As I end the day, I cannot deny the fact that there was only but one person in my mind the whole time.He filled my seconds, minutes and hours, from the time my dad and I exchanged opinions in a famous restaurant at the heart of UP to the long afternoon spent in singing songs to the Lord. When I woke up from bed this morning, I felt a sudden rush of bleakness as I saw dark clouds coming in from my window. I cautiously made sure that he will no longer be invading the little space in my mind, else I know I will go crazy all over again.
When dad and I stopped by Ateneo to check some shirts, I found myself deciding whether to buy him a dark blue shirt with an Ateneo logo designed like a Philippine flag or this other shirt with colorful letters spelling out a cheer. He will be turning 22 soon and I unconsciously started counting the money I have left in my wallet and carefully plotted my plan to 'LBC' my special delivery. I was rehearsing the plan in my mind the whole morning as every single Ateneo product I got a hold of reminded me of him even though he did not have a single drop of blue in him. The thought of college, UAAP and university halls triggered my imagination of him. It was painful, crazy and devastating.
When I took a bite of my sweet temptation in UP, I relentlessly started telling my dad stories of how painful my previous school years were. Though they saw how good I was in my academics, the rarely saw my monochromatic episodes which happened continuously in various themes and scenes throughout my four years in college. I kept telling him how I was never really happily single from first to fourth year. Though I was not always attached to someone, I was not necessarily uninvolved. All my past relationships and flings were the unsuccessful yang of my triumphant ying. They were just tremendously horrible as compared to my okay performance in school. My dad started telling me that in his opinion, I could have excelled more in my studies if only I did not get distracted. I would have truly graduated with honors, cum laude even, if I just put my academics in the pedestal instead of unnecessary relationships which led to terrible heartaches.
To my dismay, his name and face popped during the course of my conversation with dad. I started relating to him how much I truly loved this guy even more than I can imagine. He was the very arrow that stroke my achille's heel. He was the main thing of my last two years in college. The very person who broke my heart the most and left it broken, until now. Though I was the one who had the last say in our so-called "uncommitted relationship", I still held him responsible for crushing my heart. In my mind, ending all communication with him will help me live a healthy life but the past days and months resulted otherwise.
My parents never met him and never talked to him, even once. My mom must have said one word of 'hello' to him one time she tried miscalling his number on my phone when she found out about our secret fling. He never set foot in our house to meet them and I was never able to introduce him to them in a mall or anywhere for that matter. He was the 'invisible man' my parents heard of but never laid eyes on.
I thought my tragic story that morning was the end of it. By the time we got home, I forgot about his existence. But when I went to church and started singing to Jesus and hearing more about His word, that's when his presence was made known to me again. Instead of crying for my own sins and asking God for forgiveness, I asked God to forgive his and release him from his transgressions. For once, I was not thinking about the bondage I was going through because of him and asking God to release me from it. I, instead found myself crying out to Him hoping for a miracle that may be just may be, God will reveal Himself to the one I still love. It was no longer a prayer and plea to eventually get us together but a desperation and a cry to God that someday I will see him in eternity. I want to be with him in heaven so badly more than seeing his face, feeling his hug and hearing him whisper the words, "I Love You." Then I knew, this was no longer infatuation...it was love. It's impossible that there will even be an 'us' today or tomorrow. There was never even an "US" yesterday...but I do pray that there will be an "US" in the next lifetime.
To you, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, know that in my heart, the feelings never changed.
Sorry if I keep changing the layout. Naiinis ako, naiba nagulo yung format dun sa previous!
I just got her reply regarding my message which I posted in one of my previous entries.
I got so inspired.........
I am so tired and so I cannot write a decent description. This will do for now.
Hi, Lica,
Thanks for sharing this with me. I hope you don't mind that I shared this with Tito Sonny.
Alam mo ba, you actually encouraged us with your email. Kasi Tito Sonny is going through a lot of challenges in the workplace, and what you shared has also reminded him that (and this is what he wants me to share with you):
* a closed door is meant to be directive, ie, the Lord is directing you not to pursue a particular direction
* and then he said that when we go through pain, whether pain from rejection or pain from anywhere else where we have no real control, that time can be very precious in your life, because it is a time when you can go to God and genuinely allow God to carry the pain with us. You will find out later in life that those moments are so significant because you have experienced God in a deep experiential way. In short, malalim ang magiging pagkakilala mo kay Lord.
As we talked about this, I remembered a song from Joseph the Dreamer (there is a soundtrack from that musical and you might want to check it out) which goes like this: "When God closes a door, He opens a window..." There is also another song from the same musical which goes like this: "In moments like these, I lift up my hands..." Baka you can also check the songs from the internet.
Ako naman, I was looking back to my own job searching days. First of all, I remembered I didn't find a job right away. I had to wait for a few months. Secondly, I didn't know what job to take too. Kasi, I have an AB Journalism course, and I didn't intend to practise journalism, so I ended up trying one job after another...It would have been a lot different if I took up a course like nursing, or med tech, where the choices would have been limited by the course. Your advantage, Lica, is you have the Lord whom you can consult, and ask for direction. Di ba He promised, "You will hear a voice behind your ear, saying 'this is the way; walk in it'." He also promised, He will guide you with His eye upon you. So, God will certainly give you the wisdom to know which direction to take.
I was also thinking: How about if you think from a bigger point of view? What do you think God would want you to be in the longterm? Do you see yourself being a career woman like your mom? Or do you see yourself homeschooling your kids (Lord willing!), and being a fulltime mom?
If so, how will you prepare for this while waiting for the right job? How do you think God would like you to use this time of waiting? What are your other options -- is going into business an option? What skills do you need to hone? Computer skills -- learn MYOB etc? Cooking? Homemaking? I know your house is very efficiently run, but can you add something of value? Are further studies an option? I hope I am not getting you mixed up, but the point is, you can think bigger than not getting a job now. Think ahead. Think big. Think in terms of God's plan for your life in the long term.
Let me know your thoughts on the above...
You will be alright, Lica. Remember, you are the apple of His eye, and you are very precious in His eyes.
Love you,
Tita Adele (& Tito Sonny)
take this into consideration. His speech was the best thing that happened to me today.
Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
The Transcript
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
This is a letter I made for my tita in Australia. I just felt so down that I needed to talk to someone.
Dear Tita Adele,
How are you?? I hope all is well with you and tito Sonny.
I want to write you a letter because God has been teaching me a lot of things lately. There were a lot of lessons I had to learn the hard way.
1) Sadly, I was not able to reach that interview with pastor Peter so I won't be able to tell him about tito Sonny hehe. In less humorous words, I did not make the exam. I don't know which part I failed and could not understand why God did not make me pass it. It was mostly EQ and konti lang yung comprehension and aptitude. Made me wonder why I was not for CCF - I was either not intelligent enough or my personality was just not for the job? There were a lot of things in my mind the moment I received the text message. I wanted to cry in Glorietta in front of my dad but sa kakikayan ko, I did not want to look like a raccoon after smudging my eyeliner haha. Thing is tita, I just felt so bad. It made me think that I am just not good enough or intelligent enough because I keep failing company examinations. I only passed two out of the many that I took. I definitely thought something was wrong with me. Other people made it! the CCF staff made it! why can't I make it?? It was a long day of spirit searching. Then again, my parents comforted me by saying that it really was not for me and that the reason why we loved it there is because it's near and the environment is safe. Nothing more, nothing less. Still I wonder, is that the real reason why God closed the door? or is there something else. He has not told me yet.
2) I am having a hard time waiting for the right job to come along. Parang I feel like I am wasting my time. I am trying to do productive things pero parang hindi pa enough. Thing is, my parents are not even worried! good thing they are not pressuring me because they know it will come in its right time. Funny nga kasi hirit sa akin ni mommy palagi, "okay lang yan Lica, hanap ka lang ng hanap, good thing na we still have more time together before you find a good job." I guess she's right. If it does happen then I won't be able to spend more time with them. Tita, is this normal? I feel so insignificant and inefficient. I am so embarrassed to tell anyone because they might think I am being melodramatic. But it's really a difficult stage for me now. I don't know where path God is leading me and somehow He's been silent. It scares me at times.
3) I recently came across Steve Jobs' 2005 Commencement Speech in Stanford University and I was uplifted at some point. He said, "I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle." Thing is, I still don't know what I want haha. I still don't know what I am really good at. All those years in college did not make up my mind on what I really want to do. Again, it scares me. What am I going to do? hmm. I can't even 'annoy' my parents with this question, my constant worry will just make things worse. I am trying to find my niche in other companies as I started applying again. Is it really this hard? sadly, i am not used to hardship haha. My parents brought me up that way and that fact scares me also! haha. My friends are used to trials and challenges so I am guessing they'll do great and reach places...ako kasi I am so sheltered...i don't know what will happen to me once I hit the real world. Waah. Creating this e-mail is making me feel down as well hahaha. I hope I did not put you down with my discouraged attitude. I want to be lively again...I am trying.
I don't know how to close this haha. Umm...I guess I am crazy for feeling this way...after my mom's handful of encouragements. She and dad have been the best confidence boosters...I really don't know what I will do without them. I really feel so loved with you people around. You..mommy, daddy, tita Dit, tita Mariz...you've been like family to me :) Thanks for knowing that I can make it and I will make it with God's strength.
I love you, tita. Come home soon. We miss you. We've been praying for your return!!
Hi to tito Sonny. Thanks for always praying for me, I know that even if God is silent, He is already working on a miracle for my life and for the lives of those I love.
yours truly,
Lica
