Week 7: four day weekend spent at home

I wrote a bit about what was going on with me and my… paper in my Scissors post (titled The Mountain of Stress, written Saturday night after a day of feeling awful – feeling like the stress buildup of the past couple of months has finally hit me hard) and now I guess here is where I have to put in active steps on how to move forward.

I spent most of the early afternoon crying and sunken in bed next to Jackson who was watching his show. Before that, he asked me what was wrong and I was like Idon’tknow(?)everything(?) and he asked me to lay down with him for a while. So when I got there I started crying on and off for the three or four episodes of that new show he was watching. I even took a little nap. It was hard. I don’t remember a time where I felt so down on myself and everything that I just cried. And in that crying and throughout the day where I allowed myself to think about it, I thought about home. I thought about that feeling of being self aware and connected and grounded and engaged. I thought that these past four days not doing much and getting that sleep would be good for me. I just ended up staying in that miserable stage.

So I thought of home and I avoided it because I wasn’t ready to be in a positive place yet. In my paper (in its current version) I describe a counseling session where I came in distraught and was practically yelling at my counselor. We worked through those feelings and in the end he said “you landed your own helicopter, I didn’t do it for you,” essentially telling me he didn’t tell me what to do to feel better, to move forward. I worked my way around what was wrong and he was just there to be a soundboard, to ask me the hard questions to get my real thoughts through. The home I chose for this project is not always an easy and comforting place. I understand that a lot of reflection and honesty needs to happen in order to get to those connected, engaged feelings. I understand how these feelings were not accessible to me when I was younger for many reasons. So to get there I need to burst/walk/talk/shove through the walls to get to the other side.

It’s hard to focus and I know why that is. It’s hard writing about my family, sometimes it feels like I’m trying to explain their actions when I have no idea what they were and only have my sources to try to explain them. It’s hard writing about my family in relation to my ethnic identity because there isn’t much there. It’s hard writing about my ethnicity when this is literally the first time writing about it and thinking extensively about it. So. Where do we go from here.

Like I got caught up in all the emotions I’m so missing out on the how does it connect to APIA pop culture. So I was thinking about not so much writing about my family and all that drama and instead highlighting more about being a Pilipina both as a younger and then a bit older person. Bringing up representations in media, stereotypes, expectations and a bit of history. All of which I have sources for. Plus it’s a bit embarrassing to be at this stage when it’s week 7 and I’m soooo behind. But I’m not going to feel bad about it right now because I strongly feel that I needed to go through all the emotions of this week and to do all the crying. I needed this. It gets me to really think about what has helped me move through these feelings and to be conscious of the amount of energy I put into them. Of course, I can write more about this but… we got to get mentally prepared for tomorrow.