Self Studies: Burst their bubbles

Things I think I did I do

Although out of depression, I was not out of my seemingly endless poverty. My eldest sister always argued that I deliberately manipulated myself to poverty to create tragedy in my otherwise bland life. All I had to do, she said was ask money from my parents, who are self-sustaining, income-earning property owners. That’s not a hard thing to do.



But it is.

Dole outs do not abolish poverty. The last I wanted was to rely on my parents for financial security. It does not matter if I was just starting out because the fact is, there are 3 more siblings after me that should be prioritized. And also because aids do not make a person independent. The things that happen to developing countries relying on developed nations’ financial aids are the exact same things--a macrocosm--of what happens to an individuals who subsist on other people’s money: they are and never will be free.

I stayed in this friendlier city because of opportunities to earn on my own: a low-paying, honorable job here and there, and possibility of regularly seeing my friends. When my term ended I'd leave, or get opportunities elsewhere. 


Despite my seemingly self-reliant, sustainable  lifestyle my lack of permanent job made my family uncomfortable. They  think I was slowly working my way to become a professional drifter. I should get a job, they said, the one similar to what my successful high school friends have, or what their officemates' star children have. They are young and they have permanent jobs—pretty soon they will be having cars and I will still be commuting via the rotten, smoke-belching jeepneys.

What is wrong with using public transportation? I am poor. I should live by my means. 


People like my parents aren’t to be solely blamed for wanting the same success as the others because in the little town where they live, every person is born to compare his/her accomplishments with that of her/his neighbor. It was not talent or love for the art that drove me to want so badly to become an artist. It is the unconventionality of it, well beyond my parents', my nosy relatives', my childhood neighbors' grasp; it would render them speechless. 

I imagined this: 

Nosy Childhood Neighbor: Looking good! What do you do now?
Me: I’m an artist.
Nosy Childhood Neighbor: You mean you act, like people in soap operas?
Me: No, I make art.

Then her head bursts.

Self Studies: Education and others.

Education.

I’ve always wanted to have a job that nobody else has. I wanted to be a painter because nobody in my hometown does that. Then I wanted to be a writer because it seems like a non-job kind of job and again, because I know no writer coming from my hometown. I can’t, however recall when and how I started wishing to work for national geographic. I can only recall that, after having my heart broken by the fact that I can never be a university-educated visual artist nor a writer, I announced to my elder sister that I wanted that kind of work. That I do not want to become a medical doctor after I finish my pre-med degree. "When I am done with biology", I told her “I want to go around the places taking pictures of plants and animals and writing a book about them.”

I wanted a more glamorous job than just being a medical doctor. Only MDs are dying to attach glamour to their otherwise non-glamorous job.

So I procrastinated. Second year into my pre-med I read literary books. I worked on my fanzine. I did everything to stop thinking about the day that I would have to tell my father I wanted out. I spent more time with Dostoevsky more than I would with Leithold. i procrastinated some more and refused to acknowledge my math problems. I am terribly afraid of needles and body piercing but for each math course I flunked I allowed my left earlobe to be pierced. I flunked math 17. The year after that I flunked calculus. I couldn't take some more piercing because if I flunked one more, the piercing would have to go through my ear cartilage and that was just too impossibly scary to bear.

It was time to tell my father.

I have had the script for months. I wrote, rehearsed, edited, added drama here and there, researched for facts, inserted a statistics table here and there, in my head while rushing to and from my apartment and the university. More than anything else, I was terribly afraid my father would refuse to send me to another university after this one. I thought of killing myself. But pesticides were too bitter, and again, I am afraid of sharp things.

As the day of reckoning got closer a scene repeatedly played in my head, even haunting me in my sleep. It was about one of the few times my mother and father came to the city to visit me. We were at my aunt’s house because it was where they could sleep for free.

He was talking to my aunt’s husband about kids and school, work, jobs. Expectedly they came upon the topic on me.

“I didn’t know pre-med could be this expensive,” my father declared haughtily, the corner of his left lip curling in mock smile, shaking his head to add to the drama.

Because he didn’t know better, he had reasons to be haughty. My degree and my campus was, after all, both first of the 2 choices I indicated in my application.

“First choice of campus, first choice of program,” I would sometimes say to people, ego tripping.

The campus was one of the higher ups in the university system. Passing both the quota for the program and the campus meant, if at all, that I am less stupid that what my high school grades actually said about me. 

“Oh, what more can I say? Her university says it all.”
“You know,” my father began, “I took the responsibility of seeing her through her pre-med. I give all my monthly earnings to her. I barely keep some for myself.”
“Well, a future medical doctor is not a bad investment.”
“Exactly. At least we won’t have to worry about health things when we get old. And I would have somebody to look after and monitor my gall stones.”


Breaks my heart all the time, especially when I think of all those 3 years I deprived my sisters of better things because my father decided to spend everything on me.

It would be years before I would recover. In between those years of nursing my guilt, I worked hard to prove to everyone that I made a better choice.


Unemployment and Zoloft.

But life has a way of teaching one things that s/he could never learn in school. I would again confront my worst post-university fear for all time—being broke and being unemployed. I cycled through it for several years, wallowed in self-pity. I fed my depression with Zoloft and felt a lot worse. I made my psychiatrist Php500 richer every 2 weeks. The medical treatment for clinical depression, my psychiatrist said, has to be administered for at LEAST nine months.

Broke and jobless at 24, I branded myself a black sheep, a family failure. My elder sister, she knew much better. She didn’t get to the best high school and yet, there she is, rock and rolling in the city where I failed. Like most of my friends fresh graduate friends eager to be in glitzy cities, my sister was thriving in places where I felt most alienated. i am a failure. i thought of killing myself when I turn 27.

But dude, who the hell waits 3 more agonizing years to commit suicide?

Right. Only somebody not really committed to doing it. Had Royal Tenenbaums already been produced by then I would have abided by the Richie T monologue:

“I will kill myself tomorrow.” Then cut myself right then and there, in front of the medicine cabinet.

Then again, I’m already 31 and still afraid of sharp things.

I shook myself to the reality of economics and quit taking my Php98.00-per-tablet-2x-a-day-half-a-tablet-Zoloft-plus-Epival-every-day-one-after-breakfast-another-before-going-to-bed and my every-second-week-of-the-month-sessions with my psychiatrist knowing that I am too poor for this kind of disease. I was not depressed anymore, after 4 long months.

(to be continued.)