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Confronting My Ordinariness

I’m currently coming out of an intense depressive episode. It was really bad a few days ago. I can’t really say what the trigger for it was (or rather, I don’t want to share), but I was really down and really anxious all at once. I’m not formally diagnosed with anything, I only use “depressive episode” for brevity because there are very many similar symptoms. However, I am too self-aware to really deny them.

Central to my inner turmoil has been confronting the fact that despite instances in my life that I’ve been praised for things I do, I actually fall short in a lot of things. Simply put, I’m not really as amazing as people think. Or rather, I’m not really as amazing as I used to think I was.

It all sounds very egotistic, but much of my childhood struggles stemmed from a lack of confidence and bad self-esteem, and upon realizing that, I took it upon myself to be more confident. To find confidence in what I do. This, in itself, was already a huge effort for me. I tried to look at myself objectively at every turn and tried to convince myself I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was.

Well, it turns out it’s all backfiring now. I haven’t exactly developed a stable sense of confidence, but it has significantly improved from my teen years. Since 2018, since almost dying and my brain rewiring itself, I have been some level of confident. Checks out, too, because that year I joined four creative writing workshops that ultimately resulted to my self-esteem being further shot to death. Haha. (But this isn’t really about that.)

Something happened a few days ago that really brought me back down to the fucking earth. I can’t go into detail about it, but I basically ended up comparing myself to other, more skilled people, especially when it came to writing. That day, I was also mulling over non-responses from certain people. I had a lot of anxiety ongoing and the comparison to other people ended up being the last straw.

(Boljoon, Cebu, sometime 2014)

I had a breakdown. It was a quiet type of breakdown. I knew because I reverted to my self-destructive ways, which, for a lupus patient, is eating food I’m not supposed to eat (Nissin’s Five Spice Beef instant ramen is really good). The want to isolate myself was strong, too, but I had important work I couldn’t ignore. Still, I couldn’t push myself to do most things. Everything felt like too much to do, even sleeping. I started sleeping late, when my sleep schedule had already returned to normal. I was doing fine, and then it took one snap to destroy it all.

But I guess one thing I can give myself praise for is my ability to pull myself out of my own head when I need to. So I gave myself a day to be sad and to mope around. (On that note, I also acknowledge the kind of privilege I have to be able to do that.)

Things started feeling lighter when I decided to talk to people about it, to people I trust. At first, I ran to a fandom-focused Discord server (for a fic exchange I joined) and asked how people deal with insecurity in their writing. It was fine at first, but I realized I couldn’t get comfort from a group I am basically detached from, because I don’t really know them, they don’t know me, and the one thing binding us together is the mutual love of fictional professional volleyball players, one a big fat jerk and the other a too-blunt jerk, getting together.

So I ran to my friends, who were gracious enough to let me yell. It helps that they’re also writers so they understood what I felt. My friend (friend-parent, really), Astrid, said that one thing that really helped them with their self-esteem was accepting that they’re not meant to be extraordinary, and it doesn’t have to mean failure.

I imagine it should be common sense, but reading that message really did help me bring myself out of my own head. I want to be smart and intelligent and super articulate, but I have to come to terms with the fact that I don’t really have to be. That I can just be a Claire in the most ordinary sense.

That I am a Claire in the most ordinary sense.

Because ordinary Claire is still somebody who runs this blog and makes these posts. Ordinary Claire is a labor advocate and a community journalist. She puts her best efforts in amplifying the struggles of the marginalized and has done so for a few years now. Ordinary Claire writes fanfic of stories she loves. Ordinary Claire has stories she wants to tell and only she can write them in the way she wants, even if she doesn’t have good technique. Ordinary Claire loves to read. Ordinary Claire runs multiple Twitter accounts because she loves so many things, she needs to be involved in them. Ordinary Claire tells her friends and family she loves them at every opportunity she gets. She doesn’t let herself miss any chances. Ordinary Claire is full of love.

Ordinary Claire, who has reached for extraordinariness for most of her life and almost always fell short, continues to be loved regardless.

It’s actually something that continues to astound me, that there are people around me capable of giving me (me!) love in ways I haven’t learned to give to myself. I’m always reminded by others that it’s not up to me to decide how much I deserve the love that people give to me, because they’ve already made that choice all on their own.

It is, admittedly, just hard to remember sometimes.

Much of this need to be validated comes from my petit bourgeois background and the petibs tendency to want to center the world around ourselves. I have spent a good part of the past five years trying to struggle against this tendency, but remolding is not an overnight process. I need to painstakingly do it everyday.

I wrote this in an emotional email to my college professor (I had emailed to ask for a recommendation and ended up writing a whole essay about my self-doubt) after explaining that a good reason why I got through college at all was because she believed in me—that I knew I would have to learn to have faith in myself somehow. To trust in my own worth.

I’m still not feeling well enough right now as I write this, but putting all this into words has made the process of confronting my ordinariness more tangible. More doable.

I need to anchor myself back to earth and back to the communities I’ve committed to serve so that I can take a step back and see how minuscule this self-doubt is in the grand scheme of things.

Always, Claire

P.S. Since my last post was in December 2020, I feel I have not brought to light a very important health update.

In December, probably a few days after I made that last post, my doctor told me that the symptoms of the lupus are “moderately controlled” and I didn’t need to do chemo as long as I kept up my good lab results. This was really such good news for me. For the longest time, I thought I would be having chemo forever. I’ve been having chemo on and off since 2013. I was 15 years old when I started. It was a lot to take in as a young teen, but I managed to accept it along the way, so much so that I couldn’t imagine a possibility beyond it.

But it’s July 2021 now. It’s been over a year since my last chemo session in March 2020. The lupus nephritis is also not in flare, according to my lab results last June. I am at my healthiest right now, even healthier than I was during diagnosis.

These past months, I’ve just been trying my best to keep my lab results the way they are, managing my diet, and ensuring that I don’t end up having another flare, mostly because treatment is even more expensive now. There were some close calls recently, but I’ve managed to get through it.

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