Coping with the disorder meant undergoing therapy, popping pills at one time, squeezing in hours of exercise despite a full day, being a lector at a Quezon City parish, and indulging in food to improve her mood, like cabbage, basil, green leafy vegetables, and chocolates.In 2019, Kara decided it was time to speak publicly about the disorder to help remove the stigma on mental health problems and normalize the path to diagnosis and treatment.
“He said if I had finished Tourism, being a flight attendant was fine,” she recalls. But Kara was finding it difficult to land a job that suited her mass communications degree. The reason: faulty English. Months earlier, she had flunked the English newswriting tests given by ABS-CBN and ABC 5. In a small hospital, the then PA/researcher did her job diligently. She interviewed a woman who was on her way to getting married and survived by tying and fashioning her wedding gown into a floating device. “She lost her wedding ring and almost died, but was so happy to be alive,” she recalls.
Soho commended Kara’s work and spread the word about her potential. Promoted as one of the segment producers of “Emergency,” she found herself writing her own stories and spiels for program anchors like former Sen. Tito Sotto and TV-movie personality Edu Manzano. The awards she and her team won reflected the solid research work and field coordination, as well as discipline that they put into every episode. Senior program manager Joseph Conrad Rubio recalls how Kara woke up at 4 a.m. to film people lining up at 5 to get water from a well for a documentary on a remote barangay. “She is keen on details. Dapat may puso, may lalim, may saysay ,” he adds.