gratitude entry

Going through another transition, and I feel the need to write down all the things I’m grateful for. Things like good friends, probably the most valuable asset in my life right now. I’m the sort of person who’s spent a great part of my life training myself not to need others. It comes with the zeitgeist of the times, I guess, living societies that stress the value of independence.

But life is so much richer when you’re interdependent with other people, when you can stand on your own feet but allow yourselves to need others because it makes them feel like they count.  It’s like saying, here, I’ve made some space for you in my heart, you can come and stay. I was going through a tough time this year when one of my friends told me, “Need me, please need me.” People who care about you want you to give them the chance to be there for you. Likewise.

What would I do without my friends? They’re gold.

I’m also thankful for a positive workplace. How is it that I work with such thoughtful, and amazing people? Their positivity is just amazing. Work is a healing place. I can’t stress how my workmates have played such a huge role in keeping me emotionally healthy and balanced this year. They help me to be a better person every day.

I’m thankful that I’ve really honed my drawing skills this year, and that it was product of my own self-imposed discipline. I feel sharper than I’ve ever been, and I feel as if I’ve finally begun to find my own voice. As an artist, I feel more confident and sure of my identity, and I’m now ready to take that leap and convey true honesty in my work.

I’m grateful I know how to sing. Because singing is always an honest voice, and it’s a beautiful thing to do.

I’m grateful for the influx of creative and like-minded people in my life this year. It’s been a year of chance meetings and forming connections with others on the same path, and when you live a creative lifestyle, you can never get enough of those. Like attracts like. I never want to stop meeting people I can learn from. I hope to flood my life with them.

I’m grateful for the all the unexpected travel I got. I’ve never traveled so much and so far, inwardly and outwardly.

I’m grateful for good skin.

Lastly, I’m grateful for my family. We’re pretty much all on different paths, but always they will be there for me.

gratitude entry #1

This Christmas, instead of focusing on the things I want, I’d rather highlight the things I already have. I’ve decided to write a series of Gratitude Entries, each focusing on one thing I’m grateful for. Consider this to be the first of them:

He is probably the Paredes that people know the least about, owing to the fact that he doesn’t own a blog, isn’t in showbiz or publishing, and has never been on the front cover of a magazine. Not to say he wouldn’t be eligible to be in showbiz or on the cover of a glossy. As a baby, he was the cutest kid ever and nobody was surprised when he grew up to be quite the heart-throb. 

When I was 4-years old and still mortal enemies with my older sister, I remember begging my mom for another sibling . My sister, who never wanted a sibling to begin with was against the idea but was willing to accept if the new sibling was a girl. As an act of opposition, I declared I wanted a boy. Maybe it was just to piss her off, but that was my very first conscious act of defiance in my young life. 

The day my mother was rushed to the hospital in the throes of labor, my sister and I made a wager on the gender of our new sibling. I won but I never got paid my 5 pesos. 

And so we had a new boy sibling, a cute little dumpling that we sometimes dressed in skirts and ribbons much to my father’s chagrin. It was just harmless play and didn’t influence his choice of dress later on in life. We made him laugh, and sometimes we made him cry as a game, being the heartless older sisters we were.

But when my brother arrived into the world, red, wrinkly, and hairy, I was already waiting with open arms, ready to be big sister. During his first year of life, my mom was away overseas for several months, and by the time she came back, she recalled that he had forgotten who she was but in turn, was glued to my side. 

I read him storybooks when he was just 3 days old. I fed him chicken liver on a silver baby spoon.  I amused him with stories I read in school, ones he came to know by heart and ones that he made me repeat over and over again. I carried him around, balancing him on my spindly 5-year old frame. I would placed him on the billiards table and stuff the front of his shirt with billiard balls, which made him laugh. 

When he’d take his afternoon naps, I’d secretly wake him up (unknown to his nanny) so we could go play. When he started going to school and I was tasked with helping him with his homework, I’d secretly do half of it, deceitfully faking his child’s handwriting, so we could finish early and go play.  

I even taught him how to read, although nobody remembers this.

Gone are those days. 

I hit puberty while he was still into Pokemon. I wrestled with the worst of my teenage growing pains while he was just beginning to meet girls in soirees. And while I struggled with the demons of early adulthood, he was focused on his friends and his buzzing social life, as a young man should be. 

It must be hard growing up the youngest,and only boy in the family when your two older sisters have such domineering personalities, and your mother forever wants you to be her little prince. How does one assert his manhood when in the midst of such a dense thicket of femininity, always in danger of being engulfed?

When you live with your family, they become strangers. They’re so close by, it becomes difficult to really see them. The only time the picture becomes clear again is when you see them from a distance. 

Now that I’m leaving home, now that I know a phase in my life is ending I find that I’ve snapped out of the blindness of day to day living and that I’m actually seeing things for the first time in a long time. 

My brother is a young man now. He keeps his distance and I respect that for he must become who he is.  There is a natural order to things, new growth must overtake old growth, and I feel I must give way. 

I see in my brother a compassionate person. He has always been the most kind-hearted out of the 3 of us, so lacking in malice that I often fear that it is far too easy to take advantage of him. Growing up, he was the most affectionate, though manhood inevitably dictates  to young boys that there is a limit on how much affection may be shown. 

I am always so impressed by the patience and gentleness that flows from him so endlessly when he is teaching his guitar students, a patience that I have not acquired despite my being given a 5-year head start in life. 

He is such a naturally like-able person, always the central hub of his group of friends, never without anyone willing to be there by his side and hang out with him. He is a great friend, something I have always envied, being the more introspective and less social one. 

And yet, amongst us 3 siblings, he is probably also the most private, the most hesitant to express himself, content not to let most of his opinions ever be heard. 

He is also one of the funniest people I have ever known, possessing a wry, twisted sense of humor, so politically incorrect, and an irreverence that really, truly shocks me sometimes. And if there’s one person in the world who probably gets my humor most, it’s my brother. 

It is hard to see my brother objectively. How can I look at him and not think of him as a new born wrapped in a blanket, as a toddler learning how to walk, as a little boy with scraped knees, and as an awkward high-schooler. Sometimes I feel they all still exist in him, all rolled together into one. 

But he’s an adult now, and I must learn to see him as such. I think the distance will help. 

And as parting words before I leave the nest, I would like to say that I am grateful for my (not so) little brother.