Perspective

Video Transcript: I had a secret. I kept it under wraps for years because when I tried talking about it people thought I was being ungrateful.

My secret? I suffered from depression.

I still do, but I have had the good fortune of eventually stumbling upon people who also suffer or have suffered from it and understand what it’s about, people who don’t aggressively blame me for it, but don’t let me wallow in despair either.

Before I go on, let me just say… If you suspect that you suffer from depression or some other form of mental, emotional, internal disturbance, DO NOT SELF-DIAGNOSE. Please seek help. Depression is not a joke and there is no one size fits all solution. I should know, I had a close family member who didn’t make it. So I can’t say it enough; seek help!

Also, please note, what I am about to say is based on my personal experience. I am not a mental health professional or your overbearing mother, and I am not qualified to define or analyze anyone else’s circumstance. My objective here is to simply share what I personally went through in the hopes that it might prove relatable to someone.

So what does it feel like to have what I have?

At first, I seem to have shared very similar mental states (some of which still persist) with my clinically depressed acquaintances. There was that crushing feeling of sadness and hopelessness, and the distressing feeling of sitting in a black hole, alternating between numbness and overthinking the cobwebs I conjured out of nothing. I had very little belief and pride in myself and in what I did, and like my saturnine pals, there were sporadic attempts to be, let’s just say, harmful…

But then something shifted ever so slightly, and I don’t quite know how and why it did. Perhaps a combination of my unique chemical and mental make up and the demands of a changed environment made it possible, or maybe a huge purple villain from another dimension snapped, and instead of eliminating 50% of the population, his snap shifted brain cells.

Whatever the cause, I noticed, I had suddenly gotten up and began to drive myself over cliffs of excess.

I’d become so concerned about time or my perceived shortness of it that I start work at dawn to ensure I make the most out of my day, but even then I end up deeply dissatisfied with the day’s work. When I’m not working, I either stuff my face senseless or I sleep — a lot, one time clocking in a record 20 hours of sleep on one of my mandatory holidays. I sleep so much during my days off I’d likely pass off either as a cat or a piece of furniture. But despite all the seeming rest I get, I still end up perpetually exhausted.

But there is one other thing I do even more excessively than eating or sleeping — reading.

In 2016, I read 61 books and listened to 24 audiobooks, a total of 85 books consumed in one year. This, combined with my two other favorite excesses, has resulted in extremely dark eye rings and a fairly even increase in my horizontal dimensions.

Yes, I really look like a sad panda right now.

Feeling like a panda. Thinking like Batman.

I’ve been told this seemingly frenetic mutation of my earlier condition is called high functioning depression, also known as, the Batman state of mind (just kidding) — also known as, dysthymia or persistent depressive disorder (PDD).

Earlier in 2018, I went through another major shift. All of a sudden, something just lifted. There is still some feeling of heaviness, but I feel a lot lighter now, and I’ve done a lot more different things besides reading, eating and sleeping. By the end of 2018, I only managed to read 25 books, and looking back at 2016, I can’t imagine how I finished so many.

The best places to find financially rewarding jobs in Misamis Oriental are Tagoloan and Villanueva. These two places contain the companies that applicants drool over while half awake beside the telephone on a warm and dry jobless day. Getting into companies there will not just give employees the feeling of being well compensated; it will also give a view into a distant but secure future, one filled with fat chickens on the table, Tanduay in blue boxes, an air conditioned home in the Estates and the most expensive Magic Sing in the sala.

That’s why my heart jumped when I got a call for an interview from a Tagoloan company. I took out my interview clothes that had been reeking of moth balls, put on my most comfortable pair of fake leather shoes and flew off to the jeepney terminal. It was my first trip to Tagoloan and I had no idea that the sun would be crueler on that part of the world and that the trip would include a free supply of grey face powder that had a peculiar way of coating the insides of nostrils too. But I didn’t mind going through the trip. If I got accepted, I could be sitting on a company bus the following week on a cool morning when both sun and smog are at their kindest.

I got off right in front of the company gate. The company building was still some distance away and I had to walk over cemented paths that looked so warm that they could cook applicants in transit. All of a sudden I knew how the ancient human sacrifices thrown into volcanoes must have felt like on the day they died. But I pushed on, hoping that I would meet with no other form of tragedy along the way except for a splitting headache no pack of Medicol would be able to cure.

But the hammer in my head proved to be the least of my worries. By the time I reached the middle of my walk, I noticed tiny black particles following my every step. I thought the heat had finally gotten the best of me, making me more paranoid than usual. It turned out I wasn’t hallucinating. The little black things dodging my every step came from the bottom of my fake shoes.

I had no idea shoes that hadn’t been used in ages had a way of falling apart under the slightest provocation. The problem was, I was already at the office door. Oh, the shame of it all! I dragged my feet carefully but still left traces of black pseudo leather on the carpet.

I sat through my interview, praying that I wouldn’t leave the remainder of my soles underneath the chair where I had tucked my feet. When it was all over, I limped out as quickly as I could, leaving more of my nasty mystery trail for the janitor to solve. If Cinderalla had fake leather shoes instead of glass, her prince would have found her sooner.

I didn’t get the job. The interviewer must have noticed the way I sat as if I was carrying a liter of urine in my bladder. I learned a valuable lesson that day. Don’t wear fake leather shoes to an interview if you’ve kept them too long. You’ll lose your sole on a warm, unforgiving interview day.

*First posted on MisOrJobs
November 27, 2008

Everything we do involves some degree of risk. The only way you’d be able to avoid taking risks is if you keep to your bed for the rest of your life and do nothing. Even then you’d probably risk eventual organ failure for lack of activity. The real challenge is knowing when to charge and when to surrender. The problem with me is, I never can tell.
   
My experience with letting go has always involved making the decision to do so only after some alarming sign slams some sense into me, like a 500 lb. anvil falling on my head or Maricel Soriano’s palm hitting my face at 200 kph.

A few weeks ago, I had another one of those devastating alarms go off. I woke up to the news that my six year old local job site, MisOrJobs, with over 20,000 monthly unique visitors and over 50,000 monthly visits became the unwitting tool of a scammer. Some wise guy posted a bogus job ad, intending to defraud applicants.

Yup, those are some pretty decent stats I’ll surely miss.

The ensuing events felt like a bad primetime drama unfolding in slow motion, leaving a prolonged nasty aftertaste you can’t flush out with mouthwash. In summary, an applicant fell into the trap. The NBI got involved and, what I would imagine to be a nerve-wracking entrapment operation was mounted, leading to the scammer’s arrest. The media caught wind of it of course, and published an article with my website’s name splattered all over it. I was contacted for my side of the story. I had to see lawyers and then lie down anxious and immobile for hours.

I’d assume the scammer took a fair bit of time to brainstorm his grand designs of petty thievery. Really though, if he used his skills and resources to pursue a more socially acceptable undertaking, like writing better senatorial speeches, he’d have almost made an honest living for himself, but noooooo, he had to go all Lex Luthor and use his prodigious intelligence for evil.

Needless to say, my thoughts go out to the victim. I can’t imagine the stress caused by such an ordeal, but I can’t help but think I’d been ill used too, and I suspect that the effect on me will very soon spread over. The incident has convinced me to shut down MisOrJobs, leaving its thousands of followers out in the cold.

This is not a case of lack of perseverance on my part or turning my back on a challenge. This is about me finally realizing that I’ve sacrificed enough. Running a website involves many sleepless hours of administrative and maintenance work. Add to that the time and effort needed to put every single email from employers, jobseekers and spammers under a magnifying glass. If I had to screen more intensively, I’d need an electron microscope. Even then, who knows when an even more enterprising bacteria of a man manages to disguise his presence and escape detection.

Do take note, I do all of my intensive work and screening for free. I don’t get paid. I already have a demanding full time job that eats my brains on a regular basis, plus kids on lithium batteries to manage. MisOrJobs has become one of those extra weights designed to etch darker bags with the depth of the Marianas Trench under my eyes.

Why did I punish myself with all that free work, you ask? Too many have said they found the site helpful and have expressed gratitude for the hard work. It didn’t feel right to pull the plug then.

Now that I have made the decision to abandon ship for myself, I probably have more time to do things I probably should have done more, like comb my hair or check myself out in the mirror. I also have extra time now to go to the kitchen to learn to prepare food that doesn’t come out of a can or dial McDo; to go out and find out what the sunlight feels like; to burn the growing tire  around my waist; to rediscover the use of my voice box to talk to real people; to watch more fun cat and dog videos on YouTube. More importantly, now I have time to pursue things I’m truly passionate about.

I’ll be honest, just because I’ve made up my mind doesn’t make the execution easy. I’ve nurtured MisOrJobs for more than half a decade, and it feels like I’m letting go of a loved one, so I’m more inclined to drop it slowly. It’ll be a couple of months before I finally close the doors.

It’s worth noting that I’m not the type who says never. Who knows one of these days someone else might offer to take the domain out of my hands to resurrect it or I might find myself in a new situation where I’m more able to run it again. So I do encourage my fans to continue to follow MisOrJobs’ social accounts. I’ll keep updating those with relevant posts and perhaps one day I’ll let you know what the future holds for the site, but for now, farewell.

My kids call me Jollibee. My husband thinks I look like Garfield. My mom says she misses those days when I looked like a jellyfish. Doesn’t anyone in my family think I look human at all?

Of course, the members of my family value me and when they call me animal names, they do so with great love and affection. In fact when my husband calls me by my cat name, he purrs and leaves a trail of lasagna bits for me to follow to the lunch table. I am not quite certain though what people outside of my family think when they look at me.

My baby photo.

The sales clerk at the supermarket gave me a clue on how strangers perceive me when she called me “sir”. In my head, I heard Britney Spears singing: “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman… Probably because I’m really a man.”

I love my strange looks but I must admit, it hasn’t always been easy looking the way I do. I’ve received tons of advice on how to look less animalistic or masculine. I’ve been given tips about makeup, clothing and grooming; with the additional warning that someone more feminine looking (like Orlando Bloom?) will one day grab my husband’s eye if I don’t whip myself into shape. The one piece of advice I will never forget is from a former classmate who told me I should dress like a girl because I’m a girl.

I get it. To others, I don’t look cool in the image I’ve chosen for myself. The thing is, I’ve tried to look the way others think I should look. I’ve had jobs that nearly killed me with mandatory heels and lipstick. Needless to say, I found that the traditional feminine look just didn’t work for me and I came away from my heel wearing days with five valuable lessons.

1. Nothing is worth painful feet, or painful anything. If you’re a picture of agony in heels or if you squirm in emotional distress under layers of face paint, then something’s wrong. You have to make the decision to either commit yourself to the tremendous amount of time and effort it’ll take to get used to what you’re not comfortable with or you settle for the look that makes you feel good about yourself.

We all wear pants and sneakers in this house and nobody has to apologize for it.

2. You only owe people basic grooming. It’s a form of mild discourtesy for your breath to smell like a bag of garlic chips, for your clothes to look like they’ve been to Mordor and for your armpits to smell like rotten eggs, but other than making sure you’ve brushed your teeth, taken a bath and worn fairly clean clothes, you don’t owe anyone anything else. If you must look extra trim, dapper or flashy, it’s because you feel you owe yourself that.

3. Clothes and appearance don’t define people. It’s tragic when girls are put in rigid boxes and told that gender dictates appearance and identity. It doesn’t matter if you’re a girl in jeans and an undercut looking like a chipmunk. Character, values, and to a certain extent, mental aptitude matter more.

4. Your attitude about yourself is important. Sure, everyone else thinks you look funny, but what do you think about yourself? No one can drag you down if you have a good sense of your own worth.

5. Laughing at yourself is a sign of maturity. Being able to see the humor behind the way close friends and family joke about your looks is an indication that you aren’t insecure and you’re mature enough to know when people aren’t out to hurt you.

Clearly I love myself better now, but it took a few painful episodes of trying to fit in before I finally figured things out. Here’s hoping that anyone else who has yet to embark on a similar journey goes through a smoother path.