2025-05-01

Two weeks of absence was due to an unplanned break. I haven't been well since the 12th of April and everything just stared going downhill from there.

It stared with a sore throat and the uneasiness of everyday living stared to kick in. My mind was in shambles, unable to think clearly and function at work. All my deliverables keep getting pushed back. My saving grace was that there were no hard deadlines set on my current workload. But I developed a bad habit of putting things off. Some unwritten paragraphs started to accumulate due to a rising uncertainty at the back of my mind. Uncertainties regarding the future of my career and the trajectory that I would like to propel myself towards. Couple that with an intensifying fever and looming dizziness, I cracked and fell off the wagon.

I took two days off from work that became a six-day vacation because of the Lenten season. I was off on Tuesday and Wednesday because of flu and it was difficult to recover with the summer heat also peaking during those times. My body was steaming hot as well as my surroundings after the clock struck twelve. Everything around me including me was blazing. I did everything I could to recover inside the house. One glass of water almost every hour allowed me to get back on my feet on Friday. Still, my mind was hazy to the point that I have abandoned thinking and just went straight up consumption mode.

I watched 10 films in a span of five days. Mostly catching up to the most recent films that were released from the past year and revisiting genres that I have been watching less of, especially folk horror and just straight up foreign drama. It made me relive my undergrad days when I'll just be able to lie down in my room with my doors locked and watching films back to back, enough for me to average 3 movies per day. The cinematic immersion was back, at least in a sense that it allowed me to actively engage even on the slowest paces of the narratives. Once again, I was able to savor every actor's tiniest body expressions in the absence of a dialogue. I watched another experimental and conceptual film, which is "Interruption" by Yorgos Zois. The intellectual curiosity was once again alive in me, casually breezing through postmodern cinema as I used to.

Scorsese's "The Irishman" didn't hit me that well, though. It was the most dragging movie I had watched during that break perhaps because it is a supposed deconstruction of the mob films, which are I am not fond of. But I did watch the whole 3 hours of it, with a bit of intermission to douse the feeling of being burdened by my time I had invested watching it.

After the short vacation, I was back at work without my mind intact. I might have floated through that week without meaningful progress. Except, I did finish a document but I didn't feel like it was a progress because it was an overdue task that was one of the things that I've kept putting off.

Just the other day, I've already requested to have a one-on-one meeting with my manager to talk about my low productivity at work. It was a meeting that I initiated because I thought I owe this conversation to my manager. My explanations were well-received and I was able to request to move my work schedule to an earlier shift.

The underpinning weakness of my mind is perhaps also the dwindling spirit inside of me. I feel more tired than ever in thinking that taking the right way to do things is such a Herculean task. It is possible that socialization and negotiation isn't really my forte but my recent conversations with people and family members makes it all the more difficult when anger, frustration, and lashing out is never an option. The feelings are there but it is always imperative for me to hold them back in real time and pragmatically approach each task at hand with proper diplomacy and tact.

Realizing this, it makes me all the more resentful of those who are too easy to give in to anger and hopelessness, especially when they respond to any kind of struggles with inaction and pure emotions. I feel envious that they are able to give in to any emotions. It makes me feel like I am making it much harder for myself to restrict my actions because of these self-made principles that I impose on myself. I needed to struggle with these temptations, as I call it. To witness how easy it is for people to fall into the trap of impulse is the cost of walking towards my own idea of righteousness of virtue. It has been taking a toll on my perception of the world and of myself.

But carrying on is the only correct response in the midst of this difficulty.