"Kapit lang" is a Lie

Last night at around midnight, right as I was about to close facebook, I received a notification that Van Gogh is Bipolar (the restaurant) went live. On the thumbnail is Jethro Rafael, the owner and resident cuckoo artist of the magical rabbit hole that is VGIB. I’ve been to the place but I’ve never met the man. I was very curious. I clicked. And it was one of the best decisions I’ve made since the lockdown.

Jethro looked directly at the camera and addressed you as if you were in the room with him. Compared to all of the fb live streams and even the FB/Skype/Zoom calls I’ve made, this one felt the most intimate. It was a little weird but strangely comforting.

After hearing him speak for a minute, I was struck by how charismatic he was. How therapeutic his presence was. He spoke of love, positivity and of expressing all our fears and negative feelings with acceptance and without guilt. On paper, it would sound like your usual new age drivel. But paired with his sincerity and natural charisma, his words were healing. None of it felt cringey.

I will not be able to fully translate whatever that was into writing so I will have to stop the description here. I will instead focus on one sentence that really made an impact on me. It wasn’t even the first time I heard it. He said, words are powerful.

Certainly, words are powerful in that we use them to communicate with people everyday. But more importantly, words are powerful because it is how we communicate with ourselves. Whatever we say about ourselves, our body obeys.

Words are powerful, he said to a viewer who commented that they are doing their best to fight depression. He hypothesized that the viewer may be having a hard time because they used the word “fight” which would make their body go into fight mode. Fight mode is a very tense and exhausting state. Hardly an ideal state to be in when you’re trying to deal with depression.

Instead, Jethro suggested that the viewer say that they are “loving their depression”. It sounded wrong to me at first, like he was romanticizing depression. Of course, he was not as simple-minded as I was. He said that by saying you are loving your negative emotions/experience, you are triggering your body to go into being more loving, caring, and understanding. Things that would help your cells relax and release tension.

I thought about how this applies to my anxious and stressed out self and I think I have to agree. For the past week, I have been telling my friends repeatedly that I am feeling anxious and stressed but that I am still fighting. I often said, “kapit lang.” But what exactly am I hanging on to? Things are changing. And things are never going to be the same after this. Even economists are saying that it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen next because none of us have ever been in this situation before. So why don’t I just let go? Why don’t I just release and open my arms to embrace whatever the new normal will be? Why did I choose the tense state of hanging on when I could let go of the past comforts and the future expectations by embracing what is in the now?

I wouldn’t call Jethro’s fb live session to be a life-changing moment. But it was something special. For the first time since the lockdown, I was able to relax.