dreams
At first, it was because I was missing an old friend of mine. I started listing things in my head I’ve fantasized about telling him. How I’ve grown so much. How as more years go by without us talking, it seems I grow further and further away from the person he has once memorized.
I used to hate horror movies. I’m already a scaredy person without my anxiety and panic disorders, and I hate being startled as a joke. Despite that, I do find horror movie plots very interesting. And so a sporadic hobby of mine is to read Wikipedia plot summaries of horror books, movies, or tv shows I come across to1. Back then, I can only tolerate actually watching horror movies when I’m with friends or family. When I was a pre-teen, I went to an extended family reunion and met cousins I’ve never met before. For some reasons, the adults have left us kids in one room and we ended up watching Insidious (2010) with the lights off. During the pandemic, I used to do horror watch parties with my friends and family. At one point, I was lying on my grandma’s floor, watching Sunod (2019) with my aunts at midnight, when the power suddenly went out. That was the night I learned I could jump into my months-old cousin’s bed when prompted by fear. On Discord, I’ve watched Hereditary (2018) with my high school friends, secretly looking up the plot on Wikipedia in order to feel less scared. Fast forward to when my friend and I officially stopped talking, I found myself getting braver. I even attended the Sine Sindak2 with an all-day pass with A. The past few months, I’ve been watching horror movies alone.
I used to despise getting help. Or at least, people assuming that I need help. My friend knew this deeply. Once I met with him and a mutual friend in a mall, carrying shopping bags that were a little too big for me. Our mutual friend tried to offer help, to which my friend interjected, “She doesn’t like people carrying things for her.”3 This year I’ve restarted therapy, and I’m slowly letting myself show vulnerability to the right people. I still struggle accepting help, even when I’m holding multiple things at once and had to wriggle out of my sweater. But A knows I’m trying, and we just laugh about it afterwards.
I used to think of my career path as some kind of sentence. That I’ve chosen to get this degree, and so I must carve my path towards it or die trying in fear of failure. I was so scared of underemployment more than unemployment that I felt like I had it in me to stay in a loveless marriage, holding the fact that once upon a time I had agreed to this against me. But now that I’ve gotten into a position that I’ve prayed for, I realized I have always had an out. I had to look at it in the eye to realize that a door was open, and no one was preventing me to go out. And so I thought I’d try anyway and see for myself. Perhaps I could learn to love this again. In the meantime, I’ve been looking through master’s opportunities in language or literature. Or even scholarships abroad for evolutionary biology. I’ve learned to be more at ease with my time and space in the world. I’ve learned to try and walk instead of run from time to time. I feel like I’ve changed so much, and not with a major, life-changing realization but with how I think about and deal with my everyday. Little by little, I grow a little more.
That’s where I find myself in this little blue planet we’re in right now. As the Cranberries said, my life is changing everyday in every possible way.
That was until those TikTok/Facebook horror summaries existed.↩
An annual horror film festival in our country.↩
In retrospect, this might look like control. But he knew I hated asking for help, and explaining that boundary to strangers, and needing to reject their offer of help. Back then I was focused on being astounded how someone could know the real me.↩