Burdens

"Pabuhat po." That's what gamers usually new to the game tell other gamers who've been at it for longer. "Pabuhat po," "carry me," meaning, "Help me reach a decent enough level where I can at least make it on my own." Usually said as a joke, or sometimes even meant, and sometimes taken up by those kind or bored or both enough to actually do it.

In RAN, the MMORPG I played for quite a while, it translated to "boosting," where you and your fellow-newbies hang around high-level players and form a party, and the XP they get killing mobs get cumulatively but proportionately distributed to everyone. 

In life, though, it translated to having substance use disorders, and, weirdly, dependence on depression. Can't get out of bed? No purpose in so doing? Ah, you're depressed, let that be the reason and the remainder of your day. No need for pabuhat — you can lay there and rot and still be justified enough to live. I know this is unfair to those who are depressed, but that's how I feel about it. I hate having it as a crutch not to do anything for the day. I am wasting life.

Where we live now, there's three hills — three — to the main road. No one to say "Pabuhat po" there, either.

In walks to the main road, I keep my mind latched on to my mother, who, when I was a child, would take me to the market. When going home, and the way home was uphill, she would just tell me, "Come on. One step. Another one. Another one. We'll get there eventually."

I guess that's why I hate the idea of "pabuhat," even that in organized religion, implicitly, where you rely on someone else's effort to get you out of your personal hell. I think that's also why I have a strange hate for weakness, and a not-so-strange love for anime characters that exude both strength and salvation on their own terms, never being a burden to others. I know this is why I hate the idea of a weak person, a weak woman, a weak girl, asking for help and being, through her very being, the reason others have to be. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sketch: "Eye Contact" in Shawn Wong's American Knees

Shawn Hsu Wong is a second-generation Chinese American, born in Oakland, California in 1949. He obtained his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the San Francisco State University in 1974. After teaching in several colleges and universities, he is presently a Professor specializing in Creative Writing and Asian American Studies, at the University of Washington, where he is also the director of the University Honors Program. His multi-awarded works include Homebase , first published in 1979, as well as edited and coedited works Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese America and Japanese America in Literature (1991), among four other anthologies. Wong has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, and has won several awards including first pr
Read more

Mental disorders: Thoughts on a whatever something or other

I suppose I could start in plainer English discussing who I am as a layman not trained in psychoanalytic language, and if so will revert to the language that I do use when discussing anything worth discussing: half academic and half wit (indistinguishable at times from being a halfwit). As a layman I chose to major in philosophy, for better or worse, which is a fast track to being witty, or being a halfwit, and other things besides. Or I could start with a bombardment of links mostly pertaining to The Diagnostic Statistical Manual   IV and V  and increasingly technical accounts of co-morbidity and dual diagnoses involving bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder until we both drown in jargon I will not be able to understand, much less simplify. For DSM-IV diagnostic criteria regarding bipolar disorders types I and II, look at  this  if you want a full jargon drowning, or  this instead  if only for its simplicity and overall pleasant color scheme. For both DSM-IV and V'
Read more

Memory

Image
I heard somewhere that were it not for entropy, time would not be linear for us. It being linear is the only reason why we can anticipate or remember, and why those words even mean anything to begin with, and why those words are the same words only facing opposite ends. However, the linearity of time is nothing compared to what the human brain does. It processes things as they happen, but it is only in retention and protention that it can understand what it processes. In short, our minds are never in the right time. There is no right time. There is no now. There is only anticipation or dread of a time that will end, and there is only memory of a time that has ended. The paradox in the entire thing, of course, is that without the now, neither of those states would be. And that is why time hurts. We are in it, things happen the order they do because of it, and it is merciless to the last second, especially when one has to leave. It is more merciless because of things that wi
Read more