Questions to Ask (Part 1)
The year 2017 is about to be over. It started in a special way, yet it has left me with many questions - questions that needed to be answered by someone who clearly knows me - someone who can understand my condition, and someone who can love me for who I am.
Yes, I have to put this in public, over the Internet. This is no laughing matter, for I have suffered this for such a long time, and I want people to be aware of it.
The year 2017 has been kind - indeed a good year. I was able to shift careers: from a mundane, stressful and sometimes unrewarding place of retail, to the rewarding, impactful and dynamic world of teaching. Indeed, the year was a year of breakthroughs, and a start of a lifelong transformation.
Teaching is such a crucial job, and involves enormous amounts of scrutiny. It was difficult for me to adjust well, as I came from a school that didn't matter how I look like, how I smell like and how I treat people like. (You heard it right, because I am a graduate of the University of the Philippines, where freedom is gold, and proper personality is a suggestion, never a choice.) I also worked in places where you can wear, speak and act however you want, whenever you want. Yung tipong walang makikialam sa iyo, basta't ginagawa mo ang dapat gawin. That was me before.
But now, being in a school (and a tourism and hospitality school at that), hundreds of students of different ages need to get something from me, and my duty is to impart that to them. With that in mind, it involved a huge investment on myself. First off, I had to change my clothing habits. I had to buy long-sleeved shirts, coats, leather shoes, and personal effects. Basically, I had to overhaul my daily wardrobe and it was costly. Believe me, I could no longer be that "yagit" person I was back in days of being behind-the-scenes in a shopping mall or being on that cute cubicle doing nothing but make and maintain websites. I was already out in the open, and looking my best was the priority. Good thing I'm a work in progress now.
I consider myself to be messy, and mess is my definition of order. That was me before in my previous job. Because I had to repair stuff, I had to disassemble and it had to be messy. I'm not really good at organizing stuff, and that's a huge problem for me whenever I work in the faculty room. Sometimes I'll just be amazed how my co-workers are able to organize their papers, while I freak out seeing so much stuff to check. I'm still working on that.
Well, these things never bothered me, until now.
