I Got A New One For Ya

"I'm content, I'm not bitter, I'm happy. I reached all my goals."

-Momma Bear Manalili

Look out world, i aint gotta worry about momma bear. Commence the fuckery!

Sasuga!

I spent most of 2015 heartbroken and depressed. Mind you, I never was diagnosed with depression by a doctor or anything, I just had a lot of symptoms you see in someone who's depressed. (As an aside, I do believe it's disrespectful to people who are going through depression to jokingly say you're depressed, if you know fully well that you're not.)

Anyway, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. I didn't know how to deal with things. Every day and every week felt like a struggle. I felt like I was drowning. Any chance I got to grab my breath, I took. I felt out of control and it was stressful.

To complicate things, I was experiencing burnout at work. It was weird because I love my job and I love coming to work. Anyone I work with will tell you that I always walk around smiling like a fucking weirdo.

However, I was working too hard. I didn't take a real vacation from June 2014(Copa Del Mundo en Rio De Janeiro, holla!) til Christmas 2015(Philippines). I would both dread and love coming to work. On one hand, work was my safe haven, where I was good at what I did, everyone loved me, and I didn't feel so much like I was drowning and gasping for air. On the other hand, I needed a fucking break.

I learned that I'm a fucking weirdo because I would show up to work even if I was sick. I would rather be at work being productive and helping people, than at home JOKOing and playing video games. I'm so selfish that I would rather put my coworkers at risk of being sick than stay home, call in sick, and recover. Really weird, contradictory feelings here.

I also started to feel the phenomena (there's gotta be a name for it but I can't think of it) of "I go to work, I come home, I pay my bills, and that's my entire week. I don't do anything meaningful to me aside from my career. I felt like I was living to work instead of working to live."

That really bugged me because having been blessed enough to have traveled around to many places, one of the main things I've learned is that many Americans work too hard and don't put enough focus on enjoying the other things in life. There's more to my life than my career. Somehow I turned into someone I spent so long avoiding.

There's a theory called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that I've always been interested in. I'm probably going to butcher this(we dont like to fact check too much on this blog, lol), but the gist of it is we as humans need to meet our basic needs before we can address bigger, grand scheme kinds of things. It's imagined as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are the absolute basics we need to survive, like feeling secure enough to know that no animal is going to come and bite my head off in the next 30 seconds. Once I feel secure enough with that, I need to feel safe enough to take care of basic bodily functions like pissing and shitting. Once I get that taken care of, the next level up is something like building meaningful relationships with others. You can't reach one level until every other level below it is taken care of.

Eventually, you reach the self-actualization stage where you can start thinking about philosophy, mankind, earth, and big picture theories. I feel like I was able to reach this stage in college. I didn't necessarily have my shit together, but I was taking care of myself enough to think a lot about  random, crazy things. Coincidentally, a lot of those things ended up in this blog.

Anyway, during my drowning period, I never really thought about the crazy things that I would when I was still in college. I was too busy worrying about what the next hour, day, week had in store with me and how I was going to deal. It was really weird how every hour, day, week would blend into the next. I was just showing up to places without really being present. Next thing I know, the day is over. The week is over. Jesus Christ, six fucking months have passed, and I dunno what I really have to show for it.

So now I can say with confidence that I'm working my way out of that weird slump. I'm a little disappointed because I don't get to blog about anything that I feel is worthy of posting when I'm in that weird drowning state. But now your boy is BACK and I's gon' keep posting that provocative and interesting SHIET for yalls(and mostly my) reading entertainment!

Learn from each other

I've talked before about how important it is to consider who you talk to first about something. I'll find the link later and link it to this post(or maybe I won't! Fuck you! lol). Like when you come back from a first date and start talking to your friends about it, they help you digest and figure out what happened and how to deal with what happened. The person you choose to share that experience with has a good amount of say on how you feel about that first date.

On a semi-related note, I've seen advice that you should be careful about venting to your friends and relatives about your significant other. You don't want to tell your best friend about each and every fight you have with your significant other, because fighting and conflict is natural in any relationship. Eventually you're going to tell your best friend about 500 different fights, and your best friend might start to think your significant other is a fucking douchebag, when in reality you guys are just going through the typical growing pains that any couple goes through.

So you don't want to tell any one person about each and every fight that you and your SO go through, great. But how do you go about it so you're not just holding everything in? I guess the best way to go about it is to spread the wealth and go to different people each time. But what if you only want advice(or simply to be heard) from one or two people? Everyone else gives you shitty advice or is a bad listener? What then?

That's an interesting decision that any boyfriend or girlfriend has to make. I dunno why this interests me so much but it does.

In other news, new Majid Jordan in a couple of weeks, new Kanye in February, and new Mayer later this spring. Let's. Fucking. GO.