‘Bluer than blue’

MONDAY is the first working day of the week. That’s when you need all the energy to start the week right. But there I was, playing Pearl’s Peril and reading Pico Iyer’s “The Art of Stillness.”

My planner has been full of sh*t, er, things to do lately, but all I could do last Monday morning was play computer games and read a book about stillness. Does that make me the laziest procrastinator on Earth? Hmmm. There must be other people like me but they live in another galaxy far far away.

The Earth is this tiny speck, almost like a dust particle, in the universe. Once we see that image posted on Facebook, we begin to see our self as this dot way tinier than dust, and yet there we are, burdened by a million concerns, and not able to move forward with all that excess baggage.

But doing nothing must be exhausting because I was already sleepy by 9 p.m. My Monday blues come and go and sometimes it could happen on other days of the week so that there may be the Wednesday blues, the Friday blues, the Sunday blues, with that last one as the worst of all because, hey, it’s Sunday, supposed to be the most relaxing day of the week!

But once the blues start to become the norm instead of the exception, it’s time to seek professional help. Clinical depression can lead to the point of no return and it’s not the type of condition that can be treated with bahala na si Batman.

Sh*t happens and we soon realize we’re strong enough to deal with it. But if it happens one after the other without allowing us to breathe, will we be excused from functioning like a robot for a while? So we can be well again.

Battered women are especially vulnerable to depression. Imagine the man you love boxing you like as if he’s Manny Pacquiao and you’re, hmmm, as fragile as Sarah Geronimo.

There is never any excuse for the man who batters his wife or girlfriend. He has run out of excuses the moment he began abusing her emotionally, mentally, verbally, or even financially, for that’s how it starts. Then, it gradually escalates to some shoving until several episodes later when it erupts into an all-out war against the woman who could hardly defend herself and fend off his blows.

Why a man would physically harm a woman is similar to the question, why an adult would physically harm a child. A man is not a human being if he physically abuses his wife or girlfriend. Those outside of that relationship will always ask why she hasn’t left him yet. But with all the threats he throws at her, how could she leave?

Lucky is the woman who has been spared from such abuse for she would never experience the pain of being battered by the man who says he loves her.

But to start the first working day of the week with a blue tinge may not necessarily mean the blue from a bruise, and Barbra Streisand even has a song for this: “Mem’ries/Light the corners of my mind/Misty water-colored memories…” If only we could delete some of those mem’ries from our brain. But they tend to stay and we have to learn to look back without reliving the pain.

We don’t want to burden our friends with our woes, that’s why there are psychiatrists and psychologists to help us survive through it all. Better that than drowning in drugs, alcohol, and other bad habits that could do more damage instead of helping us cope in this oh so cruel world.

“Bluer than blue, sadder than sad” is for the romantically dumped. But not all blues are connected with romance. There are many other woes outside of that heart-shaped world and they’re the ones that could be more difficult to overcome. We can watch a movie, or travel outside of our comfort zone, or discover a new hobby, but since “wherever you go, there you are,” as the saying goes, our memories will always be there.

Unless we morph into the amnesiac Lucy, a character in the movie “50 First Dates,” who wakes up each morning without remembering any of the things that happened to her the day before since her memory always brings her back to her dad’s birthday when she and her father met a vehicular accident. And that could be the bluest of all blues.