Work, therapy, and recovery

Reading paths / 12 stations / 9,019 words / 41 min contemplative traversal

  1. 01 A Preface to the Apocrypha
  2. 02 The point of it all
  3. 03 What I Learned in Therapy
  4. 04 The breakdown
  5. 05 Perhaps a Prelude
  6. 06 Consequences of Belief
  7. 07 A Little Breathing Room
  8. 08 Seasons of the Mind
  9. 09 One thought too many
  10. 10 A month in the trenches
  11. 11 re_Locations
  12. 12 Seeing Myself
Plate / Work, therapy, and recovery
Hop 01 A Preface to the Apocrypha note / 4 min

It has been a while since I dragged myself to write any sentences removed from my immediate reality. I am writing this on a Sunday and I immediately feel the urge to stop. In the past three years, I’ve been approaching writing through the lens of a technical writer. The text should be bare and often without finesse. Vernacular, simple, and as-a-matter-of-fact sentences that are meant to communicate complex software…

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Tangent this note links to 2025-01-17 · On the death of David Lynch, a station on Film as philosophy.

Tangent this note links to A Return to Form, a station on Language and the unsayable.

5 logs
Hop 02 The point of it all event / 3 min

>"Writing requires its own incarnation – hand–eye coordination, and some form of technology for making marks on a surface. We take a part of ourselves and turn it into physical inscriptions which outlive us. So that a future reader can breathe, in the words of Seamus Heaney, ‘air from another life and time and place’. When we write, we give ourselves a second body." > >— Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (2019)

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Tangent this note links to A Return to Form, a station on Language and the unsayable.

Hop 03 What I Learned in Therapy musing / 6 min

It has been four years since I started and stopped going to therapy. With just a few sessions (due to financial limitations), I did not expect to learn a lot about myself and my behavioral tendencies that kept me within the confines of my hostile mind.

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Tangent this note links to 2025-01-17 · On the death of David Lynch, a station on Film as philosophy.

Tangent this note links to A Return to Form, a station on Language and the unsayable.

1 log
Hop 04 The breakdown event / 2 min

I was working as a content writer for an English proficiency test company. I was doing pretty well at my job, still having that pride I know I am good at what I do while enjoying the process of writing. In my head, that job was the best thing I could get after breaking away from my dream of writing creatively for a living. This was the moment when I began to abandon the idea of creating a career within the local art…

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Hop 05 Perhaps a Prelude event / 2 min

sigh another preface.

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2 logs
Hop 06 Consequences of Belief · The observing 'I' and the architecture of solitude musing / 3 min

I may have reached the point where it has become difficult to capture the feeling of experiencing things for the first time. At the age of 27, I am feeling a kind of unfamiliar loneliness, to say that it might be possible that I am carrying a type of solitude that grows bigger than what I can handle.

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Tangent this note links to Declarations_Of faith, a station on Distance, faith, and loss.

13 logs
Hop 07 A Little Breathing Room event / 3 min

The last sunset of 2023 seen from Mandaluyong. Photo taken by the author.

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43 logs
Hop 08 Seasons of the Mind · Nesting ideas and thriving in mental abundance thought / 2 min

I am trying to practice a form of discipline that would allow me to optimize the quality of my thoughts while employing restraint and letting loose. In the next few days (or even weeks), I would retain the practice of trying to "nest" an idea where I will be leaving it here as a passing thought that is removed from my daily logs. I have observed that since doing the daily logs, my mind is becoming less restricted to…

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53 logs
Hop 09 One thought too many · Gravity, grace, and the spreadsheet event / 6 min

The plan was the kind I could say out loud and feel steadier for having said, which is perhaps why I said it to my wife more than once: we would move only after I was regularized, six months into the new job, once the work was secure and some of the loans we had been carrying since Bobbi died had gotten smaller, and not a day before. That initial plan was what was ideal at the time, because I did not want to…

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Tangent this note links to In Praise of Deliberate Decisions, a station on Becoming a self.

3 logs
Hop 10 A month in the trenches · The knot of incompatible selves event / 5 min

I gave myself one month.

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Hop 11 re_Locations event / 4 min

It has been a month dedicated to preparing all the things that we need to move out of the metro. Packing rarely used items in the apartment: some clothes in boxes, disassembled light accessories, some musical instruments collecting dust, some words that I have told to my family about the idea of me leaving, and other memories of the city that allowed me to keep going this far. It is liberating, to say the least. It…

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Hop 12 Seeing Myself · The triadic self and the quarantine mirror thought

I have been consuming a lot of media recently. From books to videos, games and music. I also just went through a 10-day quarantine after catching Covid. The details are completely unrelated.

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