What has been shaping me
a writing and conviction building exercise
I’ve been thinking about what I want this space to be lately. I’ve realized that I’m slowly starting to miss old school blogging where the focus has mostly been storytelling about the ordinary and the mundane moments of one’s day. It felt more acceptable to be random, to sometimes write from a stream of consciousness and not need to beautify it with a lot of things like photographs or videos or sound.
I’ve had a relationship with this form of writing since the early 2000s and I’d hop from one platform to another. Trying to see the most cozy layout, that could unearth in me a slew of thoughts that are often held back because of needing to meet the day’s obligations. I miss writing without any other purpose but for pure self discovery, and self expression. Where the cadence of my thoughts meets the pitter patter of the keys and staring off into space waiting to capture new thoughts would be met with a sigh of relief for having found hold of them. This is the kind of writing I miss.
It’s been challenging to find a way to get myself into this rhythm because I realized most of my time is not really spent on musing creatively or philosophizing. Instead I have chosen a life that wrestles with problems that often needs astute attention so that the people around me, usually the ones I serve, or take care of are attended to.
I recently chanced upon this term that felt new and familiar at the same time: care work. It instantly drew me in. Tara McMullin’s article reviews the idea of care work from the book she read Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change by Angela Garbes, a Filipino-American writer based in Seattle. She asks the important question that resonated with me quite strongly,
When rethinking work or business, many instinctively seek a path that is less ego-driven, less competitive, and less hierarchical. And rightly so. Yet, I wonder how often these alternative paths end up leading to a familiar place—a priority for the productive.
What if, instead, we aimed for the reproductive?
I continue to explore material that gives me new perspectives about ways of navigating work because I continue to wonder about how mental health and wellbeing, which now has become a more visible industry in the Philippines, could bear more impact in a way that lets me deeply be a witness of it. Not to say, that I haven’t glimpsed or observed the impact of therapeutic work or expressive arts work in the lives of others. But I feel that I am looking for an answer closer to home. One that addresses my own experiences too.
What are the solutions you can offer to preserve the wellbeing and nurture the mental health of people in an organization that struggles with a fragmented culture because of the experience of deep seated politics amongst leaders? How about a family who is currently navigating the experience of their son who had just come out of rehab and find it difficult to communicate with each other leading them experience strained dynamics? How about the discouragement of educators on the absence of a promised budget to support the infrastructure for their learning environment?
It seems like mental health and wellbeing issues need to really rely more on systems and social systems, or family systems, instead of just the intervention itself. I suppose any kind of care work is the same. The importance of care work from where I’m standing is usually evidently more significant when the crisis is something you’re in the middle of.
I navigate crisis, I would say, a lot. When I say crisis, it’s a situation that has a level of real urgency and has an impact towards a person or a group of people that will affect their overall wellbeing, motivation, employment or state of life. I’m trying to be humorous but only slightly. I can’t talk about the kind of crisis I navigate so much because there are too many people involved. I remind myself that I took a peace education certification to help me with this 3 years ago but I need more practice. A person cannot solve a problem that is systemic. I guess, that’s part of the work challenge and the thing I create containers like this for my thoughts to brew, sift and be refined.
One way I have learned to cope is that I laugh at myself, eat some kamote chips, read writing that slows my brain and breathing down and offers me a place of stillness. Expressive arts work for me would be stream of consciousness writing in the middle of listening to Japanese instrumentals or Chopin. And who can disregard binge-watching action packed FBI series? I love it when the series I’m watching has parallelisms in my own real life crisis navigation experiences.
This is what I love about old-school blogging. I can rambling without feeling the need to cap this off with a really strong punch line because all there is for me right now is the willingness to show up after a crisis is over.
But here’s a little bit of perspective that I’m starting to develop after having engaged in a few crisis navigation experiences this week:
Note: I wear multiple hats, I take care of a university, I take care of an endowment aimed to help support education institutions, I manage an expressive arts therapy center, I take care of a preschool, I take care of a music ministry and I take care of Qira my cat
Maybe if people if put more emphasis on teaching psychosocial skills, life skills or socio-emotional skills in basic education, we’d help the system improve.
Maybe if parents have a school or a learning center they can want to go to so that they can also learn these skills and help their families, the system has hope.
I realized that I have learned quite a bit when it comes to psycho-education just by interacting with our clients and our therapists on the back-end side of work.
If leaders in education institutions were more trauma-informed or were skilled in the practice of EQ, we’d focus less on strained dynamics and more on helping the education crisis gain access to solutions that enable progress.
Maybe if there was less professional biases in institutions like schools or yes, even mental health centers, there would be more headspace to allocate for problem solving.
If there was a way to just cultivate interest on building interior capacities that allow people to be more sensitive, and pre-disposed to caring, there would be a load of weight off and a few significant systems can improve.
I guess these are the things that have been shaping me as I have transitioned more deeply into this line of work over the past decade. It’s tough work but it’s real work and it’s work that I have grown to wrestle with, which means, I care about it a lot.
(L-R: 1) At a DepEd school in Sirao with my relatives doing legacy work; 2) A common site to see in public schools; 3) Taking a snap with one of the university’s oldest employees Basilio and someone whose work in Social Work I admire , Ms. Rose Sequitin)
Poem 07232024
Hush it's the time of day
when everything goes still
and your memory wakes
moves into that place of
remembering
Hush it's the moment, that hour
when everything you ever
felt can be given space
give yourself space
Safe places were never far
love can console you
just as you are
If that memory robbed you
of holding joy
close to your heart
And turned the way
you held that memory
into a scar
Hush there is something
beyond that lost
aching place
Every door that closed
every longing opposed
every breath that choked
is not the end
of the road.
Every narrow gate
leads to the
wider opening
of your soul
So your heart
your eyes , your mind
your cry, your sigh
will seek and then find
That there is more
to cherish than you know
There is more to the
Seeds that they’ve sown
There is more to you.