I met my anti-vision. The intensity of how much I hate her hits me in the face every time.
She didn’t use to be this way. She was a woman admired back in college—my core memory of her is as an intelligent academic with sophisticated ideas about feminism and political ideologies.
But now, nearing her 80s, she has become fragile. She has no health insurance whatsoever. She is surviving on the goodwill of others. She’s still teaching, but paid peanuts.
It disgusts me to visit her place. There are ipis crawling on the floor, and she can’t even bend down to kill them or sweep away their empty carcasses. There are books piled on top of more books. There are used, unused, clean, and unclean clothes in every corner of the small apartment. They say she’s a hoarder of valuable art, but all I see is a narrow path that winds from her small kitchen to her bathroom to her sofa bed. The smell of her place clings to me long after I leave. Disgusting.
Maybe it’s because I have perimenopause—kaya parang war mode lagi ako. I don’t know exactly, but I can’t get off her case! It doesn’t help that she owes me money and keeps making excuses for why she can’t pay me back. (That’s the only reason why I visit her, really.)
Being a psychologist and therapist, I naturally questioned myself: why the hate? And what I found within was projection.
You see, I was projecting good and bad parts of myself onto this old lady.
The bad parts: I’m terrified of growing old poor, immobile, and totally dependent on my children. Isang malaking pabigat at palamunin.
The good parts: I admired her intelligence and former standing in the academe. Because I’m about to enter my PhD studies, I’m triggered. What if, after all the studying I pursue, I end up poor and useless like her?
I guess I’m confused and mixed up, so I’m writing this.
Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” So there I was last week, finally deciding to face what I’d been avoiding.
Admittedly, like her, I’m not very financially savvy. I noticed she carries this mindset that money is a dirty thing, something beneath her. And unconsciously, I realized—yeah—I’ve adopted the same approach. Time to change that. Time to channel my inner Chinoy, the one my daddy raised and my mother still upholds.
It was tough at first, shifting my focus from her and her chaos to my own financial literacy. It felt like pulling teeth. But I gradually got to know my numbers, tracked my expenditures, and chose a wise investment (I hope!) for growth.
How clueless I’d been all these years! And how liberating it is now to have broken free from my self-imposed limitations!
Being pushed by my revulsion of her is not the healthiest reason to start improving my financial life, right? But the parts of me she reflects—the ones I dread becoming—lit a fire under me. I got pushed by the pulsing desire not to become the bad parts of her.
The anti-vision was what worked.
I don’t want to end up like her. Literally—over my dead body.
Don’t think I can forgive her yet either.
She has got to pay up. It’s my money she has in her purse; I am entitled to get it back.
Most of you will say I should just forget about it and move on, but I’m not ready for that yet.
I guess that means I haven’t forgiven myself yet for being so financially bobo all this time.
Let’s work on that.
The featured image on this blog was AI-generated by me using free tools, namely ChatGPT, Canva, and Leonardo AI. I use these images to support my written content creatively and cost-effectively.
