Writings

Here I am, hiding from responsibilities of humanness in digital corners as my procrastination station and my tiny corner of organized chaos. I live for late-night scrolling and fantasies of what I wish to be. I write thoughts that probably make more sense to me than anyone else and express my feelings I can’t explain out loud. If you find me, I’m in my head overanalyzing a song lyric. I drink coffee to fuel my hopes; scrolling fuels my thoughts. I feel alive between song lyrics and caffeine highs. I write things I never spoke, sometimes deep, sometimes no substance. I judge myself more than anyone else does. I cry a-lot too. Just a human trying to look cooler online than I feel offline.

I dealt with so many messed-up people in the past. Because of the damage, I spent a long time of isolation guarding myself as though feeling like it’s the only way for me to feel safe. It was so deeply ingrained in my brain believing that people are fake and dangerous. I’ve held the belief in me for so long that people will always do me wrong.

It took so much from me to consciously try to change that worldview. I tried so hard to reprogram my brain and to think otherwise. I tried so hard to reevaluate my belief and try to convince myself that not every people are out to get me.

It's sad to think that no matter how much I try to move away from that belief, I keep finding myself returning to it again and again. That my experiences continue to reinforce my belief. Every time I think I've become more open, more trusting, or more hopeful about people, something happens that brings me back to the same conclusion I was trying to escape.

I remember in high school, one of my teachers once told me, “Roxanne, para kang dagat, alam mo yun? Ang lalim-lalim mo.” That stayed with me all these years. Looking back, I’m amazed that someone seemed to understand me even then, during a time when I barely understood myself.

Even now, after so many years, those words still feel true. I feel like I am deep, so deep that I sometimes struggle to connect with and relate to other people. It’s as if I’m in a vast, confined space where no one can reach me unless they truly try.

But who would be willing to stretch out their hand into the depths for me? Who would go out of their way to reach me there and make me feel less alone?

I wish for people like that.

This momentary feelings do not own nor define me. I am not them, these emotions are just fleeting moments. These feelings are just visitors coming by and passing through, seeking for their presence to be felt, acknowledged and processed. I will not be consumed by my emotions but I will witness them passing through me, knowing they are just here to pass-by and not occupy a permanent place in my heart and mind. And tomorrow I will wake up and I’ll fall inlove with life again, I’ll get excited to see the sunshine again, I’ll love to live again, I’ll be alright again. For the mean time, I’ll accept these emotions, and tomorrow I’ll come to life again.

I grieve the person that I could have been if it wasn’t for my trauma. I am not coming from an envious and jealous place, but I can't help but feel left behind in life, as I see people around me reach different stages and reach new levels of achievements in their life. Good things keep happening to other people, while I am here, still stuck and stagnant in the same place and position in life for a long time. I can't help but grieve the person that I could have been if I wasn't riddled by fear caused by painful experiences. I grieve my wasted potential, the light that other people have always seen and acknowledged in me. I grieve my lost years recovering and healing when I should have been living a normal beautiful life just like others. It pains me to see where I am currently at in life, knowing I went through so much just to end up like this. I felt like every dreams I have went down the drain. This is not how I envisioned my life to be. This is not where I feel like I'm supposed to be. Deep down it feels like my life was robbed from me because my soul always knew I could have made something for myself, I could have been something myself.

But I realized, maybe it's not love I'm afraid of, it's the pain that comes with loving someone that I'm afraid of. I'm scared of getting hurt, because I've been hurt enough by the hands of life. I have spent majority of my life in pain, and I don't want love another reason I get hurt. Giving my heart to someone means giving them the power to hurt me even though I trust and I hope that they wouldn't. I dont want to be overly-sensitive or what but I take notice of everything and sometimes little things, no matter how little it may seem, already breaks me to pieces inside. I do not know how to adjust my way of reacting to situations, but I guess when you genuinely love someone, hurt is what's on the other side of it, the pain in the heart is the proof/evidence of that genuine love for that person. I don't know if I’ll ever be strong enough to handle what comes with love. I just want love to be a complete source of pure happiness and inspiration, and not another cause of sickness in my mind and heart. I want love to be what heals me, and not what I would have to heal from.

I can’t foresee anything

I feel lost, stuck, confused, directionless

I feel like I'm stuck in a dead-end

I don't know which direction to take

I don’t know how to get my way out of this

I can't seem to find my way

I feel like I've been trapped here for too long

I need help to find my way somewhere better

I need help to get out of this stagnant situation

I just want to breakfree from this situation,

I just want to see my path, and have the certainty of a beautiful destination ahead of me.

I love my mother to death, I love my parents, and as much as I don’t want to paint them like they are the villain in my story, sometimes they are the ones that are damaging their children’s mental health.

May it be non intentional abuse, but my mother says and does things to me that is traumatizing to my brain but for her it’s no big deal, and when I try to calmly communicate to her and try to make her understand how it makes me feel she calls me “sensitive” which is another blow to the already existing trauma in my brain. Being called “sensitive” makes me feel like I’m being gaslighted, that my feelings are invalid, or that I have no right to feel the way I feel. Everytime I try to make her understand how I feel and how I would tell her I have suicidal thoughts/tendencies, she would tell me that it will make me go to hell and suffer eternally, this is how fucked up her mindset is, this is another sharp blow to my trauma. The way she handles conversation with me is an instant damage to my brain. I don’t think my parents truly understand how words and some actions that may seem small to her can be so damaging to the brain and painful to the heart. I lost so many years to recovery, trying to reparent myself, but things like this seem to ruin everything I worked hard for to heal myself. I am tired of the same cycle, repairing my heart, repairing my brain just to go through the same pain all over again. I am tired of making my life centered in healing myself when I’m supposed to be just living a normal life. At the end, I am on my own, at the end, I have no one but myself.

I can’t be psychologically stranded in the past. I might have experienced painful things in life, but I do not have to be them. I can totally start over without carrying all the weight of the past hurts. I’m trying to get to know who I am and who I can be outside of the pain I was put through and the pain that I centered my whole identity with. I’m trying to get to know who am I and who I can be if I am not operating from bitterness, fear and my grief for the injustice I suffered in my past. Who I can be if I stop being victimized by life, let go of the victim mentality and step into love. What if I change my internal world, and totally hop on a different world that is totally and completely different from the world that I caged myself into. What if I shift my identity outside of the conditioning and programming that I was molded by others. Who am I if I break the shackles of my trauma, step into a new light, invite love and open myself to new beautiful beginnings. What if I try to see the beauty of life instead and get to know the world aside from the narrative I stuck with, to get to know myself outside of the definition and titles others and I have put myself, to give life a chance again and live it without the perceived worst case scenarios I created. I am changing from the inside-out, I am changing myself, my world and my life in the most miraculous way. New doors open when you fully close an old one that's not leading anywhere. And I am saying goodbye to the past hurts, and I am welcoming the new beautiful beginnings.

I am learning to see life bigger than any emotions that arise. To see things bigger than my current circumstances. Realizing that at the height of any emotion, any momentary feelings do not own me, and I am not them, any emotions are just feelings passing through and I do not have to attach myself with them, I do not have to be identified by them. I am learning how helpful it is to be aware of and know how to manage our feelings. Being emotionally intelligent does't mean shutting down emotions, but letting them flow and witnessing them with no judgement. Minding the mind, guiding the thoughts while sitting on top of powerful feelings is the key to having control over our emotions, instead of us being controlled by our emotions. I am realizing that even if it may feel heavy now, tomorrow I will wake up with a light heart again and I will be passionate with life again, I’ll get excited to see and bask in the sunshine again, I’ll be happy to be touched by the healing rays of the sunlight. That even if now it may feel difficult, I’ll love to live again, I’ll be alright again. For the mean time, I’ll accept these emotions, and tomorrow I’ll fall in love with life and myself again.

Emotions are pumped by thoughts; what we cultivate in our mind, gets expressed by our emotions. Any thoughts that we keep on reminiscing in our head has a way of manifesting through our feelings. A thought that becomes our belief turn into our emotions, and these emotions become our attitude, our attitude controls our decisions, and these decisions define the outcome of our life. The heart (emotions) is only the follower of the thought, the thought is the one running the emotions. When we control our thoughts, the heart will follow. When we reminisce on negative thoughts, it will produce negative emotions. When we reminisce on positive thoughts, it will produce positive emotions. Feelings are just an after effect of the imaginations and illusions of the brain. When we control our thoughts we have control over our emotions. We do not force ourselves to feel a certain way, we first work on switching our mind-state, and from there, the feelings will be easily mastered.

I want to feel safe in the hands of this life. I want to not have to worry or be afraid about anything. I want love to rush through every inch of my soul and breathe it like air. I want to bathe in all the beauty that this world has. I want to be able to tell myself that life is worth living. I no longer want to attach myself with the pain and suffering of life. I no longer want to romanticize pain and misery. I want magic to happen in my life, I want my heart to feel light that it will outshine and overpower every darkness. At this point I just want to relax and enjoy life and not to have to feel challenged about anything. I want this life to be a complete enjoyable and blissful experience and not something that feels like survival. I want my soul to dance inside my body, I want to feel like I'm flying. I want to be so high off of life to where I'm no longer scared of anything.

There is strength in allowing ourselves to be weak, in acknowledging that we don’t need to be strong all the time. Sometimes true strength is allowing ourselves to surrender and be vulnerable. We don’t need to play tough all the time. We don’t need to put the facade of toughness all the time, we are allowed to be soft, we are allowed to be sensitive. Sometimes real bravery is transparency, being transparent with our own emotional wounds, weakness, flaws, pain, and fears. Softness is power. Opening ourselves up, letting our guard down, allowing ourselves to break, are the true signs of power and strength. Courage is not trying to be strong or powerful all the time, courage is letting ourselves be seen at our moments of weakness, to embrace our moments of powerlessness, to set aside all the false pretense of toughness we’ve held on for too long, and to just be honest, to get real with and admit our own fragility.

I rose from my own ashes. I give myself credit for how much I am trying, I applaud myself for how much I have improved and bettered myself no matter how little or basic it may look/perceivable for other people, because more than anyone I am the only person who fully understand myself, because I am the only person that knows what I've been through, and only I, will ever know the measure of strength I had to pull out of myself to keep going, to pick up the pieces of my scattered heart and still continue to live life. Nobody will ever know or understand how much it took from me to pull myself out of a dark hole, all by myself. Nobody will ever know how invisibly wounded I was for the pain I’ve been through and the fear that accompanied, followed and crippled me and how I had to mask all of it and had to act normal all along while dying on the inside.

Everything in this world is about the art of emotions. Everything is created to evoke some sort of emotion in us. Everything is about emotional stimulation. Everything we either do or happen to us has either an emotional reward or emotional consequence. We get into romantic relationship for emotional pleasure, we listen to music to evoke emotion in us, we do different things for emotional satisfaction. Emotions color our life experiences and give those experiences meaning and flavor. It is our emotions that filter the way we experience things in this world. It is the emotions activated within us that give sense to everything we do in life. We experience suffering and pleasure through the type of emotions that we digest within us. Lack of emotional satisfaction is what starves our spirit and and it is also the emotional satisfaction in us that fills us. Life is nothing but a grand play of emotional roller coaster, experiencing the ride of life through the highs and lows of emotions.

Some mysteries are not meant to be figured out but is meant to be lived. I am not supposed to. I am not capable of. I am never going to understand everything and that’s okay. I have so many questions in my head, but I have to accept that my role is to live life and not to make sense of everything. Maybe I take life heavily because I see through too much on the flaw and imperfection of this world and this life and it weighs heavy on my heart. But I have to accept that this has always been this way before me, and it will continue to be this way after me. I have to accept that this is really the kind of world we all operate in, I have to accept that I live in an imperfect world, but also reminding myself that despite the flaws of this world, I can focus on the beauty, on the love and the light that there is in this world, and that’s what I will live for. I have to accept that it’s not for me to comprehend everything in this life, that it’s not for me to find every answers to every unresolved questions, it’s not for me to burden myself with the unresolved mysteries of life, that I’m not supposed to carry the weight of the world, and even if it feels like it rests on my shoulders, I do not carry it alone. I have to accept that it’s not for me to save, heal or fix the world, I can only fix myself, and in that I may find hope and comfort that by focusing on the light in myself that it can ripple through. I may not be of massive influence to the world but I can impact it in my own little ways, and that even if sometimes life feels meaningless, that there is always something in me that will catalyze the world even in small ways, and that in itself is a meaningful and purposeful way to live life.

To my soulmate,

“Wait patiently for me as I heal myself, so I can love you with no fear attached, so I can be a full source of pure love for you. I’m fixing myself not only for me, but as a preparation for you.” -Roxanne

For a long time, I didn’t get to open myself up for love, couldn’t think of holding a relationship with anyone cause I didn’t even have a good relationship with myself. I’ve always felt like I was never prepared for a relationship. I am aware that I was and maybe still not fully equipped to enter a relationship with someone when I know I still have so much healing work to do in myself. I know that I can’t just come into someone’s life with all the heavy emotional baggages to carry, and have that person feel the weight on himself, neither I don’t want to bring someone into my life with the mess that I am. It takes being mentally prepared to be in a relationship, and it’s something I’m still working on. I know that I am the one who is responsible for my healing and I can’t pass this responsibility to someone else. Getting into a relationship to bandage my scars isn’t going to fix me, I am the one who is supposed to fix myself. I need to go through this all by myself and until I heal myself I will only project all my pain and trauma to another person. Until I heal and change my thinking patterns I won’t ever fit in a healthy relationship. I need to find resolve on my own issues, so I don’t bring past issues into brand new situations, so I don’t let the old rotten one ruin the fresh one. I have to find healing in my pain so I don’t take it out on another person. I have to let my heart heal before I can open it for another person. I have to confront my own insecurities and weaknesses so they don’t become a burden to another person who will deal with me. It’s not fair to come into someone’s life carrying all the negativity of the past, then it will only sabotage the beautiful things. Healing internal wounds are imperative so they don’t show up in the relationship.