To be honest, I’m still scratching my head wondering why I’ve been unusually happier this past year. It’s not like I accomplished anything big. The resolutions I made last year are the exact same ones I have now. I’m still ...
I used to think I had to have everything together before being ready for a relationship—like I had to be completely healed from all my past traumas, to have resolved all my existential crises, and to know exactly who I was and what I was doing with my life in order to be worthy of ...
Early childhood experiences led me to believe that my real opinions and feelings didn't matter. I learned that the quickest way to gain approval was through compliance and agreeableness, and that I was responsible for regulating people's emotions for them, even if it meant abandoning myself. Whatever would cause less friction, keep the peace, or ...
“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” – Dr. Seuss It's crazy how smallest things can trigger a sense of nostalgia. Like the smell of cigarette smoke, reminding you of the first time you moved out of home to live in that dingy apartment that you adored, ...
I never really knew my grandmother. But that all changed when I discovered she had begun writing her own memoir. It turned out that nine notebooks that made up my grandmother's memoir had been sent to my mom in Canada from the Philippines several years ago. They were handwritten in English and Tagalog, collecting dust ...
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that's sweeping across the globe, here are seven things we could all stock up on that wouldn't tip humanity towards the brink of extinction or cause unnecessary chaos (unlike that toilet paper fiasco). Good news: they are absolutely free, they are not susceptible to shortages (no hoarding needed ...
Last week, Vancouver was hit with its first snowfall of the season. As expected, the rain-accustomed city basically shut down when the snow reached its peak; bridges started to close, buses stopped running, cars got stuck, and classes got cancelled. And, sure enough, my lovely but prone-to-worry mother sent me a flood of texts urging ...
This past year has been very special for me, to say the least. It was the year I finally listened to a strong ache for change that had been gnawing at me for some time now. I finally stopped making excuses and did what I had to do to get to a new state, and ...
Growth is extremely exciting, admittedly humbling, terribly frightening, yet ultimately necessary. We tend to romanticize growth as an exciting time of flourishing and transformation, of trading our former lives for improved versions of ourselves. And most of the time, that is the case. But we often overlook the fact that growth can also be very ...
In an effort to minimize risk, we all have the tendency to predict possible outcomes and plan accordingly. To make these predictions, we can't help but draw from past experiences and preconceived notions of the world in order to keep ourselves safe. And this is not always a bad thing. Predicting and falling back on ...
When it comes to mental health challenges like anxiety or depression, it can be tricky to measure progress in a tangible way than, say, weight loss. Progress is often slow, subtle, and incremental, and the changes we make on the inside are often barely detectable on the outside (at first). It's incredibly frustrating to feel ...
Celine Diaz: Real Talk 