this is not a drill

i am thinking about the role of power today, and how i am so prone to misremembering myself - or how the world seems to convince me easily of how i should remember myself.

i fell asleep on the couch last night for the first time in a while after reading too many articles on a high-profile defamation/domestic violence case in which the public is certain the woman is lying/making things up/conspiring.

i don’t think women dream of one day conspiring to be bruised or broken. i think one day you realize you have been broken. and it makes you believe that every spring, your world falls apart. and that the next year will be the same, and the year after that.

i think that most men are surprised to hear that they have broken us, as if they could only do so if on purpose.

i think that’s the thing about power, it is often silent to those who have it. it is light, airy - like a breeze through the open window in your residence by the sea. and to those who don’t have it - it is the sea in which you drown, over and over again.

i am writing because i am remembering now that spring is beautiful and not cursed - that it is and always has been a time of bloom.

it is not my fault for trying to free myself from you, or for failing without grace. it is not my fault that i eventually succeeded.

in all this competition for my time/attention, the philippine election results have surprisingly dominated. ‘surprisingly’ because i am often the first person to admit that i don’t particularly identify with being filipino-american, or being filipino at all. diaspora has confused my sense of gravity, more like, and though i know that is what i am, somehow i will always feel insufficient for the part.

even as i am currently grieving marcos-duterte’s “win” - it still feels insufficient.

there a lot of facets to ph history that im absorbing, and i think it makes sense to organize them parallel to the stages of grief..

stage 1: denial

on seeing the initial results yesterday, i dove into the history of the ph commitee on electoral reforms (comelec for short). this is the body of voting administration/operations for the entire country. in 1986, this committee had members that walked out in refusal to manipulate vote counts in favor of any candidate. this independent walkout gave way to the broader edsa revolution - also called the people’s power revolution (more on this in a sec) - that overthrew the rule of ferdinand marcos (the president who declared martial law and killed/kidnapped/tortured thousands).

this year, comelec has failed in ensuring protection and efficiency at the ph polls, with numerous people attacked and killed at voting sites and voters waiting up to 6hrs in lines. there are also reports of ~1,000 voting machines not functioning, requiring manual ballot collection and possible manipulation. and not to mention imee marcos, candidate bongbong marcos’ sister, is a chairwoman of comelec, too. there are seas of people online as well looking into the vote counts proclaiming a bbm win and deeming the victory a fraud.

as frustrating as the twist of comelec’s history is, and how the election was very likely stolen from leni-kiko, it almost felt inevitable to me. my aunt, who resides in manila’s pasig city, said that the election of leni-kiko was likely impossible due to the rampant voting fraud and due to the diluted and misremembered history of the philippines. the marcos regime is remembered by many filipinos as gracious leaders who gave food to the provincial poor. in reality, they stole billions of dollars from the ph government and ultimately capsized philippine infrastructure and economy for decades to come. my aunt said “bread and milk were the cost of our future”. i hadn’t realized this deep revision of the marcos dictatorship through campaigns and films was capitalizing on this genuine, experiential sentiment - seemingly very like the stronghold of say pablo escobar in columbia. filipinos forgot about the thousands killed and tortured during martial law so quickly, for the faux hope of a “philippine empire”? built on the deaths of workers, activists, and students? as backwards as this all is - it makes sense. we hold on to the things that we remember. we have to understand this attachment to displace it with education.

influencer content/media production now more than ever confuses me - mostly because it is so much more personal and accessible today than ever before. i think with youtube creators, television, and brand representation pre-2010, content(tm) felt much more like a sales pitch than it felt like a friend’s personal camera roll. to me, this shift immediately feels like a win. for who? us, right? this notion of direct access to monetized exposure beckons like the promised land, somehow. milk and honey! just go! the rules of engagement are also much more simple than traditional entertainment industry routes, especially with social platforms created to promote viewership. and it all is so enticing, like a blessed game, no losing. it’s also wild to me that there is also a mass flood of content that’s primarily instructional - tiktoks on how to take photos, how to edit videos, how to do viral dances, how to become a paid influencer. it feels like really genuine user-generated propaganda to create user-generated content! it feels clickbaity, but super well-intentioned! and it’s everywhere! it’s really rather impressive.

i write all this never having been a personal brand content creator, while all of a sudden feeling this secondhand pressure to become That.

i was invited to a friends reality tv show wedding this past week, which i skipped. i had to have a conversation with c, in which i heard myself asking him if it was stupid for me to not go. it felt stupid to ask the question, but i think this encapsulates the phenomena of feeling so odd about it all. like, the influencer answer is obvious - you need to go. when asking myself, the answer is also obvious - you don’t need to go.

as a writer/artist, the chance to appear in and influence any part of social commentary/understanding feels really important to me, foundationally. i think that’s the main way i can understand any of it - because i do think everyone has something to contribute to the aggregate representation of the world. ocean vuong and jia tolentino said something on an interview the other week that was along the lines of ‘individuals are not uniquely spectacular aside from the fact that they are each uniquely spectacular’. i think that is the crux of it all: that individual narratives are inherently important, but not relatively more significant than anyone else’s. which i think frees me from the pressure of feeling that instagram/tiktok/twitter content is the most valuable medium and also frees me of the obligation to attend my friends reality tv wedding or make personal/viral content on the internet. because it’s not the only valuable medium, whether monetary or cultural. this also implies (?) that content has no inherent value based on its medium - which can apply to novels, paintings, podcasts, films, and social media content all the same. this thought seems really basic after i’ve typed it out, lol. but i think i needed to

while we were in mx i wasn’t sure if i was going to continue to tattoo - i think it paled in comparison to the novelty of a new place, which is okay. im trying to let my waxing and waning interest in things go their course, as a natural part of seeking and finding joy. it’s much more compassionate than my historical process (hyperfixating/obsessing and quickly fading). similarly, the thrill of being in mx waned as well. natural course.

im excited to do the five or so tattoos i have scheduled for may, and the two or so i have for june so far. i don’t fully understand the particular appeal of tattooing for me - i like the challenge, and i like the meditative/embodied medium. again, i don’t think i need to understand it fully - it just makes me happy.

i am feeling mostly well now, from covid. fever dreams have been regular, and skipping-work-guilt also constant. i hate that i felt that. taking a few meetings today, i felt some ease and relief. i recognize with both tattooing and work-work, i want to belong to something, and i want to show myself to be capable. human motivation lies in both those desires heavily. that being said, i don’t very often feel so invested in most anything, which makes that tugging yearning to return to these two constants so.. strange in affect.

these two have also been some of the main forms of work and praxis in my newer, intentional life - they are things that have also given back peace and security for me that no form of work had done for me in the past. both working at nordstrom tech and tattooing have been agreements that have fully respected my boundaries and allowed me the most rest in labor. impostor syndrome, understandably, has been less in these places as well.

i remember shannon, my therapist, telling me to imagine a curtain around my heart - and that i have control to open it or close it to things and people as i please and as i have comfort. with these two things i feel comfortably integrated into yet distinctly separate. like tools i wield with heart but not attached to me permanently or with force. i feel like i have the freedom to choose within these worlds, and the freedom to write new rules when the old ones don’t serve me. i am grateful for them and the fact that i am not allowing them to consume me.

we are sick like little kids

i learned today that tatay (my grandfather) worked in the ph military during martial law, as fabian ver’s right hand man, under marcos. i think it’s funny that the ways i learn about my family are in small shards of muddled glass, in opaque memories that wander into the door like lost dogs. my mother, her sisters, and my grandmother have always had a deep admiration for tatay that could border on obsession. of this i was always suspicious - i don’t know what man he could have been to culture that kind of devotion. but it was never my devotion to understand, i think. to learn his hand in the marcos regime - the regime that robbed the ph of countless lives, freedoms, and hopes - is somewhat devastating. i know i am not my grandfather. i could never understand what it would be like to grow up without parents, in the provinces, without money or a home. i could not understand what it would be like to have a family to fear for, while a nation i was proud to serve turned into darkness at my hands. i cannot understand the fear that he faced under the devil in power. it is easy for me to live in america and say he was wrong, that he could have done better. and i will still say that - he was wrong.

my mom said he left the military on some subtle excuse in the hopes that marcos and ver wouldn’t retaliate. i’m told he saw marcos was killing people left and right and he had to leave. i’m told he said working for marcos was worse than the korean war. i’m told he left before aquino was murdered, but that he was still invited to join marcos in exile and refused. i’m told he said that it’s not becoming to earn money at the hands of evil men.

his choices are not mine to understand, his devotions ones i could never know. all i know is that evil is always so close.