Merry Christmas! 🎄✨

So I took my time to write today as my head’s been an awful jumble of things. I’ve been feeling the holiday blues fairly lately, and I’ve been trying to finish a paper too that I thought was due this week but was in fact due last week. 😱 I hope my good professor forgives me for this mishap that I don’t even want to try to make excuses for. I’ve been too tired to even fight things. Haha.

So yah, that’s how the year has been—- an unending chase of many many things. With me helplessly watching my life transform in fire, like it was some goddamned work of art. Ahhh yes, there’s a meme for that:

And I catch myself in shadowed corners, very regularly these days, collecting holy and muted tears that escape the turbulence of my heart. I guess at thirty five, you learn to stop, and sit, and honor the whole purging exercise. You also learn to not ask yourself a lot of questions anymore, and you are mostly just resigned to let that stinging stream of tears make sense of the ambivalence of everything. As if there was a choice to it really.

“Merry Christmas, Aze!” 🥺 I told myself wistfully while packing my bags for home the other day.

I’m not the one to bring my own struggles with me around, I’ve been really so good (and trained) at keeping them in good sized boxes in my head, sealed enough for time and life to hand them proper judgments thereof. But they’ve been ruthlessly popping out of their neat piles and stacks lately, and I’m most often caught up frozen wherever, uselessly looking at my own struggles, shooting out of corners like confetti. 😵

Early this year, Pops had a bad prognosis and needed urgent and major medical care. We had to reset all our plans and adjust our lives to make room for all the things that went with treatment needs. I had to go full on eldest sibling mode and I honestly did not know what to do or how we’d go about things. For months, I’d walk around in a daze, distracted, lost and confused, not sure about the family decisions I’ve been uncertainly putting in on the table. Of course you would not have seen concerning signs of those if you saw me on those days, but really, I was awfully scared and pretty much exhausted for my own good.

There were a lot of other absurd things that happened in that same span of months too, talk about raining and pouring; it was an avalanche. And there was also talk of moving and changes, and I still had school requirements to complete. By the last quarter of the year, I moved to a new place and had to stretch myself a little bit more to make way for everything.

As a person of the universe, the main theme I reckon I had to willingly sport was trust— unrelenting and humble trust in things greater than me. My constant prayers were for God to grant me enough patience and fortitude to get by, and for the love in my heart to not die or run out.

If anything, I’d like to hug myself tightly for showing up everyday, and trying my best. I guess we’re all wired to try our best after all, and there should be some very proper yearend congratulations in order for all of us, for just making it through and to December.

Please give yourself a nice warm hug too. 🥳😌

“Merry Christmas, Aze!” I tell myself tonight, while writing this.

My heart is still kinda blue, and it’s alright really. I think I needed this year to happen.

And I’m grateful for the glimmers that surround the blues— a loving and supportive family, wonderful friends, orgmates and officemates, and packets of light everywhere. I’ve been gifted with the presence of as much people as I need in this life, I guess.

And I know in my heart that despite it all, there will always be enough light and love to give.

Happy Christmas, my friends! 🎄💖🫶🏻