Living Feels Like Shit

How You'll Get Through

You go home and you feel like shit.  Something about last week, yesterday, today happened. You feel bad, feels like this time you hit the bottom. Your mind is going crazy and you hear the words in your mind. Just seconds before you finally fall asleep, you remember of all the things you are going through now.

What do you do?

You get your phone, open up the applications that work like drugs and numb your senses as you waste away the precious hours scrolling down. The only movement you make is when you briefly move your thumb away from the center of the page to hit that like button and then you scroll down again. Thinking that maybe, your mind will wander and will not think things. You see friends, family and other people you forgot how they made your friends’ list, having a great time, going to places, buying this and that. Your new hobby is to count the number of pores in your friend’s current selfie. You have an addiction worse than methamphetamine, its drowning your failures into other’s people’s success. Uh huh, that’s what you think.

We take a peek into other people's lives and feel awful about our own. Why am I stuck here? What have I been doing? You feel the wrath of envy and dissatisfaction, little did we know that behind every Facebook post and Instagram picture, is a sad soul, wounded ego and the feeling that you are confused as shit on what to do next.

You take a selfie, just before you tell your parents in the province, that you will have to take summer classes. Again. Another year before you graduate, another year of tuition cash-outs and dorm fees before you can go back and help them.

Take another selfie in Retrica filter showing you’re sexier than ever bikini clad body. People say you look like Marian Rivera, but you want no boys. You have a steady 4 year girlfriend going strong as ever, when she suddenly told you one day, the day before your 24th birthday, she can’t do this anymore, she finally found her Dingdong Dantes. #SorryNotSorry

Take another selfie with your boyfriend, add in  the ultra-cheesy captions. When in reality, you messaged a guy friend desperately pleading if he can beat up your beloved bf because he’s too engaged in drugs and doesn’t want to leave your apartment that your unsuspecting father pays for. #Surprise #HappyAnniv

You take a food selfie in this P300 per meal high class resto, put in the hastag #foodporn, but every time you to go to 7-eleven you skip the goodness of the cheap sundae ice cream, your friends tease you so much – you don’t even want to look at that thing you call flabby arms and bulging stomach. #Thinspiration

Take a majestic sunset picture on the Manila skyscraper at your office building. #serenity #sunset. Inside your first drawer lie 3 copies of your resignation letter. You deserve better. You hate your job, your boss is hella mean and with the corporate world eating you up, but still too afraid to hand it over. What do you really want to do in life again? Oh yea you already forgot, after the office says you are a great worker that’s why they keep giving you work that’s not yours to do. You repeat to yourself everyday you are happy because you just got regularized. #WorkMode #LifeIsGood

You got an album of selfies you took using the new Samsung Galaxy phone you   recently bought using your credit card. Oh look, it automatically edits your picture. Post, post, post. 30 likes and counting alright, but at the top of the old creaking piano in your house are graduation photos of your 2 brothers with medals that you missed. #Ouch .Every day you pass by living room you wish it was you who took the grad pics but you were too busy working to pay the shiny, unscratched, phone in a 12 month debt. But I bet something inside you got scratched. #SakitMhen

Post a picture of yourself soul-searching in the greenery, lush mountain side. You say you are going on a solo adventure. Travel the world alone. Nah, it wasn’t your choice to be alone, but because you willingly did something ‘fun’ with a co-worker with 4 types of liquor running in your system. #WildNight #YOLO. You just ripped the heart out of this special guy you actually got, he flipped out – lost his mind when he learned. You threw away the 7 months worth of email, chats, phone calls, pouring of soul and heart for some guy who just wants to get his nut scratched. Congrats, you messed up big time. #ShotsPaMore.

Too much for Instagram posts and Facebook likes, where the emojis become lies, the happy face and the color blue thumbs-up are nowhere near true. The whole world thinks you are having the best time of your life, when you yourself admitted that if this year will be an ice cream flavour, it will be Rocky Road. Everything is fucked up, just the way it should be. Everyone is just like you, no matter what we post or say.

What do you do?

You get engulfed in the tide of emotions, not knowing what to do or where to go.  In the middle of the hard times, that’s how you get through. You slept for 4 hours with swollen eyes and runny nose but you wake up.  You will open your eyes, get up from bed, fix yourself breakfast, take a shower. Walk for 2 blocks, get on the train or drive your car in traffic. Wash the dishes, do the laundry, pet your dog, turn up the music, smoke a cigarette.  Eat like it was an ordinary Tuesday, work like every boring Tuesday. You curse everything that happens in between the day and night, but you stand your ground.  

This is how you’ll get through. Not by shouting at the top of your lungs in the now crowded Sagada, not on the white sand beaches and all night partying at Bora. Not in posting more photos and think that the attention you get in the virtual world can fill up the void in your soul.

You do soul searching not on empty places, but when the world got too noisy, you cried and wailed till you can’t breathe, you heard hurtful words and it tore you apart, your clients on the phone cursing, your boss getting angry for the nth time, when your parents ask too much, when you almost got hit because your young mind, is fucking overwhelmed, blank as you cross the road, patintero style in Q. Ave.

You had your eyes wide open at 2:30 am, feeling hurt, confused and shit then still wake up the next day? That’s how you’ll get through.

It’s going to be okay.

When things are messed up, face it head on. Don’t hide behind your cellphone.

You’ll find #peace when you put down the phone and close the applications. As you eat your favourite, leftover lasagne from the fridge even if you can’t taste anything, as you ride the jeep or when you scrub the Manila pollution from your skin, as you go out under the prickly heat of the sun, while you do grocery, while you slice of onions and trying hard not to cry, when you scrubbed the hardened rice on plates, you get some kind of peace in doing the most mundane things. #ForReals.

You must get through the problems, not hide from it as you show pretty faces.  When things get too hard, it won’t get better in a second, in a day, in a week, it won’t get better with a like or a comment. Everyone is dissatisfied one way or another anyway.

Hold on to the thing that’s left in you and live your life doing one task and then another. Pick up yourself one day at a time, until the next day and the next, it will get better.

That’s when you can say you are truly living.

Because at the young age of 21, I learned that sometimes in life, you'll eventually have to face certain events that will hurt or disappoint you. How well you deal with and get through it, will always be up to you.