Disposing of/holding on

I was first introduced to Marie Kondo last year when I once received messages of friends asking me to adopt the wacky socks they do not want to use anymore.  Marie Kondo has become a household name, so phenomenal that she has become more of a verb than a figure. To ‘Marie Kondo,’ as how …

A love letter

To whom it may concern: If you fall under the category of the brokenhearted, the depressed, the friendzoned, the ghostee, the abused, the stuck, the invisible, the solitary, the incomplete, the waitlisted, or the abandoned, I am giving this letter to you. So February 14 excludes you from those who will celebrate this day with …

Zine for sale: Running for HIV/AIDS and other essays

Shoutout to everyone especially the mental health advocates and HIV advocates! I am selling one of my zines ‘Running for HIV/AIDS and other essays’ for 100 PHP. This will be sold either online (bulk orders only!) and during the #BLTX9 on December 13 (Zero82 Lokal Bar, Davao City, 6 pm to 12 midnight) and December …

What a wasted run it was.

I stopped at 7.65 kilometer, which was not my gig. I am a 10-21k runner. It was damn scary too. Ever since 2k, I had always felt the blisters growing between my big and index toes, both left and right. Thought it’s something I can tolerate until I get to my running goal, which was …

The course of true love, and mental health too

In William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander said this realist take on love to Hermia, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” I do not know why I remembered this quotation while thinking of mental health. I did not have any idea, but perhaps subconsciously, I was: flexing that I have read …

I’m a good person

Trigger Warning: suicide, depression, anxiety, and strong language May 7, 2019. I was crying going home, but the driver hadn’t noticed it. I wiped my tears and sucked all of my feelings up so my parents wouldn’t notice a whiff of my emotion. I went straight to my room, pumped up a random playlist, and …

Debunking mental health stigma*

I contend that mental health at large is widely misunderstood. I haven’t remembered talking about depression until I got to college when we studied Shakespeare. That was fourth year; 2013. Fairly recent. I had to crawl to know what Hamlet said when he recited, ‘To be or not to be.’ Then again, the topic was …

The situation is a lot more nuanced than that: A meditation on mental health through Crazy ex-girlfriend*

Good morning to the freshies, to Dr. Wilter Friales, to the NSTP facilitators, and to the paid laughers and clappers I scattered around this gymnasium. This is such a wonderful day, essentially for me. It’s not every day that I get asked to speak of mental health, the thing I am passionate with and striving …

Anxiety attack on a sacred time

So apropos: As of writing I am listening to tracks of Björk, starting with Human Behavior (*If you ever get close to a human, and human behavior/ Be ready, be ready to get confused and me and my here after/ There’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to human behavior/ But yet so, yet so irresistible …