Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
The funny and often frustrating thing about having adult ADHD — aside from such fun things as executive dysfunction, time blindness, revenge bedtime procrastination, and rejection sensitive dysphoria — is the utter truthfulness of the phrase, “out of sight, out of mind.” Which explains all the open tabs on my browsers, and my meticulously composed calendar and notebook filled with to-do lists, which works better for me than Post-Its.
Still, the unfortunate happens, which I’ve learned to just laugh over. I don’t see you for six months? I’ll forget your name. Your Messenger missive got buried under 20 other messages? Best forgotten. The leftovers in the refrigerator? Does not exist until thrown out a month later, because moldy. The cup of hot cocoa the waiter in the cafe gave to me tonight but was blocked out of sight by my laptop? Invisible until Renz came over and gently nudged it to my line of vision. “Oh, my cocoa!” I responded, and happily finished it.
Currently cleaning the apartment, which means that my ADHD brain is firing all cylinders and getting new ideas, which means that I have to stop once in a while to take notes [or else forget them] or to message someone. This is why it takes me three days to clean my apartment.
At one of my lowest depths in the days of the pandemic, when I was struggling mentally to just live through each day, I was tasked to teach a writing workshop for [bleep]. This was before I was diagnosed, by the way, and was properly medicated. [Or was this after I was diagnosed, but quit medication for more than a year because I thought I didn’t “really” need it? Who knows.]
But I accepted the challenge of a workshop, because the organizer is a very good friend, and I believed in the project. And the project paid. The thing was, the date of the event did not even sink into my consciousness, nor the brief. I forgot all about it. Eve of the first day, I was reminded by my friend that the whole thing was starting the next morning. Fine, I said. I can wing it. That next day, I realized it was to be a writing class with regional languages in mind. Fine, I can wing it, I thought. I've taught a workshop on writing in Binisaya before, anyway. Then when I was finally facing the participants, I realized that they came from all over the Philippines, and Bisaya would not be the primary language of most of them.
Dear God, I don’t know how I got through those three days just winging it — but I actually did supremely well, and their final activity, which involved a performance of some sort, was actually a highlight of the closing program. We even made a zine of their outputs! But I will never recommend doing the same thing to anyone. I was just lucky I had stock knowledge, and a well-spring of bravado and guts.
Please seek help if you feel like you’re flailing. I finally did a few years ago, and my life has been better because of it. [Although I still mostly wing it with life.]
Lately—for the past few years, to be honest—I have sensed a pattern to my TV watching, and it always goes like this: the first season of a show invariably gets me hooked. Maybe it’s the premise that I find intriguing—a man gets into a game of life and death to win a bonanza; a young man finds he has superpowers, and finds himself fighting his father to save the world; a bunch of rich white folk check into an exotic resort not knowing that death for one of them is part of the immersion. Maybe it’s the crispness of the storytelling [hello, Severance or Game of Thrones or Dark], or the world-building is so intricate [hello, The Lord of the Things: The Rings of Power or The Wheel of Time or Dune: Prophecy], or the intrigue of the format is so addicting [hello, RuPaul’s Drag Race or The Traitors US or Survivor] that there’s no way I cannot make myself watch. Maybe it’s the way the characters feel fresh, as though their existence has been meticulously sketched just for me [hello, Dash and Lily]. I can be enthralled by what I find on Netflix, on Disney+, on HBO Max. And I am also a completist, so I consume every episode with the kind of manic energy that can only come from needing—aching—to know what happens next. I can be obsessed with a TV show.
And then the second season rolls around.
Somewhere in the tangle of new characters, shifting allegiances, and increasingly convoluted plot lines, my ADHD-riddled brain begins to short-circuit. Who is this new character again? Why are they suddenly in Westeros? Was this the guy from three episodes ago or someone entirely new? I watch, but I also… don’t. I invariably forget things. I rewind scenes but still miss crucial details. The sharpness of my understanding blurs into the background noise of a world expanding too fast for my neurons to keep up.
So what do I do?
I read recaps. Religiously. I scroll through Vulture like it’s my salvation. I let YouTube videos made by pop culture aficionados to spoon-feed me the details I failed to retain [hello, New Rockstars!]. “Oh, so that’s why Kendall Roy did that,” I mutter to myself. “Oh, so the goats in Yellowjackets are a metaphor.” I have made my peace with this process. It’s a life.
Maybe it’s not just about TV shows. Maybe it’s about how my brain functions in general. The way I navigate the world, consuming fragments of knowledge in non-linear ways, always needing a narrative scaffolding to piece it all together. It’s like being an architect of my own understanding, building with borrowed bricks. But maybe this tendency to need a secondhand interpretation of things I love isn’t about laziness or even incompetence. Maybe it’s something deeper.
Maybe my adult ADHD is a rebellion against a world that refuses to accommodate minds that think in spirals rather than straight lines? Maybe all this neurodivergence is not a curse but a call—to live a creative life, an expressive one. To reject the dull machinations of an artless existence. To understand the world not through memorized facts and formulas, but through emotion, intuition, and an ability to see beauty where others see only the mundane. The inability to sit still or to execute a task so readily, to follow a linear narrative, to adhere to prescribed norms—I don’t think this is a failing. I think it is a refusal to conform to systems that were never designed for people like us in the first place.
My ADHD says: stop stuffing me with useless information. It says: let me live; let me carve out a life that is rich in meaning, in joy, in discovery; let me exist in a way that is fully, beautifully my own.
And maybe that is why I have always clung to art—to film, to books, to music, to TV shows, even with my kind of attention span—because I also like stories that sprawl beyond the confines of syllabi, that resist easy categorization. And yes, maybe I need a roadmap sometimes—a recap, a review, a trusted voice to remind me where we are in the plot—but does that make the journey any less valuable? Or does it simply make it my own?
Perhaps this is why I find comfort in my kind of creative chaos. I do not need to follow a narrative from point A to point B to understand its value. I do not need a perfectly structured essay to tell me that meaning is there, waiting to be unearthed. I am at home in the whirlwind of half-formed thoughts, unfinished projects, and sudden bursts of inspiration that sometimes fade as quickly as they arrive. And that is okay.
Maybe ADHD isn’t a disorder at all. Maybe it’s just an unwillingness to care for the crumbling order of an information age given to fake news and AI-regurgitated narratives. Maybe it’s a refusal to be herded like cattle, an insistence on taking responsibility for the shape of our own lives. Maybe it’s a radical rejection of limitation, of senseless rules. Maybe it is the quiet revolution of those who refuse to be boxed in. Maybe it’s an embrace of something better, something bigger. Maybe it is a way of being that is fluid, dynamic, deeply personal. Maybe it is a different kind of intelligence that does not bow to the rigidity of the world but instead reshapes the world to fit its own rhythms.
This always happens to me with subsequent seasons of a TV show I like after the first one gets me hooked [e.g., Game of Thrones, Severance, etc.]. As I watch the rest of the next seasons, my ADHD brain can no longer quite follow the twists and turns, and the myriad new characters. So what do I do? I read recaps of each episode [usually in Vulture] to have them explain to me what exactly is going on. I’ve made my peace with this. It’s a life.
I was working for a bit but became sleepy, so I went for a nap late in the afternoon. This turned out to be real sleep, only to be woken up to the sounds of Renz coming in to the apartment. I thought it was morning. I asked, “What time is it?” He says, “Ten o’clock.” I was like: Oh no, I overslept for a meeting. I asked, just to make sure: “It’s Wednesday, isn’t it?” He says: “It’s Tuesday.” And I was like: Oh no, Renz is confused about his days. Then I asked, just to be clear: “Is it morning or evening?” He says: “Evening.” I was like: Oh, thank God, but wasn’t I supposed to only take a nap? The endless battle with sleepiness.
Last Monday, January 20, was a day thick with contradictions—a day where reality seemed to embody the peculiarities of a David Lynch film: baffling, surreal, outlandish. Coincidentally, it was the birthday of Lynch himself, who had passed away just days before turning 79. The surreal twist? It was also Martin Luther King Day, a moment ostensibly dedicated to hope and justice, while across the globe, the shadows of despair seemed to loom large. That same day marked the inauguration of a felon as President of what was once the most powerful country in the world—a nation, I believe, is now teetering on the edge of its ideals. Add to this the declaration of National Mental Health Week and the infamy of Blue Monday, the day New Year’s resolutions typically meet their doom. Together, it made for an ensemble of events that felt both absurd—and painfully resonant.
Truth to tell, I haven’t actively read the news since November. At first, it was a conscious decision to preserve my sanity, but over time, it morphed into something darker: a slow embrace of nihilism. It’s hard to keep believing in the sanctity of things—of hope, of progress, of love—when every headline feels like another nail in the coffin of optimism. And yet, here we are, navigating the chaos, still managing our lives and expectations, and still trying to find happiness amidst it all.
(Or, are we?)
I know that life often feels like a tightrope act. We tread carefully, hoping not to fall, but the weight of societal expectations, our personal struggles, and global despair can make even the sturdiest among us waver. From a young age, we are taught to envision happiness as a goal—a destination we’ll reach once we’ve checked off all the boxes: a good job, a stable relationship, financial security. But what happens when those boxes remain unchecked or, worse, when they are checked, but happiness still feels elusive?
Lately, I’ve come to realize that managing life and expectations requires a kind of recalibration. Instead of chasing an ideal, perhaps it’s more about learning to live with the imperfections.
There’s a quiet beauty, to be honest, in accepting that not every day will be good, but there can still be good in every day. This isn’t about toxic positivity—the kind that insists on finding a silver lining in every storm. It’s an ability to acknowledge the storm, to feel its weight—and still find a way to move forward.
Today, I was invited by the staff of the Silimanian Magazine to talk about my mental health struggles in an interview, hoping to feature this story in an upcoming issue of the magazine. I did so because mental health has become a kind of advocacy for me of late—and I know I have a considerable platform where people listen, where I can actually help them find articulation for what they’re going through, because I’m going through the same things myself. When that story comes out, I think in March, I hope Sillimanian Magazine will do justice to my mental health story—and I hope it will find resonance in people who need help, as well as with people who need to understand that mental health struggles do in fact exist.
Managing mental health, especially in times like these, is akin to tending a garden in the midst of a drought. The soil is parched, the air heavy, and yet we persist in planting seeds.
For me, this has meant setting boundaries with the deluge of bad news. It’s not about ignorance; it’s about self-preservation. There’s only so much heartbreak a person can take before they begin to crack, and it’s okay to step back, to choose silence over noise, stillness over chaos.
Therapy helps, of course. So does certain tricks to grapple with my ADHD like body doubling , or even journaling—pouring out my thoughts that swirl endlessly in my mind, and giving them form and then letting them go on the pages of either my diary, or on my blog. (Or this column.) Some days, I find solace in books or music or the simple act of brewing a cup of coffee. Other days, it’s harder. The shadows creep in, the mental paralysis takes its nasty form, and all I can do sometimes is hold on, trusting that this, too, shall pass. (Ritalin helps.)
I have come to understand that happiness isn’t always a grand and sweeping thing. It’s not the fireworks on New Year’s Eve or the applause of a crowd. Often, it’s small and quiet, easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. I know it sounds corny, but it can be the warmth of sunlight on your skin, the sound of laughter shared with a friend, the first bite of your favorite meal. (Or, like what I noted last week, an OBT around Dumaguete with your beloved.) These moments are fleeting, but they are also powerful reminders that even in the darkest times, there is still light.
It’s tempting, in the face of so much despair, to surrender to cynicism. To believe that nothing matters, that all efforts are futile. But perhaps there’s a kind of courage in choosing to care anyway. In planting those seeds, even when the odds are stacked against you. In believing, as David Lynch might have, that life’s absurdities hold their own kind of meaning.
Last Monday was a microcosm of the world we live in: a place of contradictions, where joy and sorrow, hope and despair, coexist. It’s easy to get lost in the noise, to feel overwhelmed by the weight of it all. But maybe the answer isn’t to drown it out entirely. Maybe it’s to find your own rhythm within it, to dance to a beat that feels true to you.
Today, a confessional I’d like to share for National Mental Health Week. You know what I hate the most about ADHD? It’s actually not the executive dysfunction [because I mostly solve that through doubling], it’s the weird mental anomaly we call “date blindness.” I have always had this, but I always thought it was just me being lazy about dates. Like, my ears hear “August,” but my brain makes my hand write down “December.” When I used to make posters for the CAC, I took painstaking care of the playdates I’d put in, recognizing this was always something I’d do, but often I’d still get it wrong and Leo Mamicpic would be the one to gently remind me: “Ian, the show is on February 11. You put in March 24.” Like, that totally happens, all the time. Like I know Silliman was founded in 1901, but I’d still put in “1902.” I really had no idea why and I used to berate myself a lot about it. Until I got diagnosed, and learned about date blindness. Fun, fun, fun! Today is Wednesday, right?
My brain off Ritalin and on Ritalin is so different. It’s like living two existences. One is vaguely foggy, but it has always been the existence you know. Your normal. The other is clarity, and it’s like someone putting on glasses for the first time and seeing the world that’s sharp and colorful you had no idea.
I had a small anxiety attack today, so the s.o. surprised me by buying three dozens of my favorite flowers. Arranging them gave me something to focus on, which was quite calming. Also: this is love.
I wish everyone an anxiety-free National Mental Health Week!
I finished therapy with my psychiatrist yesterday. She’s recommending new antidepressants. She reminded me: “Your meds is just a tool,” to which I said: “I’ve learned to accept they’re not magic pills, but they help.” She also reminded me: “You’re doing so much. Executive dysfunction happens when you’re overwhelmed. Try to do only the things you really are passionate about.” Which is also what I tell myself, constantly, and I’m still learning how to do this. We talked about mindfulness, we talked about expectations management. She’s giving me a new exercise to do, something about having a double when I do things. It intrigued me. “I love that you’re looking at all these like a child in wonder,” she told me finally. I took that as a compliment.
One of the best things the pandemic taught me is to recognize bullshit and to verbalize it as succinctly as I can. I certainly did with mine. “I don't need therapy!” I told my s.o., even as I was unraveling in 2021, and my hair was falling from all the stress, and a panic attack was a daily occurrence. He simply made the appointment with the psychiatrist for me, drove me to the clinic, and accompanied me to the drugstore to get the meds I needed. So, yeah, no more bullshit.
I’m going back to meds starting today. Been having enormous difficulty concentrating since December, and my usual tricks to go around the ADHD have not been working. I honestly didn’t want to go back to taking psychotropic meds, but I feel now that I do need to—for the sake of work. But this time around, I’ll take care not to get too entangled with the meds.
But I’ve forgetten this is how a normal brain works: without noise, without fogging. Today, while delivering my lectures, I knew exactly what to say, what words to use, what points to make. The ability to concentrate without trying too hard is a gift most neurotypical people take for granted. I envy this of them. The confidence that springs from raw brainpower is like no other. The world clears up before you, and you are able to breathe a little easier. I listen better, I read better, I speak better.
The following is a modified version of a speech I gave to the Honors Day convocation of Silliman University Junior High School last October 11 at the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium.
What would I tell sixteen-year-old me?
When I got the call last week with the invitation to speak before you today for your Honors Day, I was actually teaching a three-hour class on Asian Literature, and was wondering if I was going to lose my voice to a bad spell of coughing that has been going around in Dumaguete for some time. The invitation proved to be a welcome distraction. Over the phone, I did not hesitate to say yes to the invitation—this was my high school after all, and you do not say no to your old high school.
But at the back of my head, a question lingered: Why me? What was it about me that made my old school think I was worthy to become Honors Day speaker? There are certain parameters, I think, that exist when invitations like this are sorted out: the ability to inspire, for example. Perhaps also being articulate. And certainly there’s the measure of accomplishments. I have been convocation speaker before, many times in fact, but this one proved particularly anxiety-inducing: I wanted to say just the right thing for the current students of my old high school. The burden felt immense.
People generally know me as a writer, someone who has gained considerable attention and rewards for being a writer, someone who has actually published books, and whenever I am asked what it is that I do, I always mention being a writer first and a teacher second. The writing bit is my chosen vocation. So I quickly deduced this was the impetus for the invitation: they wanted the award-winning writer to be your speaker today, and hopefully I can be articulate enough to dole out a speech, and hopefully said speech could contain some inspiring thoughts around the theme of “embracing the future as God’s gift,” which is the theme given to me to expound on—the same theme of the Founders Day we recently celebrated in Silliman last August.
But what does a writer know of futures that are supposed to be “divine gifts that need embracing” in our present? To be honest, nothing. Writers are mostly not in the business to be prophets. What we do is write to tell hopefully immersive stories—although I can also argue that a great number of writers do serve the function of futurists. So many science fictionists, for example, have mapped out compelling future worlds in their stories—sometimes utopic, and sometimes dystopic—and often these visions of the future do trickle down to become our eventual reality. Then there are people like Jose Rizal who use literary prophecy for nationalist purposes. In his essay, “The Philippines a Century Hence,” Rizal mapped out the political fate of the Philippines within a hundred years since his own lifetime. All but two of his predictions have come to pass.
I write science fiction, too. But I am not a futurist as far as I know about the fiction that I do write. I mostly write fantasy stories set in some imaginary version of the Philippines when Spanish colonization began to take hold. I mostly write children’s stories about kids finding some sort of inner strength to battle the challenges they face—like the fear of the unknown, or the disability they bear. I mostly write realist fiction about being queer in a world that’s changing fast. I mostly write about my mother. So, in my capacity as a writer speaking before you right now, what do I know instances of embracing the future as divine gifts? What does it even mean?
For some reason, and probably because I am an avid movie lover who also happens to teach film in college, this theme made me think of the 1985 movie Back to the Future. If you know your movies, this is the Michael J. Fox sci-fi romp where he is transported back in time via a car that has been rigged to become a time machine, where he has to correct certain trajectories in his parents’ past as high school teenagers just so they would in fact meet, marry, and have him and his siblings as children. Because if he doesn’t correct the anomalies of fate, he and his siblings would then cease to exist. That’s the ultimate fantasy, isn’t it? To be able to go back in time, and serve as the corrective for a viable future to happen?
I was mulling about this movie—and thinking about what I needed to say to you today—and I turned to my partner Renz to ask him what I could possibly talk about that has something to do with the future, and embracing what’s to come. His answer proved helpful. He told me: “If you could, in fact, go back in time, what could you possibly tell your sixteen-year-old self? Or possibly even your thirteen-year-old self?” That made me think. How can I “Back to the Future” this narrative? Being able to give specific advice from a life yet to unfurl would be a talisman for the younger me.
Now, I have to say I can no longer quite recall what I was like when I was thirteen. That was way back in 1989-1990, practically ancient history, and the world was very different then. The Gulf War occupied our thoughts and it was broadcast live all over CNN to our living rooms—which was something to behold because Dumaguete finally had cable television! We went crazy over Ghost and Pretty Woman and Home Alone, and we were grooving to Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love” and Madonna’s “Vogue.” I was thin and dark, but already quite imaginative—and thirteen was the age I began thinking of myself as a writer. What can I tell that boy which I could impart as a kind of wisdom from the future all of you here can also mull about?
It turns out, there are five specific things I might want to tell thirteen-year-old or sixteen-year-old me, culled from the future he will eventually meet. To start off, I would tell my younger self to listen to his instincts, and that there is such a thing as gut feel. This means: to recognize the signs, and to act accordingly. Granted, this is a life skill that can only be honed through experience—when you meet new situations, for example, and when you meet new people, and you take your experience with them as lessons with which you can navigate similar signposts in the future. But instinct sometimes take on an almost supernatural ability for me—the ability to recognize deceit, for example, from a smiling and friendly face; the ability to discern what’s hidden from you; the ability to smell bullshit.
I sometimes call this prescience. When I was a sophomore in high school, I had a classmate that was the perfect combination of Tracey Flick from Election and Regina George from Mean Girls—a driven girl full of academic ambitions who sometimes was capable of small cruelties. It just so happened that I had a monobrow in high school, and was quite unaware that for certain circles this was a cosmetic no-no. One school night, after I was done doing my homework and was preparing to go to bed, a voice from the back of my head stopped in my tracks, and told me: “Pluck the excess hair between your eyes.”
Without question, I obeyed that voice. And the next day, I went to school for the first time without a monobrow. That morning, while waiting for our homeroom to open, I saw Tracey Flick/Regina George coming towards me, dragging another classmate by the hand behind her. She stopped short in front of me, and without looking at me, pointed at my glabella and told our classmate: “This is what I am talking about, a mono—” But she stopped, and became quiet, because I no longer had a monobrow! I escaped an instance of ridicule! And all because I obeyed the voice from the night before. It is a voice that regularly whispers from the depths of my spirit that tell me to watch out for certain things, and to obey my gut instincts about certain people that I will meet. In my life, this gut instincts has been mostly right.
The second thing I would tell my younger self is to listen to his happiness, and to not be a follower. It is difficult to not follow the crowd, especially if you have an unformed self. I had no idea what I wanted to be after high school. In my younger years, I had some vague notions about wanting to become a doctor—because being a doctor was society’s perfect ideal of a professional. Never mind that in high school, I was most happy when I was creating stories, and putting them down to paper. When it came to enrollment in college, nursing was in vogue, and almost a third of everyone I knew in my high school class trooped to Roble Hall here in Silliman to enroll in that course. I followed the crowd, and got myself a Nursing prospectus. [I almost became a nurse!]
But another third of my high school batch also went to Hibbard Hall to enroll in the newest professional craze at that time, Physical Therapy, with its promise of lucrative employment abroad. Again, I followed where everyone went—and finally decided to enroll with the pioneering batch of PT students at Silliman. It felt like the most responsible thing to do, never mind that it was not my dream. And never mind that I would often go out of the PT prospectus and have myself enrolled in extra English and Creative Writing classes, just to give myself a spark of the creative life I wanted to have while I was following the dictates of my own PT course.
Needless to say, I was not happy. I endured three years of Physical Therapy, knowing full well that this profession was not me. Picture me in my third year in PT, having to go to my first hospital assignation as a student health care giver, and given the simple task of attending to a real patient and taking down their vital signs—their pulse, their breathing, and their blood pressure. Picture me wearing my white smock, with my stethoscope and my sphygmomanometer.
My patient was a middle-aged woman of considerable weight who was not the picture of a welcoming human being at all. She looked at me crossly, and I knew she was looking straight at me as an impostor in her midst. I hurried to take note of her breathing—but I could not find her pulse! So I pretended to just “use” my blood pressure apparatus, and came up with invented numbers—and then hurried outside her room, where I found myself staring down the corridor at SUMC for a long, long time, feeling out of my depth. And I found myself thinking: “Is this what the rest of my life is going to be all about?” And the immediate answer that came to me was a resounding no. The very next semester, I shifted to mass communication—but I eventually would become an English teacher, and a writer.
The third thing I would tell my younger self is to listen to the sound of deadlines. This one I mean to keep short and sweet. You may be the most talented person you know—the best writer, the best artist, the best of whatever it is that you do—but when you cannot keep to your deadlines, all would be useless. Certainly, people will admire you for your brilliance, but nobody will hire you. This is a lesson I learned early in my career as a writer—and something that I strive to keep, because having a sound work ethic is a measure of success like no other.
But having said that about the necessity of the work ethic, I would also offer a rejoinder: the fourth thing I would tell my younger self is to listen to his life’s purpose—because his work is not him. Your work is not you. It is easy to get lost in the grind of work especially when it means the benefit of great material returns—a new car, a new house, all those perks of being able to travel. It is easy to fall prey to overextending ourselves in our work, because we think that work is all, and without us, our workplace might not be at its optimum. This is simply untrue. Everyone is replaceable. Your work place will not miss you when you are gone.
When I obtained my MA in Creative Writing in 2012, I was made the founding coordinator of the new Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center at Silliman, and I oversaw a sudden rise in enrollment in creative writing. I took that as a chance to pour myself into work, and worked hard I did for the next ten years straight without any breaks, without any sabbaticals, overextending myself with overloads, often taking away from my personal time just to work and work and work. I worked so much that I was not even writing anymore. When the pandemic came and added more stress in terms of Zoom classes and other alien features that were stopgaps to the new difficulties, I was primed for a burnout. When I caught COVID in December 2020, I broke down physically and mentally—and I quit teaching for the next two years. And guess what? The department simply hired other people to teach my classes. Replaceable. This became one of the greatest lessons in my life. Today, I work to live, but I do not live to work.
Enduring COVID in a time before any vaccine was available was bad enough. But what ultimately dismantled me was how the deadly but often silent tentacles of the pandemic made underlying neurodivergence, semi-dormant through the years, suddenly rise to the fore. I badly needed help because I was broken, and I was eventually persuaded to seek psychotherapy. I was finally diagnosed with adult ADHD—which made everything in my life thus far make so much sense. The only thing that saved me besides psychotherapy was the purpose I came to realize was my life: in my darkest moments, I wrote and wrote. And because of that, I found myself wanting, and willing myself, to live.
But I also learned something else about my diagnosis. Thus, this is the fifth thing I would tell my younger self: to listen to his innermost self and find strength in that—because his brain chemistry is not him. Yesterday [October 10], we celebrated World Mental Health Day, and this is an important point to make because the pandemic saw a huge spike in mental health cases. Before I was diagnosed, I was already aware that I exhibited certain frailties that made me look down on myself, that harbored so much guilt. I always forget things, and it’s also very easy to get distracted. I get overwhelmed and when I do, I tend to disappear. I often cannot summon the slightest motivation to finish the simplest of tasks—not even the threat of repercussions. I only get excited with the new, and find it very hard to carry on with what I’ve already done before. Validation from others is essential, not for vanity’s sake, but as a replacement for what my brain is incapable of manufacturing: self-validation. I cannot say no, and I am incapable of delegation. And I am a people-pleaser, often to my own detriment. All these make me feel like I am a terrible human being.
And then I was diagnosed with adult ADHD, and it made me see that all that I am [see above] are actually symptoms of a common neurodivergent condition. But I also learned this: they are symptoms, but they are also not me. They are just flukes of brain chemistry. This is a lesson that took some time to sink in. But I was freed from that old guilt I used to feel, and I was suddenly empowered to face my condition, and devise creative ways with which to function around my dopamine-deprived brain. Thus, if I could, I will tell my younger self to seek help and therapy. I have become an advocate for this, because I genuinely want to help end the stigma around mental health in our society.
I am not exactly sure about this, but I believe that I am the first person from my batch, the Class of 1993, who has been invited to become speaker for our old high school’s annual Honors Day convocation. This year also happens to be our 30th reunioning year, so in honor of all my high school classmates, I have opted to wear this red letter jacket they issued for all of us: it feels cool, it wears well, and it looks like it’s something straight out of Riverdale or Glee.
But it is also highly symbolic of perhaps the most formative years in my life—the four years I spent roaming the halls of Silliman University High School, and gradually learning who I was and was meant to be from all that I encountered: the teachers who taught me, what they had to teach me academically, and what I did in the realm of the extracurricular—all things I didn’t know had shaped my life considerably.
This jacket is also in honor of one of my high school best friends, to whom I dedicate this speech.
Her name was Jacqueline Piñero-Torres, and she was our Class Valedictorian. She was the most brilliant among us, and also the kindest and most understanding. Among other things, she allowed us to copy her mathematics homework right before the school bell rang. In our adulthood, she became an accountant rising up the ranks, working for Silliman University’s Business and Finance Office. And she was also the mother to brilliant children, including Jev, who is my godson and who is very much her spawn.
But she died very young. And it was devastating.
I think of her now because her future was indeed cut short—and the very promise of her feels unfulfilled. Sayang. What else could she have accomplished if she had lived?
And that made me think: all our futures are a precarious promise. And every day we get to live that future is indeed a gift, because each day is one more chance to live out our fullest potential, to realize our purpose, to become the ideal human beings we always dreamed we could be.
But it is also so easily cut short, like in the case of my dearest friend Jacqueline, because we really do not know when the end comes for us. The future is a blessing, and our ability to live it through is a gift.
I wish we could live each day with sharp instincts. And I wish we could live each day with a direction towards our happiness. And I wish we live each day respecting our responsibilities and deadlines, but also live each day knowing how to balance our lives beyond work. And finally, I wish we could live each day knowing the source of your frailties, and acknowledging they can be managed because these frailties are not you.
These are signposts from a future life I’d love very much to tell my thirteen-year-old self.
They all mean one thing: to live fully.
That’s the best gift we can give ourselves, and the surest way to embrace a happy future.
The past few days/weeks have actually been such trying times for me — going through the flu and then avoiding reinfection to boot, and no compensation [yet] for hard work of two months — but I made a deal with myself [and my ADHD brain] that somehow I’ll try to power through and make good on my deliverables and responsibilities, while acknowledging my neuroatypicality. I lack sleep, but as of now, on the last day of September, I’m actually good on almost all fronts! So I’m patting myself on the back because this has been such an effort. One good thing about being psychologically diagnosed is knowing your own neuroatypical challenges and finding ways to accommodate them. Before, I’d just feel overwhelmed and disappear. Now I know that “overwhelm” is actually an acknowledged and significant phase in the ADHD brain, so I have devised ways to counter it as best as I can. Before, I thought I was just a terrible human being. Now, I know that these are just mental health symptoms, and I am not my symptoms.
The good thing about getting properly diagnosed for one’s neuro-atypicality is that it explains a lot of things about you and why things happen in your brain — and you’re not left alone to flail about thinking you’re just crazy or lazy, and you’re unique and everything’s your fault. Like, why am I triggered to anxiety with emails and phone calls? Why the debilitating panic attacks? What's the deal with suicide ideation? Why do I give long background answers to simple questions? Why do I tend to disappear when the going gets tough, when all I can do is open up about my difficulties and misgivings? For the longest time, I thought it was just me. And then when I got diagnosed with Adult ADHD, I found out many of my frailties actually spring from that disorder. And because I now know they are symptoms, and not character traits, I can actually find ways to work around these mental tendencies and still function superbly. [For example, I have someone I trust answer most of my messages for me, especially requests. The buffer helps disperse the feeling of being overloaded.] But it takes effort to arrive at that juncture of one’s mental health journey: going for help and finding the best psychiatrist suited for you is already a difficult but significant first step. [People with ADHD find it hard to seek help.] Navigating one’s relationship with meds and therapy is another. But I’ve learned to process things more now because I know why my brain acts in a certain way, and knowing is what matters most. So go and find help if you feel you need it! Let’s break the taboo about talking about our mental health.
After the ravages of the pandemic, I’ve now found myself back to teaching. It was a very long hiatus from that part of my life which had always defined me. When I took the leave without pay, it was essentially to take care of my spiraling mental health, but it was also to find my footing in a world that suddenly felt alien. And now that I have come to the end of that long tunnel, here are some thoughts and some confessions.
There was a huge part of me that felt the leave was going to be permanent. When 2020 came around and we were on the precipice of the coming pandemic, about to jump into the abyss, I was already feeling burned out—although I must admit I was trying my best to ignore the symptoms.
In 2010, I had come back from the United States after a fruitful fellowship at the International Writing Program with so much vigor and many ideas, and then in 2012, I finally earned the MA I had been postponing for about a decade, and then I was appointed founding coordinator of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Center, with the creative writing program now fully back on as an academic offering—after decades of it being a neglected part of departmental concerns. Everything was full of promise. The work was fulfilling.
It was a joy to teach creative writing. Even the fact that I was the only creative writing teacher on the roster—although with an esteemed and retired faculty filling in as adjunct professor for poetry—did not bother me at first. [I was told there was a freeze in hiring given the uncertainties of K12.] I did not mind for the most part, because I genuinely loved teaching. I loved having the opportunity to mold writers at the beginning of their creative prowess. I loved that the efforts of those years produced so many books by my students, with two of them winning the Palanca for plays workshopped in my classes. [For my teaching purposes, I considered the Palanca and similar platforms, like the Virgin Labfest, my equivalent of a board exam—which is just the kind of professional marker denied graduates of creative fields.]
But the toll of all that eventually got to me. Workshops are not easy classes to teach; they require blood and sweat from both student and teacher, and immense amounts of concentrated time—and part of that difficulty was my fault: I was a demanding teacher, meticulous to a fault, and I also allowed the work to swallow me, sometimes giving up my own free time just to be able to workshop all the stories and plays submitted for consideration, with all the attendant revisions that come with them. I was also ignoring the fact that in that immersion, I was letting go of my own practice of writing—and then, like a cancer metastasizing, I secretly began to begrudge all the time taken away from my own pursuit of crafting fiction. I would find myself feeling defeated when a work that had been previously workshopped did not bear any effort at revision, and I’d think: “We spent all those hours talking about this work so that it can be improved—and yet nothing? What a waste of time!”
Still, I worked myself to the bones. I did not take any sabbatical in a decade, nor did it occur to me I should. I was constantly told to pursue my Ph.D., but every year I was also given heavier loads to teach—and with the creative writing program still in the process of being fully formed, I felt the need to stay. During one schoolyear, enrollees to the creative writing program actually topped all the other programs being offered by the department—and I felt a sense of pride in that. But unbeknownst to me I was also slowly cracking.
The pandemic, with all its Zoom classes, broke me. In 2020, I thought making lecture videos for all the classes given to me would be the best way to go. As usual, I went about it with unsustainable effort that sprang from my undiagnosed ADHD: I was crafting meticulous scripts for every lecture, designing meticulous graphics to go with them, and waking up at 2 AM every day to record my spiel without the distraction of outside traffic to mess with my sound design. I wanted my videos to be topnotch, information-wise and design-wise. And I was making at least three lecture videos a day. It was a heavy burden that I was somehow able to “sustain”—until I contracted COVID-19 and was so sick, I could barely continue.
When I recovered from COVID two weeks later, I found I could not regain my footing—my anxiety was a deep maw I could not overcome; my brain was forever distracted like glass shards in perpetual limbo; my physical capability was limited and I could not move properly; my hair was falling out in clumps, I thought I was going bald; and my every day was defined by waking nightmares I could not begin to comprehend. Which was when my boyfriend finally forced me to seek psychiatric help.
I was diagnosed with adult ADHD—and it made perfect sense. It gave me an idea why over the years I was often forgetful, why I was often feeling overwhelmed and panicky, why I needed specific boosters to carry me through even tasks I could usually finish in an hour, why I hated answering text messages and emails, why it took so much to muster motivation for things that were quite easy for me to accomplish—but also why I also had a thousand brilliant ideas, and why, when the condition is properly managed, people with ADHD also say their mental singularity is a superpower. It was all that, and then multiplied to a greater degree because of the pandemic. [My therapist told me she was beset with so many mental health cases when the pandemic happened. “It is unprecedented,” she said. It was often difficult to set up therapy appointments with her, given the high demand on her time.]
For a while the psychotropic drugs I was prescribed to take helped. I cannot even begin to describe the perfect feeling of being on Ritalin. The way it massaged my brain. The way it made me feel secure. The way it made everything so clear. This is the thing: every single day for a person with ADHD is like having a brain that’s constantly full of static—but most of us learn to live with that kind of chaotic brain chemistry it feels almost normal. Ritalin, on the other hand, was all about calm, steadiness, and focus. Taking it was like being a person with bad eyesight finally putting on a pair of prescription glasses and seeing the world perfectly for the first time: you notice the outline of the green leaves of the trees, you notice the subtleties in the shadows, you can read signs from far away. The sky is bluer, the sea greener. Ritalin gave my brain breathing space, and its gift was concentration. I could remember things now; I could follow through tasks; I was no longer nervous about messaging anyone. [In fact, my first act on Ritalin was to respond to and purge all the unanswered emails on my inbox.]
And so the drugs helped, until they didn’t—because, truth to tell, I was feeling their efficacy waning out with every passing month, even as I slowly became physically dependent on the drugs. There were times, when my prescription was running low at the end of each month where I’d panic because I was running out of medicine to take—because the withdrawal was often severe. And the medicine was also very expensive.
Eventually, because of this and other circumstances, I made the decision to manage my condition without medicine. It felt unsustainable. When I made that decision, it was the month I was due to receive an award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, which was recognizing me for my work as a writer and as a cultural worker. I remember giving a speech in a televised ceremony at the Luce Auditorium—but feeling like my brain was flying elsewhere, especially in the panicky clouds that was secretly smothering me. But there I was on stage, acting as if I was perfectly fine; inside me though there was a dervish threatening to spin out of control.
Around this time, I made peace with myself about no longer teaching, because going back gripped me with so much despair. There were also circumstances that made my heart harden, like my department hiring the worst possible person in the world to be my replacement—and also finding out that in my gravest hours when I could not function, they could actually hire more people to teach and share the creative writing load. It was a dark time, and I admit my mental condition made many of my actions irresponsible—but never once did I feel my former colleagues reach out to me. [Some did, privately—but not the ones who mattered.] I had no plans of going back. A dear friend, Karl Villarmea, advised me however not to entertain thoughts of retirement or resignation: “Take a leave of absence instead, and then find out later if this is something you truly want to do.” I was at that time completely incapable of making definite decisions, and I am grateful that he went beyond himself to facilitate things for me as a representative of my teacher’s union. [In moments like this, you find out who your truest friends are.]
That was also the time I decided to focus on finding myself, and on pursuing writing without baggage. That was also the time I made the choice to step away from things that felt superfluous. I remember Renz reminding me: “You have done so much already, Ian. You don’t have to prove yourself anymore. You can just be yourself.”
So I exiled myself to the proverbial desert for three years, turned my back on almost everything I used to hold dear, and leaned only on my creative endeavors for sustenance. It wasn’t utopia. Like I said, there were often psychotropic meds involved. And there were a lot of failures and disappointments, as well as unexpected successes.
I learned discernment.
I now know how to map the ebbs and flows of my mental challenges, and to recognize the whole thing as being not a flaw of character but as a health condition that can be managed. [Still working on this.]
I now know how recognize the honest promptings of my heart, and to obey it. [In other words, to trust your instincts. Because they’re often right.]
I know now how to calibrate expectations. [To under-promise, but over-deliver. Still working on this.]
I now know to disregard the entrenched worship of the institutional.
I also now know who friends truly are.
I have learned that I’m at my happiest when I write and create. [The exile was an extraordinarily productive time, creative-wise.]
I have also learned gratefulness, forgiveness, and the delicate balance of the adventurous yes and the self-preserving no. [Always saying yes burns you out; always saying no makes you lazy and uncreative.]
I do still need to work on replying to people in a timely manner [I get overwhelmed so easily by the volume I get, compounded by debilitating ADHD], but I’ve set up a structure that will help manage the flow.
Above all, I hope I don’t have to go back to the desert again. It wasn’t bad, but life I’ve found is more than just a metaphorical abundance of sand.
In the first faculty meeting I attended after being away for three years, my fellow teacher Rina Hill led a short reflection before we tackled the formal business of getting ready for a new schoolyear. She gave us a piece of paper with a question on it, which she asked us to ponder on. The question read: “What motivates me to work and work ‘with all [my] might’?”
It felt like the perfect question for my first day back as a teacher. What motivates me indeed? I found out that I’ve never lost my passion to teach—all the lectures and seminars and cultural tours I’ve given while in the “desert” prove that—but I just needed rest, and a new way of looking at things. My resolution now is to teach the best that I can without losing sight of myself, and my time, and my health.
Around June this year, while I was counting down the days before my official leave of absence was set to expire and I needed to decide once and for all what I wanted to do by the time August came, two friends approached me, each on their own, which motivated me to teach again.
The theatre artist Dessa Quesada-Palm, who teaches theatre directing, came to me and said: “Ian, my students need you as their playwriting teacher”—and explained why I needed to come back. Alana Narciso, a fellow literature teacher who was sitting in as chair of the department, also made an effort to meet with me, and told me over coffee: “Ian, you have so much to give our students as a creative writing teacher. Please come back.” She explained why I needed to come back. I thought of their implorations, and my heart began to melt. Sometimes the reassurances of friends are enough to make you reconsider things.
So here I am, back again. Scarred, but think wiser. The desert taught me well.
I celebrated my 48th birthday soon after the current schoolyear started. Birthdays are usually fraught with the blues for me. My dark days usually start right around the end of July and only lets up at the end of August, a monthlong commiseration about disappointments and growing older.
This year, I decided to let go, to let others in, to swim with the flow, and to reconsider once again my life’s work—and for all that, this turned out to be the happiest birthday I’ve celebrated since forever. Understated, but so full of meaning. May we all have this kind of birthday revelations.
Ready, tentatively, to re-embrace the world after a dark period of mourning and disappointments. Fortifying my mind, channeling Dolly De Leon’s undefeated spirit, and echoing Jinx Monsoon’s mantra: “Water off the duck’s back.” But also mindful about balance.
Drained after Dolly de Leon missed out on the Oscar nomination tonight. The only way to deal is food therapy. So I’m taking The Menu’s Margot Mills’ cue: grab a [bacon] cheeseburger to escape.
Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (2022) gets struggling with mental health so well. The “okay” facade to hide the depression. The triggers. The hidden depths of despair. What is it like to love and remember someone who struggles with mental health issues but keeps it hidden, erupting in secret shadows, always under the guise of normalcy and smiles? This film gently unfolds this, and I love it for that. And that last 20 minutes — the long shot of the father and daughter floating at sea, the slowly developing polaroid photo, and peaking with that unexpected David Bowie/Queen needle drop — is heartbreaking.
1:39 AM |
Life with Adult ADHD
