lately i have been feeling quite alone. to be quite honest i’ve been feeling that way for a long time, but even more so now, i think. i want so desperately to talk about so many things, really: my wretchedness, my ambivalence at work, my lack of enthusiasm for my graduate studies, the depressive episodes that i thought were just episodes but are just going on for far too long. 

but—i’ve learned the hard way that people can sometimes make you feel like you’re taking up so much space for just talking about things when literal pandemics are going on. make you feel small-minded and childish, and then in the same vein dwarf you under their own pain, or conceit, or worse—and these are the worst kinds of people—compare your struggle with global crises. how sad, how needlessly heartless. 

Let’s see: it’s been roughly two, three years since my last blog, which means it’s been two to three years too since I wrote for myself on a regular basis. 

The only thing I know now is how to churn out copy for the local paper. My life is fairly bland, and the most interesting things happen only when I am batshit drunk and wasted (which is to say nothing that isn’t expected of the batshit drunk and wasted). 

But in daylight I am a normal, vanilla person, which really makes it outright ridiculous that I must be within the radar of far more compelling people. Widows and orphans of Duterte’s drug war, pugilistic police officers with fragile egos, government officials with a taste for the salacious, fellow reporters who keep shooting for the stars. The only way my life is not boring is being in their orbit.

As such, nowadays I prefer to keep to myself, to quiet my spirit. It takes so much to push out a week’s worth of work off my mind and to zero in on my heart’s woes, and to be honest there is some sort of stigma among journalists to be writing for and about yourself. You can’t be the story, ever. This, of course, was a radical shift from my late teens. I didn’t just outgrow my issues, but I also consciously, deliberately deprioritize them in the pursuit of The Story. 

And honestly, that’s really not as bad as it sounds. When you’ve heard as many stories as I have, suddenly your crises seem so insignificant, so inconsequential, it sobers you up immediately. Whatever half-assed shit you have, I guarantee you that someone will always have it worse, and sometimes it’s better to rechannel your energy to helping them out and finding some salvation in it for you in the process. Whatever shit I need to work through, they better fit into 280 characters because that is all the headspace I can afford to give it before another deadline rolls in. Everything beyond that I just try to forget.

But also, sometimes, I feel...compelled to write about my own life, like taking a pulse to see if the heart still beats underneath the hotblooded farce. To talk of things that interest me, of people I fall in love with, of stuff that infuriate and vex me. To forget, for once, about my borrowed lives. To remember my own struggles and heartbreak and not feel guilty about others, for a little while.

Earlier I figured that I gave up on writing because my mind makes up images faster than my words are able to give them form. More often than not the concepts evaporate into smoke as soon as I try to ambush them with language. 

And then there’s also the matter of not being able to stick to one train of thought--jumping on and off tracks trying to be in all places at once, only to be nowhere at all. Trying to have an opinion on everything but failing to have a decent one beyond the barest skeleton.

It’s easier thinking in short bursts, I guess. To write in snappy one-liners, like a tweet, or a text message, because that’s who I have become now. Instantaneously gratifying, no longer with nuance, deaf to cadence. 

I stopped remembering things now, too. Not in the spaced-out, blundering, blithering idiot kind of way. It’s that things just suddenly stopped making impressions on me. Maybe I just stopped trying to commit them to memory thinking I could make better ones. 

That rarely, if ever, happens.

ii. 

Sometimes I try to recapture my old self, though. It’s not like I don’t try. When alone, when in a crowd, when in silence, when in the bustle of the commute to work. Strangers whose faces are sure to appear later on in a dream. Conversations I suddenly want to have with friends. Lines in books I wish I wrote. Words and words and words put together in ways I own.

Later I figured out what I lost: the ability to storify the world. After many months of letting things simply crash down on me, I’ve gotten used to just dealing with things one at a time. No more thinking about events in a sequence. To me, the world now, the space I occupy at the moment, is just the consequence of what I have done before. 

There is no sense of things piling up or leading into anymore. There is just me and the moment, like my mind decided to compartmentalize my existence into hours, not days, not months, not years.

iii.

What has that got to do with this, my perennial problem in writing? Well, it’s harder now to understand what it’s like to go through. I deal with--that’s my thing now. There is nothing on my long-term memory anymore except a vague sense of struggling, though the specifics have long ceased to exist to me. And sensing, rather than feeling, does not exactly inspire words to the forefront.

The great Masters in writing all say suffering is the key to a good writer. Some would say it’s imagination, but that is naivete--imagination is inert, while pain is the standard against which all other feelings are held. Even so, all pain needs context, and without the ability to connect feeling to memory, there is nothing for me to give. 

iv.

Still sometimes, in the deepest trenches of my heart, I find vestiges of sentiment that enable me to write something, like this. So when I say that I say this from the bottom of my heart, take it figuratively-literally, because that’s all where the rest of me is.

Oh, but don’t mistake this limbo as being too emo, or grungy, or trying to be cool by going numb. I think all people eventually get here, to the indifference, because the world does not make sense, and the self does not immediately catch up to where it wants to be. 

Not in the sense of any paradigm shifts or transitory life phases, but quite literally the world: the space, the time, I now move in. My family asks if I'll be home in the morning and I don't give a straight answer. I stopped living in the same time zone as my own home. I arrive as they sleep; they leave as I wake. 

If anything, though, I was right before: the nocturnal life suits me well. I thrive in the waking up to the orange tinge of the afternoon, to going home as the urban underbelly writhed beneath my feet. Headlights and stoplights have come to replace the sun. Strangers who were faceless to begin with are now just silhouettes swathed in the yellow of street lamps, removing them further from any chance of personification.

What I love most out of all this, however, is the silence: magnified by the darkness, amplified by the utter aloneness. Like the world tipped and spilled over its contents into some Great Unknown to allow me to walk, undeterred by people or cars, down the last stretch to home.

You, child, you have yet to know what it feels like to be disappointed with yourself with every waking moment. How it can’t be helped that even among friends, whom you love more than anything else in the world, you will feel nothing but shame and belittlement. 

You’ve yet to encounter the feeling of paling in comparison, but it will shatter you the first time it hits you. It will be very, very difficult to recover and find your confidence again, and it will be the reason why you will be afraid to pursue so many things; why you will find yourself four years later, with a pack of cigarettes in your mom’s hand and a sound scolding to cry yourself to sleep.

If things were different, i’d have told you to go get an org, or busy yourself with a productive habit, or learn a new language, or something—although maybe even then you’d still turn out the same as me, because you and I, we’ve barely changed, haven’t we? The bare minimum of what makes us great in what we do, cannot be forced upon us; we are geniuses on our own time, and diddly-squat with the rest.

Still, I have dreams now that I would’ve never realized back then, dreams that have blossomed far too late, just when I’m almost graduating and with little freedom to pursue other things outside the university. Things that I should’ve fostered at your age if I’d known back then that I wanted it. People I should have loved if I’d only known that the people I chose would implode right under my nose and reassemble themselves into annoying little shits of ghosts that do not haunt in that melancholic way, only bother.

But don’t worry; I’ve managed to fulfill most of your dreams and then some. When you worried that you wouldn’t find friends, I did, and they’re some of the most beautiful people you will meet. When you worried you wouldn’t quite fit in in UP from all the militant-shaming your teachers in high school did, I managed (I didn’t become an activist, but it was more of a shame than a relief, really). You’ll be part of a national daily, for crying out loud! and you’ll know what it’s like to be in the heat of national issues, and to see your name on the papers. From time to time, the universe will affirm your choice to enter journalism, even when your parents push you to turn corporate or switch courses altogether, or even when you’ve written 1,500 words only hours before a deadline only to delete them all in the end.

To my fifteen-year-old self, I am sorry; as it turns out I am a coward with very low self-esteem, and it will be the reason for your many regrets. You will learn to cry for the first time in eighteen years (when it happens, all your days will feel like a legitimate occasion for a weepfest).

But as it were, I am proud of what we’ve—I’ve—turned out to be. Because we survive. We thrive. What makes us who we are is that we do not hold grudges, against ourselves, or against other people, or against the universe. Even when everything we shunned catches up with us, we let it have its time—cry, sleep, watch 15 films in a day to forget--and move on.

Maybe in the next fifteen years, we will be so radically different.