Great Expectations: A therapy

Yesterday I received a message which says that the root of all disappointments and hurt, if summed up in a word, would have to be “expectations.” True? True.

Last year, I sent a distress call to one of my friends. I think my exact SOS was, “Feeling ko heartbroken ako.”

I got her attention alright. I just wish she didn’t fall off her chair or something. It’s just that “heartbroken” and me aren’t really the world’s most likely pair. Come to think of it, “heartbroken” and me are kind of impossible—well at least if you work on the more popular idea of being heartbroken.

It’s probably a common misconception that a heartbreak is solely caused by a romantic element in one’s life gone wrong. In my case it would have to be a boy, thus the need for me to explain my trouble further.

My heartbreak wasn’t limited to a boy. It was bigger than that.

I felt taken for granted by people whom I expected to value me. I felt deprived of my opinion on matters which, if we really are who we say we are, I guess I deserved to have had a voice. I was reduced to being a gofer—to do errands regardless of what was going on with me.

I wasn’t allowed to say no. Well I was allowed but it would have come with a price—resentment. So I was somehow forced to shut up and do what I was supposed to do.

I don’t know. Maybe I am such a pushover that’s why it’s so easy for people to order me around. Or maybe it is because of what I do and don’t do that’s why I give the general impression that nothing important is going on with me; they might as well pull me out of my life and let me serve them. In which case, I would be of greater purpose.

But the thing what broke my heart most is the fact that I never did receive from them, the people whom I expected to value me, a genuine concern—a sincere, “how are you doing?” An authentic, “I care so tell me the truth about what’s going on with you.”

Nope. I never got one of that from the people whom I expected to get it.

If I were fine, then all that I have said above would be last year’s story. But I am not fine. I haven’t been for a long time. But I tried to be.

My troubles are haunting me. They are the depression that visit me on a regular basis. I shake them off but each time, they get worse.

I know that I am never the strong one but I was forced to be. What with witnessing my youngest brother wither because of the multiple doses of chemo drugs induced in his body, seeing him grasp for air because his lungs had been betraying him, consoling him amidst his puffy red eyes while the doctors shove tubes down his throat, helping roll his stretcher towards the ICU, keeping calm as he loses consciousness and succumb to seizure, sitting by him as he fight infection after infection, and wishing helplessly that he gets through all the time. As if that’s not enough, my other brother had to acquire a heart disease which, thank God, hasn’t gotten serious. Then there are my parents. Well they are my parents; I know how they can be a handful especially when you live with them. And, oh, there’s my other brother whose life should be none of my business but for some reason bothers the hell out of me.

Then there’s my life where I continuously struggle to matter, to make a mark, to live with substance, which is hard to do when you are suppressing trauma, when no one’s there to support you, when you are trudging a great strange road by yourself.

No, this is not in any way another SOS. As my title states, I’m writing this for my so called self-implemented therapy.