My Strong Opinion

On humility

/ iamsupercarla / Leave a comment

There have been way too many things happening at work and I have to admit, I have not been handling it well. I’ve been brave enough to divide my time with school, and now, the workload from both aspects are just getting to be too much to handle.

Let’s put it this way: when I’m in school, I think about work. When I’m at work, I think about school. I am neither here nor there, and the office gossip and drama do not really make it any easier.

However, I cannot deny the lessons learned in the past couple of weeks. The implosion of a hot tempered personality has vindicated so many people in our team (and by team, I mean team that knows that personality’s evil ways). I don’t even know how to properly articulate what has been going on in the office without implicating myself.

Is this really the way to work or operate in the office scenario? Always watching your back for people that may stab it? It’s weird, I thought quitting show business had saved me from the drama. Evidently, it is a plague on all houses.

Looking back, there was only one thing lacking between the initiation and the disorderly exit of it all: humility. Once you start walking around as if the world owes you something, you start burning bridges, you begin to demean people, you ignite flames that could have easily been managed in the first place. As a professional — or rather as a human being — humility should never leave your body. After all, whatever it is that you have now, the world gave to you. Sure, hardwork cannot be discounted, but only humble work is rewarded greatly.

With that, I hope to lessen posts of my work dissatisfaction. I have never failed myself at this scale for so long, but at least I have people believing in me, rallying behind me, and a certain kind of faith that never waivers, that always believes in justice, where prayers are always answered.

That seems to be a rock solid foundation I can boost myself up from.

I hope your month is turning out to be better than mine. Past the halfway mark, I hope to catch a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel.

Humility

You knew better.

/ iamsupercarla / Leave a comment

Dear You,

In all honesty, your two-facedness is something I didn’t quite anticipate.  In 2009, you were the quiet one, the one who reads the Word for lunch, the one who took jokes and jeers in stride.  You were the one who asks if anyone else would like something from McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts, or anything that you can bring back to Manila whenever you’d go home to your hometown.  What you have become is quite unprecedented.

I really didn’t anticipate your backstabbing ways.  But then, I should have known we all have our dark sides.  I should have known that we have two wolves in all of us.  I just didn’t think you would be the kind of person who will feed the bad one.

Is it the smoke up your ass?  Is it their constant fawning over the work you do?  Is it the way they worship your work?  It has to be that right?  After all, you do pick up their slack.  You are the one completing everything that’s supposed to be their workload.  You are the doormat.  So you have to be part of that click.

And a part of it, you have become.  It’s so disappointing.  But then who am I to expect loyalty?  Who am I to expect some semblance of identity?  I just graduated with you, finished the training with you.  We probably studied together once, but that’s it.  I have mocked you endlessly, but then, you have mocked me to my face too.  Our relationship was limited to that.

Was I wrong to assume that you have a sense of fealty?  After all, we went through the same hardships.  I do not expect you to know the inner workings of my twisted mind and harpooned feelings, but at the very least, as someone who went through the same kind of test as you, I just expected you would at least defend me.  Or not add fuel to the fire.  Instead, you contributed to the senseless and baseless babble of my so-called elitism and spoiled-ness.  You contributed to the preconceived notions others had of me, notions that I have always thought you knew was wrong.  You and I met way before all these, after all.  You knew me way before all these.  As it turned out, you are not the ally I thought you were.

I only hope that I am the lone victim of your backstabbing ways.  I still have use to you; I am still your lone link for matters that require his confirmation.  And that’s how I’ve come to be for you — a person who will entertain your bitch-filled lunches, your passes to a click that “accepted” you, your shining example of what not to be.  But you want to know the real sad story here?

Never in a million years would I do the same thing to you.

May you sleep soundly at night, you backstabbing two-faced lying low-level ass kisser.

Baggage check

/ iamsupercarla / 1 Comment

We all have complicated histories. When was the last time your past experiences informed a major decision you’ve made?

The Moment

This moment also happens to be the saddest moment of my life.  My father died on 21 January 2013, 12 days after my birthday.  We buried him 6 days later.  It wasn’t until his body was buried six feet under did I take a close look at all my relationships:  the one I’m with, my friends, my family.  It was a rude awakening.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t good to me.  It wasn’t that he wasn’t kind.  It was the lost wonder, the humility that comes with feeling a sense of disbelief that this person is with you.  The how-did-I-get-so-lucky feeling.  The I-cannot-believe-she-chose-me feeling.  That one went out the window quite a long time ago, and it took three wheelbarrows of dirt and a hole in the ground to make myself finally admit that.

I have lost touch with the oldest of friends so much that if they did not insist on being present in my life, I won’t insist on their presence too.  That was one of the worst decisions I’ve made, because at my lowest low, my friends were the first one to rally with me.  I am blessed.

My brothers were hesitant to depend on me, but when our father passed, they knew they can count on me for anything.  Some may say this kind of dependence should not be present anymore when you get older, but I do not mind.  I want my brothers to need me as much as I need them.

I realized too that the strongest person in the room — actually in most rooms — is either my mother or my grandmother.  I can only hope to grow up as strong willed as them.

So… I packed my bags for a quick staycation with my best friend and sister Marga, a quick trip to Cebu with another friend, went back to school, worked my butt off, and reclaimed the love that was never lost in the first place.

It is sad that my father cannot see that I am at my happiest, even though work sucks most days and school is hard.  Still, my heart has never been happier, more content, and more at home with it belonging to one man and to all the people I have pulled back in my life.

Oh how glorious it is to be loved by the man who wishes to carry your baggage with you. <3