Idiosyncrasies of a Wannabe

I have missed the peace and quiet of having a room to myself.

I have never had my own bedroom, or a nice place I could call my sanctuary, and though I was able to briefly eke out a home office for myself when I had started working again during the height of the pandemic, I soon had to give it up when we moved into a small apartment.

Now, more than ever, I have valued times when I could just sit with a sturdy table on a comfortable chair with back support, and write in my journal/ planner, which I had gotten out of habit last year, and trying to re-instill this year. I recognized this when, during my local travels for work, I would much rather prefer to sit alone, earbuds in place playing lo-fi or binaural beats, rather than go out to explore the city I was in (not that my workload allotted any time at all for it). But really, things don’t just go as planned, and I just end up getting dragged elsewhere.

Which is why, I have now booked an AirBnB, to peruse in my thoughts, and plan for my future in the late nights.

I have only done it twice, once, at a poor attempt to study for my exam since, at home in our apartment, I did not have a dedicated workspace nor could I, in good conscience, leave the household chores to my sister, and now, to have some alone time and catch up on work and life planning.

For starters, to honor this solitude, I will update my planner, and get it up to speed, then plot the next few events of my life with my trusty colored pens. Next, I will work on the documents I have left sitting for way too long, write my reports finally, organize my work documents to be printed and prepared for audit, list down my expenses and do some financial management, and lastly, crack open the IELTS book that I bought almost two months ago. On the side, I will make sure to catch the sunrise on the rooftop of where I’m staying at, and walk around the city. Hopefully, I am able to achieve all this before I have to leave on Friday. (sweat drop).

All this aside, I am relearning how to be comfortable in my own skin and do activities on my own. 

These days, whenever I am able to articulate a grand essay, or anecdote in my mind brought on by extreme either anger, sadness, or desperation, or all of the above, I am able to succinctly articulate the maelstrom of emotions surging in my mind. However, when I try to pen them down or type them out, the words escape me.

I used to be able to focus on writing, creating the narrative that best fits my mood to my satisfaction, but I have not been able to publish or share anything on my blog for the past two to three years. Time has eluded me.

I regret, that I was not able to appreciate the version of myself who could have been a writer, who could have enjoyed other more fruitful past-times, instead of numbing my mind by succumbing to the Youtube and Instagram blackhole.

I started this blog when I was in high school. Before that, I had a blogspot account, but that didn’t last long. 

I wanted to write, and become a doctor. I wanted to be a writing doctor. 

There were so many things I wanted, and had envisioned myself to be when I was younger, but life wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be. I realized that I matured too late, and made bad decisions because of it. 

But you live and you learn, right?

Unfortunately, my lapses has led me up to this point- not going to be a doctor, not a microbiologist (yet), wondering if I should just shift careers, still living a mundane life, and still the stupid little shit I realized that I was when I entered college. 

Everyday, I wish I were smarter, and better. But I’m not. And as much as I don’t like to make excuses, sometimes, I wonder if there is any point to fighting my ‘natural limits’, trying to be more than I am, more than I had been. 

Which led me to think of deleting this account, or at least filtering it. The latter would take too much time and effort, the former I’m deciding against because I don’t want to forget my youth. I wasn’t able to document much on here anyway.

I complain, I cry, and lament my sorrows.

But don’t get me wrong. I may be your average millennial, but I do work for a living and do my best, (which is always not enough, I know) to push myself and do more, be more (i.e. taking up online courses). 

It’s a work-in-progress, but I just have to keep trudging on. 

I hope I could wake up one day, in another person’s body, in a world that I’ve read about, and do-over my life. It’s one of the most appealing points of reading isekai mangas and manhwas.

I am not okay. 

I am in tears as I write this, and I want to come clean that, I am not okay. 

Whether it be from the current pandemic, the fights I’ve been having with my family members, the cold war with a friend that I am having, or the despondency that I am feeling about being romantic rejection, or my oversensitive self, I am not okay. 

I am just in search of someone who will love me unconditionally, wholeheartedly, and never tire of telling me that I am worth it, that I am worth something. I want to be told that I was a good person who won’t be so easily forgotten. 

Most of all, I want the screaming to stop. 

Denigrating my existence as if I had never done anything worthwhile, as if I were just a waste of space. I used to wish ill upon the people who bullied me, but I realize that if it were a proverbial gun in my hand, I would never be able to shoot it even if I detested the person to the core. Right now, I just wished that I would disappear instead.

No one else gets hurt, and no else will notice. 

And life would move on without a hitch. 

I am so fed up with myself, my constant failures, my fears, my inadequacy. What does it take to get far in life? What does it take, for someone, anyone, to give me an opportunity, to mentor  me, and help me build my self-confidence, because I am lost. I am a failure, and I am lost. 

I am aware that I may not be qualified to feel the sadness and desperation that I keep, since I am living well compared to so many others in this crisis. I feel guilty for feeling this way, and mad because no one will genuinely think of me deeply even when I go. Not even my so-called bestfriend, who has many other friends more important to her than I ever was, and will ever be. 

I wish so deeply that someone will celebrate me as a person, because they genuinely love me, and not because I am so easy to take advantage of. 

In my darkest moments, I would just want something or someone to whisk me away, painlessly, in a way that I will never wake up from again. 

I don’t want to feel like a waste of space anymore. I know that no one can make you feel something without your consent, and that you have power over yourself, but I can’t help it. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, acceptance from others is also considered an essential. 

I don’t want to be ordinary.

I want to win awards, I want to be a renowned scientist, to be successful, to be a force of change whose efforts will affect those even at the fringes of society. I want to be someone who was the first, the first to be defeat the odds, the first to turn my life around even during my middle 20s. I want to be someone dependable, useful and credible. I want to astound people who did not expect much from me. I want to break the mold and emerge as a new person after metamorphosis.

I want to look at the mirror one day and be able to say, “I am the person I wanted to be during my youth, despite the hard road I took, despite my flaws and all.”

I want to be worthwhile, to be of service.

I want to be someone. Not rich or all-powerful, but to be an authority on science, specifically public health. I want to lead and inspire.  

Imagine standing on a podium one day, giving a heartfelt speech with the audience in awe, I would like to teach the next generation that mistakes may be made but it is never too late to take a hard look at life and change. One step at a time, taking it day by day... I want to tell them, through my example, that it is possible. Difficult, but definitely possible. I want to be that person for them. 

The sad truth, though, is that I am unemployed, fatter, currently embroiled in graduate studies that I envision to be the start of the career path I actually want, and, in spite of my light academic load, procrastinating and wasting valuable time. 

I try not to. I’ve read much on the subject of how to avoid procrastination but at the end of the day, the irony of it is that I still procrastinated by watching Youtube videos and obsessing over a simple task. To be honest, I do not have the best study habits and lifestyle. 

And pitted against myself, how could I win and become the best version of myself that I can be? 

Thus, I am afraid.

I fear that it is too late, that the ship has already sailed. My golden years and opportunities have passed and I stand on the brink of monotony that could be my everyday. More so, that with my track record, I would not qualify for life-changing opportunities as luck is where opportunity meets hard work and preparation. Too late now, too much time wasted... 

I will not be daunted this time, as I was many times before. 

They say it takes 60 days- roughly 2 months- to make a hobby. Before it becomes muscle memory and ingrained in me, I would have to exert effort to wash, rinse, and repeat. And to be smart about time management. 

These things I already know but am not practicing. 

So now, this will be a manifesto of how, whether or not I succeeded in finishing my tasks for the day...

As much as I cling on to my childhood, I must do a rough assessment of myself.

I am getting nowhere. I have no laurels, no achievements. I have nothing under my name and have had meager experience.

Is it time for me to let go of excess baggage from childhood?

For example, this blog, anime and manga? Or is it just a matter of perception? I will never be Henry Jefferson Morco, the guy who had it all. Hell, I’m not even a regular student in my master’s program, nor have I made a research study of any worth. 

I’ve realized that I have been a really mean bitch. 

I’ve been mean to people who may not have done anything wrong. 

Who have not done anything at all, for that matter.

I was mean to a girl back in high school when she and I were partnered for a pseudo-research project. She contributed absolutely nothing to data gathering, the write-up, and final presentation of the project. The only thing she did was ask her brother to make a questionnaire for our project and distribute it to people she knew and then returned it to me. I told all this to my teacher and asked if I could just work on the project alone but she told me that she couldn’t do that since my classmate would fail. I had to carry the burden all through the semester, as if I didn’t have anything else to worry about (I was failing in Physics, for the life of me). 

I confronted her about it but all she did was flaunt the fact that she was ‘disabled’. Sure, she wore thick eyeglasses but she wasn’t mentally or physically impaired that she couldn’t think of a way to compensate for her so-called ‘disability’. I showed her that I was angry because she wasn’t making an effort to offer me help or even think of a way to do something to contribute and it really made things difficult for me. It was unfair because it was supposed to be a project done by a pair, not just by one student. I wasn’t nice to her because hell, I believed in equality and equity. If she was so impaired, then how the hell had she been able to reach high school? She wasn’t even apologetic at all that I had to do the brunt of the work! She dwelt on her misfortunes and her brother ‘having it all’.

I finished the project and never spoke to her again.

I was also mean to a girl in college.

She was a friend of my friend so I immediately tried to befriend her. She was a bit eccentric and haughty, but it was all cool. I’ve met people who were eccentric and a bit arrogant but who participated in group work and pulled their own weight.

I did not expect though, for someone who went to a prestigious national science high school, to not participate in group work during a laboratory experiment. 

Her inability to read instructions and participate as a group member in the two laboratory classes (microbial ecology and microbial genetics) I was enrolled in with her left messes I took part in cleaning up.

One time, she failed to show up without providing a valid excuse during an outside lab session her group was in charge of in our environmental microbiology class. They were to prepare materials for the following lab session so as to save time and this was mandated by our lab instructor and since it required a lot of work, they were shorthanded, not to mention that they were newly assigned to the degree program and were concurrently taking the basic lab technique course. I already knew my way around the lab and so I offered to help. Mind you, she was a higher batch than I was and this was part of her group work and yet she didn’t even have the decency to apologize for not being able to make it. 

Another time, only the two of us remained to inoculate plates since we both had free time after the lab session. It was then I realized that she didn’t know how to read instructions. She made what could be considered a stupid, not a rookie, mistake.

We were using pipettors to incoulate plates for our ecology class and I used the appropriate pipetor for the tips that we had. She, on the other hand, was banging the pipetor on the tips placed in the box that just wouldn’t fit. If she had gone through the basic technique course, which I suspect she already had given her seniority, she would know that there are certain colored pipetors for certain colored plastic tips. It was also common sense that if it doesn’t fit, then most likely you got the wrong match! She continued banging away on the tips, deforming some of them and complaining loudly about the pipetor she was using, until I told her her mistake. I resisted rolling my eyes at this point since I was already aggravated and was trying my best to be civil though I was exuding hostile vibes. I ended up inoculating all of the plates since the pipetor that I was using was the only one available for the tips that we had. I thought that would be the end of it but she did something even stupider, hard as it is to believe. 

After inoculation, we were supposed to incubate the plates at 27 degrees celsius, according to the laboratory manual. That was at room temperature, if it were any other month aside from summer months in the Philippines. We had pseudo-incubators around which did not really have a controlled temperature set-up but since we got it from environmental samples, then placing it at room temperature was all right, aside from the fact that we did not have much of a choice. I asked her to incubate the plates since I took it upon myself to disinfect the laboratory table, which she did (because how can she fuck up placing the plates in a covered storage box, am I right?) and then left without so much as a goodbye. I finished cleaning up, and already had one foot out the door, but got a creeping feeling that something was amiss. I decided to see if she had at least properly labeled the plastic bag which contained our plates but when I tried to find it among the (4) incubators in the lab, it was nowhere to be found. 

I started to panic. 

Where in the world could she have placed it? 

I thought back to before she left and remembered the sound of a refrigerator door slamming shut as I was disinfecting the tables. Could it be?, I wondered. Was a microbiology major student really dumb enough to put plates inoculated with raw samples from a non-psychotropic environment in a refrigerator which was, at best guess, at 14 degrees Celsius? 

I saw our laboratory instructor who was coming to check up on us and asked if we could really use any one of the incubators in the lab even though it wasn’t exactly at 27 degrees Celsius. He said yes and asked what the problem was. I opened the refrigerator and sure enough, there were our newly inoculated plates in its shiny new plastic bag, without a label. My professor shook his head and sighed but made no comment, as I had already explained that it was Zoe who had placed the plates there. We found an incubator with enough space to incubate our plates and that was the end of it. 

Throughout the semester, she was the problem of her groupmates and the rest of the class pitched in to help with cleaning up whatever havoc she wreaked. To be fair, I wasn’t only mean to her, but also to my own groupmate who I thought was under-performing. In the end, he pulled through for me and it was water under the bridge after that semester. We manged to stay friends. Still, that female classmate of ours was truly something else. Admittedly and obviously, I was hostile to her but only in our microbial ecology class since there were less experienced people there and more preparations to take care of, i.e. obtaining raw environmental samples in a specified time duration. She was a problematic student, to begin with, since she missed classes from time to time with stupid reasons until she maxed out and went beyond her allowable absences. Though it was not an excuse, I was rude and curt with her. I couldn’t believe and hated the thought of a joyrider who would pass without doing the minimum required effort in a group just because there were others who could bear the weight. This was the case for both of the classes I was enrolled in with her.

She did get her revenge though because she tattled to our microbial genetics laboratory instructor. I was obviously mean to her in ecology lab, as I’ve mentioned before, but did not interact with her at all in our microbial genetics lab class since it was less stressful (unless it was your turn to head the lab exercise). Despite the fact, she tattled on me to the lab instructor of our microbial genetics lab class. I’m not sure if it was because she thought it was all the same, or because the lab instructor was kinder and more sympathetic to the well-spun woes, or if she got the lab instructors mixed up. She lied and said that she was dropping the microbial genetics course altogether because I was mean to her. As a result, I was reprimanded by the professor without airing my side of the story. At the time, I was very hurt that I cried. 

Another girl I was mean to was in medical school. 

She got passing grades, despite zero class and group participation. Despite finishing her degree in a national university in Taiwan, when I asked her for material for a group report, she gave me a link to an internet source. When I asked her to summarize it and give it in a way that could be presented, she copied and pasted the content of the article and sent it to me via messenger and not in a word document or powerpoint presentation. To say that I was livid was an understatement. Presumably, she was well-equipped enough to give me material made by a learned professional since she graduated from such a prestigious university. It enraged me that someone like her, who has very, very rich parents had bought her way in medical school and that professors were being nice to her just because she was considered a foreigner. 

She appeared diligently in class but I heard the disgruntled complaints of her groupmates in the trans system. I didn’t believe that she was underperforming then, because I myself had trouble submitting my part of the trans on time, but when she became my groupmate, I immediately suffered the pain of all those who had become her groupmate for our Community and Family Medicine presentation. I was rude and obviously angry at her, so much so that she asked why I was acting the way I was, and I told her that what she gave me was crap content and that I had to redo her part of the report, on top of everything else. She may as well have just gotten her grade for free and paid us off in helping her get it since she was so rich, she could afford a tutor for Physiology, Anatomy, Histology and Biochemistry. Talk about privileges and entitlement! 

I know I’m biased when I say that she thinks she’s innately superior to us because of her race, but apparently, because of her socio-economic status, a few of the doctors think so, too! Or maybe her mother was a close friend of the dean who, in turn, asked the doctors to be kinder on her since she would also be adjusting to her Filipino classmates, on top of being in medical school. This did, in fact, reflect on her grades. So much so that where I failed in one of the minors we had in medical school, she passed. The grading system in that minor subject was already faulty to begin with and the course matter dubious, so, in my best guess, the passing and failing of a student had more to do with whoever was more of a familiar face to the doctor. I was never actually able to gauge my performance so my opinion on my own performance remains subjective, unlike in the other subjects that I failed because I know I deserved to receive a failing grade. In any case, I was mean and somehow, I regret it.

I was also mean to a thieving bitch who I had the unpleasant experience of being roommates with. 

I asked if we could rent a room together so that I could have a place to stay closer to work but in addition to the squalor conditions that surrounded the room I was renting, I was also subject to her thieving and lying ways, her inability to ask for permission when taking my household (my tupperware and basin) and consumable items (body lotion), at one point, piss on the lid of the plastic storage box which contained all my clothes. Indeed, as sordid was the conditions surrounding the little room I rented, so was her personality. I confronted her about the missing consumable items, went into a tirade because I trusted her and because I was nice to her and respected her that I emphasized we had a joint responsibility in keeping our living quarters clean and neat and then moved out after consuming my deposit. That time, I did not regret being a bitch because she deserved it. At the very end, she still did not admit to her thievery.

In all of the instances that I had been a mean bitch to people, I only regretted it once. This is not to say that I don’t regret my short temper when I lash out on my family, but I regret being mean to my former classmate in medical school because I never apologized. Of course, with or without my apology, she will still live her life of extravagance but I were to be true to the person I aspire to become, I should still apologize. 

I am still alive but I feel like giving up on myself. 

I can’t seem to get the results I want, and that’s because I don’t exert enough effort, I admit. But how can I do that, though? 

Give so much of myself that I can physically feel myself emptying out. Work and work until I am satisfied with my progress and actually complete a task. 

How can I not be me?