I think, to despair.

Yet the despair is there: somewhere just out of sight. Maybe it knows I have grown used to it; maybe it lies in wait, knowing fully that I will be vulnerable eventually. Or maybe I still have a bunch of bullets in my emotional corpse. Emotions are difficult; sometimes I wish not to have been allowed them in the first place. I could have been cold; I could have been level-headed.

But again: temperance. I find that it helps when I take a step back from visceral reactions to negative stimuli. It helps to pretend to be objective, taking into consideration different interpretations of an event, knowing fully that I will probably go along with the one thought that is most convenient, most comfortable. I cannot afford the discomfort—not now.

(My tigers’ eyes glimmer; I need to stay calm. The tap-tapping of the keyboard has slowed. Have I been rambling all this time? My emotions are mute, but nod their concurrence. Sometimes I cannot stand metaphors.)

Maybe after I have had myself a good cry will I be willing to be discomforted again. I am a few months overdue. I wonder how long this will last—it feels like I stand on a ledge somewhere, looking up, with the void peering into my mind from my peripheral vision. My dreams for med school are dead, but maybe I can still be a trauma surgeon for myself.

20180716

There was a time I was so enamored by the city that I would escape the confines of my room just to experience what I thought back then was beauty. It seemed obligatory, as a pretentious teenager, to go out and get lost as part of a quest to “find myself.” I used to be under the impression that everything would make more sense once I had a sense of self, but somewhere down the line, I figure maybe identity is not the end-all-be-all of life, because people are prone to change. There is nothing truly essential about a person anyway, so why force the issue?

It started out as solo walking tours around San Juan or Quezon City—I would meander after hours, tiring myself out before even considering navigating my way home. At some point, I would spend entire days out just exploring different areas. At nineteen, I was comfortable enough in Quezon City, San Juan, and Makati City to last a whole day on less than minimum wage at the time. Manila City, the portion north of the river, was necessarily disconcerting, but by the age of twenty-one, I got used to the feeling.

When I was fourteen, I had the opportunity to explore Mandaluyong in the summer; my friend who lived there would invite me to hang out, and so we did. That summer, I found out that I enjoyed photography and physical affection. I remember holding hands in the cinema during a particularly bland action movie. It was more fun to walk around and take photos of nothing in particular—I gravitated to geometric subjects. I did not yet have my own camera at the time. I just intuitively figured that photography was fun because of the skill involved.

For the most part, I would get lost on my own, with no clear goals in mind. I would go out and watch movies by myself; eat cheap food by myself; and think to myself. It was about stimulating myself on my own—part of finding out what I resonated with and what I did not. I resonated with sensory experiences. I did not resonate with grays. I resonated with urban decay. I did not resonate with stagnation. I resonated with lived experience. I did not resonate with death. The journey enlivened me; the city lived with me; and living meant activity, whether in solitude or with company.

It used to be rare that I would invite a friend to join me, but I find it has been easier for me to reach out these days. (It might be the loneliness.) Usually, it is Makati City at night, or Manila City in the daylight. Familiarity helps; it feels like I want to rehearse for tours, or mostly I am the tourist, rediscovering the city each day I get lost.

It has been a while since I got lost. I think by twenty-three, I had exhausted most of the areas I could get lost in. I lost the taste for the city; I think I felt I went through them all—the sweet secrets behind doors, the bitter crossings, and the soured memories revisited.

(How I learned language was thus: I listened to the ambient noise of the city, absorbing the phonologies of cacophony. Language does not roll so much as percuss—the stiff tongue strikes dent or palate. The lips purse and stretch almost arbitrarily, and air escapes the throat, sounding off stiff consonants and liquid vowels. The rhythm is exhilarating. Eventually, I would learn how gongs made sound, in a similar way. I learned language by eavesdropping on conversations to which I was outsider, stranger. I learned language by asking questions in words parroted from others. I learned language by listening—sometimes by listening to the subtleties of breath.)

Every other year, I would go with family to Dumaguete City. It was—and still is—not a city in the way that Quezon City is, but it did its best to emulate a platonic city. I tried getting lost, but I always ended up somewhere familiar—somewhere strangers still recognized me. I thought the whole point of getting lost was that people would not know me; I thought that I could get lost in a city I did not frequent. But they seemed to know me, with my alien tongue, percussing to a different tribe. They prefer it when I speak in English; I prefer it when I do not have to. It is a city of silence, in which words are stolen from strangers, never to be heard unless agreed upon.

I used to know my way around Diliman, but the memory fades. Everything changes, and I keep getting lost. There is a new cinema in the area, and I find myself attracted to the isolation of its location—the top floor of a building along a dimly lit highway. It screens mostly local films, and I feel I can get lost once more, even while at home.

When I was twenty-four, I went to Baguio City alone. It had changed since I was a child—even the air felt different. The cinemas were closed, but Session was alive at all hours, inviting me to coffee served in bars, and beers served in cafes. I rested that first night in the smoking area of a cafe; the heat of the sun and the whiff of reds woke me up. (The black coffee helped too.) They had to hide from the public eye; I had to remain a stranger so as not to accessorize the disorder.

There are parks in Baguio City that, at night, remind me of the cinemas in Quezon City. But the air is crisper, not as cold, not as damp. Maybe if the pine trees could grow in the darkness, the cinemas would be desiccated. There are movies about people who prefer trees over people, and there are movies about strangers getting lost. Sometimes there are movies about these movies, and I am perfectly satisfied to watch in the darkness of a cinema. Something about losing myself soothes me; I do not always have to be myself, and that provides solace, maybe.

20180710

I was born in the city, and for majority of my life, was also raised in the city. One of my first memories, though, is from a time my family and I lived in the province. Not a province so much as a peri-urban town across the river from an accretion of cities. And not just one city, but they may as well have been the same with the logic founding the streets and the structures.

Up until the age of eight, I was ferried to school each day along a road that connected the peri-urban town through two cities to what was then a municipality. School was a private sectarian institution nestled just a block away from a major road. Passing through the road all this time, I noted how quickly the scene changes; what was there when I was a child no longer is now. Establishments came and went at such a rate that it is difficult to picture the road at any point in time; it becomes a blur of gray punctuated by traffic lights, painted pavement, and electrical posts.

The route changed when my parents moved us to Manila City, in an area straddling a district with distinct Spanish planning, and the American-era district lit at night with red light. We lived at the top of a five-storey apartment building nestled in the middle of a residential street hidden from the nearby highway by commercial establishments. I used to count the steps to the top of the staircase, and whenever I lost count, I knew that exhaustion was not far behind. Going down, I would take the stairs two at a time, noting the odd- and even-numbered flights until I hit the ground landing.

The garage was crammed with cars, and the metal barricades were tall. I could only see the street through the pedestrian gate, iron wrought into twisted bars like a baroque prison door. The noise was predictable from the time of day; what was less so but enlivened me were the yells of the balut merchant and the melody of the ice cream peddler. I think my father took in some stray dogs, allowing them to eat and rest in the garage; I would play with them when I went down to watch the street on which the dogs would later die.

Manila City was something of a rude awakening from living in Taytay. In Taytay, we had a quaint four-storey house with a heavy wooden door punctuating an off-white facade. The black-painted iron gate was not more intimidating than an open window. Growing up as a rambunctious nuisance, I knew every corner of the house, often violating unspoken boundaries in my boredom. I even went out to the patio out by the front door to watch past the black gate, the nearby playground.

Something about that gate was restrictive. I would often think about finding out about the rest of the neighborhood, but my parents kept me confined. They would allow me to go with the firstborn to keep an eye on me; the furthest I had gone was to the sari-sari store at the end of the road to buy sour gumballs with coins that I would find along the way. Other times, I would watch the flow of the nearby creek, never crossing the makeshift bamboo bridge to the other side.

I stopped threatening to run away when we moved to Manila City; maybe I grew out of it, or maybe I got used to the inconveniences. The incessant urge to wander picked at me, still, and at thirteen, I was given permission to leave school without a fetcher. When San Juan was declared a city, I would wander the backstreets on foot, trying to find out nothing in particular. I likely just needed a break from all the familiarity of home and school.

At twelve, my parents moved us to Quezon City. We were near another major road straddling the interface between Quezon City and San Juan. We lived in a four-storey split-level house in a subdivision; I remember the weather being mostly overcast for some reason—maybe because of how densely the houses occupied a concrete canopy. There was another wrought iron gate—this time painted green—to keep the city out and the citizens in. Our house was well within the subdivision, so going out entailed a ten-minute walk. Instead, I would wander the pavement of the subdivision.

My father said it was because of our landlord that we had to move again—I was fourteen when we moved to another subdivision. This time, the gate was white, and the subdivision spilled clearly out to a major road, the one separating Quezon City and San Juan. I managed to convince my parents to let me walk to school on my own in the mornings in the guise that it would be faster than taking a car. Some days, when I would wake up early enough, I would walk slowly and take in the concrete dust—a kilometer in thirty minutes. Most days it would take around fifteen minutes to straddle the cities and go to school, sweating profusely from humidity.

We moved again when I was twenty-two, deeper into Quezon City. The barred gates are now completely opaque and painted green. The other side of the block is a highway, but none of the noise makes it to this side. The constant roadworks in the area make the streets unpredictably impassable, but as long as I have my pedestriation, I should not mind. The lease will be up in a few days, but I think my parents will renew.

Sometimes a sense of home for me depends on the movement—I only ever feel at home if I could freely leave, and freely come back. There was a time I would explore the different cities, only to come back to this—a room in a house in a subdivision just off a major road in a city among cities. I wrote some pieces before about my daily walks, but reading them now tires me, as if reliving the walks also brings back the exhaustion. Sometimes I tire of cities.