Dear Mama and Papa,

When I was still a young girl, you always told me to fight for what I believed in, to not be let down by the littlest of discouragement, and to have a stand in this world. For sixteen years, I was the headstrong daughter you raised me —until the time I was heading off to college and choosing my career path.

You came into my life
     Silently, slowly
As your tiny bones grew
     And your tiny heart throbbed
And I never knew, never knew.


For eight weeks, or nine
     I had you in my womb
Then tiny drops of crimson
     Dripped, dripped, gushed
And you were gone
     Too soon, too soon.

                            - k.m.t.g.

Ever since I was a kid, it has always been my dream to work as an editor—or just a part of the editorial staff, even as an editorial assistant or contributor—at a lifestyle or fashion magazine. Elizabeth Wakefield of Sweet Valley Twins and Betty of Betty La Fea were my role models: how I wish I could be in their shoes and work as a sassy editor for a posh magazine.

And just this month, as I was looking for a new career opportunity, I landed a job as an editorial assistant for a classy and well-known magazine. If it happened a few years back, when I was still so young and naive and starry-eyed, I would have jumped into the opportunity—with no second thoughts, without considering anything else but my wide-eyed zest to be what I always dreamed about.

On a humid and sleepy Saturday morning sometime in March, I realized that my two-year relationship with my then boyfriend had come to an end, much to my chagrin. The second thing I did after crying out ugly was to call one of my best friends and plan an out-of-town trip. Our destination? Vigan.

Dearie,

You have sparked the attention of a lot of mothers out there, and I'm here to voice out my opinion as a daughter.  

Let me introduce myself. I'm a twenty-four-year-old unmarried and childless writer who grew up not really seeing my mom that much, and was raised by a hands-on dad, a doting grandma, protective sisters, and a string of yayas. I have two older sisters who are in their thirties and are apparently "fake" hands-on moms because they are not at par to your losyang standards in your oh-so wonderful article "How to spot a fake hands-on mom of toddlers." (And by the way, both of them have toddlers and one-year-olds, and they still are hands-on moms, have time to work full-time, and look as young to pass as college girls.)

I am the youngest from a brood of three, and at the time of my birth, things were financially difficult for my family, so my mom had to work her ass off to give all of us a future. I barely remember my mom in a lot of my childhood memories. Heck, she wasn't even there when I had my menarche.

I was 20 then. It was just a few months before graduation, when I would have become a full-fledged adult with a bachelor’s degree in nursing. But for the moment I was focusing on being a good student nurse.

It was our first day in our clinical duty at the emergency room. We were on the morning shift, so we had a busy start. One of my assigned patients was a young male just a few years shy of 30, with the diagnosis of meningitis.

He was just one of the many patients I tended in the whole four years of my student-nurse days. But I remember him so well, and I don’t think I will ever forget him.

Today marks the twenty-fourth year of my existence on Earth. Today, I'm a year older and a year wiser. Today, I learned a few things about life.

"What is depression like?" he whispered.

"It's like drowning. Except you can see everyone around you breathing."

The death of Robin Williams was the long-overdue spur the world needed to understand depression better. Depression is a poorly understood condition—more often mistaken for something as normal as frustration and sadness. But depression is something else, something much deeper, much darker.
Then what is depression like?

As a student back then, I found it more comfortable and more efficient to study at night; hence, I dubbed myself a night owl.

Now that I am past the student phase, I landed a good job that, unfortunately, requires me to work at night regularly. Health-wise, working at night is not beneficial: higher stress levels, messed-up circadian rhythms, higher gastric acidity levels, and much more. But looking on the brighter side,  I can list down a few things that can make night shift duty much more preferable than on normal office hours. Here's why:

I recently read the Grimms' version of Cinderella, Ashputtel.

Being a Disney fan, I would have expected the original story to be more or less the same as the one portrayed in the cartoon. However, Ashputtel is far from the fairy-tale happily ever after.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore engraved a cryptic message on the Golden Snitch that Harry swallowed in his first quidditch match: I open at the close. It took Harry many grueling days to figure that one out, until the time came, on the Final Battle at Hogwarts, that he let all his guards down, eventually unveiling the answer to the message: I open at the close.

In the Philippines, BPOs have become the newest nursing to date. When "call center" is brought up in most conversations, negative connotations are automatically pitched in:

"Nursing graduates but ended up in call centers,"
"Degree holders but settled with call centers,"
"You just talk to people. What's so difficult with that?"
"Did not finish school, so he ended up in a call center."

Personally, I used to have the same mind-set, thinking lowly of call center agents. But then, after a year of working in a BPO company, I made friends with call center agents, and I thought otherwise. Was it their choice? Was it because it was an easy job to get into?

Every man is paired with a woman to procreate and share a life together. But grammatically speaking, is the singular noun "woman" a fact or merely a myth? With the interaction of neurotransmitters in man's body, the answer might lean more on the latter.

In a romanticist's point of view, a relationship blooms when a man falls in love with a woman, and vice versa. With love, the couple can move mountains, doing the best they can to keep the fire burning, to accept his partner for who she is wholeheartedly, and to build a life as husband and wife forever. For hopeless romantics, love is the essential  force of the relationship. The man and the woman are bound to each other, perhaps even in the afterlife.

But in the view of science, this is all debunked.
And in the view of realists, this is all bullshit.

I've noticed that a lot of my friends have been diagnosed with scoliosis, something that I also have—a not-so uncommon abnormality of the spine. But the way I see it, it is a poorly understood condition.

While Google can cite you several references to what scoliosis is like, how it is manifested, diagnosed, treated, prevented, and other trivial information about it, here, I'm going to write about my actual experience of being a scoliotic—something that I don't talk much about to others.

 Originally wrote this article as a reflection of something I was going through before, and posted it on Facebook. I submitted it to our college's magazine and was eventually published. This time, I'm reposting it here in my very own blog. 

Changes will always happen in the course of life, and the most evident are the physical ones.

We may look like gods and goddesses right now— what with our youthful bodies. But no matter how much you try, age will inevitably transform us. A few years from now, lines will start to form on our faces. Women get pregnant and get sagging breasts and build up cellulites. Men get their beer bellies. We get fat, have wrinkles, and eventually will have to wear glasses as we grow older. When we wake up in the morning, we might look like hags without our makeup—dried up saliva, milky tears, and awesome-smelling breaths from the night before. Yes, it is important to look our best, but we will never be pretty or handsome at all times.

It has been said that when choosing your life partner, you have to get to know him well first. 


That principle didn't evade me even in the world of nursing: Assess before you diagnose, plan, implement, and evaluate.


But what if even after thorough assessment, you found out that there are things yet to be discovered? What if even after all those years of knowing a person, you realize that you actually didn't know him well enough after all?