The Wring Out of Pent-Up Emotions

17 August 2010

Anger consumes me. When it does, does it mean that God still has a room in my heart? Oh the sorrows. I could remember how much I prayed to the Lord that I want to be of service of Him in anyway. I am a very cheerful person, in nature and so I agreed to what He gave me.

One night, I was awakened by an overwhelming flood of so much grief I felt that a part of all the sorrows of the world was placed upon my shoulders. And I found that God delegated me to suffer for that moment in exchange for relief for other people’s sufferings as He does. I have a tendency to feel for other people in a high extent that I don’t feel like being overtly happy as I really do if I have sufficiently been aware of how many had suffered so intensely. I felt I was giving Him delight in doing so. I want to alleviate other people’s suffering. I know that that’s what He does too, after all joy is the serious business of heaven as C.S. Lewis states.  After all, we are one now; I am to feel for Him too. If we humans have the capacity to carry in our hearts such great agony, how much more could the God who is beyond us can? Maybe it may be considered a fantasy but it is my reality. I believe that He wanted me to feel in His behalf what sin has brought into our lives, how much He has been involved with us to suffer that much over and over again when we shouldn’t, much more should He since after the Cross. But we are very vulnerable beings, we keep on heaping upon ourselves suffering, paying for something already sold. His love for us makes Him ready to suffer again for us not to feel much more pain. He as my partner, shared with me how it was to live His life – how it is to live for love.

Today, much more than ever, I am filled with anger - anger for everybody, those who have died, those who were not even conceived. I am filled with hate. I wanted to be mad at the Lord, even to Him, after all I still owe Him my honesty. Look what He has done, in my anger, He used my anger, to proclaim Himself. Even in my anger He calls me to His presence. Even in the wastefulness that I am in, or I have become, He still deems me worthy of being in His presence. How could He love me so utterly and yet how could I not feel it and respond to it accordingly? Is my heart shattered?

Have I no right to be angry with so much injustice and suffering? Why should I blame the Lord for my incapacity to feel or at times my being overburdened with other people’s lives? There is misappropriation of everything. My eyes have been conditioned by the continual ritualistic exposure to the ever progressing gap between the rich and the poor in every way. I am very much guilty of this. It seems very natural to estimate or to measure people according to the money they have or that they could spend, even if that is only what they assume to be. How could I change a system even I am guilty of employing even if I loathe it? I could hate everybody. Why can’t everybody avail spa treatments especially when they’re on a thousand peso complete head to toe combo (hair, facial, scrub, bleach, nails and eyebrow shaping)? Aren’t movies for everybody, what type then would the deaf be able to understand? Do they get discounts in cinemas too? All unjust deaths, merciless killing, undeserved misery, dehumanizing destitution, self-deprecating oppression, greed, corruption, selfishness, lies. But this is better – being angry and feeling it subside. At least I do feel something.

I do feel something. I am in deep shame, how much more thick-faced can I get when I go to my closest friend’s debut party with nothing but myself, eating up all I want, not giving anything in return? Her giving me food good for three days and letting me experience digesting food I never would’ve afforded to treat myself to. My indulging her wish to drink (alcohol of course) on her first ‘legal’ night, dissolving half of my allowance for a drink which I despise. Allergies from alcohol, how suitable. After all I’ve always cursed it, biologically my body also fights it. Why should it have been here on earth when it alters your consciousness and makes too much people die, families break and dreams drown to oblivion. How would I not know, it created a gap between my father and me, my father and my mother and consequently my father and my sister. It isolates my father from our family. Not that he was a drunkard and that he resorted to hurting us, he never did hurt us, me and my sister not, but our mother, yes, in his unconsciousness. Too much burden from a good man - a generous and loving father. It was something he never would’ve done if he was himself.

I never loved him much. I just respected his being my father. Fathers were supposed to be respected. And then I knew. We were in deep debt, adding to the debt I owe as a citizen of the Philippines.

My father stopped working for a while to be with us as we grew, applying for a loan which was later on granted. A debt which has been growing with us too. The debt we carry on our backs on every breath. Then, know that I’m in the university and my father had to leave again as an OFW, I realized how good a man he was. How fortunate I am that God granted me a father like him. I finally realized that he does love us though he was never the affectionate type. I hated to have him leave because of me. I felt that was the case. Getting a college degree is expensive even if it’s UP after the 300% ToFI which was first experienced by our batch. The pressure was on me. It never left me. My relatives, both on the left and the right, my dad’s and my mom’s were both against it. It wasn’t practical they would say. “Why don’t you just grab the FEU scholarship, after all it would mean lesser expenses.”  “They’re such a show-off. Their eldest isn’t that smart. She’s not worth the price.” “You’d better be a laude, your parents have worked so hard for your degree.”

And here I am. I just squandered my money on liquor, my father’s vice, my nemesis, his only flaw aside from his willingness to try new things and invest in his dreams though plans were not very much clear. He is a visionary but he wanted what he thought to be done at once, it fails because he hasn’t planned enough for it to work. But his intentions were good. Always was, even if this trait of his caused us to spend beyond our means to catch up on paying beyond what we’ve spent. He was an extravagant man as he was naturally generous.

Very much not what I am. I wasn’t able to give, what I have is less than what I need. I pray I have room to spare. I pray that I find more to share in what I have though I couldn’t make it fit my needs. There was stingy me, misallocating her money on the enemy and not giving her friend a decent debut gift. Then, not reacting or just hearing but not sympathizing with her mother who is presentl y having qualms with the emotionally coping impaired father.

Instead of studying, I partied, even if just this once, forgetting all that I have to do as a student - papers to pass, readings to learn by heart. What’s more frustrating is that I have finally been shown that I could not learn everything all at once. It takes time.

This studies. I have had two incomplete subjects which I would have both completed after this sem ends and I am very far off the laude cut-off. Besides, it appears that I even didn’t even learn anything from what has been taught within this torturingly priced college education other than being more bitter and ending up more of a loser each day. How could I speak to my parents about this? I know they don’t expect but that’s what they both deserve from me.

Then here I am again, apathetic me, not being conscientious, diligent and perseveringly hard-working enough to do what I am supposed to do even if only my responsibility as a student when my mother has been tormented in every way by those she love most – us, her family, which she works hard for day and night, forgetting that she has a life to live, defining her life as that filled with toil and forbearance. My impatient father has been reverting to my mother his subconscious frustrations, as I put it, for our seemingly incessant and ever urgent and increasing demand for money which he should’ve been doing something about. His helplessness and seeming uselessness as a father to salvage his family from the embezzlement he has brought them into has caused him to vent it to those closest to him, especially my mother. Then here we are good-for-nothing  children with the priceless golden values of their wisdom which did us no good, did not always prevent us from committing sin, not even drove us to be courageous and to stand up for what we believe as right, our faith or our dreams and to act in favor of the greater good. All it was was for the sake of knowing, and having something to remember as a lesson our parents taught us.

My life is in bits. I have nothing I can say I am good at. I am not best in anything. I understand I will never be.  So many people are talented and why is it that some people seem to have all the talents? My relationships hold because the people stay, not because of my efforts to make them to. My relationships seem all superficial and lasting but not deep enough that I would not keep on remembering memories of us being together but of us actually making new ones to add to our memories.

I feel differently. So, oppressed and yet still entirely fortunate. I still am thankful to the Lord that it does not end in here. I still have time to change all that I find lacking, fill in what I find wanting. I can still create and help and dream for the world. I can still accomplish raising the level of humankind. I may not be the best in anything but that doesn’t mean I would stop trying to improve myself from what I am now when there’s so much more that needs to be done. If all the worrying I had would be paid or all the suffering I imposed to myself were to be converted to money, or if it was a measure of something of value, I would’ve been part of the rich elite. But with all that I’ve seen and learned beyond what I’ve paid for in UP, I am in the position to claim my reliability and to advice other people despite my not yet considerably wise age of eighteen that both of those would never be of help in achieving anything worth pursuing. They would only be burdens we will be carrying when we shouldn’t,  like stones on our backpack on a hiking trip. And besides, I am not to carry the world on my shoulders because my name is not Atlas. I am entitled to live and fulfill every creation’s purpose – to be in praise of the Lord in every moment in every way one can and that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t experience fun. Instead, it means I should find joy and experience it the best way I could every moment I live without compromising my purpose in life.