The election is not about our candidates. It is about us, the individual voter, and the Filipino voter within us. It’s becoming starkly clear that 2022 is a year of transformation in Philippine politics in the context of voter experience. Enabled by advanced technology, we have seemingly unlimited access to knowledge and information. With the responsible use of our devices, a mouse click or a screen tap can bring us to what we think we need to know about our candidates.
We perceive, analyze, decide, and select all higher-order thinking processes that we share with humanity. Most importantly, we call the shots in discernment as the media and technology can’t formulate judgments for us. Hence, the Filipino voter is way more engaged emotionally, mentally, and socially in the exercise of the right to vote today than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
From a psychological wellness perspective, the success of the 2022 election season has little or nothing to do with the candidates. Our pool of candidates is simply an instrument for self-discovery, personal growth, and development of individual supporters. Normally, through our thinking, feeling, communicating, and acting capabilities which we employ in unique ways as individuals, we can continue to learn more, develop insights, and increase our self-awareness sans any personal interventions by particular candidates.
How we engage our political self, how we would campaign for our candidates, how we view election-related events, and how we decide on whom to give our support reveal essential and trivial things about us. If we choose deliberately, face up to our own mistakes, and examine ourselves, we are doing service to our mental health and well-being. Otherwise, we simply use candidates to hide our frustrations, to avoid confronting our true feelings, and inner conflicts, or to attribute our imperfections, failures, and inadequacies on to our candidates, risking our wellness, peace, and happiness.
When the May elections are done, we can only wish that the results shall reflect how much we have learned as a people, what progress we have made as a nation, how well adjusted we have become as voters instead of how retrogressive, rigid, and immature, we remain to be as a people and as a nation.
To choose well and not to use candidates means that we serve best the better, the more mature, proactive, and emotionally intelligent Filipino voter identity of the future.
Ultimately, choosing with full awareness our candidates is a sure win for the individual voter and an honor for the candidate well chosen.
MARIS C. TANANGCO
maria25808@gmail.com