Mystic Aperture

I went to the VA hospital today, to get checked for some recurring depression. I just wanted to talk to someone and have a medicine change, but because I said I was a little more suicidal than usual, they had me change into psych unit pajamas and gave me a quiet room with a bed covered with anti-suffocation bed sheets.

Terminator played quietly in the hallway behind plexiglass.

To be clear, I wasn’t going to commit suicide. Very simply put, I live with a severe disability that needs to be closely monitored; I monitor my feelings like a diabetic manages their sugar. When my “levels” are low, I check in, well before there is a crisis. 

I want to write about my experience in the ER psych unit, because even if it’s a short 2-3 hour stay, there’s always a lot to say. 

Hospitals are prisons. French philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault made that claim a few decades ago. He is one of the most revered contemporary philosophers. He said medical professionals “treat” you the same way a prison guard or police officer gains compliance.

Some of the ways Foucault points out hospitals, specifically ER psych units, are like prisons: They have authoritarian structures, dress codes, emphasis on silence and order, negative reinforcement, loss of individual autonomy, abridged freedoms, and minimal input in decision making. 

This was supremely evident during my stay in the psych unit. 

As I settled into my room in my uniform pajamas, I heard another patient say loudly, but not in a shouting voice, “I’m agitated because there’s seven of you around me trying to force me to take medicine! I don’t want antipsychotics!” 

“We are just trying to calm you down,” a nurse said. I couldn’t see directly into the space, but from what I know about psych units, they hire some buff people to control people. I imagined at least two or three strong men standing near the patient.

“I’m not calm because you are surrounding me and forcing me to take medicine!”

“If you’ll just calm down…” While they all stood around him.

He said the psychotics made him feel like shit, and he has his own body. He came in voluntarily, after all.

My head was abuzz. The nurses and doctors kept insisting that the problem of his agitation was him, not the circumstance of being force-fed medicine. A mix of benzos and an antipsychotic, would solve this man’s issue, they argued.

Unsuccessful in their bid, the nurses and staff retreated to outside the patient psych unit area. 

I looked into the hallway and finally caught a glimpse of the man. He carried the saddest and most distressed expression I’ve ever seen—like a child pouting when they’re being hit by a parent. From what I gathered, he voluntarily checked himself into the unit for 72 hour observation so he could get away from everything. Clearly, he was agitated, but not aggressive. I wish I could’ve just gone over to him and asked him about his day.

But because he was formerly an infantry sergeant, he was also rough around the edges. 

The nurses asked/demanded he stopped talking so aggressively. They threatened him and ordered him around the room so he would behave — like a prison. He retorted that’s just the way he talks. I kept thinking, if they just stopped ordering him around, and acknowledged his agitation and how their behavior is making him feel uneasy, the man would calm down. 

What the medical staff saw as aggression was, on the outside, just a person who is crusty and salty. A former infantry sergeant with a tough demeanor would be celebrated as a paragon of masculine strength. But in the ER psych unit… it’s aggression. And under Foucault’s theory, if a patient is perceived as aggressive, real or not, they are to be disciplined.

That’s exactly what eventually happened. 

After the nurses left the patient area, and a few minutes later, the patient rasped on the window seperating patients from the medical staff. They asked what he needed, and he said he wanted to talk to the doctor. This went back and forth a few times, with no one really understanding each other, until the nurse on the other side just started ignoring him.

After being ignored for a little while, he rasped on the window again. Eventually, the nurse came back to him. If he went to his room, the doctor would come.

“Why do I need to go to my room?” he said.

“For the patient’s safety,” the nurse replied.

“What do you mean for the patient’s safety?”

“For the patient’s safety,” the nurse repeated.

I should pause here really quick and mention that the nurse couldn’t use the second-person pronoun “you” because according to the theory hospitals are prisons, his agency was so far removed that he became an object to himself. In other words, he was just a patient, not a person with a set of individual desires and needs.

Eventually, the elderly man went to his room. Shortly after, the nurses rushed and locked him in. 

A gaggle of burly nurses gathered outside his door. I looked at him again through the door’s window, with a huge disappointed frown, as the situation made itself evident — the nursing staff manipulated him.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“You were slamming on the window, and that’s being disruptive,” a male nurse told him. 

“I was just knocking on the window!” I was there, I saw it, he was indeed just knocking on the window. Annoyingly, certainly, but not aggressively or with malice. 

“You were slamming on the window,” the nurse repeated himself, ignoring the patient’s argument.

“I just want to talk to the doctor.”

“We’re past that point,” said the nurse.

In my mind, I’m thinking, are we really past the point of talking to the doctor? The man complied with what the nursing staff asked. Let him chat with the doctor, maybe it’ll actually calm him down and feel like he’s being heard and his agency is intact.

I took a close look at the elderly man through the window. His eyes were crying tearless tears. The nurse said he had to sit on the bed, and he looked back with fear, as if to say, “Is this really happening?”

The buff nurses bum rushed his room, and he said, “I’m not resisting.” In less than thirty seconds, he was restrained in the bed. He kept asking for the doctor. “Doctor, let me talk to you” “Before they give me medicine, let’s talk.” “I want to talk to the doctor before the medicine.”

Meanwhile, the nurses prepared a syringe and prepped the injection site. The doctor stood behind the commotion, observing, not doing anything. The patient looked directly at her and said, “Is this what you want? Why won’t you talk?”

The nurses gave him an anti-psychotic, and he writhed and shouted for over thirty minutes.

While I was there, he never did get a chance to talk to the doctor. He was just an agitated, rough-around-the-edges, sad guy who needed to be heard… and because he didn’t act right, he was punished. 

==

We often wonder why veterans distrust the VA. 

I’m fine, by the way. When the doctor came to me, I smiled politely and was effusively grateful.

In our world, being sensitive is seen as a weakness. That’s because we associate sensitivity with the inability to handle hardship — sensitive people are easily offended or made upset.

The fact is, being sensitive doesn’t make you weaker necessarily.

Being sensitive means you can feel life.

When military men and women leave the service, we sometimes gravitate toward helping others, in counseling, the arts, the medical field, or in academic settings where we research life. We re-acquaint ourselves with being in tune with the rest of the world, instead of stuffing our feelings inside so we can deal with the bullshit of the day. In other words, we often find ourselves trying to become more sensitive post-service.

The reality is that having sensitivities is like an antenna that puts you in tune with your fellow human being and the world around you. Like a receiver, you quickly and accurately receive other people’s feelings, allowing you to accommodate them more. Then, you start seeing beauty in simple things, like the petal of a rose. It does not necessarily mean you are easily bruised or take offense easily.

If we separate sensitivity to each other from sensitivity to having an easily bruised sense of self, we can then appreciate that being sensitive can also be paired with the idea of toughness. Imagine being able to feel the world’s hurt, other’s pain, responding to them in the way they need it, yet not being bogged down yourself. You can help other’s burdens without feeling burdened yourself. That’s sensitivity when it’s strong. That’s toughness. Even those who are “manly” and “strong” shatter like glass when they have to deal with their repressed feelings — is that really toughness?

I come upon this topic as I think about my own life’s sensitivities. I was often ridiculed as a child for possessing this trait, especially as a boy, and more as I became a man. Now I don’t give a fuck if I cry when something touches me deeply, whether it is the joy of someone’s accomplishments, the pain of someone’s loss, or appreciating my own growth. Now, I find myself in a place to help others more than ever because of my sensitivity. That’s toughness. Sensitivity is life’s gifts to me, and if I may, I would like to share how sensitivity needs to be heeded today.

Roe vs. Wade. Those gloating about their victory with Roe vs. Wade aren’t imagining the individual depth of pain of having their autonomy taken away; the pain of the idea of millions of children growing up in broken and poor homes; the pain of a society who cares to forget them once they’re out the womb; the pain of mothers who cannot raise their children. With one raised fist for victory among anti-abortion advocates, they smack with their other hand women and mothers across this whole country. I cannot say this is sensitivity to its greatest extent; in fact, those gloating about this victory have shown callousness. “They should have made better choices.” “They shouldn’t have sex.” “It’s their own fault.” That’s callousness to the fact that women can and should have sex outside of marriage.

They proclaim saving a life, while ignoring the consequences of their actions that have greater magnitude. Ignoring consequences, in many ways, is a classic example of insensitivity, and the tell-tale trait of an underdeveloped human being.

The beauty of being sensitive is that it’s a trait we are all born with. We come into the world keen to our caregiver’s ups and downs. Our first footsteps are towards our parents and family, giving them hugs. Our first steps after graduation is towards our biggest supporters. Our first walk down the aisle is to be married to a person. None of these walks can happen without sensitivity; we are born with it. I just ask, as we decide to make laws, are we walking towards the people we should love and care for? Or have we turned our backs on them? Perhaps in smug satisfaction of our victory?

It’s worth noting that the current issues with inflation are related to the massive increase in demand when production was essentially halted during lockdown. Rather than increase production, many companies found it more profitable, easier, and logical to simply sell their current stock at higher prices. This had the knock on effect of leading to shortages. Again, demand is a major contributor to inflation right now.

The narrative that the stimulus plan is causing inflation issues is related, but let us not forget that when the bond market failed during the recession, the Fed pumped in $2.2 to 2.3 trillion in loans to Wall Street. Yet, while we talk about the hand-me-up we give everyday Americans contributing to inflation, no one is talking about the bond market or Wall Street receiving just as much.

It is also curious to note that countries that did infrastructure and social spending, like those in Europe, are weathering inflation and recession much better than America. While countries that have taken a more classic neoliberal approach of non-interference in the economy are suffering the worst. America sits somewhere in the middle, just slightly on the edge of doing worse.

More importantly, we wouldn’t be in this mess if businesses weren’t profit-driven. Let’s be clear — businesses are the backbone of our society. They manage the logistics of our goods and services, give us our needs and wants, and provide an avenue for people to live decent lives. However, their underlying program of seeking profits distorts their behavior. In the case of increasing demand, instead of ramping up production, companies found it safer and logical to their bottom line to simply jack up prices. The alternative, increasing production, would bear too much risk to their profits.

If businesses were coordinated in some fashion with the demands and needs of its people with some statistical forecasting, and businesses would be reassured that doing right by the economy wouldn’t necessarily mean taking a risk on its existence, we wouldn’t worry about hills and dips in the economy. Arguably, we would greatly soften or even completely eliminate recessions.

I’m working with a friend on a YouTube documentary series and this is my friend’s first foray into doing interviews. I, on the other hand, have been doing interviews for just under a decade for a variety of formats. (You would think that I’m pretty good, but I’m going over footage from my latest documentary right now and boy, I need some work on delivering questions! Still, I know a thing or two about the art.)

About ten years ago, I was sitting in a lecture hall at UC Irvine taking research methods with Professor Gilmore, a sweet elderly sociologist with a strong southern accent. He told us that when we asked subjects about what they thought about something, we should ask them to tell a story. After they complete the story, Gilmore said, “Then ask them what that story means to them.”

The theory behind asking about meaning is not some flippant idea, but an idea borrowed from psychology that helps people tell their histories and helps them “make sense of influences, relationships, and sources of knowledge in the world.” (Wikipedia page on meaning-making)

Meaning situates people in their world. If you ask a person who recently lost a dog, you can sometimes ask what it means to them, and you may hear a response like, “Losing my dog taught me that life is short, and I need to cherish sooner and more often.”

Having asked people about meaning in their lives, I’ve wondered why meaning is important. I think I recently stumbled on an answer.

Meaning-making contains a spiritual aspect, as well. It shows us where a person is, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going. If our lives are journeys to be experienced, as the mystics claim, it is helpful to compare notes about our journey. So learning about other’s meaning making helps us out in our own path.

Without making meaning of our life’s challenges and triumphs, we become an amorphous blob with no particular direction in life. Experiences pass through us like wind through a broken windmill. What kind of life is that?

This perhaps explains the importance of moments of self-reflection, introversion, and meditation. It loosens our gears, so to speak, so the windmill can turn, then in turn, churn what it needs inside of us. All too often do I, unfortunately, see friends continually re-enter situations over and over because they haven’t let the lesson — the meaning of their situation — come to them.

I often find that when I ask people to make meaning of their lives and the situations they come into, I’m the first person to do such a thing. I sometimes catch them off guard, and as a result, their responses are fresh and unvarnished. People also appreciate the question of being asked what something means to them, too. So that’s a practical conversation trick.

Today, while my wife was minding her own business and drawing a sketch of a staircase in a city park, a friend approached her. The friend is a ceramics art teacher. Noticing Sarah’s drawing, she invited Sarah to hang out in the future and do art together. While they’ve been friends in a “everyone I’m friendly with is a friend” kind of way, this small moment of recognizing the other person’s values could begin a deep connection between them.

I love this moment my wife shared with me, because I feel that one day, when we are evolved enough, everyone will connect with each other so easily.

There are just so many barriers in modern life, the main one being we close off our hearts to each other. It is so hard to walk up to others and simply ask for an embrace, and receive one in return. And when you do, it is seen as weird with an ulterior motive.

Last winter, there was a disabled homeless man crying into the streets, “God, where are you? I need you!” I continued walking past him five or six meters, and something moved inside me. I have a few dollars, I can spare a few for this man who was deeply distressed. As I passed the bill from my hand to his, I looked into his eyes, and I started crying. I could sense his soul feeling forsaken, alone, desperate. I embraced this man, like my own father and said, “You are loved. I love you.” He thanked me and the heavens for the gift of recognition and the money to go home in the freezing winds.

I don’t always act this way. In fact, I’d say, I’m like most people. I give when I can, but mostly keep to myself because I’m afraid of what will happen. If you engage with the wrong person, they will start rummaging through your stuff for more food (happened to a friend); they will start talking to you non-sensically (happens all the time on the train); they will say violent things (happens every month in New York City).

But once in a while, my hearts stirs, beats, and moves me to act.

When I release my fears of others, and when society can do the same, we will all live in such greater harmony.

The first time I met my wife, something inside me moved.

It was within the first week of college starting. In our dormitory, there’s a floor just for women. I went into the first room I saw. There, I met her, Sarah. She had an innocence and zest for life. She was quirky with her possessions — keeping little knick knacks that entertained her, including a colorful folding paper mache with numbers, a letter opener in the form of a sword from Lord of the Rings, and a drawing she made from “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.”

I, on the other hand, was much more… simple. I decorated by dorm room with military memorabilia, because at 19, the military is your personality. My dog tags and medals hung on the wall as well as my helmet from being an EMT.

Within a month of meeting, we were a pair. We would go on long walks together, caressing each other’s hands. I once forced her to run two miles, and she hated me for it. Then she got me to start driving more safely. Today, she still hates running and I am a better driver.

When I went to war, we had tearful goodbyes. It hurt that I hurt her. But I had an obligation, and if I didn’t fulfill it, I would go to jail. It seems so asinine now to feel coerced to go to an illegal, inhumane, and unjustified war… and to hurt all those around me because of it.

But that year apart would prove to be the year where we cemented our relationship for the rest of our lives.

I am your common man, but not terribly common. If in a thousand years you picked me out of a crowd, you’d say, “Yes, he is quite representative of his times.” On the other hand, if you picked me out of a crowd today, you’d say, “He’s a bit unusual.”

On the outside, the case is apparent. I am part of a small minority of people who have been to war; I attend an elite institution; I am a racial minority in America; I had kids before the age of thirty. I’m quite blessed in so many ways.

Inside my heart, however, I feel a deep churning like the cold waters of the deep Pacific feeding life to kelp forests along the American West Coast. Deep, deafening in its volume and enormity, but silent and unknown. Yet, from deep within these waters arise rich nutrients feeding life.

I seldom watch war movies, but when I do, I usually find them unbearable. In the inevitable scene of profound loss, whether it’s the loss of a comrade or a loss of the sense of self, I find myself transported. I’m in the war again. I’m young, naive, and impressionable. I’ve almost died a few times and I have made peace with my own death. Then, I remember coming back home, after the war, thinking, “I’ve learned to live with my own death for so long. Now I’m back and I’m supposed to live. How do I do that when I was ready to die?”

Then the movies unfold, and the films’ protagonists inevitably act out what I felt over years in a split second. The rush of pain and suffering. The gnawing sense of death inside you.

In my suffering, I’ve realized it is easy to feel superior to others. I am a better person for having gone through the worst of humanity. I am thankful I haven’t taken that road. Rather, I find myself empathizing more. Having gone through my suffering, I understand the suffering of those oppressed by the state (Palestinians), those pushed out of their homes and forces to travel dangerous lands (the Rohingya and the Syrians), and those killed in the name of property (Native Americans and African Americans).

Well, how the heck did we get here?

In 2013, the millennial-supported blogging website Xanga.com closed down, which took with it millions of pages of millennial youth culture. 

To be fair, like some of our musical and fashion tastes, a lot of it is worth vanishing into the electronic ethers. JNCO jeans, Xanga posts about how our moms were unfair, and screaming emo music should make any millennial shudder.

On the other hand, for millennial youth who were emotionally neurotic and enjoyed writing like myself, Xanga was where we sharpened our verbal spears. Through formless, countless rants, we expressed the inner worlds of being a teenager or a young adult. It also very quietly planted the seeds for my future in journalism, twenty years and two career changes later. 

Twenty years after starting my blog on Xanga, I’m nostalgic for those posts. Did my posts foretell my future? Have I grown beyond being reflective and passive into a dynamic go-getter? 

As I pondered who I was and who I am today, I have to say my basic proclivities are still the same. The only difference is that I have had a ton of life experience, and an equal proportion of therapy to go with it!

However, a key trait of mine is the desire for reflective journaling. I can only guess why I stopped journaling after Xanga, but the reason isn’t important. Today, I want to start writing again. I feel as though I have so many more meaningful things to say to myself, and to the five bots who care to scape through my blog. 

I will craft intentional pieces reflecting my internal musings about being me and things that are important to me. 

Some topics that I will write about

• Being a second-generation Filipino-American feeling the pull to the motherland
• Exploring healing trauma through Eastern and Indigenous medicine
• The growth of my spirituality under COVID-19 lockdowns
• The Veteran Affairs’ mismanagement and its tolls on veterans
• Going to Iraq, 15 years later and what I have to deal with
• Being a new filmmaker that wants to tell philosophical stories
• On trying to be a good Dad with so many emotional setbacks
• Maybe I’ll even write about the time I saw an Army officer put my sergeant in handcuffs