Tag: 2014

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?

All These Things (1)

Tina Leave a comment

I meant to blog more before July ended (because that last post can get a bit too maudlin, right? Also, I haven’t used the word maudlin in ages), but alas, work, a typhoon, several SFC events, and sickness got in the way. Before I knew it, the month was over and we’re well into August, and I…well, look, we’re in August.

I realized something recently, though, in my new-ish job (can’t believe that I’ve only been here for less than 3 months – feels like forever already): the more you do something, the better you get at it. I mean, okay fine, I know that already, but being in this new role proved it. I haven’t done any major designing stuff since 2008, 2009. Now that one of my job functions is to design ads for work, I have been stretched in an interesting way and I find that it is getting easier for me to be more creative in making ads.  I am learning to use Adobe Illustrator more now, and I am really liking vectors. And I have used the Pen tool properly! How about that. Excuse me for being a noob, but it’s all so fascinating. (And to think I used to say I was a graphic designer. Heh.)

Then I realized how much that principle also applied to other things, particularly, writing. I admit that being so busy in all this newness has stopped me from writing – here, in my book blog, and even creatively – and I missed that. But if I can get better in designing because I do it everyday, then I would get better at writing if I do it everyday regularly more often than I do now.

Like I said, nothing new there. But indulge me a bit.

To put that in action, I am starting this little, semi-regular thing called All These Things. Because I don’t always have to write about oh-so-serious stuff – sometimes, I just really need to write. So let’s start.

If there’s an award for a song that has given me the most massive case of LSS, this would win. I heard it in my friend’s car last week and I have been playing it all week. I haven’t played it today yet, but I bet later I would play it and sing it and I don’t know if it would end anytime soon.  And there, I just played it again.

[youtube ejayqEKDAcs]

I just finished reading Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You, upon recommendation of a friend. I liked it, but I have very mixed feelings about that ending.

mebeforeyou

But this is not a review, so I won’t talk about that. There’s this line from the book that I want to print out and frame so I would remember it everyday:

Some mistakes…just have greater consequences than others. But you don’t have to let that […] be the thing that defines you.

Book season is starting in the Philippines. Book season = time for sales, book fairs, and reader conferences. And just this week, we kicked off the 3rd Filipino Readers’ Choice Awards. Nominations are now open! Nominate your favorite 2013-published book by a Filipino author. There are thirteen new categories! :D

I’ve had my gym membership frozen since March because I wasn’t going there anyway. I’ve been contemplating on having it cut because I haven’t been using it as much. I forgot to have the freeze extended, so I got billed for August. I decided to use it again and went back for a dance class yesterday. I forgot how fun it was. And how much I missed dancing. :) This little fella dances way better than me, though:

Baby-dancing-Groot

One of my new favorite bloggers, Hannah Brencher, ((Hannah, who actually inspired me to come up with this thing with her Field Notes feature)) wrote this post a couple of weeks ago. I keep going back to it because…because:

And while I’m not an expert or a ghost buster, I think a ghost gets born out of a constant wish that maybe you and another person might have more to say to each other. Like maybe you never reached the point of finally saying everything. And maybe, just maybe, if you can manage to keep a person in your orbit or your memory a little while longer then you’ll never have to face the real truth: you can’t fix everything.

So many powerful words in this post that I can’t pick. But what she said about having final words, about how “Final words shift the atmosphere” give me hope. And it reminds me of this quote from Yann Martel’s Life of Pi:

So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

Maybe all I really need are those words.

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Have a great weekend, everyone. :)

** Featured image credit

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.

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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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