We never get sick, we never die, we never age

My extended writing fast started a week or so before the Psychological Association of the Philippines Junior Affiliates (PAPJA) convention of November, 2010. If only for the spirit of wanting to make amends, I owe myself an explanation as this has pained me since. You know I can't stop writing for the life of me. This hurts. Deeply.

Initially, starving myself off from my usual diet of internet usage seemed like a good idea. Being in my final year of college, I had to get my shit together for the sake of an easy and uneventful graduation. Looking back, this ended up becoming horribly counter-intuitive. Without a means to keep myself in check, I ended up losing focus, misconstruing a legitimate outlet as a distraction I could've done without. In a way, I single-handedly derailed my first push towards being a career academic. My thesis was behind schedule to the point of never having reached completion. Luckily however, I still managed to come up with the best paper in my batch. Of course, I'm grateful but my professors knew how deep my discontent ran. To live with that discontent is worse than not graduating, really. For the end of an era, we reached a close penned in hanging notes. In the end, I had nothing tangible to show for my efforts. What's the point of building yourself towards a credential with no concrete output? The academic equivalent of development hell. Okay, maybe not that. Maybe an undergraduate Loveless. I won't dispute the value to be found in the chase but since I am no longer doing this on the basis of academic merit, I only see it as a project to be taken on as a labor of love. Years later, I'd still be grateful for having gone through this. For now, I'll have to bear with the pain of birth; a birth to sleeping cartographers, mapped in time and drawn in situation.

After graduation, I've come to the realization that I haven't learned much. Maybe I am in dire need of space that a family would not allow and an unsustainable lifestyle that my current paycheck could not accommodate. With the months I've spent quiet, I've learned that deprivation does not always lead to peace. Lack begets discontent and sorrow inevitably follows in the wake of loss. New to the idea that serenity need not root itself to flourish, I only had the strength of my quiet heartbeats to keep me going. I lost track of those heartbeats somewhere.

I'm on the way back to finding them. I'll find them in the cacophony, where I least expect. Today, I make amends. Because I know better, I've learned to learn from and let go of my regrets. Let me start over, please. I owe you.