You are who you vote for so choose your candidates well

It has become starkly clear that 2022 is a year of transformation in the country’s political dynamics.

Enabled by advancements in technology during the election season, we have unlimited access to knowledge and information. At the same time, we are able to maximize our inherent capabilities as humans in processing information. We pay attention, perceive, select, decide, and take action, all of which involve our higher-order thinking processes. Evidently, a mouse click or a screen tap could easily lead us to whatever we think we need to know about our candidates. However, we call the shots in discernment as technology can’t make up the minds of people on their behalf. Therefore, looking at the big picture, the Filipino voter is way more engaged emotionally, mentally, and socially in the exercise of the right to vote in the May 2022 elections as compared to previous elections.

From the lens of psychological wellness, without downplaying other perspectives, the success of the 2022 election season has little to do with the candidates. The current pool of candidates provides an instrument for self-discovery and personal development for voters. Through our thoughts and decision-making process, we can develop new insights, and increase our self-awareness sans any actual form of interventions by particular candidates.

How we campaign for our candidates, how we view election-related events, and how we decide on who to support reveal essential aspects of our “self.” If we would choose deliberately, which could mean first, facing up to our own mistakes, next, examining our own weaknesses, biases, imperfections, values, talent, and strengths, we are doing service to our mental health and well-being.

The call for an honest self-assessment reverberates. Otherwise, we would just be using candidates to hide our frustrations, to be mere symbols of our aspirations, to avoid confronting our true feelings and inner conflicts. In that condition, we would be highly risking our wellness and real sense of peace, and happiness.

When the May 2022 elections are done, the results shall reflect how much we have learned as a people, what kind of progress we have made as a nation, how well-adjusted and mature we have become as voters. On the other hand, it may also be telling how retrogressive and rigid we remain to be as a people and as a nation.

To choose well and not to use candidates superficially is to improve your voter identity. It is to serve best a new, more mature, proactive, and emotionally intelligent “you” both as an individual and as a Filipino voter.

Ultimately, for the individual voter, choosing with full awareness his or her candidates, is a sure “win” in well-being. And for the candidate whom the individual voter has chosen well, indelible esteem and honor shall be within him or her in the long run.

MARIS C. TANANGCO
[email protected]