Psychobabble

I get asked a lot on why I majored in psych when I didn't want to be a shrink.

I wish I had a strong enough answer, but the truth is that the kid working the registration table that summer flubbed up my application and I wanted to be able to read people.

This was during my "I will be a JAG and the first female admiral of the Philippine Navy" delusions.

The dream was pretty bullshit, since I had the discipline of a paper bag and barely weighed over ninety pounds. And despite my passion for the law, I didn't love it enough to read it every night for four years...or the rest of my life, for that matter. But for some reason, I perpetuated the delusion simply because I thought it was the right thing to do.

So why psych?

Having been rejected outright by the Philippine Military Academy for being underweight, I thought I was just destined to be a lawyer, since that's the kind of job that I thought was accepted in my family: a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant...maybe a nurse. You could be something else, but growing up I just never really thought of the options. I had them, I just wasn't made aware of them.

Senior year came and everyone--my teachers, my friends, my family--all had a general idea on where it was going to go.

My art advisor thought I was going to take up Fine Arts, my english teacher I thought I was going to be an academic and take something like Lit or Philosophy, while my Lit/Journalism professor thought I was going to journalism school and become a reporter. My whole family thought I was going to take a straightforward pre-law course: political science, legal management, economics, or maybe even accounting.

No one ever thought of psych, so that's what I took.

I snuck in this slim general psychology book when I purchased my senior year textbooks and what I read intrigued me.

All my life, i'd always been interested in why people were the way they were. Mostly, why criminals fucked up and why the bigger, better and scarier criminals seem to want to fuck up.

I wanted to get into people's heads. A dim notion, since one of the first things listed in the gen psych book was that psych never teaches you how to read minds. I believed it, I knew it was true, but I thought that maybe--just maybe--it would at least help me understand people more. Maybe I needed this to know what was going on in a clients mind...

I ended up in UST because it was the only school that I tried for that accepted me.

I applied for a total of three schools: the top two of the Big Four and nothing else.

Ateneo rejected me outright, which dented but didn't necessarily blow my ego. The tuition was expensive, and for some reason, I never saw myself in that school. I applied because it was the second best thing and everyone was applying to.

Passed the test for University of the Philippines in Diliman--didn't make the cut for any of my courses. After some finagling, the university accepted me for their Los Banos branch, but my dad freaked out and said no. No to the free-frall school thrumming with hormones and fertility.

That I cried for. I wanted to go to UP so badly, I didn't take tests for any place else.

So the summer after graduation--a month and a half before the start of the new school year--I took the test for school number four (La Salle--number three--is at the end of the world)

Everybody warned me not to go to the College of Science. It had the second highest cut rate in the university and with the term about to start, I needed to get into a school pretty badly.

I was supposed to take two AB courses: Pysch and Philosophy. People advised me to put in Nutrition as my last option, since the cut rate at the College of Education was pretty low. I decided against that (don't I love to take risks) and went for another AB course: Legal management.

UST's last test was scheduled at the end of April, which made me miss a free trip to Hawaii and then Las Vegas to attend my aunts wedding (with Elvis officiating, no less)

I wanted to bang my head into a wall. I never wanted to go to UST. It was too damn far and they had uniforms. I was sick of uniforms.

Still, I went on some terribly hot summer day for my application. The student working the registrar knew someone who went to my HS and started flirting with me. I wasn't really in the mood so I just kept nodding my head and watching him shuffle papers.

When he asked me what major I wanted, I told him "psych" and he handed me an application for the College of Science. Anxious to get out of there, I just signed it--without looking, since the damn things are the same for all colleges except one small marking--and moved on.

It turns out that there are two psych classes in UST--BS Psychology at the College of Science, and AB Behavior Science, the closest you could get to AB psychology.

I wanted to return the application, but I was already out and it would be a mess and so I just decided "the hell with it".

So that's how I got to BS Psych.

...

I used to wonder what would have happened had I just gone back and gotten another application--one to AB.

Would I be in law school now, trying to manage all my law courses and hating myself for it? Since i'm pretty sure I would have loathed being stuck with all those books.

If i'd gone to Behavior Science, would I still have considered profiling? I used to--for a long while--think I was going to be Mulder from the x-files and played detective. At one point, I thought that the only way you could understand how a person can go crazy is to simulate it in your head---forgetting that if you go nuts in your head-even if you think it's just a simulation-then you really are nuts. Going crazy and being aware of it isn't all it's cracked up to be.

...

But no doubt, the biggest question that I get is: why do you want to be a writer? A filmmaker?

I don't know.

I have no grand vision in my head. I don't feel like I want to be the next Orson Wells or the next Lino Brocka. I have no epics in the making.

All I have are these snippets of scenes and images that I would like realized. In paper, in film, in canvas...I just want to see them.

So why psych? Why writing? Why directing? Why chose to be this for the rest of your life and not that any of those predicted something else's?

I don't know. To be quite honest, I'm still waiting for the right question. I feel like if I get the right one, the clever one, i'll find the right answer along with every one of them.