Bree Jonson and the outrageous pursuit of hope
By Mark Nicdao Sometimes I’m afraid that the sound of her laugh is beginning to fade from my memory as early as now, which is absurd because it was such a distinct, goofy laugh, and it came out of her mouth so often when we were together. That’s one of the things that frustrates me most about the conversation surrounding my friend Bree — that so much of what heartbreakingly little noise there…
I’d very much like to break out of the terrible habit of only writing here once a year (if at all). But the problem is that I never quite know how to do that these days. “Write anything,” one of my university writing professors told me recently. “Travelogues, flash fiction, a short story.” He even offered to edit my work — a great kindness and an even greater honour from a celebrated writer I…
Published on 22 December 2019 in the Philippine STAR.
How well do you really know your friends and your loved ones? How in touch are you with yourself and your own feelings?
We live in strange times — never have the stories of our lives been more readily available for the perusal of others, friends and strangers alike. But at the same time, never have we been more isolated. Yes, social…
I think I just saw someone who looks you, you text me on a Sunday morning in Berlin. Are you here somewhere?
Not yet, I reply. That’s not me. Still getting dressed. But I’m coming.
Eleven in the morning is a little too early for Berghain when you aren’t trying to catch a particular DJ set, even for me, but what I don’t tell you, and what I’m trying not to admit to myself, is that I was not…
From the moment we became real friends (there is always a threshold over which you cross into something true — you will know exactly when it happens), I waited for her to meet the love of her life.
We got to know each other by chance, introduced by a mutual friend even though we should, by all means, have already known each other beforehand since we inhabited the same circles. In Manila, those…
Published on 17 November 2019 in the Philippine STAR.
I think it began when I decided to clean my room.
I’m a firm believer that the state of your living space is a reflection of your internal and mental state, and mine, after the tumultuous and messy ending of a ‘situationship’ that had gone on for far too long and hurt far too much, had become just as tumultuous and messy as I was…
Published on 17 November 2019 in the Philippine STAR. Most photos by Terence Angsioco and Raúl Cerezo, with a beautiful moonrise by Nicolas Geysens and a few of my own.
The right place keeps finding me at exactly the right time.
When I confirmed my attendance to a friend and business partner’s super random 30th birthday weekend at Tao Philippines’ Camp Ngey Ngey in 2017, I had no idea…
Sometimes my depressive phases are really obvious, but sometimes they creep up on me slowly and I don’t realise I’m in them until I assess the state of my room. I really like having things neat and organised, so it starts to become painfully clear to me that something is actually wrong when everything is a mess.
When my purses are piling up on the couch, along with press kits and other stuff…
Published on 2 November 2019 in the Philippine STAR.
For all that Halloween is my favourite holiday, I have never been a fan of horror. When forced to watch horror films or series, I unapologetically spend the entire duration with my hands over my eyes. I scream along with every audio cue even though I can’t even see the jump scares; a waste of money at the cinema, a source of amusement…
I think one of the worst things about having clinical depression is the guilt. You want to pretend it’s not there — the emptiness — because you don’t feel like you have any right to it, and you know that there will be people out there who maybe won’t say it to your face, but will be thinking, How dare she? So many people are living infinitely harder lives, and she, with all her privilege and good…
I’ve begun writing a new column for the Philippine STAR’s Sunday Lifestyle section called Attack Decay Sustain Release. Henceforth, I plan to upload my columns here as well, some time after the original publication date, in order to compile more of my work here (in a format I find pleasing), and also so that it’s more readily accessible.
I think it bears mentioning that the tone of my writing…
Oh I could ask you a million questions All these words That can never again be a conversation Because I don’t talk to strangers
I would still struggle against the reflex To call you Love I can’t Because love is enough
The only thing that ever closes Is the door
I am looking at the clock as I type these words. I have a little over thirty minutes to go. Thirty more minutes to mourn. Thirty more minutes to indulge myself in the agony of my heartbreak. Thirty more minutes to allow myself this anger, this bitterness. Thirty more minutes to hate him. Thirty more minutes to love him. And when the clock strikes midnight on March 1st, I will take a deep, deep…
Hi. If anyone's still here, I figured I'd take this opportunity to announce that I've migrated to WordPress/my own domain. Figured I'm pushing 30, it's about time, and I want a space where I can do the kind of writing I've always wanted to do. So yeah, see you there, I guess, and thanks for sticking around.
I always do a year in review post of some sort, but from the outset, I already know it’s going to be difficult to write about 2015, because 2015 was difficult.
This was the year that I left my job. This was the year that I walked out on the publishing industry — my dream since I was 17, the only thing I’ve known. This was the year that I thought I could finally let my guard down and let myself fall for someone — admittedly someone a little ill-advised, but who isn’t, and don’t the slightly ill-advised ones always make life more interesting? — and found out the hard way that I was wrong. This was the year that I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, which didn’t come as a surprise to me, although I’ve been skirting a diagnosis (and psychiatrists) for the better part of a decade. This was the year that I let go — both voluntarily and otherwise — of the last vestiges of everything I once thought I would become, and that’s not an easy thing to do.
You tell yourself when you’re young, “This is who I’m going to be when I grow up.” You grow up, and you become that, and you discover that it’s not what you thought it would be. Then you’re lost, because all your life you’ve been working towards this one thing, and then you have it, and you realize it may not be for you after all.
What is left to dream, when your biggest dream comes true and it isn’t a dream? Who doesn’t come away from that disheartened?
As I’m writing this now, I’m telling myself in my head that people have gone through worse things this year. People have died horribly, people have lost their entire lives senselessly, the world is in crisis; what business do I have, writing from this privileged standpoint, from the warmth of my bed, complaining about how badly I have it when, in fact, I have it so well? I’m living comfortably despite my ‘funemployment,’ my parents are incredibly supportive of both me and all my fledgling recovery plans, I’m always having a good time when I’m not having a bad spell. I have real friends who have stuck by me through all of these personal crises, who stayed my friends even when I stopped being editor and stopped being ‘useful.’ My family is moving to a beautiful new house in a month; I’m getting my dream room. I’m going to Berlin next year and Mom just told me yesterday that maybe I should think about not setting a date on my return flight. I have it so good, and I know it. But another voice says: That’s not the point. It says, that doesn’t invalidate anything you’ve felt or gone through. It says, your having it good doesn’t instantly make it so that you didn’t also have it bad.
It says, you have a right to feel the way you feel. (My shrink says that, too, when I bring it up in our sessions, and I always bring it up in our sessions because I can’t seem to stop feeling guilty for every last thing.)
The hardest thing about 2015 was that it wiped my slate clean. I don’t know who I am, I’m not entirely sure where I’m going, or where I’m going to be in the next few years, and that’s fine when you’re fresh out of college, but when you’re nearing your thirties like I am, it’s a terrifying prospect. You’re supposed to have your shit together by this age, or at least that’s what everyone else makes it seem like. I have failed miserably at that despite having all the tools at my disposal to succeed. Despite having already succeeded.
And now here I am trying to cobble together a new face. Trying to build myself again from almost nothing, unsure of the form I will ultimately take, and unsure if it will be better than the one I have shed.
I feel like a child, and I am not afraid to admit that I’m afraid. I feel like I’m standing on a precipice, looking out into darkness with the knowledge that the only way out is through — the only way out is to jump, regardless of what’s waiting ahead of me, because while I’m not certain about what is coming, I am certain that I cannot go back.
What is left to dream?
New dreams, I guess. New dreams. I don’t know what they are yet, and I’m scared, but I’m hopeful that 2016 will give me that. A different perspective. An altered view of the world. New dreams, new goals to aspire for and work towards that I just can’t see right now because they’re still shrouded in that darkness, because I’m not ready for them at this point in my life.
But I hope that 2016 is the year that I will be. And that’s all I can do right now. Hope. And that’s enough.
I’ve kept this Tumblr running since 2009. It’s a little surreal but despite my years in publishing, it’s always this blog that comes back to me, it’s the things I’ve written here that people have approached me about. And you have no idea how much that has meant to me, because this is — was — my outlet. I’ve been mostly unfiltered here for the better part of five or six years; this is myself as myself. That it has been helpful in some way or another to complete strangers, that it has been related to, that it has been appreciated; I don’t have the words apart from thank you.
But I’ve been thinking for quite some time now that maybe the time is finally right to close this public chapter of my life, and 2016 seems like as good a time as any. So this will be my last post here. I may pop up again elsewhere, and I’m not going anywhere on Instagram, but this, this particular story, I feel, has come to its natural end. Thank you for being with me on this leg of my journey.
I am five weeks into therapy and my anti-depressant medication.
I don’t know if you saw my post on Instagram a few weeks back, but I guess I just...decided to come out with it. (So every anon who ever told me on ask.fm once upon a time, kindly or unkindly, that I should see a psychiatrist — you were right.) It’s an illness that a lot of people are struggling with, and struggling alone with, when the fact of the matter is that there are a surprising number of people — friends and strangers alike — who are afflicted with the same, or similar, or relatively worse. And I don’t know if it’s easier to go through it together — if we will feed off each other’s neuroses, but it may make it a little easier to know that you aren’t alone.
It’s an expensive illness to treat (I am beyond grateful that my parents are supportive and paying for therapy, among other things like taking me and my brothers for a weekend trip out of town to just...get me away from Manila and spend time together as a family. I pay for my own medication), and it’s one with no outward physical manifestations. I don’t know when I will be deemed “well” or if I can ever actually be deemed well; for now, I’m just slowly learning to cope better so as to handle it better in the future. My doctor is teaching me mindfulness. I am learning to manage myself and my emotions.
What I can tell you is that I feel mostly numb now. During my second worst spell (the first was years and years ago), all I could do was cry and sleep and shamble around the house like a zombie except on nights when I had to go to Black Market to work or had to go out to fake DJ. I still have my bad days — today was one of them — but otherwise, I am functioning much better these days. I enjoy the joys of life, of course (I still get kilig, haha), but more and more, I find myself entering a state of apathy. (The State of Kebs, I call it.) I am less anxious about things I shouldn’t be stressing myself out about. I don’t think about the hard or painful things that happened to me in my past and fall back into that black abyss of despair. My triggers don’t trigger me anymore, and I no longer get those out-of-nowhere spells of intense sadness that I could never explain and was always so ashamed of having, because I know precisely how lucky and how privileged I am and didn’t feel that I had any right to feel that way, and yet felt that way all the same. I can turn a more objective eye onto the situations in my life, take a step back, and react more rationally when I would have once reacted immediately, and emotionally, without a second thought. I am more forgiving, towards myself, and towards people who wronged me.
I was afraid that it would make me ‘less,’ and I think perhaps it has, but I drank the Kool-Aid anyway. I needed to. I was falling apart. I need to put myself back together, and it will be a long process.
The trade-off has been that I find it almost impossible to write about anything involving feelings anymore. I told a friend (and wrote elsewhere) that I feel like I amputated a limb that was infected and festering; cut it off before the infection could spread to the rest of my body. And I no longer have access to it, but I still feel the phantoms of it there. I instinctively know that something should be there, but it isn’t there, and I try to use it, try to flex, but there is no movement. (Maybe it’s not an amputation. Maybe it is a paralysis.) “You don’t post about feelings anymore,” he said. I don’t. I can’t. I’ve chemically blocked myself off from that wellspring of pain and hugot that was the soul of all my personal writing.
So I don’t think I can write anymore.
Oh, I can write. About products, about events, about things external to me. The ability to string words together and have them make sense is an ability you don’t really lose. But I can’t write about me.
And maybe that’s a good thing. I begin to wonder if maybe I put too much of myself out there over the years. If it was healthy. I used to get emails and messages — still do — from people who read my writing and said that it helped them, that they could relate, that they were glad there was someone like me just being real, and while that was never my intention when I would write (my intention was to exorcise my own demons), I was always glad to be able to be of help in some way or another by just being myself.
But now I need to help myself.
So maybe this is goodbye, for now. And thank you. Because you helped me, too.
Caught green-handed outside Black Market. My last Manila Halloween until I stop trying to run away from home. See you in 2017/2018/whenever/never.
For a very last minute costume, this turned out incredibly badass. Happy Halloween!
Poison Ivy was a one-woman show at Today x Future last night...but she's sharing the DJ booth at Finders Keepers tonight with Tisha and DJ Mica! See you at Black Market! Photo by Joseph Pascual, costume (extremely last minute costume!) by Santi Obcena. LOVE YOU GUYS.
The Carpenters, “Goodbye To Love”
I’ll say goodbye to love No one ever cared if I should live or die Time and time again the chance for love has passed me by And all I know of love is how to live without it I just can’t seem to find it.
So I’ve made my mind up, I must live my life alone And though it’s not the easy way I guess I’ve always known I’d say goodbye to love.
There are no tomorrows for this heart of mine Surely time will lose these bitter memories And I’ll find that there is someone to believe in And to live for, something I could live for.
All the years of useless search Have finally reached an end Loneliness and empty days will be my only friend From this day love is forgotten I’ll go on as best I can.
What lies in the future is a mystery to us all No one can predict the wheel of fortune as it falls There may come a time when I will see that I’ve been wrong But for now this is my song.
And it’s goodbye to love I’ll say goodbye to love.
My favorite Carpenters song. According to the little booklet that came with the secondhand The Singles 1969-1973 vinyl I bought in Copenhagen, this was Karen Carpenter’s favorite single, too.
