#& also the possible implication that she was never into mariano to begin with but was marrying him for the family’s sake *head in my hands*

[the-meme-monarch]

sorry I’m not done thinking abt encanto. isabela is ace i think

[sareally]

Getting Lost Somewhere New - Thoughts?

Article by: Yumi Mariano

Somewhere Only We Know by Keane

          I walked across an empty land           I knew the pathway like the back of my hand           I felt the earth beneath my feet           Sat by the river, and it made me complete

          Oh, simple thing, where have you gone?           I'm getting old, and I need something to rely on           So tell me when you're gonna let me in           I'm getting tired, and I need somewhere to begin

Have you ever been lost? Have you ever lost something important to you? We often lose things. We lose our favorite shirt, or our car keys. We lose friends and loved ones. We lose grasp of our purpose in life. We lose sight of the things that make us happy. When we embark on trips, when we travel, we get lost. We get lost in thought. We get lost in wonder when we go on journeys to unfamiliar places.

This year, I am going to embark on a once in a lifetime journey. I will be entering a new environment, on my own, as a participant of the Junior Term Abroad Program. Living in a foreign country without my family will surely be an eye-opening experience. This will not be the first time I travel, but it will be the first time I will travel alone, making it a journey unlike any I have ever had before. It can definitely be scary, immersing myself in something I have no clue about. I feel scared. I have never been placed in a situation like this. I am leaving the comforts of home, which I knew “like the back of my hand.” Instead, I am immersing myself in something new, something I have never experienced before.

Whenever I travel, I usually bring the things that I cannot live without. I bring things that I use every day. In relation to Kahneman’s article, my System 1 and System 2 were put into action as I decided what to bring on my trip. My first instinct, or what my System 1 told me, was to bring my ring because I never take it off and I use it every day. My grandmother originally owned it. When she passed away, the ring was left to my mother. Around 4 years ago, my mother passed it on to me. Since then, I have worn it every day. This ring has already become a part of my identity, to the point that I feel empty without it. My System 1 would always alarm me when I forget to wear it. I need to have it because it has become a part of my daily routine. It’s automatic for me to look for the ring and make sure I’m wearing it. My system 2 is what makes me remember that this ring is significant for me, and I end up looking for it, making sure it is not lost. Digging deeper, once I thought about it, I realized how significant this ring is to me. My System 2 assigns meaning and memories behind wearing my ring.I then realized, that the ring became a symbol of my family’s love for me. How much I value my ring is a reflection of how much I value my family. Family is a huge part of my life, and I view a healthy relationship with my family as a part of my well-being. I know that I will dearly miss my family when I leave for JTA. Anticipating the feeling of home sickness, I want to have something that is like a piece of my family with me. When I feel lonely, seeing it will remind me of the love they have for me. Their love that will not fade, no matter where I go.

Since I brought something with me, I would also leave something behind to my family so they will not forget me. I would leave my dance paws with my family. Dance paws are what contemporary dancers use to protect their feet when they dance. For context, I have been a dancer my whole life. I started dancing ballet at the age of two. When I was 16, I joined a contemporary dance team called Raw Elements Dance PH. The very first piece we performed for an audience was entitled “I Was Here.” I will leave behind my dance paws for my family because first, it will remind them of me and my love for dance. Second, because the message of the piece I first performed was that “I was here. I lived. I loved.” A lot of the message of the dance is being remembered for something. It’s about someone who wants to make sure that they made an impact on the people they interacted with. “I want to leave my footprints in the sands of time, know there was something that I left behind.” The lyrics can be taken literally, like through System 1, in the context of you actually leaving something tangible behind, which in this case are my dance paws. The lyrics can also mean that you want to figuratively leave an impression or make a difference, through System 2.

Sadly, it is a reality that most things fade, that things are lost and forgotten. Based on my personality, I am the type of person who gets easily affected when I feel forgotten. I often get depressed when I feel left out or neglected. It then becomes possible, in the situation I face, for JTA to be a trigger of negative emotions. Upon setting foot in the new country, I will have little to no friends. I have felt lonely and friendless before. As I have discovered in Mind, Body, and Emotion by Williams, Teasdale, Segal, and Kabat-Zinn, being in a new environment without many friends or familiar faces may push me to feel the same patterns of thought with a traumatizing experience in High School.This experience happened in the past with my barkada in High School. There was one girl whom I could not seem to get along with. She would often backstab me. I ended up fighting with her. She would deliberately make me feel left out of the group by excluding me in the conversations and uninviting me from their hang outs. This made me feel like I was unwanted, that I did not have true friends. The danger here is that the pattern might trigger the emotions I felt during this difficult time of my life, to resurface. I cannot allow this new JTA experience to suck me down into the same vortex of negative emotions. The similar environment you are in triggers your memories. There is a cycle that triggers these bad memories, and has the capacity to suck us into a spiral of depression. The thinking patterns and moods that we experience in childhood are highly likely to return in the present. That is why our unhappiness is amplified, because they are accompanied by feelings of inadequacy in the past. Now, the question for me is, how do I avoid this?

This experience changed many things about how I view life. I think it would also be good not to be too negative. Like for example, if people accidentally leave me out, I can jump to conclusions and believe the worst right away. Interpretation is a large part of the emotional process. If we have negative interpretations of things, we are more likely to feel depressed and sad. Being able to control or be more aware of how you interpret things that happen in your environment, especially when interacting with other people, you can lessen unnecessary stress. Looking to deeply into the situation can do more harm than good. Negative thoughts can plunge us into depression more. Sometimes it’s all in our heads, the criticism that we give to ourselves. Our thoughts have an effect our mood, and our bodies. Being more mindful about what we think about will help. Applying the concept of rumination, often times we think that we need to dwell on our problems in order to fix them. Dwelling on our problems only makes them worse, according to the research on the principle of rumination. Using the story of “Spilt Milk” as an example, it is not a good idea to water down the spilt milk, because it will only look the same and become bigger. This may only perpetuate the cycle of feeling like we are not good enough. We keep trying to fix it. That might exactly be the wrong approach, because doing so will only immerse us more deeply into negative thoughts. We probably do not have the answers to our problems either. Basically, don’t dwell on a problem. We’re trying to get rid of it but we don’t realize that we are only making the problem bigger, and rumination backfires. We may not be able to change our initial or automatic System 1 reaction to these sad feelings, but we can always choose how to address our feelings. Becoming more aware of these patterns and triggers can help us apply mindfulness when faced with depression.

How we choose to be mindful and how we address our personal feelings are related to our loob. Yet, with loob, there also exists a labas. Labas deals with the people and environments we are placed in. As Hermans has eloquently put it, I think we need to have a balance between the open and closed self to be well. We need to research on the flexibility and resilience of the self because globalization is bringing more problems that the self needs to adapt to. We need to be open to new experiences but at the same time remember our values and culture that make up our identity. Hold on to who we are, but not close ourselves off to the experiences and opinions we will encounter in a new environment, in the context of JTA. “Self and culture are not mutually exclusive but mutually inclusive,” said Hermans.

Planting the seeds of awareness is essential to understand the inner workings and depth of our loob. Being aware then makes an impact on how we handle the environment around us, the labas. Part of my new definition of well-being now is that I don’t rely too heavily or overthink too much about whether people remember me or not. I need to be comfortable standing on my own. I need to be okay alone, so that I can also enjoy the company of my friends when I am around them. I shouldn’t be afraid to get lost, because by getting lost, we also have the opportunity to be found.

Sources:

Hermans, H. (2015). Human development in today’s globalizing world: Implications for self and identity. In L. Jensen (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Ch. 3, pp. 28-42). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Kahneman, D. (2011). The characters of the story. In Thinking, fast and slow (Ch.1, pp. 19-30). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Williams, M., Teasdale, J., Segal, Z., & Kabat-Zinn, J. (2007). Part I: Mind, Body, and Emotion. In The mindful way through depression: Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness (pp. 11-49). New York: The Guilford Press.