*annoyed grunt*

Week 6: How to condense a blog post you didn’t save, mini-grieve a thousand lost words and summarize the main points without the same amount of passion and energy.

My dumb ass lost the blog post I was working on and it was a long and good one too. So I’m not going to retype what I wrote. I’m going to like take a break and wait for the anger to go down.

Okay so like here were the main points of the post I made:

+I was super distraught and mindfucked while watching The Beautiful Country. I was fucking crying, I was literally hugging myself. After class I went to my journal and wrote my feelings.

+That night, Jackson and I did our own “Halloween” thing. We went to Trader Joe’s and bought a bunch of pumpkin stuff. I drew a face on the pumpkin he got last weekend and he carved it. I made fried rice with egg and spinach with tofu on the side for dinner. We had a nice night together that allowed me to step away from what was troubling me. Even though I didn’t tell him what was wrong, having that time with him was what I needed.

+The high point of that feeling came when Jackson picked me up from school and started driving: I started to disconnect myself from reality and stared into the sky. I told myself to “think of home” and that snapped me back to my body. I let myself cry for a little and then allowed myself to move on and go shopping. I didn’t stay in the distraught stage I was in before, knowing that I can come back to it, I can make space for it. Telling myself to think of home helped me move on and for that I’m thankful. It shows how important this project has become for me and how it will continue to be a part of my life when this program finishes.

+On Wednesday, I had my one on one with Kris. She is BRILLIANT and gave helpful feedback on my paper. The worst part is, I haven’t touched it since then. But I understand it because… like I had that student governance retreat from Thursday to Saturday. Then Saturday night Jackson and I went to Seattle for that ACLU fundraiser dinner. I GOT TO SEE ***LAVERNE COX**** SPEAK. It was a highlight of my life. Then Sunday we went food shopping, prepared pho and spring rolls for our friends who visited. And I’m catching up and finishing the last two blogs tonight. I do have the next two days to get right to the dirt and like…I hope I get to the writing mode because I really want to have a draft I’m proud of for peer-review. I can’t believe that’s all happening this week. Ah.

 

Unstructured Scissors Post

Week 6: In before the weekend rush

It’s 8:39PM Wednesday. Since I’ve been home I have stayed on our sofa chaise wrapped in a blanket with my computer on my lap. I’ve been at this for a while! And I figured that I should do a post…you know, do something productive during this time. So this weekend will be pretty full. I won’t be in class on Friday because between Thursday afternoon – Saturday morning I will be at a student governance retreat in…Tacoma? I think it’s in Tacoma, pretty sure it’s in Tacoma. I’m pretty excited to go on this trip. It’ll be like a break from the daily life. It’s just that there won’t be a lot of time for me to work on my paper. Saturday night Jackson and I are going to this ACLU fundraiser dinner in Seattle. And then on Sunday we are inviting two friends over for a potluck type thing. We met our two cool friends at Highline College while working at the Center for Leadership and Service. One of them is a student at Evergreen and the other goes to St. Martin’s. So yes, busy weekend. Jackson and I also have to buy food for this thing and clean the apartment. LOL yeah that has to happen. Here are other things that are going on in my mind…

1) I am SO craving noodles. Jackson and I had salads for lunch today and he wasn’t feeling well so he went to the bookstore to buy a cup of noodles. While he was eating that, I was thinking about making noodles for us next week and just thinking of all the possibilities. I really think I can do it!

2) And for hours now I’ve been on YouTube watching vegan recipe videos, like I’ve been doing all quarter. It started in the summer with the Astig Vegan which is a Filipino  vegan channel. Lately I’ve been watching Cheap Lazy Vegan (hosted by Rose who is Korean-Canadian) and the Viet Vegan. And you know what I don’t even like follow recipes but they’re all giving me ideas for what to do. There is so much vegan content on YT, I can just get lost in it and that is why this post is taking me such a long time.

3) This program is more than halfway over… we have two books left to read… draft number 2 is due on Tuesday. I get that feeling of I wish we could do more even though we’ve done a lot already. I’m just thinking… next week is week 7 and we don’t have the Friday class and then it’ll be week 8 when we have seminar again and week 8 is soooo close to week 10 which is the definite end where we do evaluations and academic statements.

And then it’s going to be 2018 and I’ll be graduating. SO a bunch of scary stuff is happening but I have to put the scary stuff in mind otherwise I wouldn’t make post-grad plans. Ugh. Anyway, I’m super tired and there’s a sink full of dishes I have to clean because I’m also a housewife (rolls eyes). Until next time 😉

Getting to the Dirt

Week 5: The day my Pumpkin brought home a Pumpkin

Seminar Thoughts: At the end of my Paper post, I noted how I thought it was funny how no one in my seminar named Filipino culture as a theme. I didn’t even name it even, the thought came to me when the time at the chalkboard was “over.” It didn’t have to be over, I could have cut in and said we forgot a huge fucking theme. But I didn’t, I kind of just let it go and a took a second to be amazed how no one else caught it though it’s not that amazing not that surprising. In seminar we ended up talking about masculinity and connections across texts and symbols and character development and war and family relationships and the role of women in these stories… I don’t think we talked about the Filipino American experience enough. But I don’t know how we could have gotten to that point if we didn’t know much about Filipino culture to begin with. We’d just be asking a lot of questions? But then a question could even be what did you learn or notice about the Filipino American experience… or something along the lines of that. I think the same could be said about the weeks prior where we discussed several themes in our books but didn’t go in depth about the specific ethnic group shared by the characters in the story. If we don’t ask these questions and if we don’t talk about it beyond a surface level then what are we achieving in this program? And then there are ways I can push this forward but I know that when students have asked questions we kind of shy away from answering and getting to the dirt about it (the what is racism question comes to mind specifically). So I’ll now ask myself a question I commonly ask to try to move things forward: where do we go from here? How will I push for this in seminar, how will I deepen my reading to incorporate this… to maximize my learning… to go beyond the surface level?

The Debut Thoughts: Seeing all the food I recognized definitely tugged at my heart. When I first heard we were going to be watching this film, I was excited because I assumed the film was about a young Pilipina getting ready for her debut and all the drama that gets attached to it. So yeah I was in for a surprise while actually watching the film to see that it’s actually about the brother and all the things he goes through. And again the female character gets pushed into secondary character status and the other leading female actor is the love interest in a *gasp* terrible abusive relationship. Okay, I won’t get into it on this post so instead I’ll write about other observations of the film:

The relationship between immigrant parents and US-born children: now this is something I relate to because that’s how my family is structured. It’s probably a common thing with families of color for parents to want their kids to be a doctor/nurse/lawyer/accountant/*insert high paying career here* because they just want the best for their kid. Think of the sacrifices, the hardship, the struggles that all come with leaving behind your home country and moving and raising a family in a country that sells you false dreams, hopes and opportunities. Okay, that last part was mine but you get the point. So personally for me, my parents tried to push NURSE on me back in high school but obviously that didn’t work. My upbringing was definitely different than you’d think if you’re thinking stereotypically which is another conversation. And lately I’ve been more sensitive to the struggles my parents have endured so me and my siblings could at least have a chance in this (stolen) country. So I understood it when the father got frustrated and violent with Ben in the beginning of the movie. You have to understand that this is an ongoing thing… meaning Ben has been stepping away from his family for a while. Not helping his family prepare the food or practice the dance for his sister’s debut was just one of the things he’s done to make him seem like a disappointment to his parents (probs just the dad since it looked like the mom just lets it go but that’s also a typical thing for moms to do I think). And Ben is a teenager so of course he’s going to step out and try to do his own thing and that definitely conflicts with what his parents want. It’s interesting how Rose was like the opposite of Ben (with how little we know of her) in that she got along great with her parents and… well that’s about it from what I gathered. She ended up being like the “voice of reason” type character which gets reserved for the female characters right.

Anyway…

It was really nice seeing a whole bunch of Pilipinx people in one film. And they didn’t all look the same. There were people of different skin tones and faces and I really appreciated that.

There’s a lot of things I could say but I didn’t want to turn this into a long post…

Other Life Thoughts: Today Jackson came home with a pumpkin and that was the sweetest thing. LOL. Today is Saturday and I have spent the day doing laundry and now I have my blog posts done. I am also going to read 60 pages of the book for this week and I am also cooking a spaghetti squash.

A Piece of the Philippines

Week 5: yet another rant on misogyny

This week we learned about pop culture of the Philippines! There’s so much rich history and culture in all the ethnic groups we covered this quarter and it’s a kind of bittersweet shame that we don’t get any kind of coverage of it unless we choose to learn about it in college. But like… they got us singing about Columbus in kindergarten because that was so important. *rolls eyes* But anyway, I wasn’t expecting a total immersion into Pilipinx culture because Tuesdays are the only days we get our culture on. I was so blown away by learning of the Great Pinoy Boxing Era, an era I had no idea existed (for obvious reasons). It’s “amazing” how an era that spanned twenty years has been almost completely erased because of *ahem* white supremacy, racism and war.

It’s also pretty cool how Peter Bacho incorporated boxing into Dark Blue Suit. I was able to relate to certain cultural connections in the book like: having family members with nicknames and not calling them by their actual name, listening in on conversations in another language acting like I don’t know what they’re talking about (even though I don’t speak or understand Tagalog, by listening for certain tone and familiar words in Spanish/English I was able to guess what my parents were saying to each other). But I had a big problem with the book, like I did with Better Luck Tomorrow, which is the blatant misogyny and sexual objectification of women. I guess it’s a sad truth in literature that’s written by men (and also content that’s created by men) that women have to be background characters and have to suffer in order to be in the story. But then again if women were written into stories written by men, they wouldn’t even be accurate depictions because men are often so far off in their perceptions of us – because they “often” don’t recognize our humanity – they can’t write us without reducing us to stereotypes. You see the difference in how Catherine Chung and Julie Otsuka wrote their characters. There’s a BIG difference. Just like in Better Luck Tomorrow, I didn’t feel any sympathy for the characters because of their collective misogyny, I felt the same about Buddy and Rico in Dark Blue Suit. Even fully knowing that Rico’s life was turned upside down when he came back from the war. It’s just that I didn’t feel as much compassion for him as I had the potential to. Trying to write a story about the horrors of coming back from war to a country that does not value your life and mental well-being can be done without treating women as objects, as a “good time” and using “tall, long legged blondes” as an overall descriptor (which is all the more terrible because that is literally reducing us to body parts and even while I have my reservations about white women which is a conversation for another time, they’re still women and also suffer under this woman hating world). It just turns into a big masculine show where how masculine a guy is directly relates to how many women he had laid whether he’s doing it as sport or if it’s just part of the life they’ve been socialized to be a part of.

In seminar I made a comment about how the men in the book, as a way to get closer to whiteness, treated women the way they did. In the United States you don’t get an example of women being treated as people and with respect and decency. And these men are fighting for their lives trying to make a living in a society that only values them for their labor and not much else. I guess what I’m saying is before I write myself into a hole, there are a lot of factors to consider while discussing a conflict like this. While I hate the way men have oppressed all other genders since the beginning of time, I can’t ignore other aspects of identity like ethnicity, class, ability, etc. while I express my thoughts and beliefs. But there is one thing that won’t change about me and the way I see power and oppression is how there is one group that benefits from the oppression of another and all people are contributing to that whether we’re complicit or actively working against it, trying to destroy it or ignoring it or using it for our benefit while pushing down others. It’s complicated and not completely all that is on my mind. But I’ll try to wrap this up nicely in the next paragraph.

While I didn’t like the blatant misogyny in Dark Blue Suit I tried to sidestep it and focus on the Filipino identity of the characters. And it’s still funny to me how Filipino Culture was not a theme said by anyone (including myself LOL) in seminar. But I understand why that is.

Thoughts on my Draft

Week 5: An often forgotten step in the writing process is hating yourself, your writing and wanting to scrap everything and start all over.

This past weekend, I tried to work on my paper. I think I’ve said this every week: how writing is HARD. Tell this to anyone and they can totally relate. It’s difficult and it’s so rewarding when we finish. If there even is a finish. There doesn’t have to be I guess. Except in this assignment, we turned in three assignments: the project proposal, the annotated bibliography and then the first draft aka the shitshow in paper. Over the weekend I tried to work on my paper… I didn’t get anything done. On Sunday I grew super frustrated and just turned out and watched two episodes of Days of our Lives at the end of the day. There’s just something about my writing… I mentally won’t want to do it until the night it’s due and even when I sat down to write Tuesday night, it was so hard to put down. I didn’t free write before writing the actual draft which made it feel inorganic. I always say bad things about the things I write and I haven’t even looked at it since Wednesday. IDK. One of these days I’m just going to have to sit down and really take the time to go through everything I want to say. I think I’m all over the place but I’ll always put myself down.

I think what I need to do next is go through the rest of my sources again, pick out what I want to use from them and then free write about the narrative pieces of my essay. Which stories should I include, which people should be in it. It’s pretty open. So like this weekend, I should like not sleep in until like 11am so I could maximize my time because I know it’s going to take a lot mentally to get in the right space.

SO…even if in the first paragraph I made two comments about how I put myself down and say bad things about myself… I feel pretty optimistic about my paper. I FEEL GOOD about it. There’s a lot of potential, a lot I can explore. I’m kind of putting a lot on it, how I describe it to people, saying how cleansing and healing it’s going to be for me because I’m writing about something I never thought deeply about before. But however it turns out, it’s going to feel good in the end, that’s just the way it goes, you know. I am a bit bummed that we aren’t going to present at the end of the quarter but that’s cool.

Right now I am home. I do feel connected (because I’m writing!), I am honest, I have great people around me who held and support me, I feel safe and welcome where I am. My mental health is not falling apart and I am grateful for being here today. So…I’m home. And the cool thing is, there’s varying degrees of it too. Like different rooms, different temperatures… some days I can be at home and warm and fully connected and other days I can be a bit cold but self-aware, frustrated and looking to feel better. *smiles* That’s cool.

The Future

Week 4: When it gets colder…

What an emotional week. My Rock entry turned out to be longer than I thought it would be and it sums up my week pretty well so I think I could keep this one short. It is Saturday 3:24PM, I’m alone in the apartment comfortable on our sofa chaise while Jackson is at the school doing some video taping and editing for his program. It’s raining outside and super cold inside. There’s broth simmering on the stove right now and it’s really hard not to drink all of it while he’s gone. We’re attempting to make pho with a premade soup base we bought at Capitol Market last week. It has such a great flavor I wish I could just drink it all and make more broth before he comes back but… (that means I’d have to get up)

We watched a film called Twinsters on Tuesday and it got me to think about my relationship with my sister and the guilt I feel for ignoring my mom’s pleas for us to stop ignoring and pretending each other doesn’t exist. Seeing the two sisters in the film long for each other’s presence and how much they bonded through their screens and while together were really sweet to watch. It was a great, light film (much better than the one we saw the previous week, tbh) and I’m glad it was made. I hope that it reached a large audience and other adoptees were able to see it.

Now that I’m here, I really want to express my thoughts on this “guilt.” Because I don’t really feel guilty for the past… I think 10 years of being out of my sister’s life and her being out of mine. I understand why things happened the way it did. I don’t blame her for anything that happened, I don’t blame anyone. I feel worse about knowing that it has hurt my mom all this time. I know I made a promise to reach out to her and my older brother this weekend. Well, the weekend is right here right now and I haven’t done it yet. I know I will, just like I knew I was going to do this post today, it’s just a matter of time. I just want to be in the right mental space.

A while ago I think I wrote about how I wanted to enhance my learning and maximize my experience here… this quarter has been pretty stressful emotionally and physically since the start and I haven’t been able to do all the things I planned to do. The graduate school fair earlier this week hit this idea in my face. IDK WTF I’m doing with my life after I graduate. But that’s a lie. I know where I want to be… but figuring out the steps on how to get there is paining me. Sometimes I feel like I want to take a break from school after this and then I remember my big ass stack of student loans is just waiting to me at the end of this. SO. IDK. I feel like I need to talk to someone but I just end up wishing they would make all the decisions for me even though deep down I know that’s not want I need and not what I want. AH.

“Keep your side of the street clean”

Week 4: I hope you are proud of me (for the thing I’m about to do)

I think it goes without saying that my blog has been pretty deep into the personals… especially with my Rock posts lately, talking about identity and being open about my crying and writing. And then with my other topics, writing about the Better Luck Tomorrow film, writing about my hesitance to speak during seminar and all that stuff. It goes without saying but I said it anyway so that must mean I’m building this up to be another personal post. I mean, the title and the subtitle are both things that relate to the book we read this week but they aren’t in the book.

I don’t talk about my family a lot and when I do either it’s all okay I can make it through the conversation or my eyes well up with tears and suddenly I’m in a closed door meeting with my adviser talking about why it hurts so much to talk about them.

This week we read “Forgotten Country” by Catherine Chung and I have never cried so much at a book before in my life. THIS IS TRUE. Also what’s true is I have never had a book touch me so deeply. The themes of family, migration, secrets and death really got to me. The relationship between Jeehyun and her parents, Jeehyun and Haejin mirrored my own with my parents and older sister.

My family has kept secrets as well. My parents have kept secrets, I have kept secrets and I bet my siblings have as well. When they come out, it’s ugly. It’s all screaming and crying and saying “you did this to me” – just expressing a deeply hidden hurt that ends up making everyone feel guilty and shitty and then there’s no talk of “where do we go from here.” Life goes on with another pothole in the road we carefully tiptoe around.

Last year when I was in therapy I shared something I never told anyone before because it was just one of those moments you forget thinking it doesn’t affect you today. I remembered something happening with my sister, some little fight or something, and mom asked us what’s wrong. I sat on her bed crying saying “I’m such a bad person.” And my therapist asked me to think about what a child could ever do to make them a bad person. And then she asked me what I would have liked my mom to do in that situation. And I cried my eyes out because the thought of little me being comforted while crying was too much to imagine in my mind.

While reading this book I thought of the arguments my parents had when I started high school, opening up some wounds that were decades in the making. To this day I don’t understand why they screamed at each other in English rather than Tagalog which made me think they purposefully put on a show for us so that they could separate and it wouldn’t be a “surprise” for us. They never spoke to each other in English. I thought of the arguments my parents had with my older brother, older sister, myself and our younger brother. The really bad arguments make us bring up the past. But to my recollection no one has ever accused anyone of being the perfect child or getting whatever they wanted. When it was a siblings argument we didn’t accuse each other of anything, it was more like we say things, shut down emotionally and not talk for years. With our parents it was much more vocal. The fight before high school was a major topic in therapy last year, it lead to stuff happening to me in my sophomore/junior years that I only started talking about recently, after years of shame and keeping it to myself. As of right now I am closest to Bobo, the youngest one and have just recently reconnected with my mom this summer after being at odds for several months.

THAT STORY is one to tell on its own but this is already getting too long. I haven’t spoken to my brother or sister in years. We used to be close as children but when we started to get to teen-age things fell apart. For many reasons I bet, but we just never were the same. My relationship with my dad hasn’t really been one. I recognize the sacrifices he made to support us financially and all the hard labor he’s done to make that money. My idea of him shattered when I was a pre-teen after seeing something I shouldn’t have seen and then the fight before high school happened where he was accused of doing…some things. I haven’t really talked to him either, we didn’t have that kind of relationship.

So when the parents in the book pleaded with Jeehyun telling her to find her sister, I couldn’t help but think of the times my mom would plead with me in connecting with my brother and sister. I thought of the times she sat crying telling me that’s all she wants me to do, telling me she’s lost her brother and sisters. I thought of how it would make her happy if I did what she asked. I thought of how silent my brother and sister are when we’re in the same room. I thought of what happened when we were teens that destroyed our communication, how little and immature we’d all been and I guess we’re still the same to this day.

On Thursday after reading a couple of pages, I had to put the book down because I was crying so much. I texted my mom saying I love you and I miss you I hope you’re proud  of me and I can’t wait to come home soon. What I was originally going to write was I hope you’re going to be proud of what I’m going to do next. This book has really motivated me to reach out to my brother and sister, hoping we can reconcile and not be strangers anymore. I don’t know what words I’ll use but it’s going to happen this weekend. All the crying that I’ve done for this book is that built up-unreleased-unexpressed deeply hidden hurt that I’ve held close to me for years.

My partner Jackson always tried to push me towards reaching out to them, extending that olive branch, just putting myself out there to “keep my side of the street clean.” He cautioned me against be like them in the sense of hiding things, holding in resentment and being silent when there’s something wrong. All this time I’ve agreed with him and knew he was right and there’s just something in me that has to light up and actually do it. This book is the catalyst, I had to come to this conclusion on my own. Land my own helicopter, as my former counselor once told to me. Throughout the week of reading this book I knew I had to capitalize on the feeling, on the crying so that I would not forget to do it. It’s weighing heavily on my heart and I’ve got that in me – I really do just want to make my mom happy and proud.

Long Drawn-Out Explanations

Week 4: Heavy Mental Lifting

This week’s assignment towards our creative essays was the annotated bibliography. I remember skipping this assignment in my first quarter (last Fall) because I still hadn’t picked a topic yet. LOL. This time I actually turned in the assignment. I finished it Tuesday night at like 10PM and felt good about it. I thought I picked pretty good sources and was able to synthesize the ideas and relate them to my paper. I just hadn’t completely read them all word for word so maybe I’m better at skimming than I thought.

Anyways, my essay has taken an extra layer than the last time I wrote about it. I’m still sticking with my connection topic and the words that come up with it for me were: self-awareness, counseling, centered self, emotional, honest and trusting. Then I will go and write about the disconnection (and longing, I suppose) where specifically I will write about my ethnicity and that will break off into two sections. One, with my family dynamic, our relationship to each other and our cultural connection. Two, as identifying as a Pilipina, incorporating representations, stereotypes and other thing. My sources have been about mental health, immigrant parent and US-born children connections and female representations in media. One thing was for sure: Pilipinx Americans (is that even an accurate label? I know that lately using the term “American” has come under criticism because when we use that word we’re commonly talking about the United States and not South and Central America… and Canada. So like IDK) are a vastly underrepresented group in psychological literature. I’m just glad I found something specifically about us, even if the number of articles were sparse.

I’ve found that when people ask me what my topic is, I can’t just give a one word answer. Other people have easier ways to answer this question without explanation of their topics. This probably is just me, I always feel the need to explain myself. I can’t say my topic is connection or feeling connected. I got to go into the whole story, talk about all the things I wrote about in this blog lol. I could just say ready my blog hahaha but then again I don’t often get asked this question. The topic has become pretty entwined with the other parts of my paper that it wouldn’t do it justice if I just said an easy answer

“Heavy Mental Lifting” is something a previous History instructor would say. They would be like “it’s time to do some heavy mental lifting” trying to engage our brains into thinking deeply about the topic. And I’ve taken that and related it to writing in my journal and also writing papers. Writing is my thing to do, I have a journal that I do my best to write in regularly. Writing papers has always been a struggle, it takes me a long time to get my thoughts down on paper (something I also wrote about a bit on here) and this draft will take a lot out of me. So we’re just going to see where it goes, I hope that I don’t end up crying too much.

Push

Week 3: Tip of my Tongue

Seminar Thoughts: Towards the end, the topic came to defining racism. And like I WISH I had said what was on the front of my mind. At Highline College, I took my first class with a social justice focus. It was a coordinated studies course and on my transcript it was split into two classes: Critical Thinking for Equity and American Diversity. Each week we read a chapter on a form of oppression. During the first week they defined racism for us. How I understood it was this: all white people are racist because they benefit from racism. That’s how I understood all the forms of oppression, by pointing out who benefits from the system and who doesn’t. Now, my thoughts on these definitions have changed. Because to say all white people are racist assumes a pretty rigid boundary and it leaves little room for nuance. Or maybe “white people” is used generally like when we say “I hate white people” or something like that. (For example, I always say I Hate Men and I don’t mean I hate each individual men personally and I don’t treat and look at men with absolute hatred. I mean, I wouldn’t be partnered with a man if I hated men unless if I just wanted to marinate in the hate every single day.) Anyway, I wanted to share that definition in seminar because I think it gets people to think in many different ways and I just wanted to throw a definition out there. And hear people critique it, react to it, disagree – dissect – unpack it. But I didn’t I kept my mouth shut like I usually do lol. It’s a problem because I had that urge to speak and I just held back. Sometimes in seminar when I actually do speak it just feels like a performance and I’m not being authentic. Also in life in general and specifically in this class I feel like I share a lot of the same views as other students but they all just words things much smarter and better than I ever could. It’d take me a long time to share my thoughts in a clear way.

But that’s just a prime example of me diminishing myself in an accepting and open class. Like ugh. My goal is to actually say something, I’m not even going to put a time deadline on it because I know I’m working towards it. The discomfort feeling is absolutely real. I just wish I could believe in my words more.

Anyway, this week we read Donald Duk and I really enjoyed this book. I felt like this could/should be made into a movie. The imagery, the storyline, the history packed into it would make such a riveting story. The dream sequences and the dialogue would just come alive onscreen. The character of Donald was so real in his thoughts and behavior, he wasn’t someone to root for but you wanted him to be okay in the end. By the end, when he stood up for himself to his racist teacher and recognized the contributions of his ancestors closed the book real nicely. It was great. When life happened over the weekend and we were gone for the most part of Sunday I was behind in my reading. But on Thursday I practically read the whole book and I just had a good time. I’m glad I got to finish it because it was a nice wholesome story with a focus on family, heritage and coming of age.

General Life Thoughts:  It’s Saturday 11:20PM right now and on my mind is just kind of fried. I drank so many cups of tea it has lost its flavor. I still need to read and then I can go to sleep. Tomorrow I hope to do more reading and research. Also tomorrow Jackson and I are going to clean the apartment and that’s going to be an adventure. I just hope that like I can get a couple of episodes of Days of our Lives in before the weekend is done. It kind of sucks how the NBC website/app deletes episodes after a certain amount of time. Ugh.

Committed to Connection

Week 3: “It’s so heavy, it’s so stressful”

Now there’s an annotated bibliography due on Tuesday. I like searching for academic articles and getting lost in what I find. I’m kind of excited but it’s 8:11PM Saturday and I still need to finish this post, the Scissors one and read some of the book due on Friday (and make dinner lol) so I can dedicate some time tomorrow to research. On Thursday I actually started and printed out some articles. I just haven’t taken them out of my backpack yet.

I decided to stick with my topic of that connected feeling (and maybe one day before I turn in the creative essay I’ll be able to word my topic better and not have to go through the whole story) because it’s so important to me. In my mini-research session on Thursday, I search for articles on mental health in the databases because that’s where one of my homes ended up being from that writing session I did last week but I didn’t end up with a lot of articles. I’m sure they’re out there (I hope so cuz it’s super important) but mental health isn’t my strong area. I don’t think it’s an area I want to write about. I’m completely open with my time in counseling as it’s been a majorly transformative experience in my life but I’d rather talk about it than write about it.

What I do want to write about is… you know something it’s so “funny” because I know what I’m going to write about next and it’s such a sore spot I can already feel my chest and face grow tight. So going along with the metaphorical home of being connected, I thought about being disconnected from my ethnic identity. This is an experience I’m not alone in but when you don’t talk about it, it sure feels like it. I’m already feeling like I’m going to cry which is amazing because I haven’t even gotten to the thick of it. Doing the blogging thing during Friday’s afternoon block really showed me this is what I should write about. I could connect all the things I wrote about last week into this too, because all connects together. On Friday, I was talking about my topic and then I talked about my life and after the convo I reflected on it because it felt good to share my life story with another person. But I also realized that when I’ve talked about my story, it feels like I’m telling it like it’s my past, rather than something I’m currently facing. Meaning: that when I talk about my childhood and growing up with my family, it feels like I’m so far removed from it on the inside. When seriously talking about my family is a super sore spot and I don’t talk about them very much. On the surface in conversation I can talk about the good and bad parts but when the convo is over, the feeling I’m left with is discomfort, heaviness and emptiness.

It’s like there’s a big hole missing in my family that would have connected us together: our Philippine identity. At least that’s what I hope! I can only speak for myself and in recognizing myself as a woman of color, as a shy student leader striving to lead with a social justice and feminist focus I can no longer push forth certain parts of my identity while hiding from my ethnicity because I feel disconnected from it. In having done that for years, I’ve shunned myself from being more open and learning from other people.

So this is why I have to write about this. It’s a personal project, it’s an important one. It’s one I hope I can find five sources for it by Tuesday night.

Bonus: here’s an excerpt from my journal, written Friday afternoon. After all the writing I did above, I hope it’s clear what IT is.

3:40PM It hurts me so much to talk about IT, I feel like I just need to let go and start crying. It’s like I’m holding so much in, it’s so heavy. It’s so stressful. I wish I want to get to a point where I’m comfortable in talking about IT, actually being in IT and not so much apart from it like how it feels. I do wish I were more connected I’m trying to find my way. I’m getting closer and closer every day to getting towards the feeling. And there’s no stopping point. That’s an important thing to remember. It’s getting me toward being authentic, I can’t deny how important it all is to me.