Category: Dear Diary

One Hundred Days

Tina 2 Comments

Not to freak you out guys…but if I counted it correctly, we only have 100 days left in 2014. 

Okay, never mind, you can freak out now.

So in the past days since my last post, I had been working (not new), working on releasing something (eeee), been to Pangasinan and almost got caught in the middle of a typhoon on the way home, and got stuck at home for a weekend because of another typhoon, effectively missing a wedding because of all the floods. If I hadn’t been paying attention to Twitter, I wouldn’t have realized that there are 100 days left because somehow, my days just seem to blend into each other. Sometimes I even forget what happened at a certain day because other things get in the way.

I don’t want that.

I don’t want the next few days in the rest of the year to just blend into one another, for me to forget the things that happen in everyday. I don’t want to be so consumed with work, with being busy, being worrying about work and being busy that I forget the essential things. You know, the things that bring joy, the things that make me choose joy. Take delight.

It’s just 100 days left. Soon, it will be 1.

One of the things I learned in the past years is intentionality, and with that comes mindfulness. I want to make the last 100 days of 2014 to count, and for that to happen, I need to take it one intentional and mindful day at a time. I know that there will be moments that will fall into the cracks, that will get lost in the busy-ness of the days, but I don’t want them to just be forgotten.

So this is the plan: remember that #100happydays challenge? Well, I enjoyed that so much the first time, so I thought, why not another round? Except maybe I won’t use that hash tag anymore but stick to my own. I will still post photos in my instagram account, but maybe not all of them will be photos. I’m not entirely sure yet.

But I do know that I want to count down the last days of 2014 recalling at least one blessing in a day. I want my 2014 to end with me learning and relearning to choose joy, and to take delight.

Because…Joy is a choice to believe God when He calls what He has made very good, and a choice to draw near to that very good world in its ache and terror and sadness.

Are you with me? :) Happy last 100 days of 2014, friends!

* Image 1 and Image 2 (combined from we heart it

Passing Time

Tina 2 Comments

I feel like I’m running out of time.

It’s not like my clocks are set to run faster than anyone else’s. Or that I live in the future, or the past, or whatever. As far as I know, I still live in the same time dimension as everyone else.

But I still feel like I’m running out of time, all the time.

Have you ever felt that way? Like days just pass by, and soon they’re weeks, and then months, and before you know it, the year is over. And you feel like the days pass by without leaving a mark, and sometimes I can’t even remember what happened at a certain time – as in I have a hard time recalling what I did last Tuesday, or last Saturday.

I hate it the most on weekends – when all of sudden, the weekend is ending, and I’m back to the daily grind. I feel sad because it’s another week, and it feels like everything’s the same even if in reality, it’s not. I mean, my job is anything but routinary. Or perhaps it’s not about the routine, but how things just seem so endless, and sometimes, pointless.

Thinking about all of that – how endless and pointless it all seems – makes me exhausted, to the point that I just want to stop, and stay in bed. The most I was excited about was doing nothing, and when faced with commitments outside, I get stressed out because again, I feel like I’m always running out of time. Like there isn’t enough time for me to do the things I need to do for my commitments…

…and yet I still have time to sleep in, to read, to lounge around and do things. I have time to do that, while finishing the things I said I finished.

Then I go through it all again, and I’m just tired, and all I want to do is sleep and rest.

But then there are those commitments.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I swear, this must be where personal crisis comes from.

Time stops for no one.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I feel this way, and I keep on pointing it to how I am still settling into my new role at work. But it’s not just that, isn’t it? I mean, work is work, and it can be endless, but it’s not always the reason why I feel these things. Perhaps it’s because I’m back to managing our household, and I’m not so used to doing it again (even if I should be, especially since I do it every year anyway). Things are changing and changing and I am so out of my comfort zone, and I feel like I cannot keep up, and sometimes I panic and I want to yell STOP, because I need time to orient myself.

At first I thought that I am afraid of running out of time, but really, I’m afraid of running out of time for myself. That’s the thing with being so used to having time for myself in the past years – I feel like I’m entitled to it, even when I should be spending a better part of my day working. The reality is, I am not running out of time for myself – it would only happen if I let it, and I always have a choice. No matter how busy or crazy things get, I still have a choice. I forget that sometimes. I need to draw clearer lines, build better boundaries and respect them. And I need to remember that things do end, even if they seem so endless when I’m in the midst of it. They always end (even if it means something else starts right after).

I think the thing I need to do is to make time for the things that matter to me. I need to figure out what they are, and fight to have time for it. I am not a slave to my circumstances, and like I said: I always have a choice. So I need to make a choice to make time for the people and the things that give me joy. I need to resist the urge to lie down and do nothing, avoid sleeping in so I can wake up earlier and have time to do something that I want to do. There is a time for rest, yes, and I recognize and honor that, but more than half the time I say I am tired and I need rest, it’s just me being lazy. I need to distinguish which is which, so I know when to surrender to rest, and to fight the laziness.

I need to carve time for these important things, because if I don’t, then no one will.

Stop hitting the panic button.

I need to learn to be still. I need to remember that all of this in my life is just a period, and there’s infinitely more things that will happen later on. This is just a drop in the ocean, and it’s really not worth panicking over.

Relax, self. It’s okay, it’s all good. You are not running out of time.

After all, I serve and love a God who is the Author of Time, and He loves me back. What am I so afraid of?

When a heart breaks

Tina 16 Comments

The first time I got my heart broken, it was fifth grade, Valentine’s Day.

I’ve had this terribly huge crush on a schoolmate for a while now. He knew I liked him, because I told him, and ever since then I’ve been acting all weird around him so we weren’t really “friends.” Valentine’s day was fast approaching, and I wanted to give him something. I saw this pair of heart-shaped pins in our school’s bookstore, and being a romantic sap, I bought them. I put his heart (haha) in a little box that I decorated myself and asked a friend to give it to him. I didn’t see him accept it, but my friend told me he did, and I was elated.

Hours later, as I was waiting for my service to fetch me from school, my crush’s classmate came knocking at the classroom door. She handed me the box with the pin, and told me that she heard that my crush was planning to give it to the girl he liked. She told him off, took the gift, and brought it back to me. I thanked her and waited for my ride home quietly. As soon as I got home, a friend came over to ask what happened, and I burst into tears.

It was the first time I ever cried over a boy.

* * *

The last time I got my heart broken, I was a mess.

As in, a total, absolute mess. I cried all day. I cried all week. There was a moment when I was curled up in bed and crying when a part of me wanted to laugh, because I realized that all those rom-com movie/romance novel cliches where the main character talks about how she can’t eat and can’t sleep, and all she wanted to do was curl into herself, cry and wish for the pain to disappear was actually real. I wanted to laugh because I didn’t think it would ever happen to me, but I was there and it damn it, it all hurt. I wanted to laugh, but the urge to cry was stronger, and the pain just kept on banging in my heart.

I didn’t stay in bed the whole week, but I could cry at the snap of a finger. At work? Oh, of course. I had a pack of tissues beside me for the week, and I could easily finish the entire thing in a day. My teammates were sympathetic, and tried to make me laugh several times. A text message comes, and my eyes start brimming with tears. Crying in the shower? Oh, I’ve done that, several times. Complete with background music, because sometimes you needed effects to accompany you as you wonder when your tears will ever, ever run out.

And it’s true, too, how you just lose the zest to fix yourself after the shock of the heartbreak has worn off. I didn’t want to wear contact lenses or put on make-up because I’m going to cry later anyway, and it’s just futile effort. My eyes were constantly swollen, and because my defense mechanism was so awesome, I got allergy attacks when I cry too much. So I drink knock-out allergy meds at night to get rid of the sneezes and to help me get to sleep.

Funny thing is, I wasn’t even crying about lost love – only the possibility of it. See, nothing was ever official, and it would have gone on longer if I hadn’t decided to speak up and finally ask The Question I was scared of asking. I didn’t really lose him at that time, because we were still friends (sort of). I was crying because the thing that fueled me – the possibility of something wonderful – became an impossibility, and I didn’t know how to deal.

But like I learned sometime ago, you don’t cry forever. You really don’t. When the tears finally subsided, and I stopped randomly crying at every moment, I had to face an even tougher question: what now?

* * *

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