Ronan Colin Co Needs A Best Friend (According To His Therapist)

By Mikael Rizada-Borres

Before Ronan Colin Co stopped going to therapy sessions, the last assignment his therapist gave him was to, and I quote, “get a best friend.”

“Imagine a therapist giving you that assignment,” Ronan said.

For Ronan, it’s not a walk in the park to forge relationships with people to the point where he can call them his “best friends” or anything else of the sort. 

I asked: How do you achieve that? I wanted to know how to get a best friend too (as I share the same social plight as my interviewee). 

“I know, right?!” Ronan exclaimed. “That’s what I said! I was like, ‘How do you expect me to find a best friend?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t think that’s how best friends work.’”

In defence of the therapist, Ronan limits himself from finding suitable candidates who can be his closest confidants since he works with a narrow definition of “best friend.” 

“I think my definition of a best friend would be someone you grew up with, you know? Someone who’s been there for you your entire life,” he explained. “I think it’s just a constant person.”

With his meaning of “best friend” confining his selection of people to just childhood companions, Ronan’s best option is to perish his thoughts of discovering that “constant” person.

A younger Ronan playing Minecraft at home.

Before settling with the University of San Carlos in his Grade 11 year, he moved between five schools and two countries. He lived in America from the ages of six to twelve, then in the Philippines between those six years. Those changes of scenery led to a revolving door of faces and personalities. Hence, he never got used to having a best friend because he never grew up with one. His friendships seemed destined to be defined as ‘fleeting.’

The failure to attain a best friend was one of two things he has yet to resolve despite trying to better himself through several therapy sessions. The other thing concerns his documented anger management issues.  The difficulty in controlling his emotions was more apparent in his younger years. He first described when he recalled how he got suspended twice during his time in elementary school. “The first time,” Ronan tried to remember, “I basically started a food fight in the cafeteria ‘cause, like, a girl pissed me off. So I started throwing food at her.

“Second time was a lot more extreme. There was this Korean kid that was annoying me. And I used to grow out my nails. I still do [...] I walked up to him and just sunk my nails inside his neck.”

As maturity kicked into gear for Ronan, he refrained from hurting others. However, that did not mean the anger got quelled down as the number of his age went up, and he lashed out in other ways. 

One time, after getting into an argument with his first girlfriend, “I broke everything in my room,” Ronan said, pointing to one of the walls of his room. His Zoom background was blurry, so it wasn’t clear whether he was pointing to a specific object.  “I had windows that were broken there,” Ronan continued, then pointing to what one can assume were his windows. “I had an electric fan that was demolished to pieces. Basically, everything in this room was a fucking mess.”

The eruption prompted Ronan’s parents to finally send him to therapy, which was a departure from their usual parenting style of telling their son to brush off the negative emotions. His mother was more inclined to remark how her generation didn’t experience mental struggles. It’s a classic (false) narrative Filipino parents would say to their children who may be in crisis. Meanwhile, Ronan’s father’s advice for dealing with such a predicament would be to “just think happy.”

He doesn’t fault his parents for having that mindset regarding mental health, calling it a product of how his grandparents raised his parents. “It's just generational trauma that they’re carrying around, and it signals to me that it’s a cycle, that it’s something I have to break when I eventually have kids.”

Ronan with his mother and father.

Nevertheless, for Ronan, it did taste sweet to prove to his parents that he did need therapy. When asked what Ronan felt when he received a formal mental health diagnosis, he said he didn’t feel much about it since he already knew something was going on with himself. “I told my parents, ‘I told you so,’” said Ronan, who then let out a quick laugh.

Based on Ronan’s accounts about his relationship with his parents, one can tell that the relationship has had its deep ebbs and flows. The ebb between Ronan and his parents — which may never turn into a flow — is that they don’t say the three words that can affirm a family’s bond. “I don’t remember the last time we said ‘I love you’ to each other,” he said. “I can’t even remember.”

He’s the second eldest of four children (his older brother is two years older, his only sister is eight years younger, and his younger brother is nine years younger), and never getting to hear or say “I love you” contributes to the middle child syndrome Ronan believes he experiences. Oftentimes, Ronan felt unseen. “I definitely had a lot of resentment and felt neglected when I was younger,” he said. 

Without much consciousness, Ronan sought to fill in the gap his parents couldn’t always fill by basking in more attention from those outside his family. “My dad has a theory. Apparently, he told my older brother that the reason why my brother and I got girlfriends so quickly was because of the lack of attention from our mother,” Ronan said when describing his father’s Freudian thinking. Still, he’s unsure if the theory works out. “Who actually knows for sure? I have no fucking clue,” Ronan continued.

There is no definite guarantee that Ronan will finally understand why he got girlfriends at a relatively early age through therapy. No one can be sure whether some internal problems like Ronan’s anger issues and middle child syndrome can be solved through therapy. Maybe they could be solved, but there’s no certainty. One can suppose that there will be instances where the problems are unsolvable. Perhaps the only thing Ronan can do for some of those instances is to acknowledge that the problems are there and there’s nothing he can do about it.

When asked whether he does want to hear the words “I love you” from his parents, he replied: “At this point, no. We’ve actually established that during therapy. Because apparently, there are two ways to solve that problem: either you communicate with your parents, convey your needs, tell them you want them to be more affectionate towards you, or you just accept that your family’s like that — and you don’t get affected by it anymore.

“And guess which one I picked?” Ronan asked me.

Assuming that I am right in thinking that Ronan chose to accept his parents’ hesitation to display affection, I asked him: Isn’t the second option not necessarily squashing the issue? 

Ronan feeding his nephew, Blakey.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too, actually,” Ronan said, noting how the thought of him not getting enough affection from his parents kept creeping up soon after he chose acceptance. But the longer that time passed, the weaker the impact the lack of hearing those words of affirmation had on his mental state. “I don’t think a therapist would suggest that option if it didn’t work,” Ronan joked.

After learning his diagnoses from his therapist, he initially utilized them as cudgels for his advantage. When his depression hit an all-time low during his senior high school year, he used the diagnosis as a “get-out-of-jail” card, sending excuse letters to skip class. But at some point, he realized that knowing there’s an issue and being self-aware is not enough. 

He asked me again: “What’s the point of being self-aware if you aren’t going to do anything about it? I think that’s where therapy really comes in, where you have to act and make yourself better, or else you’re just gonna be useless for the rest of your life.”

Nowadays, he’s trying to act upon his understanding of himself. After graduating high school, he shed the need to pull out his cards whenever he felt like he needed to exit. Since starting college, his hands have been full with a new set of cards. Last school year, he was part of his university’s debate team, political science department’s student council, and USC’s progressive official student publication. Starting in the 2022-23 school year, he trimmed down his commitments as a liaison for the university-wide student council. 

As Ronan strides in his work-life, he’s reaching new social cliques. He’s with the nerds; he’s with the tryhard student leaders; he’s with the debaters; he’s everywhere and with everyone. Ronan’s even allowing himself to be amongst who he loathes the most, “dumb people.” The term “dumb people” consists of academic nincompoops he’s kicked out of his project groups and misogynists with the tendency to spew slurs. 

But maybe that’s how he’ll find out that there’s somebody out there who can be his best friend. Perhaps he’ll start to confide deeply in a misogynistic nincompoop.

Ronan and Mikael conducted the interview through Zoom on Saturday, July 9th, 2022.

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