Why I am Here

i am writing this post because i have been living now for three years in this land and for the first time in my life, i have finally made the decision to live here. let me clarify - for three years i have existed in london. today, i have decided to live in london.

as my therapist said, 'you may be in london but in reality, you are still in heathrow, waiting to take a plane ride somewhere else only you know'.

only the Empress lives in a suspended state of life like she does.

i know now, i am here. finally, i am really here. it doesn't matter what the reasons are. i am here. and that is all that matters. time now to stop avoiding the unavoidable. time now to live.

i went through all my old blog entries and unearthed this post when i left leo burnett. that was when i ran away. i just packed it all up and ran away - to where i was running i didn't know. what i was running away from? many, many things. demons, disillusionment, a broken spirit, a meaningless life, a general flat emptiness. so i ran away to london.

i re-read this post that i wrote five years ago. the lessons are still the same. fortunately, in the span of three years that i have lived here, i have begun to find myself again...

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July 26, 2004: 32

One day I woke up and discovered I had turned 32. The last time I looked, I was 23 and I had to wonder myself how I turned from 23 to 32 without even looking.

I surmised that perhaps the problem was that I wasn’t even looking at all. In between, had metamorphosed from the strange, psychotic child with the strange I.Q. into this psychotic wonder woman, with the strange I.Q. I lived a life that was fairy tale meets kitschy diva drama of breakdowns, passion, survival and perhaps, loosely do I use the term, redemption.

While suffering from near poverty, 2 nervous breakdowns, 7 years of countless prescriptions for Prozac, Ritalin, Epival, lithium aka Depakin chloride, Trazodone, Thorazine, a string of therapists, endless hours of personal introspection and talks with well meaning, hopelessly supportive and empathetic friends – I managed to reach the apex of my advertising career in record time for such a late starter.

You see - I am living proof that psychos walk around all the time, holding down regular jobs, attending meetings and talking like regular people.

I’ve done the regional posting where I practically lived on planes and got paid money so I would ignore the fact that work had taken over my life completely. There wasn’t any time or space for my personal life. With the exception of work, everything else stood frozen in time and that included my ovulation.

People talk endlessly about how women are transformed into angry, weeping, lashing, melancholic banshees when they get their period. The flipside is you must wonder what happens to a woman when her periods suddenly stop in conjunction with her life.

There I was living on planes, hopping from one hotel to the other, with a fancy regional director title on my name card, presiding over a team, shopping like mad with my credit cards that were my welcome badge in any designer store I walked into and walked out of with various goodies, more money in the bank than I thought I would ever have, while working 15 hours a day Sunday to Sunday.

A year and a half later, my apartment still remained an empty white shell begging for some sign that a being lived there. When I started to pack to return to Manila, I discovered heaps of clothes and boxes of shoes with tags attached to them. All were unused. Some fit and some didn’t. I could not even remotely remember when or why I bought them all.

One day during a meeting, I thought out loud as my brand manager tried to cajole me into paying attention during the meeting –“ Someone tell me again why I am doing this. If this is such a great job, why am I so miserable?”. It was then that I got up and told my boss I quit. And just like that I went back to the meeting feeling like someone had pulled out a thorn the size of a sequoia tree from my chest.

Don’t think that having that size of a thorn pulled out of you makes it all stop. A thorn that size will leave a gaping hole in you that will bleed so badly. It will leave you in so much pain you wouldn’t even be able to decide between staunching the blood to dress the wound or just lying down there to die.

I actually did both. Being the depressive diva that I am, at first I decided to savor the pathos of almost having had my soul sucked completely out of me. I spent the first 2 weeks in my bed, surrounded by 8 large pillows, lolling about like a baby. 3 days of lying in bed, the first of a series of thoughts started coming to me – my God, how wonderful fabric softener smelled like and how wonderfully soft it made the sheets. Two years of my advertising life I spent trying to sell truckloads of detergent to all the housewives and laundry women of the Philippines and this thought occurred only to me after I had left the business. Other people stop and smell the roses. I stop and smell my newly laundered, freshly changed sheets.

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the career hasn't been the same since i packed it all up. in fact, i am still a-wavering and a-wandering about what to do next.

however, i am happy to let you know that every time since i wrote this, after i ran away and found myself in london, i have stopped and i still smell my newly laundered, freshly changed sheets.