Sometimes, I don’t know if I’m well.

It’s not about looking A-OK when you are rotting away inside. I feel good and bad at the same time on some days that I get confused which is which.

When I was younger, I thought it was because I was writing all the time, expressing myself, and I have no problem discussing my personal life the way I would discuss the apartheid or the Holocaust or an impending zombie apocalypse. It is also the reason I have never ever in my life needed a shoulder to cry on, or so I think. But I usually keep my troubles to myself, sharing them only when it’s appropriate, never quite to vent off or release the pressure, but by way of conversation, which really is my ice breaker, unskilled as I am in the art of small talk, so I get to talk beyond the weather or appearances or the freshness of the floral centerpieces at a party, even with strangers, as long as they are as open as I am.

When Jo Malone, for instance, was launched in Manila, we were at Blackbird’s airy, bright dining room with the noonday streaming sunbeams in through the picture windows, and, well, it was a fashionista event blathering with fashion statements. But by the time dessert was served, I was surrounded by all these girls, the most beautiful in the room, and we were deep in conversation over champagne. No, we weren’t talking about wood sage and sea salt, English pear and freesia, blue agava and cacao, or nutmeg and ginger on this good day, we were talking about depression and suicide and how hard it was to be lonely or worried or terrified for no or all reasons.

Either I am in full control of my emotions or I am an emotional wreck that has yet to be diagnosed, not that I am a stranger to psychology. I saw a psychiatrist, no less than the head of the psychiatry department at St. Luke’s, for a whole year when I was in my teens, but even she, the late great Dr. Lourdes Lapuz, did not give me any diagnostic label as much as my friends did or still do, who would so easily, as if they had a master’s in psychology, call me an overthinker or self-indulgent with feelings of loneliness or oversensitive or reeling from generational trauma. 

Nor did Dr. Lapuz prescribe any meds for me, which she did for my younger brother, who was seeing her at the same time. And yet, throughout my life, I feel I have been searching for answers I cannot even pin down, whether through philosophy or meditation or religion or history.

The truth is I suspect I am happy. I am at home in this world, where I have found many friends and a place I can call my own. Recently, at a dinner for my book club, The Very Extra Book Club, which has four Scorpios, including me, among its members, the others being Nix Alañon, Jae de Veyra-Pickrell, and Stephanie Zubiri, I raised the question: Would you rather cry in a Rolls-Royce or in a trike and is there difference? I raise the idea of being Scorpio because Scorpios are often described as intense, intuitive, and deeply emotional, but I can say the same thing of our other non-Scorpio members Pauline Juan, Rajo Laurel, Rocio Olbes, Marielle Santos-Po, and Farah Mae Sy, who would know that crying in a Rolls-Royce or in a trike is a statement on the universality of anguish. The Very Extra Book Club, especially before the pandemic, which put our mental health under grave assault, has neither been afraid of life’s most terrifying truths nor most terrible lies. We have always faced up to the most unsettling questions literature raises about life.

In a way this is me—I’ve never been protective of my psyche or my soul or my heart. I read everything, including trash. I would watch the most depressing film, if it means washing my soul of it after with something uplifting the way I read Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull after immersing myself in Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude and its disturbingly comic, senses-grating, soul-moving magic realism. I am drawn to people who have as great potential to hurt me as to love me or even to people who cannot love me but whose presence in my life I treasure. As a teenager, though I was 150 percent loved and though I love people, I resonated with Morrisey’s contempt for people in The Smiths’ classic “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”        

But I guess self-awareness is no antidote to the deep lows of life and, in recent years, now that I am older, the blows are more personal, more damaging. And yet I still walk the earth with a spring in my step. And yet I still break into dance even as I am harboring a broken heart. And yet my heart sings to desperate songs like Måneskin’s cover of “Beggin.’” And yet I love some people as much as I hate them, or I love them even as I see through their lies, their machinations, their contempt, their indifference.   

Life is hard, that’s true, a bed of roses full of wounding, deadly thorns. I want to be happy 100 percent. Impossible, I know, but I think it’s all a matter of perspective. I can be 10 percent happy. It’s just 10 percent, but if I should focus on the 10 percent, without being blind to the rest of the equation, I should realize I am happy anyway.