“I like to pretend I’m deep and mysterious. Truthfully, I’m not. I’m simple, and easy to please. But, you don’ fall for girls that won’t break your heart.” -Unknown

We threw a party for two friends who came back to the Philippines the first time since they moved there and the conversation inevitably drifted to women, and the kind of girls our friends go for. A lot of our friends are couples or married, but recently, a few are now back on the market and yes, we talk about the women (or men) in the radar.

Generally, the desirable traits were: hot, skinny, sings, nice, confident, sweet. In general, if you get those naturally, well, yay! If you aren’t genetically blessed, those are harder to come by and take work. I’d like to think my friends are combinations of some if not all of both (I constantly find myself in the presence of incredible women, I’m lucky like that). My amazing friends are single though, so maybe the conversation we needed to have are what are the “actual” traits that translate to the “relationship type”.

I consider myself fortunate, as I have found love, lost love, and have known love in my life and is still knowing what love is capable of. Love is a way different concept from relationships however, which are difficult long term, and change dramatically over time.

But I digress.

I am not mysterious. You can read pages of this blog and find out a lot of my history, my ideas, how I think and how I speak. I’m quite simple and easy to please, as my idea of an ideal date night is a simple night in with a good meal. I won’t lie and say that this is the only thing I go for, as I do like to get fancy sometimes, and I think I work hard enough to deserve the things I can afford from time to time. But I recently reconnected to the me that does not drink, I don’t like to wear makeup or go out too much, and I have been so used to working in my own space at home, I find my tolerance for bull very, very limited.

Why am I thinking about this Monday morning first thing in? I guess since I am turning a year older this week, it’s time to take stock of what I’ve done in the past year, and what I want to do in the coming one. What I’ve learned is in the multitudes, what I’ve had to get up from, interesting and definitely takes the cake (Ooh, cake).

So what are you thinking about this Monday morning?

From a rosy pink outlook on the beginning of today, came the bleak news that a friend died. It wasn’t sudden, we knew she was sick, and we saw her last month before she went home to Bacolod to be amongst family after her stage 4 cancer needed really expensive, scary radiation treatment she didn’t want to go through. We had made plans to go visit her this month with another of my sister’s friends and make a trip out of it, but unfortunately, we didn’t go early enough.

She was Ate Sheila and she was such a nice person. We weren’t super close, I knew her from my sister who worked with her at her last office job. She was always sweet and I remember her being the one who introduced us to Calea in Bacolod, because she hand carried whole cakes for us when she went home. I will keep remembering her voice, which was always soothing and calm, and around her I felt calm, which, for people who know me, know this is not the case for a lot of the time.

She is in a better place now and I am grateful she is no longer in pain, but to know she’s no longer with us just well, sucks.

Death has been around us lately and it hasn’t been sunshine and rainbows. A close friend’s dad passed away, one of my mom’s best friends, a cousin’s husband. Nobody went gentle into the good night. Strokes, an accident, a terminal illness, none of these are easy ways to go, and it’s even harder for the people that are left behind. I feel the pain resonating from the people we’ve been with lately and sometimes you just want to absorb all that pain they’re going through for them. But all we can do is be there for them.

Life isn’t fair and good people get hurt and sick and sometimes, there are just bad f**king days. It comes with the cost of living. We have to deal with the good, the bad, and the ugly. And sometimes all you need is a hug and that hug never comes.

So maybe I shouldn’t be writing in this mood but hey, I figure I’d be more honest about me this time around and that there are days that you just want to crawl into bed and forget the world. I’m dealing with it, and letting the pain, the hurt, and everything else be felt.

So how’s your Friday going?

In as long as I can remember, Sonnet 116 from Shakespeare has spoken to me. It just sounds right, and it feels right. But don’t let me try to convince you, read it yourself here:

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

It may be a bit naive, but the idea of love that doesn’t change and not being shaken by circumstances, I’d like to think we all have a chance at that. Even with time, mistakes, obstacles, real love stays, and cannot be taken away. Now I am not an idiot that thinks that love doesn’t need work and doesn’t evolve, but I am agreeable to the idea of love being there, if it’s real. It may be the most difficult thing to do, to love when crap hits the fan, or circumstances change, but it’s there, you just have to dig deep to find it. And it’s not just romantic love, it’s the love you have for your friends, your family, your pets. Life throws crap at you all the time, it’s how you deal with it that matters. It’s how you love through it.

What do you think about love?

I come from a family of eaters. We plan our trips around food. My immediate family mostly look forward to Sunday lunch, because we know that after church, we have good food. My mom’s family and my dad’s family both have amazing cooks that love to feed people in massive amounts.

It’s no secret that I have felt the effects of a waning metabolism quite significantly. From being able to eat like a construction worker and not gaining an inch, to now having to buy clothes every few months because I can no longer fit into waistbands or armholes.

Difficult is a word that I use a lot of the time to describe this situation. I used to love buying swimsuits, and now I can’t find ones that actually fit. I used to be underweight, but now find myself usually the biggest one in a group of girls. Stress brings me to want food. Happiness makes me want food. Anger makes me want food. My basic waking life revolves around the next meal.

I miss being a sample size, and finding cheaper clothes by buying from the children’s section. I get daily digs from my mom about being larger than she is. I have friends who have told me that they weren’t sure it was me when they chance upon me in public because I had gained that much weight.But then I can’t give up pasta, or coke, or ice cream. Oatmeal actually makes me hungrier after two hours. Being hungry makes me irritable.

Food is both my comfort and my stress point. It has been a great comfort and also the cause of many internal and external issues. While getting older is not making it any easier physically, I find myself saying the words “I’ve made my peace with my size” much more often now, and 80% of the time, not being sarcastic about the statement. I am way more than what my dress size is, and the ability to earn to eat well is something I don’t take for granted. Sure, summer is coming around and it is time again to check if my bathing suits still fit, but I am finding that the small stuff, like what I look like in the mirror, compared to what I used to look like, hardly matters in the long run.  I have gone through a lot. My scars, stretch marks, incredibly expanding hips and thighs all bear witness to what I can endure. And there’s still more to get through, but I am ready to take it on.

My body is mine and we’ve got a long way to go baby, so tighten the straps, belt yourself in, because the adventure is just beginning.

Frank Warren has been in my life for more than a decade. I have been reading the secrets on Postsecret.com most every Monday morning Philippine time. It’s a very simple concept. People write their secrets on a postcard. They mail the postcard to his address. Frank scans and puts them on the blog once a week. When there are occasions like Mother’s Day, or Fourth of July, there are similar postcards mostly pertaining to what the upcoming holiday is . It’s very simple, but also very resonating. When the shows started, I always made it a point to see where he was going, to maybe, just maybe catch him when I was in the country in the same 3 hour radius he was going to be in. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet, however when I found out he was in Long Beach, I had to reach out to a friend that was near there and was going through something to maybe go see it, and hope that she liked it. She had been helping me with what I was going through at the time as well, and I felt like I needed to share something with her to help her through her stuff.

This friend, selfless as she is, offered to do Facetime or call me, and sent photos of the auditorium it was going to happen in. The show is very strict about turning off phones during the show itself, so she had to turn off. And honestly, I wanted her to enjoy the time she was there for herself as well. After, she even got in line for a long time having a book signed for me by Frank, and most amazingly, this:

When she was having the book signed, she turned on video call so I got to “meet” Frank. Thus the shaky, awkward face in the photo, because honestly, I got very weepy with just that “Hi!”. We both wanted to say more but the people were telling my friend to keep it short, and I knew if I was in line for a long time too, I wouldn’t appreciate a video call from several thousand miles away cutting into my time with Frank.

In as much as I felt the experience resonate with me, I was glad that she felt connected to it as well, and I felt closer to her with this new thing we have in common. Even if it is sometimes controversial, sometimes depressing, sometimes sappy, I do think secrets are the currency of intimacy. Intimacy is always a tricky thing. It leaves you vulnerable. You can get hurt. You most likely will shed a tear, either of happiness or of other things.

So thank you Frank, for bringing my friend closer to me in this distance, and thank you my friend, for doing this for me, and for yourself. I feel quite lucky to know you even more now. And soon, I will have the courage to send a postcard of my own, as soon as I find a post office here that doesn’t read postcards before I send it on.

What’s your secret? Can you share it with the world?

I have been unable to work out, wear high heels, run, walk too long even for the past few years. To really be honest, this has been happening for a while. Since 2013, I have been counting bad knees as a major hindrance to my everyday life. I have found it painful to go up and down stairs, do a jogging laparound the UP Academic Oval, even when I go around too long around the mall.

It’s really sucked. Just when I thought I found a way to workout that felt good and engaged me, I couldn’t. The pain was too much that after a day of boxing or muay thai, I would hobble around the house. I even bought braces for my knees for travel, for when I knew I was going to walk extended periods. Even with the brace on I felt horrible and had to take long breaks.

I tried a lot of things. Physical therapy. Supplements. Dieting to put less weight on my knees. Stopping exercise altogether. Even going through a procedure that included my own plasma to be harvested and reintroduced to my knee as supplementary lubricant.

Nothing has worked so far. I have to admit that this may be a lifelong issue and that my knees will always be an obstacle to being too active. But maybe it’s also my body telling me it’s not going to bounce back when I put it through the wringer and I should take care of it more overall. The past few months, I’ve been doing very moderate cardio and giving myself a break whenever I could feel the knee clicking or when I find it folding on its own while walking.

My body has its limitations but it’s been with me through a lot. It has expanded, shrunk, became bruised, scarred, but it bears all my history. It knows me and even when I’m not the biggest fan of it (big, dammit), it hasn’t given up on me yet. I recently noticed a very noticeable scar on my arm from mistakenly grazing our gate a few years ago has faded to almost nothing. So while the reminder is still there, it doesn’t have to be a glaring sign of what I’ve been through (much like my other scars). And that’s all right.

So what are your current limitations?