This has never been my favorite month of the year. This aversion to July was most prevalent in the last 8 years, for reasons I explained in previous blog entries around this time. Just two more days to go of this godforsaken month. But this year’s July is different from others, yet it remains consistently my least favorite month of the year.

The majority of this month was spent in solitude. I deactivated my social media accounts and kept to myself. I stayed informed of local & national news but without the doomscrolling. I minimized my contact with others because I did not want to talk so much about what was going on with my life at the moment. It was a lonely time, more so than in the last few months of the COVID era.

There was a lot of journal writing. A lot more in the past 3 weeks than in the last few months of this year. It is a major thing for me because I observed the dates of my journal entries and noticed that there have been gaps in between days when I had a busy schedule. Keeping a journal has been almost a decade-long practice, but this is the time I have been most reflective of all the things that I had pushed aside in order to function in a semi-orderly world. I had to connect with the parts of myself that I was most uncomfortable confronting because I kept upholding this ideal of myself.

All of those revelations will eventually unfold in the coming months. One thing I have learned is to pace out what is ready to come upfront.

---

Two big pieces of news I can share:

• I filed for a leave of absence for the Fall 2020 semester. LOA is such a privilege, given the recent debates on reopening schools for this coming academic year, including in higher education. Just today (July 29th), I received an email from my university that they will do remote learning, the same as last spring semester when COVID started. While it sounds promising, I already made my decision for LOA two weeks ago, during my whole reckoning phase for this month. I want to talk more about this in a separate post, but basically I have to really consider this path I’m embarking on and if it will lead to any positive outcomes in the long run…
• After waiting so long to manifest this passion project, I had decided to shut down {getLITfilam} in all of its digital platforms. It was a very hard decision for me to make… but given what transpired in the past 2 months, I felt it was an action I had to take, if I wanted to contribute to creating a better environment, especially for Filipinx. This is also another thing I want to elaborate on, in a separate post, when the time is right. For now, I am keeping my book projects to myself and learning/taking notes from others. I would love to create another space for this endeavor, but I want it to have a more solid and affirmative foundation than what {getLITfilam} had. (Everything has been deleted.)

Other plans I have, for this time, is fixing up my living space so that it can have a more functional and motivating vibe that will allow me to work and to relax–finding that balance so that everything can flow easier.

Noted that I’m still adjusting to the current shifts within my immediate space. I might be less active online, but I will still engage through observation and note-taking. This process may not sound very radical or spontaneous, but it allows room for slow & careful growth.