If I Can Make It Here, I’ll Make It Anywhere

Last week, at an event called Pecha Kucha Night, I sat in the audience of about 300, listening to one amazing speaker after another share something about their work or personal project. Pecha Kucha, according to the organizers, is Japanese for “chit-chat.” There were fourteen speakers—“chit-chatters”--from diverse fields. There was a Jungian psychotherapist (my wonderful shrink, for whom I all but waved pom-poms at, heehee ☺) sharing her thoughts on Pinoy “woundology” or our collective victimhood psyche—our “Ph.D. on pain”, the captain of the historic balangay sailing expedition, the creator of the popular comic book Trese, a green architect, a green urban planner, an underwater photographer, a writer sharing his concept of “wasak” or “ang mga taong sumira ng buhay ko” (super loved that!). All Pinoys. All doing their own astig thing.

As I chomped on my popcorn, I thought, Mehhhn…I’m so glad I’m here. And I didn’t just mean in the Shangri-La mall theatre, where the event was taking place. I meant, in this 7,100-something-island Southeast Asian archipelago.

See, once upon a time, I was obsessed, like a lot of Filipinos, with leaving the Philippines. At 24, I wanted nothing more than to get out of here. Think Vietnamese boat people desperately scrambling out of war-torn Saigon.

My life was nowhere like I imagined it to be when I was a teenager looking forward to being in my 20’s. I didn’t harbor particularly ambitious dreams at that time; all I wanted in my 20’s was to be able to afford my own place and to travel at least twice a year. Westerners my age—those I met and those I saw in films—had those things that I wanted even when they held blue-collar jobs while my friends and I, college graduates from really good schools working in advertising, did not. I was convinced that this was due to our having been born in the wrong country. In a Third World country. (My sisters and I were watching The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 yesterday and we kept complaining loudly how easy it was for the American college girls in the story to travel to Greece. “Pucha, ano yan? Saan sila ng pera?”)

Unlike my friends, however, who seemed to not be losing sleep over our situation, the idea that I was getting the raw end of the deal was eating me up. I was desperate to leave the sinking ship of a country that I happen to have been born in—without my permission!--and get me to a First World one.

My adoptive land of choice was New Zealand. Long before Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson added a cooler dimension to the country’s more-sheep-than-people reputation, the land of Kiwis (the fruit, the bird, the people), Greenpeace, Neil Finn and Crowded House, and Jane Campion had already taken hold of me largely because of its strong environmental streak. And I just found the Kiwis—the people, that is--so cool.

After I spent three weeks in New Zealand, however, in 1998, as a sort of ocular inspection, I had a feeling I wouldn’t be completely content there, either, until I knew what I was going to do for work. By then, my infatuation with advertising had fizzled out, but I was staying on for lack of a better place to go. Now that I had found my dream country, I needed to find me my dream job next. I returned to Manila with a firmer resolve to figure that out.

When I finally faced the—scary--fact that I wanted to make films, I decided that the only place to learn to make them was in New York City—in particular, at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. I had this fantasy of being an NYU alum like M. Night Shyamalan and Ang Lee, having my films reach an audience beyond the Metro Manila Film Festival…and having something to talk about with former NYU teacher Martin Scorsese when I would later bump into him at a party ☺. Spurred by that NYU alumni scenario in my head, I quit advertising to focus my efforts at getting myself into the school. Not once during that time did it occur to me to learn filmmaking here in the Philippines.

I was consumed by the notion that my real life—the life that I wanted to have—could only start there, at a place far from where I was. This was reinforced by the belief that where I was was not where I was supposed to be.

Filling up the NYU application form that first time was a revelation, a resounding whack on the head. I hadn’t realized until then how unremarkable my life was. Gaping at me was too much empty white space where a rundown of my “achievements” should have been. Shit…what had I been doing all that time? I was almost tempted to write down the spelling bee win in high school just to have something to put in there.

Without much ado—and here is where it pays to be obsessive--I went out and tried to get myself “awards”—the outer, tangible proof of the kind of achievements the world recognizes. This meant, for me, joining writing contests that I didn’t have the nerve to even consider before. And so the following year, the empty white spaces in the application form were, at least, half-filled. So what if I had to write down what little I had in big bold capital letters to achieve that? I thought, Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Two years and two rejection letters later, I was more than a little surprised that I had not yet penned my suicide note. At that point, trying to get into NYU film school was the hardest thing I had ever attempted. I had practically put my life on hold those two years and developed tunnel vision. My existence was defined by the pursuit of qualifying to the school, which I had seen as the beginning of all my filmmaking aspirations and, indeed, all my creative dreams. I felt stretched out to almost snapping point in every way--physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.

That is why it struck me as rather curious that I hadn’t spiraled into bottomless depression. I had failed, hadn’t I? Failed quite spectacularly, too. I was stuck here in the Philippines. And that, to me, had meant being stuck forever in mediocrity and regression and soap operaland and everything that made this a Third World country. Wasn’t depression and hopelessness the appropriate responses to that?

Of course, there were breakdowns and crying jags and days when I couldn’t get up from bed, gripped by a paralyzing fear that I would be forever chasing—and never getting—what I want. But these spells never lasted long enough for me to seriously worry. In fact, I was more worried that my real affliction was over-optimism or, ehem, delusion because of the way I seemed to bounce back with a vengeance. Before I knew it, I was excited again and raring to have another go at it. I felt like one of those inflatable mascots that, no matter how hard you punch them so that they kiss the ground, always float back up and never stay down for long. That was what I found more worrisome—a bit freaky, actually; that I didn’t seem to react normally to the tragedy of my failure.

It turned out that there was a solid reason why I couldn’t muster the supposed appropriate misery and it was this: In my single-minded pursuit of qualifying to NYU, I ended up doing things that I never had before. And because of that, I saw a part of me that I had never seen before, either.

I saw that I could wake up at 6:00 AM, sit at my desk and type away at a screenplay everyday for a month and submit it on time for a contest. I saw that I could gather talented, dedicated, supportive friends and family together to make a short film. I saw that I could learn to write a play that literary judges could appreciate. I saw that I could be thick-faced enough to borrow money from my parents and other relatives in order to fund my personal projects and workshops. I saw that I could pare down my lifestyle and not need a lot of material things so that I could afford the training that I needed. I saw that I could be disciplined, organized, resourceful, confident, courageous, tenacious, trusting in the unseen forces—if that’s what it took to do the work that I love, to make it exist.

All the things that I was hoping to see in myself--the traits I was hoping to develop--once I was in New York, the city whose operative word, as Elizabeth Gilbert pointed out, was “ACHIEVE”, I learned to see, learned to develop right here, in the place that I didn’t think could give me anything good or worthwhile.

I think maybe we’re born into our circumstances—our ethnicity, our family, our body, our gender and, yes, our country—in order to overcome it, to not ever be held back by it. It’s so easy to make ourselves believe that other people got their break because they were born rich, thin, tall, a man, a woman, good-looking, a child of a rich/famous/influential person, American, French, Brazilian…But I do think that’s just us making excuses for—and, thus, compromising--ourselves. As Art Valdez, expedition leader of the Filipino Mt. Everest team and of Team Balangay, said, “Everyone has their own Mt. Everest.” Everyone has their own seemingly insurmountable challenge. Kanya-kanyang hassle lang ‘yan. Nobody has it easy, even if it may seem that way. I’m pretty sure none of the 14 speakers at last week’s Pecha Kucha Night have it easy, even if some of them make it look that way—like Lourd de Veyra’s riffing on “wasak”. (Did I say I super loved that? ☺)

I do believe that our particular circumstances are designed specifically for us to develop the skills we need in crafting the lives we imagined for ourselves. Kind of like having our own personal Navy Seal training camp. It may seem like useless torture while we’re in it, but when we’re in the jungles of enemy territory, trying to do our job, all those killer push-ups and food and oxygen deprivation and Viggo Mortensen-in-pekpek-shorts yelling at our faces suddenly make sense. You realize this is the scenario you’ve been priming your mind, your body and your spirit for. As Steve Jobs put it in his Harvard speech, “You can only connect the dots backwards.”

I firmly and truly believe that if we can make something worthwhile out of the things we were born with, we will have created the deepest, most unshakable, most solid foundation for our lives. And life will be a little less difficult and impossible. I mean, with what else are we going to construct our dream lives? What we have right now is our raw material. It is our starting point. We begin our work with the givens and for me, this is one of those givens: I was born Filipino. This is what I have for sure, among other things. And after those two years of trying to be anywhere but here, I’ve slowly learned to not only live with that fact, but to use it is a layer in the foundation of my life and my work and, quite surprisingly, for my happiness and peace of mind.

The Sundays perfectly captured this sentiment in the following lyrics: “When you’re searching your soul/ when you’re searching for pleasure/ how often pain is all you find/ When you’re coasting along/ and nobody’s trying too hard/ you can turn around and like where you are…”

I still think of New Zealand. I still dream of living there one day. And I’m still looking forward to making my first full-length film, even as the NYU dream has died. I figure I can always find another topic to discuss with Scorsese, anyway. “So, um, Marty—I was a former Catholic, too…”

However, that country and that Scorsese conversation will just have to wait. For now I’ve still got stuff to do. Right here, in my own personal Navy Seal training camp called the Philippines.



Please watch the speakers on the third Pecha Kucha Night in Manila—they’re all too astig to miss! Log on to pechakuchamanila.com. ☺

The Luckiest Girl in the World

My grandparents, Felix and Nena Tiukinhoy


If I were to allow myself one regret, it would be that I didn’t write my grandparents’ love story, as my grandfather requested.

I was in college when my maternal grandfather, my Lolo Daddy, during my family’s visits to our hometown of Surigao City, started pulling me aside to recount the story of how he met “that girl”, pointing affectionately at my grandmother, my Lola Mama. They were then in their 70’s, but my grandfather spoke of my grandmother as if she were still his 19-year-old bride.

“That girl,” he’d say, loud enough for her to hear. And, exactly like a teenager, she’d stick her tongue out at him in response.

It wasn’t that I didn’t find their love story interesting enough or worth writing. In fact, I never tired of hearing it no matter how many times my grandfather told it. I would imagine the handsome 22-year-old young man driving an army jeep while stealing glances through the rearview mirror at the 19-year-old teacher who had flagged him down for a ride into town and who now sat at the backseat, trying not to stare back. Their story was dramatic and funny and beautiful--and that was my problem. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to adequately capture it, terrified that I would invariably ruin the telling.

Why me? I agonized onto several pages of my journal. I wasn’t the grandchild studying creative writing or joining writing workshops—that was my sister Tara. I was a mass communications student, majoring in hanging out. I had not written a story since high school and even then those stories were largely confined to my drawer. I didn’t know why my grandfather thought I could actually write a story—his story--as he’d never even read any of mine. I remember wishing I’d fall asleep one night and wake up as Joyce Carol Oates. She couldn’t ruin anything even if she tried.

I was too young and too insecure about everything, especially about my ability at the thing I most loved to do—writing—to see that my grandfather’s request wasn’t about me. In particular, it wasn’t about whether or not I thought I had any talent or capability. It was about a story that needed to be told—because it was a story that was very dear to someone. And that someone was very dear to me.

He must have felt that his life was coming to a close and he wanted his children and grandchildren, at least, to know him and my grandmother a little bit more.

So what if I didn’t think I was talented or skilled enough? That wasn’t the point. The point was that I was supposed to learn some storytelling skills so that my grandfather’s story—the story that I fell in love with—could be told.

My grandfather died six years ago, but I never really dwelled on the thought of not having written his story because I do not indulge regrets; my personal philosophy is that everything that happened—and did not happen--was meant to happen—and not happen. Which, as far as I’m concerned, makes regret—like guilt—useless.

So when my grandmother asked me to edit her autobiography, I was surprised at the feeling of déjà vu it triggered in me. It was my grandfather’s story all over again, especially when a familiar protest echoed in my mind: “Why me? I’m not the editor in this family.” Editing is not my strongest suit, which is why I’m obsessive about rereading my work over and over so that an 800-word article often takes weeks to “get right”. And even then, after having subjected the piece to countless drafts, I still find a few things that have slipped my merciless blood-red Pilot V5 pen long after I’ve sent it off.

But my grandmother’s request strangely felt like a chance for me to rectify a past misdeed I didn’t know I had committed. So I took a deep breath and said yes.

“This isn’t about you,” I kept reminding myself as I sweated over my grandmother’s manuscript. “Who cares if you think you’re bad at editing? Tough shit. Just do it already.”

As soon as I threw myself into the editing work, which my editor sister Tara and I split between us, the this-isn’t-about-me mantra had another important use: it kept me from turning my grandmother’s book into mine. We have very different aesthetics and ways of expressing ourselves and sometimes I had to fight really hard with myself to not completely change what she’s written just because I didn’t like the sound of it. Sometimes, for instance, her references to God have a Carlo J. Caparas tenor to them. But I know where she’s coming from—and it’s not the place that Carlo J. (God Help Us) is coming from, I think—and this is her book and, again this isn’t about me. So I step aside and let her tell her story the way she wants to tell it.

And I’m so glad that I did. Because it cleared the way for my grandmother’s brand of charming, guileless storytelling. Far from sophisticated, her voice is disarmingly child-like, girly—innocent and wide-eyed and excitable. As she usually carries herself with such unerring ladylike poise, I’m not sure if her children and other grandchildren are acquainted with this little-girl side of her.

In her book, she talks about her Intramuros childhood, her family, her teaching with the deep affection of someone who sees what she has and is grateful. And the way she gushes about the love of her life, her Felix, and the 60-plus years they were married reminds me of Bella frothing at the mouth about Edward. (Kelangan talagang isingit ‘yun, di ba? ☺)

“I’m the luckiest girl in the world,” she often says. “I had the best husband. He took very good care of me.” He built her a large, rambling house, enough to accommodate their 13 children (yes—13!). He wrote her passionate love letters, which she keeps under her pillow (and which my sister Dang, the book’s art director and lay-out artist, has been eyeing; she has already asked my grandmother to leave them to her in my grandmother’s will.) He was an old-fashioned man who provided everything she could ever want and need and never let her worry about the practical things, like money. My mom and my aunts, married self-providers, say, like an accusation, that my grandfather spoiled my grandmother. “Talaga,” my grandmother assents, no shame in her whatsoever.

My dad once wondered aloud about my grandmother’s obsession with her book project. He said he couldn’t understand why people want to write about themselves. Was it vanity?

I said, Yes, as with everything we do, the need to tell our own story is motivated by both vanity and something else. I saw that something else in both grandfathers (my paternal one, my dad’s dad, wrote his own autobiography and gave it as a gift to friends and family before he died) and I see it now in my grandmother:When we near the end of a journey, there is a need to remember it from the beginning. There is a need to cradle in our hands the memory of every single thing that defined that journey, that made it what it is. This loving, painstaking remembrance is a way of reassuring ourselves that the journey was worth it.

I see in my grandmother’s book her need to know that her life mattered, that she spent it well.

She still has a lot of spirit in her, which I hope will carry her all the way to her book launch in January 2010, on her 87th birthday. She’s been saying that she sees my grandfather in her room, smiling at her. I sometimes find myself asking my grandfather, in the darkness of my room, to hold off taking my grandmother until she’s signed her book and sipped her champagne and let her friends and family toast her full life.

His girl—and my girl—deserves it.

Earning the Ending

My mom has a thyroid problem, we learned recently. None of us in the family, including my mom, know exactly just what that “problem” is because, despite her doctor’s suggestion, she refuses to undergo a biopsy. She said that the word “biopsy” sounds scary.

“It’s just a way of knowing what’s in there, mom”, I tried to reassure her as she shook her head, grimacing like a stubborn little girl, not in the least reassured.

So, instead of finding out what was wrong with her thyroid—how and why it wasn’t functioning in the way that it should--my mom went to a healing mass and healing session conducted by “healing priest” Father Suarez, after which she promptly declared herself “healed.”

Assuming that her approach to her health works for her, I still can’t help feeling that it’s somewhat...anticlimactic. Kind of like skipping to the end of the DVD and catching only the final happy-ending scene of a movie.

I mean, where was the joy in that? Where was the satisfaction in having an ending—no matter how good—to a story that you did not sit through or participate in? How happy can you really be with a happy ending that you did not earn?

Just how convinced can you be of your healing if it’s not something you’ve worked hard for?

About eleven years ago, when I was twenty-five, I discovered that I had what doctors call “cystic fibrosis” in both breasts—benign cysts or, in layman’s terms, non-cancerous marble-like lumps of fat. Of course, the first time I noticed them through a breast self-exam, “benign” and “non-cancerous” were the furthest words from my mind. I had panicked, cried, imagined the worst—saw my bald head wrapped in a bandanna and all.
When a biopsy was suggested, “to be sure”, I had immediately agreed, for my peace of mind.

But even as my doctor confirmed his initial diagnosis (“Just a fibro-adenoma. Nothing to worry about.”) and I stared at the strange yet harmless-looking little white thing that he dangled in front of me, at my request, as I lay on the operating table, I knew it wasn’t over. I had questions. Lots of them.

Questions like: How do these cysts develop? Why was I the only one among the girls in my family to have these? And when I was told, after I prodded and prodded, that, yes, they may or may not turn cancerous--How do I prevent these benign cysts from one day turning malignant?

No matter how calmly my doctors told me that fibro-adenomas are “just like pimples. Some people are prone to them, others aren’t. And you happen to be one of those people who are prone to them” I couldn’t quite make myself mirror their calmness. The cysts were growing, multiplying, as my regular annual check-ups revealed, and yet I was told the same thing—“Nothing to worry about. Still benign. Come back next year.”

For seven years, I felt like a sitting duck, just bobbing over the waters, blinking stupidly, awaiting the fatal gunshot. Every time I went in for my annual check-up, I braced myself for the possibility that I would be told I had cancer. Between check-ups, I tentatively tried other healing methods: pranic healing, herbs, yoga, healing nuns and priests.

But the operative word there was “tentative”. Even as I disliked its reliance on drugs and their curative rather than preventive approach to health, I was still a little afraid to fully venture out of conventional Western medicine—and the thinking that it fostered, intentionally or not, which is that you cede control over your health to your doctor because they would always know better. Your state of health is what they say it is: if they declared you healthy, that means you are healthy. If they declared you otherwise, that means...exactly what it means.

As I was also going through so many major changes in my career and my relationships, I didn’t feel confident enough about changing doctors or changing my mindset about doctors. I figured I had to keep some things in my life familiar and, therefore, safe.

By 2005, I felt I had no choice. My hair was falling in alarming clumps, I was losing so much weight, I was having nightmares. I was walking around with an Alfred Hitchcock sense of dread and doom; I had no idea exactly what horrible thing was coming at me—I only knew that it was coming.

I also knew I had to do something other than submit myself to a doctor’s reassurance--a reassurance that became more hollow with every year—and drug prescription. I deeply suspected that my own sense of helplessness was making me sick—and I wanted to stop feeling so helpless and powerless. I wanted to stop feeling that the shit was about to hit me, and that I had absolutely no way of keeping it from happening.

I finally focused on getting serious help and tracked down an Ayurveda practitioner. I had read about this 3,0000-year-old medical system that developed in India and its whole-person view and approach to health—regarding a person as not merely a physical being, but also an emotional, spiritual one—sat very well with me.

On our first session (which lasted two solid hours), my Ayurveda doctor threw questions –and so many of them, too—at me that no other doctor had ever asked me before. What work do I do? What time do I wake up? What time do I go to bed? What do I eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner? What form of regular physical activity do I do? How many siblings do I have? Where do I live? Some questions I found too personal that at one point, I almost stopped to say, out loud, “Wait lang. Close ba tayo?”

In turn, she told me…quite an earful. I was hormonally imbalanced and the hair fall, the weight loss, the cystic fibrosis were all physical symptoms of that. I wasn’t grounded enough, I lived too much in my head. I was too spontaneous, I had no daily routine. I was having a difficult time transitioning from my 20’s to my 30’s because I was still lugging around too much baggage from childhood. I was still too tied to my family. I had an incredibly stressful, even traumatic past year, experiencing different kinds of loss that had taken its toll on my body and my psyche, yet I wasn’t giving myself enough time to rest and recover. I was lactose-intolerant, yet my diet consisted of a lot of dairy. My body wasn’t built to digest a lot of red meat—it cost me too much effort and energy—and yet…

I staggered out of her clinic overwhelmed, bewildered, intrigued and most of all, relieved. I was right all along: something was very wrong with me. A professional had told me point-blank what I had all these years been feeling: that I was off balance, out of sync. No pat on the arm telling me I was alright. No soothing words saying that my condition was “normal”. It was as if my new doctor had lit a candle in a dark room and I was beginning to see, for the first time, what was in it.

I realized that what had really frightened me was the idea of not seeing, not knowing who or what the enemy was. I had no idea just what I was up against. And when I saw it, when I saw that the enemy was me—that it was my habits, my thought patterns, my choices, my lifestyle that were threatening my health and undermining me, I began to feel less hopeless, more in control. For the first time in seven years, I felt I had a real say in how my health, how my life was going to turn out.

My doctor didn’t stop with giving me a laundry list of what was wrong with me. The woman was on a roll. She gave me another long list, this time of all the things I was to do—a tacit order for me to get to work. Eat only freshly-cooked, organic dishes, no leftovers. Cook with ghee, a low fat cooking oil made from clarified butter. Eat mostly brown rice, grapefruit, papaya, avocado, seafood. Yoga sun salutations in the morning and early evenings. Stick to a regular breakfast, lunch and dinner schedule. Go to bed before10:00 PM, get up before 6:00 AM. Shower with warm water from the neck down, cool water from the neck up. And that was just for grounding me physically, which was the most urgent concern. Once I’ve done that, I would have to ground myself emotionally and psychically by seeing a psychotherapist. Also, I was to submit myself to a thermography and a breast ultrasound…

Of course, my stress level spiked those first few weeks at the thought of the amount of work involved and I wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake by taking this on. I mean…ghee? The nearest Indian grocery was all the way on the other side of town…

However, when my mind and my body had gotten over the initial shock of my new diet and daily routine, the realization of what all this was for finally dawned on me: I would be able to sleep at night…at the least.

Hell, bring it! I was glad to finally have something real to do; something to do besides wait, twiddle my thumbs and hope for the best. The work, though daunting at first, gave me such a great sense of power and control over my life that I threw myself fully at it, with the zeal of a fanatic.

This is the work I’ve been on for the past four years—that of knowing me and of consolidating the seemingly disparate parts of myself into one solid unit. During that time, I tried other healing systems as naturopathy and homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, Jungian psychotherapy…investigated other philosophies and belief systems as Kabbalah, Buddhism, Wicca…got to study the Christian story from the Protestant angle aside from my family’s Roman Catholic one…

All of these have helped me to slowly unfold, revealing parts of me to myself that I otherwise wouldn’t have discovered had I stuck to what was familiar.

I will not gloss over the difficulty of such work. Coming face to face with certain truths about ourselves carries with it its own unique trauma, which some people just aren’t ready for, no matter how much liberation and enlightenment it may promise them. As Sue Monk Kidd succinctly put it, “The truth may set you free. But first, it will shatter the safe, sweet way you live.”

I wish I could present a Hollywood ending to this particular story—an obvious, if often simplistic, clear-cut resolution--and say that, after all my effort, I’ve rid myself of those pesky fibro-adenomas. But they’re still there. They still may or may not turn cancerous.

Yet in the most fundamental, most essential way, in a way that is hard for me to explain, I feel healed. And I say that with the awareness of its striking similarity to my mom’s own declaration. Like her, I have no tangible, measurable proof. Like her, my test results may refute what I feel. I am due for a check-up again and my results may be as they were a year ago.

But I am not the person that I was a year ago—I made sure of that, just as I have been doing since 2005. Every year I know myself a little more. And so every year I’ve become much better, more efficient at giving myself what I need and removing from my life what no longer works, whether it is a piece of clothing, a thought pattern or a toxic relationship. That discipline has been making me feel stronger, more in control, less susceptible to the paranoia and sense of imminent doom that had once stalked me.

I wish all that could show up on a medical test.

How would a sense of freedom and lightness register, I wonder?

What Now?

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt

For the past week, as I packed emergency goods for drop-off at a flood relief center in our area, I have been racking my brain for the best way—that is, the most long-term way—for me to respond to the latest natural disaster to hit the Philippines.

The two public responses I was most glad for came from architects: Jun Palafox’s statement that the flood that swallowed up many areas of Metro Manila is “man-made” and Dan Lichauco’s reminder for personal accountability.

“We should remember,” Lichauco said in a newspaper article, “that all of us are contributors to this disaster. From the plastic bags we throw into the sewers, to the trash in the streets, to the indiscriminate abuse of unsustainable resources and our reliance on a government that is not working, we all play a part in this disaster.

In the same way that the great earthquake and fire of San Francisco in 1906 changed the standards of that city’s urban planning, Manila will have to reevaluate and revisit its standards, too.”

We have to use this disaster as an opportunity to evaluate and change the necessary building design and urban designs in the country.”

Use this disaster as an opportunity to evaluate and change.

I am not an architect, an engineer or an urban planner, but five years ago, after a personal disaster struck and my life, much to my bewilderment and horror, went under, that was what I found myself doing: I found myself using that disaster as a golden opportunity to evaluate my life and to change the things in it that needed changing.

I found myself promising to never let something like that happen to me again, ever. More accurately, I promised myself that, if I absolutely could not keep horrible things from my life—though that was definitely Plan A--I would, at least, see them coming. Still a very good Plan B.

I would face my worst storms, prepared, better equipped in the manner of one who expects them. Never again would they take me by surprise.

I would be a more involved participant in both the joys and the sorrows of my life.

I daresay I’ve not done such a bad job. There are still storms, of course—now very few and far between. But I find that I can now detect them when they are only still low pressure areas in my life and I can sort of visualize its pathway and assess the possible damage should I be foolish enough to stand in its way. So I’ve learned to calmly sidestep them and I watch in awe as these storms, which could have easily swept me high off the ground again and violently toss me every which way like they used to, blow past me, leaving me—thankfully—unscathed.

Unfortunately, I see others—many of them people I care very deeply for—routinely get swept up in and badly battered by their own super typhoons. I throw them a rope--give or lend them my “savior” books and “savior” DVDs, write them rah-rah letters, offer them rah-rah speeches, give them a journal, forward my shrink’s phone number (“Please, please, see Tita Rose”, I beg them), sit quietly and listen as they once again go over the details of their latest heartbreaking trauma.

I always wished, though, that I could do more for them. Like slice open their skull and rewire their brain.

Because you have to act to steer your life towards a healthier, less disaster-prone direction. But in order for you to act differently, your mind has to think differently from how it used to. It’s our thinking that directs our actions. And you can’t change your thinking unless you first know exactly what you think.

This is what writing has done and continues to do for me—it lets me know what I think. It lets me know what my biases are, what my current fears are—all the things that could be keeping me from making the choices necessary for real change to occur in my life—so that I may pick them apart and find the deeper thoughts that fuel or strengthen these fears and biases.

This is why I urge people to write. Writing has been the tool that has most helped me understand my nature—and thus, my life—a bit more. And understanding this nature has helped me embrace it—the most natural tendencies and inclinations that I used to judge, deny or stifle because they made me feel like such a freak--so that I now work with it, not against it. This has been the key to my lesser-storm and lesser-damage scenario. But more importantly, this has been the key to my peace, the peace that allows me to do the things I’ve always wanted to do without too much fuss and anxiety. As my friend Cecilia so wonderfully put it, “Your highest potential is found in your most miserable traits.”

Learn, I urge the people I love. Endeavor to know who you are and use that knowledge to pull yourself from your dark pit of despair and propel you forward. Please learn. And I want them to, not only for their own sake, but for mine, too. Because it hurts to watch the people you love and good people with good intentions flounder and go under again. I never expected to be so affected by it (I used to think nothing could hurt me other than my pain) but I am.

Write about your troubles and your desires and your dreams, I tell anyone who staggers to me from the rubble of some great personal devastation or to one I see is headed in that direction. I know you don’t see the point now—or the coming danger that all this writing and introspection and reflection are supposed to help you guard against or, at least, ride out—but, believe me, it will serve you well.

Write. And along with that, read. Travel. Discover and try new things. Volunteer your time, your effort, your talents, your material resources. Get your blood circulating with physical exercise. Question things. Keep questioning things until you find the answers that satisfy you, until you find the answers that, to paraphrase Anita Roddick, don't insult your soul.

Why this focus on the inner life when addressing the recent typhoon-wrought devastation? Because I do believe that, to take some liberty with one religious song, all the disasters around us are mere reflections of what’s within. If our physical world doesn’t make sense to us, if to us it seems terrifying and out of control, it is because we do not understand it and feel disconnected from it—in the same manner that our lives spin out of control when we no longer understand it and feel connected to it.

Mother Nature—our natural physical world that we have continued to indiscriminately raze and over which we build humongous malls, among many such abuses—is much like our own individual natures: we have to find a way to work with it, not against it. Because to do the latter, as we've been shown over and over and over, is to ask for it; it to ask the heavens to crash down on us and the earth to swallow us.

The first step towards working with this awesome, powerful force is to take the time and effort to understand it, to see how it works.

And understanding only comes with deliberate intention and the willingness and foresight to stop all our feverish activity in order to take stock, to “reevaluate and revisit” what we know, what we think we know and how we conduct ourselves.

As long as we are alive, we are part of this world. And so how we live—whether it be thoughtfully and responsibly or mindlessly and carelessly--affects this world, for better or for worse. Whatever we do in our own lives, whatever choices we make, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant we may find them, matter in the big scheme of things.

And as long we acknowledge that we are part of the problems that wrack our world, we can begin to embrace the idea that we are also part of the solution.

The question that we should throw ourselves, then, is: "What particular part do you play?"

I write. And I introduce people to the tool of writing so that, hopefully, it empowers them to handle their own storms and to figure out what they were meant to do while on this fragile planet in a way that ensures that this planet continues to be the home of many generations that will come after us.

This is what I do. This is what I have. This is where I am right now.

This is what came to me as I contemplated Teddy Roosevelt’s words while packing relief goods for the victims of the latest man-made disaster to hit us.

And so this is what I offer to the massive effort of steering this country, this world, in a new, better—and, quite, frankly, exciting--direction.

The How Of It

I’m more than halfway through Eclipse now and all the unabashed love talk in there—by teenagers!—has caused me to meditate on the L word yet again. Like I need an excuse. I thought that somehow, by now, I’d have nothing to say about it, anymore. But, alas, the purging continues…

I got to thinking about Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, where Spanish painter Juan Antonio (played by Javier Bardem) tells American tourist Vicky (Rebecca Hall) that the reason his poet father didn’t want his own poems published was that the latter didn’t think humans deserved anything beautiful because, after all these years, “they still haven’t learned how to love.”

Ah, strong words. The kind that are uttered by someone who is absolutely certain of something valuable. It was all I could do then to keep from crawling into the TV screen and into the living room of the old poet in a kind of reverse-Sadako maneuver, and ask in breathless desperation, So…hhhow? How are we supposed to love?

The answer could very well be in that word “how”--or the manner with which we express love. I do think there’s some kind of clue there. Having been an avid, dedicated--“shameless”, my therapist’s word for me--student of love (meaning, spending a huge chunk of my time, attention and effort trying to figure out what “love” means and how it works) since God-knows-when, I have come to think that there are really as many ways to love as there are individuals in the world. And that our myriad problems with love stem from the assumption that there is only one or, at most, only a handful of legitimate ways to express it.

“If you really love me, you wouldn’t forget our anniversary.” “If you really love me, you should try to make more money than me because, after all, you’re the man.” “If you really love me, you’d be more patient when we’re out on a date and I’m on my cellphone half the time.” “If you really love me, you’d call me everyday just to ask how my day went.” “If you really love me, you’d compliment me all the time.” “If you really love me, you’d marry me.” “If you really love me, you won’t break up with me.”

And the litany of what love should look like, how it should be, goes on and on. I look at what we’ve made of it and can sort of understand Juan Antonio’s father’s lament. We’ve made love so small, so narrow, so limited. We’ve confined its essence and meaning to our own notions of it, to ways we recognize and are familiar and comfortable with. We try to bend and fashion love to our will (believing, of course, that we can) then we hold up this bent, shaped—or misshapen--thing and declare it as “love”. Worse, we impose this prototype upon others. Anything that doesn’t look like this, we further declare, is not love.

So when the people in our lives express their love in a way that seems unfamiliar or different from ours, in a manner that does not meet our description and characterization of what love is supposed to be, in a manner that doesn’t adhere to our prototype, we assume the worst: that they don’t love us. Or, at least, that they don’t love us as much as we love them. (As if love were a contest, as if it could really be quantified.)

I’ve been accused of not loving someone enough and I have, myself, accused someone of not loving me enough. Neither position—whether I was cast in the role of heartless biyatch or I cast myself as the KMV (Kinawawz Martyr/Victim)--was fun for me. Sure, I found the role of KMV shockingly inebriating. Like someone who’s had too much to drink and suddenly has a wonderful excuse to make an ass of herself, the role of martyr/victim can be a convenient way to vent all your life’s frustrations at one person (“It’s your fault I’m not living the life that I want!”), not to mention a fabulous modus operandi for washing yourself of any responsibility or accountability for your misery and unhappiness.

After I went through that experience, I can understand why lots of people just looooove inhabiting the kinawawz role. By staying in that role, by making themselves thoroughly at home in it like some Method actor, everything that ever happens to them—or doesn’t happen to them--is someone else’ fault, never their own. How lovely. And how tempting to want to stay in it for, oh, maybe three more lifetimes.

But even then—even as I was relishing the KMV role like Johnny Depp--I felt the strong visceral falseness of it, like watching one of those TV soap operas or worse, Wowowee. Indeed, like a party pooper, the truth of what I was really doing planted itself stubbornly in my being so that I couldn’t thoroughly enjoy my state of victimhood. I knew I couldn’t stay contented as the “wronged party” or “long-suffering partner” forever. For doing so would not only constitute a grave disservice to both my partner and myself, it would be a great insult to love itself. I would be making it small, mean, limited. Or as Bon Jovi once accused—not me, let’s just make that clear—I would be giving love “a bad name.” If I really wanted to understand and know love, nothing could be more off the mark than wanting to stay a victim forever.

Back when an ex-boyfriend and I--trying so very hard to make our relationship work--were going to couple’s therapy, our shrink, perhaps sensing the outcome of our sessions, e-mailed me the following piece, which she found on the Internet:

“We all have unchangeable parts of our hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannot nourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves growing further apart until you live in separate worlds where you share the business of life, but never touch each other where the heart lives and dreams. From there, it is only a small leap to the cataloguing of petty hurts and daily failures that leaves so many couples bitter and unsatisfied with their mates.”

I’ve become quite convinced that knowing oneself--what one needs and wants, what one’s personal vision of life is--and then finding another person who not only shares those needs and wants, but is actually aware of those things—and not love--is the key to successful, lasting relationships. I look at my parents’ marriage and, though I know it’s not the kind of relationship I want for myself, it works marvelously for them. They still really enjoy each other’s company, laugh at the other person’s jokes and can be such an annoying tag-team. Young as they were when they got hitched—my mom was 21, my dad, 22—I do think they were lucky enough to meet a person that early who wanted the same thing that they knew they already wanted for themselves: to start a family.

I have felt, in all my past relationships, that my partner and I wanted some of the same things. I had always thought that those similarities and, of course, the desire to make it work with the other person, were enough. The thing is, even those things would later come up short. Something else, something seemingly unexpected would crop up—a need in me that I hadn’t even been aware of before or perhaps had dismissed as inconsequential but was now undeniable, urgent, in-your-face. A need that just wasn’t being fulfilled where I was and got increasingly desperate the more it was denied. But I stayed, sometimes much longer than I probably should’ve, because that’s what I thought love meant: you stay, no matter what. No matter how wild-eyed and restless and desperate you become. No matter if you’ve made a nightly ritual of locking yourself in the bathroom and crying silently while you brush your teeth.

Loving someone, I’ve realized, should never be confused with sustaining a relationship with that person. One of the truly liberating discoveries for me, about love, is that you can actually love someone with everything you have in you yet can’t stand being in the same room as that person. Love is more than physical proximity. Or sweet text messages or romantic candle-lit dinners at expensive out-of-town restaurants or no-occasion surprise gifts or promise rings or marriage contracts or fabulous, sunset Boracay weddings. Love is all of that, yes, but it is so much more than that, too. Love can also be the courage you need to do the right thing—whether the right thing is to stay or to leave.

I’ve come to know that we give love its due when we see it, not in terms of degrees, but in variations—because, really, just how does one measure love? It can take on an infinite variety of shapes and sizes and situations and arrangements. Married, unmarried, single, widowed, remarried—love can inhabit these stations in life, if you so wish it, and not one of them is more superior or inferior to the other. Different people love differently. And we are all different.

I have promised myself to no longer assume to know another person’s capacity for love. The only capacity for love that I should know of is my own. I’ve seen me in action over the years so I pretty much know what I’m capable of. I now know for sure just how I love—I rather tend to give everything or, as Elizabeth Gilbert put it, to not only give away my hand, but “to give away the farm”, too. And so I do tend to ask for everything in return: Unswerving commitment and devotion. A solid friendship. Constant companionship. Equal partnership and teamwork. Headboard-banging, uh, chemistry. And the room to grow and evolve as individuals and as partners.

I’ve realized that, for me, it’s got to be all of the above…or nothing at all.

I have also promised myself to no longer get all bent out of shape trying to prove my love to others. Whether or not they believe me or feel my love is not my problem. I’ve learned from experience that people who can’t feel another person’s love should go to therapy or do the babaylan healing dance or get on a plane to Batanes and build boats with the Ivatans…or whatever it takes to shed the defensive armor, to remove the blinders from their eyes, to spit out the ball of bitterness from their mouth—to get some perspective, mehn!--because it’s their problem, not the other person’s. So it’s theirs to solve, not someone else’.

I should know. I kept hearing my partner’s words of love, saw him mouth them all the time. But somehow, they couldn’t reach me. His words seemed to lose steam on their way to me and dissolve to dust at my feet—I couldn’t believe them, couldn’t feel them. And I saw what that was doing to us.

So…

I danced the dance that our priestess ancestors used for healing the villagers. Spilled my guts, bawled my eyes out and drew mandalas in my therapist’s office. Vented onto pages and pages in my journal and, when that wasn’t enough, set up a blog. Chanted Hindu deities’ names. Said novenas to Mother Mary and Saint Therese. Thrashed and spluttered through surfing lessons. Watched go-girl movies. Reread my favorite books and splurged on new ones. Started a book project. Met for tea and endless chika with good-vibe friends. Did innumerable sun salutations and warrior poses. Sang—or rather, screamed—Bono’s empowering lyrics almost every morning, upon waking, “I want you to know / That you don’t need me anymore/ I want you to know / YOU DON’T NEED ANYONE OR ANYTHING AT ALL…”

Then, one day, I felt it again. I felt loved.

And so I did what only love could give me the strength to do: I finally freed the both of us from each other.

Let Bella Be Chaka

It’s my fault, of course. No one put a gun to my head and ordered me to read Twilight (and its sequel, New Moon)…or else. I picked it up on my own volition after watching the film with no expectations and coming out of the cinema catatonic, my whole supposedly grown-up psyche run over and totally mangled by the juvenile love train. Wha—! I thought. What just happened there?

Also, I had been sufficiently warned by friends who have read the phenomenally popular four-book vampire romance series by Stephenie Meyer. “It’s going to suck you in,” my friend Kat said. And, when I started complaining about Bella’s over-the-topness in book one, my sister Jof said, “Naku, wala pa ‘yan.”

So I only had my unquenchable curiosity to blame when, in the middle of New Moon, a heat crept from the center of my body, spreading out towards my neck, my arms, my legs until I felt it on my face, my scalp, my hands. My breathing came out shallow and labored and I was thinking in a panic, I can’t take this, anymore. I was gripped by an uncontrollable urge to grab Bella, the book’s 18-year-old heroine, by her hair and slam her head against the wall. As I looked down at my hands, clenching and unclenching them as I paced my room (I didn’t notice I had gotten up from my bed), I was almost surprised that I didn’t, er, transform. (Jabob, is that you?)

But I had to do something with my hands, so I snatched my phone from my bedside table and typed out an SMS to both Jof and Kat: “WHAT’S WITH THIS SUPER LOW SELF-ESTEEM LOSER GIRL?!!!”

ANG CHAKA! CHAKA! CHAKA NG BABAENG ‘TO!

I wanted to punch Bella in the face REALLY HARD—nang matauhan—even as I took note of my violent reaction with a mixture of shock, mortification and fascination. Aba, overly affected ang lola. All I wanted was to know how the story was going to end—it was too late for me now to not care about it, I was in too deep; I had, as Kat predicted, been sucked it--but…did I really have to endure this? This horrifically pathetic display of I’m-not-good-enough-for-you-Edward and I’ll-give-up-my-life-for-you-even-if-you-don’t-want-me-because-I-don’t-really-matter-anyway?

CHAAAAAKAAAAAA!!!

“Yes,” was Kat’s grim response. “You have to suffer through Bella’s un-boongzeehness! And it WILL get worse!” I gulped. It will? And did I detect a sadistic glee there, as if my friend was glad she could share the painful experience of watching Bella slowly chip away at her own self-worth? “But plod on, it will be worth it in the end!!!” She ended that text message with a smiley face icon. I stared at the icon closely, trying to make sure that there was sincerity behind those black-dot eyes and that the smile wasn’t, in fact, a sneer.

Please let it be worth it, I prayed, rather desperately. I didn’t want my curiosity to be the only thing spurring me on—that reason sounded too much like an addict’s. Just one more hit, just to see how that feels. And I am still a recovering love-junkie. I wondered if maybe it was too early to be taking on unapologetic, do-or-die romantic stories such as this one; I wondered if maybe I was pushing it. And that’s why I needed to believe that there was something big, something awesome waiting for me as a reader at the end of this story. I needed to believe that Bella’s self-destructive idea of true love was just a phase she would eventually get over, that she would later on “break on through to the other side.” I knew I would hate it, hate it, hate it if, after staying with her through this very dark, utterly frustrating and downright moronic part of her journey, she would remain as stupid and suicidal and spectacularly twisted about love.

I took a deep breath, sat back down on my bed, picked up the book, gritted my teeth and, as Kat urged, plodded on.

An hour later, I took another much-needed break. By then, I was ready to drag Bella up to the rooftop of a 30-storey building (I was racking my brain for one nearest my house) and kick her off the ledge—nang matapos na. So we can both be done with her already.

I also took this break as an opportunity to ask myself why. Why was this fictional girl getting to me this way?

I didn’t have to wait long for the answer to come to me. In fact, hardly had the question formed in my head than the answer pushed past it like an overeager, know-it-all class nerd (Hermione, is that you?). The answer made so much sense that I didn’t even try to deny its validity. Yeah, yeah, I thought, rolling my eyes. Then I sent Jof another SMS, admitting to her why think I was so pissed at Bella I could barely see straight. She agreed with my reason, recalling her own experience with books two (New Moon) and three (Eclipse) when she’d skip pages—the alternative to hurling the book across the room--because she was so “ASAR, mehn! Punyeta sha!”

“That’s why we’re so bothered by her,” she said in her SMS. “Because we were her before. Haha, shucks.”

Shucks, indeed.

OK, Bella darling, you can relax now. I promise I won’t slam your head against the wall or push you off a building. It’s not about you, dear. I know you’re only eighteen and, of course, it’s natural to go totally wacko over your first love and all. So, you know…go ahead, knock yourself out.

Really, I understand what you’re going through. Listen, when I was 20—the first time I was in a relationship—I went through the horror of having my boyfriend’s three beloved Great Danes attack me. He and I had tearfully broken up the night before, so of course, I didn’t sleep all through that night, until at 5:00 AM I decided to take the bus from my house in Las Pinas all the way to my boyfriend’s house in Fairview (trust me, dear--that’s far) to try to get back together. He didn’t know I was coming, so he wasn’t expecting me. But more importantly, I didn’t know the dogs were let out of their cages for breakfast, and so I didn’t expect them to come barreling at me when I was inside the gate. Yup. Rar! Rar! Rar! I was screaming my head off, woke up his whole house and the neighbors, too…but it’s a lucky thing my boyfriend was able to throw himself between me and his hungry dogs AND I was in a jacket. Thank God, that jacket was the only thing that got ripped.

I know it’s nothing like being attacked by a vampire, but in my world seeing extreme close-ups of three sets of bared Great Dane teeth snapping and lunging at you can be pretty intense. The things we do for love, right?

Now, that’s fine when you’re young—we can somehow forgive ourselves our insanity when we were a certain age, laugh about it even. But I think that when we find ourselves acting irrationally sometime in our supposedly mature, level-headed mid-20’s and 30’s, it’s just harder to laugh about it. Maybe because most of us expect to have shed that crazy nature, leaving it in our teens or early 20’s. It can be incredibly unsettling to realize that, despite the years added and the experiences gained, something of that will-do-anything-for-love crazy teenager still lives and breathes in us. And that it can be triggered again…when the next person we ordain The One comes along.

You see, some of us reading your story are in our 20’s and 30’s and we desperately want to believe that we don’t do wacko, anymore; that we’re so over that. Except that our most recent experiences resoundingly refute that belief. For some of us, it’s not been that long since we last lost our head over someone. In fact, my own recovery began only less than two years ago. The wounds may not be all that fresh or exposed, anymore, but they are still scabs. And reading about your, um, walk through that pitch-black, seemingly endless, hopeless tunnel—reminding us all too well of our own walk—is like rrripping off the scabs and revealing the still wet wound underneath. The pain—and the furious awareness that it’s all really quite unnecessary and stupid (why the hell would you do that to a scab?!)--is such that you want to lash out, grab someone by the hair and slam—!

Sorry.

It’s not your hair I want to grab, really—I know that now. It’s mine. Because I still get angry sometimes when I remember how I let myself get so self-destructive, when I remember how I disregarded my own deepest needs and desires, how I all but trampled on everything that was sacred and important to me…just because I had this idea in my head that that’s how you prove you love someone. That you have to feel all hollowed out, emptied of everything—including your soul—to prove to yourself just how much and how deep you can love. When I think of all the things I’ve put myself through, it does make me sometimes want to drag me up to the rooftop of a building and kick my stupid-ass, sappy self off the ledge.

But at the same, I have to admit that, during those recollections, I also can’t help marveling at myself: Wow…kinaya ko ‘yun? I have sat through some really seemingly interminable awful times, when, with every step forward, the way just got darker and more hopeless than I ever thought was possible. And I marvel that I have pulled through, that I’m here. I’m in one piece. I’m happy. And—most amazing of all--I’m more hopeful than I’ve ever been. I think that’s usually what happens when you feel you’ve been to hell and back. Hope gets a real beating in hell. When you’re in there, burning and yelping and hopping around like Yosemite Sam (“Sure is hot in here!”), the part of you that doesn’t really expect to survive seems more overwhelming than the hope that you will. So that if and when you do make it, that small hopeful part of you packs on more muscle and gains serious leverage. There’s nothing like surviving your own personal inferno to transform that hope in you from a naïve belief into an unshakeable, solid certainty.

Was this certainty in myself--and in the things I most value--perhaps the thing that I was expecting to gain, if subconsciously, when I entered a relationship that scared me--a relationship I once compared, in my journal, to “throwing myself into a furnace”? Were all those tears and crumbling self-worth and claustrophobic emptiness and nervous break-downs in movie theatre toilet stalls really worth it? Were they necessary?

The answer, I have to admit, is YES. Looking back from where I stand, there is not one thing I wish I could have done differently. Everything was really a step forward, even when I couldn’t feel or see it then. I had to go through the chaka parts—I had to be chaka. I had to be the complete opposite of strong and clear-minded and confident. Much as I wanted then to have skipped those parts—to not have to see the ugly, the unflattering, the self-denigrating and soul-insulting parts of me--there was just no way around them. Not if I wanted to be where I now find myself: altered from the inside out, possibly forever.

So, fine, Bella—be chaka. Stay there as long as you need to. Annoy people, make them uncomfortable, remind them of their not-so-great selves—and show them how to embrace it because that, too, is part of the process of becoming whole. Isn’t that why we love—to feel whole? Show them not to fear getting lost because we do have to be lost first in order to be found, right? And isn't that why we allow ourselves to be loved--to be "found", to know that we are seen and accepted for who we really are, including the deepest, darkest parts of us?

Hey, why don’t you download Alicia Keys’ song “Lesson Learned”. I think you’ll like it. “Yes, I was burned/ But I call it a lesson learned/ My soul has returned/ so I call it a lesson learned”. Nice, noh? ☺

It's been six days since I finished New Moon. I'm feeling calmer now, less agitated. So I take Eclipse, which I bought along with Breaking Dawn two days ago (thus, still covered in plastic), down from my bookshelf with a mixture of dread and anticipation. Kat’s words ring in my ears: “It WILL get worse!” Shet, kaya ko ba ‘to? But also…”It will be worth it in the end!”

OK. I will sit through this next book with you, Bella. And I will try my very best not to judge you—because I realize that would be judging me—so harshly.

I tear off the plastic wrapping of Eclipse and flip to the first page.

Here we go…

What I Talk About When I Talk About "Making A Difference"

Over the weekend, at a youth leadership forum in Misamis Oriental for “sustainable peace and development in Mindanao”--between being star-struck at meeting Governor Ed Panlilio of Pampanga, Governor Grace Padaca of Isabela, and Tony Meloto of Gawad Kalinga--I collected myself enough to give the following speech ;):

Good afternoon and thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak to you today.

I was asked to speak on the topic of “Leaders in Readers” and that the group I am to address is comprised of student council leaders who have been tapped to contribute to the effort of achieving sustainable peace and development in Cagayan de Oro and in the rest of Mindanao.

As I’m sure you are aware, the vision you have set for yourselves is quite noble; the mission, ambitious. Lasting peace has always seemed elusive in this country, especially in Mindanao. And because peace has been slow to come, so has progress.

I'm also sure that the young participants here are raring to change all that. I'm sure you can't wait to make things different, to make things better. But before you go out there and seek to make your individual and collective contributions to this enormous task, let me share with you a few things I've learned about wanting to make a difference.

If it may sound like a deviation on the topic—and not what you had expected to hear--bear with me, as I feel called to share this with young idealists like you.

When I was about your age (not too long ago), I was impatient to start changing the world. I couldn’t wait to start doing the great things that I felt I was destined to do. The problem, though, was that I didn’t know where or how to begin. More importantly, I had not the faintest idea what those supposed “great things” were.

So I did the next big thing that a U.P. graduate could do: I got myself a job. I became a copywriter at a big advertising agency. It was a fun job. I was earning some money and not sponging on my parents, anymore, and I loved my funny, creative, irreverent officemates, most of whom were also from U.P. So my work just felt like an extension of my university days—except that I was getting paid to have fun. What a deal, diba?

Then in 1998, my father ran for Congress, representing our home province of Surigao del Norte. I was never a great fan of politics, so I fought that decision as hard and as loudly as I could until it was obvious that my father had made up his mind about running, hysterical eldest daughter notwithstanding. The rest of the family threw their support behind my father and so I finally decided that the mature thing was to go and do the same.

I took a two-month leave from work and, along with my four younger siblings, left for Surigao City to help my parents run the campaign. In the course of that campaign summer, however, I found myself becoming more involved than I had originally intended. I sat with mothers as they told me their wishes for their barangays—a school, more teachers, college scholarships for their children; nothing high falluting. I sat with smart, funny, energetic young girls who, I felt, could grow up to be amazing adults when given more opportunities to apply themselves. And at some point in the campaign, I began to think that politics may not be so horrible, after all, or government so irrelevant if it can help us fulfill all our wonderful plans for the province. I had just been to a visit to New Zealand some months before and was so impressed with that country’s efficient, robust eco-tourism industry. And I thought how wonderful it would be to adopt the same well-thought-out and highly evolved scheme to our province, which was already enjoying a fair amount of local and international visitors because of its world-class surf spots. What could be more ambitious, I thought, than adopting a First World eco-tourism structure to a very Third World province.

I became so excited at the thought of making a real difference in my home province, the place where I had grown up, that I was convinced this was my opportunity, finally, to do something great, something big and important. I decided that if my father won, I would quit my job and apply as his chief of staff or as his environment chief. I naturally—and naively--thought that my years as a member of the environmental group the U.P. Mountaineers was enough experience.

Then my father lost the elections. Of course, it was heartbreaking. But not as heartbreaking, not quite as devastating, as when those mothers I had spoken to and made great big plans with--many of whom were the leaders in their island barangays--came to the mainland with the intention of congratulating their new congressman, my father, whom they honestly thought had won as no news of the election results could reach their islands.

It was humbling to see the anguish on their faces. It was as if all hope for them had disappeared from the face of the earth. I had not fully realized the extent of their reliance on my father’s winning. While my family could pick up the pieces and carry on with our lives in Manila, the people from the province who supported and campaigned for us as if their lives depended on it were left with nothing but the faint echo of our promises. Aligning themselves with a politician, I realized with a sick feeling, had been the only way they knew to survive. Their lives really did depend on it.

I wanted to tell them that, really, all was not lost. It was just an election, for God’s sake. They still had themselves--their health, their imagination, their spirit. They were alive. I wanted to tell them, “Listen. You are still your own best hope.” But I didn’t know how to say it without sounding like a sheltered woman, a stupid burgis, who was out-of-touch with the realities around her. The more painful truth, however, was that I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.

I had never felt more useless in my life than I did that day, as I tried, along with my family, to comfort the weeping mothers. My education from some of the best of schools in the country could do nothing for them. I had never felt more powerless to do anything. I felt I had nothing real, nothing of value to offer them or anyone.

One of the lasting lessons for me from that experience is that while politics or the government can be a powerful, effective way of changing people’s lives for the better, it is, by no means, the only way. Mariane Pearl, journalist and author of the memoir A Mighty Heart, about the slaying by Islamic extremists of her husband, Wall Street Journal writer Daniel Pearl, said that, “Personally, I believe there is a limitation to how much politics can change the world—but there’s no limitation to how much individuals can change the world.”

Personally—and especially after that sobering experience in Surigao--I couldn’t agree more.

Trouble was, this particular individual had no idea how she was going to change the world. It was this awareness of my cluelessness that haunted me when I returned to Manila and went back to my office desk and to my copywriting job. Nothing was the same, anymore. I didn’t feel I was the same person who left for Surigao two months ago. Everything that used to make me happy just felt hollow and meaningless. I felt hollow and meaningless, as though there was no real point to my existence. Writing ads for shampoos and conditioners and candies and underwear—something I really enjoyed before—began to feel to me like some kind of slow death.

I realized that I didn't love advertising enough, and that lack of love, that lack of passion for what I was doing showed in the mediocrity of my work. While my friends threw themselves at their work, investing it with attention and creativity and care—clearly doing something they love--I would grouse or growl at the sight of a new job order form on my desk. I would come to work late and leave early, had very long lunches, would go back to the office just to show my face, and then leave again for a very long coffee or tea break. I knew I was dragging my friends and my family down with my listlessness and boredom and sucking them into my black hole of misery—and it wasn't fair to them. I knew I had to leave. But where would I go? And what would I do? I didn’t know how to do anything except write and tell stories.

The faces of those mothers stayed with me. I badly wanted to help them, but how could I when I couldn’t even help myself? I couldn’t even figure out what it was that I wanted to do.

And so it was that, as I began to consciously figure out what it was that I really, truly wanted to do, I also naturally began to turn inward. I became more introspective and more reflective. I began to read more about the things that interested me, I wrote almost everyday in my journal about my observations, I asked the difficult questions. And because of all that, I became more aware of my thoughts, about my perceptions and my notions of things. In other words, I got to know myself a lot more.

I realized that, if I wasn’t so hell-bent on making a “contribution to society”--to do all the obviously important things like creating livelihood projects, building better schools, roads, etc.--what I really, truly wanted to do was to make films…and write books…and stage plays…and travel…and meet all sorts of interesting people. None of these pursuits sounded world-changing to me, none of them seemed to have any direct contribution to “nation-building”, but if I was truly honest with myself, those were the things I most wanted to do.

It was a lucky thing that among the many books I was then devouring was The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. In it he said that “to realize one’s destiny”—to fulfill one’s biggest dreams—“is a person’s only real obligation”. You can imagine how liberating it was for me to read that.

So in July 1999, after a little over a year of intense introspection and reflection, of feeling more and more lost and out-of-place at client meetings, of more “meaning of life” discussions with my friends than they could tolerate, I finally tendered my resignation and left advertising. I vowed, from then on, to write only about the things I cared about.

For the next several years, I rabidly pursued my dreams: I made short films. I applied to NYU Film School twice—and was rejected as many times. I wrote screenplays. I entered all sorts of writing contests—winning some, and losing most. I wrote stage plays. I contributed articles to magazines. During those years, when my rent money would run out, I’d go and get a regular job, making sure that it was the kind that would enhance my skills as a writer or as a filmmaker. Whenever I had saved up enough money to sustain me for a few months while I wrote or took short classes and workshops or made a short film, I’d quit my regular job and focus on what I regarded as my real work, my soul work.

In 2004, my first novel was published. Many young women tracked me down on the Internet to say “thank you” and to detail how much the book “changed their life”. I was shocked and delirious when I made the connection--when I realized that by simply doing what I most loved to do, I was making my own contribution to the world. That by making my life better, I was inevitably making other people's lives better. I was amazed to realize that “making a difference” can be as simple as figuring out what you are most passionate about and then going out and following that passion.

Of course, there's nothing really “simple” about that. You run up against all sorts of personal issues, all sorts of fears that you never even thought you had. Am I talented enough, smart enough, attractive enough for the profession I want to pursue? What if I go do what I love—and fail? It's scary, it's risky—and that's why many people don't do it. Po Bronson, author of the book What Should I Do With My Life? (The True Story of People Who Asked the Ultimate Question) writes that, “Finding out what we believe in and what we can do about it is one of life's great dramas. It can be an endless process of discovery and one that should be appreciated for its difficulty. Don't cheat. Treat this as the one true life you have.”

It is what we achieve in our personal lives that we bring to the table. It is the lessons we've learned in our own lives that we offer as solutions to the larger problems in our community because it's what we know. It's saying, “How about we try this? It worked for me and, who knows, it might just work for you.” We cannot offer solutions we don't know, we cannot offer solutions we've not tested ourselves and proved to be effective. Otherwise, it's all just rhetoric. We have to first practice in our own lives what we want to preach. Our lives and the way we live it are the most persuasive argument for what we believe.

I've come to know that showing others what’s possible, by the example of our own lives, is the most effective way to lead.

Before President Barack Obama was catapulted into the position he is now in—as an inspirational leader to an America that is experiencing its worst economic crisis and a world that is going through unprecedented challenges--he was a young man with a lot of questions about his identity. He didn't look like his classmates in the school he attended in Indonesia nor did he look like his Indonesian stepfather, neither did he look like his white mother and the white grandparents who raised him. According to a Newsweek article, Obama was “an undistinguished student, distracted by the diverse ethnic and ideological impulses that muddled his mind. As a teenager, he resorted to cigarettes, drink, pot, blues and basketball. His salvation was in books, a world of ideas where the young Obama could explore his conflicts about race and identity, service and selfishness, without fear of reprisal. At Columbia University, this obsessive reading became a monkish habit. Steeped in the works of Nietzsche, Saint Augustine, Lincoln and Graham Greene, Obama forged conclusions in solitude, sometimes shunning human contact for days.”

It is the conclusions he forged in solitude that he applied to his work as community organizer in Chicago's tough and unglamorous South Side. It is here in this neighborhood that he “perfected the skill he'd learned alone in his room: creating unity from diversity. He could urge parties who disagreed on almost everything to agree on coherent action. And so he found his vocation. Ten years later, armed with a degree from Harvard Law School, Obama had made unity his particular specialty. Now an undivided self, he could use his narrative to bring other people together.”

Reading about the lives of the people I most admire, like President Obama, has validated and strengthened one of the most, if not the most, important lessons I've learned: that all meaningful work out there, begins in here. That “all meaningful change in the world begins in the individual life”. That whatever we wish to see out there—whether it is peace or progress or security or all of that—we should first be able to see within ourselves, within our own lives.

Our work begins with finding out who we are. We have to recognize our own potential in order for us to fulfill that potential. No one will do that for us.

We have to keep educating ourselves and developing our own skills and talents. We have to keep evolving and growing as individuals. Inevitably, as others become curious about what it is we're doing right, our circle of influence expands so that we are able to positively affect more and more people. Our personal power—the power that drives our life from within—expands from ourselves, to our family and personal relationships, to our community, to the larger community of our country, and to the even larger community of the world. When we are authentically empowered, we can't help but empower others.

Over the years, as I've paid more attention to my life and to the world around me, I've noticed that there are six things that help people develop and empower themselves:

1. Reading…anything and everything that interests you. As the writer Joyce Carol Oates said, “Be guided by instinct and not
design.” Don't discriminate among reading materials. “Anything that gets people to read is worthwhile”, wrote author Po
Bronson.
2. Writing…regularly in a journal, as well writing letters to friends and family. It helps clarify and organize your thoughts and
keeps you in touch with what you're thinking and feeling. It helps you become more self-aware.
3. Traveling…within and outside your country. It develops tolerance, a love and appreciation for diversity. It broadens both
your mind and your heart. It literally expands your horizons.
4. Volunteering…to causes you personally believe in and not just to what's popular. It keeps you in touch with the generous,
big-hearted part of yourself. Give of your time, your understanding, your energy, your attention, your money.
5. Questioning…everything. Anita Roddick, social and environmental activist and founder of The Body Shop said, “Re-
examine all you have been told. DISMISS what insults your soul.”
6. Exercising…regularly. The Buddha said, “To keep the body active and in good health is a duty. Otherwise, we will not be
able to keep the mind strong and clear.”

I'll wrap up this talk with a wish that each of you will strive to be all that you were meant to be. Because that, I firmly believe, is your best gift to the world. Thank you. :)

Boxing People

A few days after Manny Pacquiao knocked Ricky Hatton out cold, I found myself in a fiery discussion with my grandmother and my dad about Pacquaio’s political plans. As with many Filipinos, my dad and my grandmother were of the view that Pacquaio had no business entering politics. My dad: “He should know his limitations.” My grandmother: “He’s just a boxer.”

My response to my dad: “Maybe he does. And boxing or politics is not it.”

My response to my grandmother: “So you’re belittling boxing…and boxers.”

It didn’t end there, of course. A back-and-forth ensued—me versus my dad and grandmother—and quickly heated up. Pretty soon, the discussion degenerated into our taking a swipe at one another.

Me to my dad: “Of course, you’d think you know Pacquaio’s limitations more than he does. That’s all you see in people—their limitations, not their potential. Because all you see in yourself are your limitations and not your potential.”

My dad to me: “And you don’t know your limitations. If I didn’t tell you that your nose is crooked, you won’t know that your nose is crooked.”

A week rebuttal, I know. But this was all done in exaggerated, talo-ang-pikon, half-kidding fashion, so we each dangled what we thought were the sharpest--if illogical and baseless--hooks out there and tried not to take the other’s bait. It was trash-talking Floyd Mayweather-style.

Me to my grandmother: “Oh, that’s such old-school thinking—that people can only be and do one thing. Expand your mind, Mrs. Tiukinhoy.”

My grandmother to me: (Glaring) “It’s useless talking to you because you don’t listen. You think you know better.” Later, when my dad had walked off and left the two of us at the kitchen table, my grandmother peered at something on my face. “Why did he say your nose is crooked? It’s not.”

Anyway…

For the sake of argument-- because, really, it’s not as if we have any real bearing on Pacquaio’s decisions—let me just say that I don’t think anyone is in a better position than Pacquaio to know, with certainty, what he’s capable of and what his limitations are. I find it arrogant and presumptuous and self-delusional, this idea that someone other than Pacquaio can know for sure all that he can actually be.

Whether people are putting him down (as my grandmother did—she’s so not a fan) or putting him on a pedestal (calling him a “national treasure”, a “national hero”, the “best boxer that ever lived”), they are still putting him in a box, each trying to define him according to an easily recognizable mold. Either way, it is essentially saying the same thing: “This is all you can do, so stay there” or “That is what you are. So be that and that alone.” The terms “authentic, living hero” and “unifying force”—which a Philippine Daily Inquirer editorial gave him—no matter how flattering and ego-inflating, are still no more than a trap, a constriction of his full potential as an individual, if these seek to keep him where people are used to seeing him—in the boxing ring—and discourage him from following the other things that call to him, like politics.

I remember having a similar argument years ago—with about the same degree of passion—with a friend about Richard Gomez. (Uh-huh.) Gomez had just been appointed to a government post in sports and my friend carried on about the former’s not knowing his place, about his “overreaching”. My friend wondered derisively why the guy just can’t stick to movies and acting and stop trying to be some kind of Renaissance Man—kayaking, fencing, directing and now holding a government post.

I found that statement more revealing of my friend’s state of mind and world view than it was of Gomez’ supposedly overweening ambitions—and I told my friend so. Which, of course, led to a “why are you defending him?” kind of discussion. But as I said then, it wasn’t about my “defending” Richard Gomez. Nor was it about my later on “defending” Ethan Hawke when he published his novel The Hottest State, of which I have a copy and which I found to be a terrific read—subtle, sensitively-observed, honest—but which, of course, some people derided as Hawke’s delusion by trying to be something he’s not. And most of these people have not even read his book. (How dare he think he can be a novelist, too, besides being an actor?) Or Angelina Jolie when she became an active crusader for refugees aside from being an Oscar-winning actress, a blockbuster action heroine, a pilot and mother.

It was, rather, about my defending—and making a strong case—of my personal world view: that you simply cannot box people in. That you cannot slap a label on them and expect them to act according to that label. People are too complex—and every single person’s potential, boundless—to be narrowed down to one thing or to be pinned down to a cliché. Richard Gomez, Ethan Hawke, Angelina Jolie—and most, recently—Manny Pacquaio, were simply Exhibit A, B, C, D in those conversations. They were merely the strong evidence and examples of what I mean; they were not the main issue.

For me, there are so many more such examples of people who do not easily conform to a clear, recognizable mold: the bestselling (and astoundingly eloquent, elegant) author who also happens to be the current US President--Barack Obama. The teacher with no business degree who went on to create The Body Shop, one of the most successful global businesses--Anita Roddick. The immigrant bodybuilder, actor, Republican Governor who married a Kennedy and is also his party’s “most powerful voice for green living”--Arnold Schwarzenegger. The high-profile member of the Kennedy clan whom people have been urging to run for office but who chose to be a journalist and is now an author and one of the most outspoken supporters of Barack Obama but who is married to a Republican Governor who supported John McCain--Maria Shriver. The playwright who became the president of the Czech Republic--Vaclav Havel; the Mexican TV soap star who didn’t speak English but became a Hollywood director, producer and Oscar-nominated actress--Salma Hayek.

I can go on and on, but...you get the picture. I hope.

My world view has strengthened over the years as I’ve seen and experienced the evidence for it countless times—in other people’s lives as well as in my own. People still continue to surprise me, even the ones I’ve known for a long, long time. And I continue to surprise myself, even when I begin to think I’ve seen everything there is to see about me.

I’m not a fan of boxing—never have been. There’s something I find quite barbaric, even if it’s done under certain rules, about trying to punch each other on the head as hard as you can—and getting paid for it. I’m no great fan of Richard Gomez or Ethan Hawke, either, even as I am one of the biggest admirers of Angelina Jolie ☺. But I am in awe of strong individuals—people who defy labels, who refuse to stay put in one place, who continue to discover and learn and grow, and frustrate those who try to pin them down. And the story of Manny Pacquaio is looking to me like a story of an individual who is becoming stronger and stronger, someone who is becoming more and more authentic to himself.

There is something I find quite riveting about Manny Pacquaio’s journey, especially with the news, shortly after his stunningly decisive win over Hatton, of his intention to join politics. People may interpret it however they want, but for me, it is about a person finding out that the boxing ring--no matter how much fame, fortune, titles and adulation it has brought him—is not big enough. It is about an individual who still needs to discover all that he’s made of.

If the news is true, I suspect that’s what’s driving Pacquaio out of the comfort zone of the ring, the hero-status, the adulation and into the uncharted territory of politics—he has to test himself in other ways as he probably hasn’t yet seen his true strength, awesome as his power may already appear to the world. He hasn’t yet experienced his full capacity as an individual. Besides, if Pacquiao approaches politics the way he boxes—that is, by using his mind (“planning, preparing and executing”) and his heart—I think he just might surprise the naysayers, yet again. I do think his desire and capacity to learn (which requires curiosity and humility—two things that seem to be glaringly absent in an overwhelming number of so-called public servants)—as evidenced by his adoption of a new boxing style—will serve him well.

It takes guts to step off that familiar, comfortable pedestal and discover what else you’re made of. (Think of John Lennon leaving the “more popular than Jesus Christ” Beatles to free himself to discover other talents and other passions he may be harboring). Many people simply aren’t able to muster that guts—which is why the very few who do, stand out, become great and, in so doing, inspire others. By their example, they show the rest of us what’s possible.

Whether Manny Pacquaio reaches greater heights in politics or crashes and burns is not my concern. The point here is that he is not allowing the very real possibility of the latter—that he may turn out to be a complete disgrace—to kill the equally real possibility of the former—that he just may turn out to be a great public servant. (Because the truth is that, as with anyone else, he can really go either way). At least, give that to the guy. Most people let their fear of the unknown stop them from straying outside their familiar surroundings and into new territory.

I say go for it, Manny. And I wish you well.

Because it’s tough out there…you know. ☺

...And the Super Sappy Girl Finally Snapped Out of It

Written in November 1995:

I am stung
by your obliviousness
How can you not want
to share
a little of your breath
a little of your space
a little of your self
with me?
It’s dark again
Too soon
Daylight is
my only reprieve
From damning thoughts of
Why, why, why
You can’t love me
As I love you.



Written in February 2009:


Learning

I will no longer try
To slay your monsters for you
I can’t be your hero
I can’t be your saviour, anymore
I AM NOT THAT STRONG
and
YOU ARE NOT THAT WEAK
I will try to slay my own monsters now
(and they are many)
You watch me
Very closely
And you
learn.

Winging It

More than two weeks have passed since I stood onstage, facing a barangay of family and friends and strangers (and one heckler aunt), and delivered my monologue. (My friend Kat later on said that our guy friends seemed most impressed by the fact that I remembered all those lines—“Ang galing ni Tweet mag-memorize!” Uh…OK. Gotta be grateful for whatever compliment is thrown atcha.) It’s been more than two weeks, but I still kind of levitate off the bed when I think of the miracle of getting through my first ever theatre performance without a hitch.

There was no gagging, no words catching in my throat and me running off the stage in tears because I completely blacked out and forgot my lines—all the horrific scenarios I had played in my head just so I wouldn’t be completely shocked if any of it did happen. There was none of that. As I stood there onstage, I was quite frankly amazed by how relaxed I felt. In fact, I was so relaxed, and thoroughly enjoying myself, that when I bent down to reach for a prop--a lighter--to supposedly light my cigarette and found that it wasn’t there, I couldn’t even muster the energy to panic. My then seemingly Zen, in-the-moment brain quickly told me to mime the lighting and the smoking as if that’s what I had intended to do and my body did just that, quite effortlessly. As I delivered the rest of my monologue--while fake-smoking an unlit cigarette and feeling like that was exactly what I was meant to do, in the first place--I thought, with a shock of recognition (and just plain shock, actually), This is it! This is what Michelle—our director—was talking about! I’m—nakanampu--WINGING IT!

About a couple of weeks before opening night, in the middle of a rehearsal marked by flubbed lines--with performers stopping in mid-act and calling “Line!” to the stage manager Joan too many times--Michelle had swept the entire all-women cast with a somber look and said, in a tone that was as grave as her expression, “Ladies. I need for you to start winging it. I won’t be there with you, anymore, and nor will Joan. No one’s going to be feeding you the lines that you don’t remember. Now, you are going to have to find a way to get through your act without the audience noticing your mistakes. If you make a mistake, if anything should go wrong, the audience doesn’t have to know that. You understand me? Make it work. Do whatever you need to do to make it work. You’re on your own.”

I don’t remember a speech sending more chills of terror down my spine.

No Joan feeding the first—or second or third or fourth—word of the next line when I momentarily black out in the middle of my monologue? No Michelle calling to me that I’m staying too long in stage right, as if I were stuck there, and that I need to move around in order to not bore my audience and lose them? No comforting thought of me being in rehearsals, anyway, so I can screw up and just grin sheepishly and say, “Oh, sorry, sorry. Can I do that over?” The scenario of me standing by myself onstage, under a spotlight, doing what I need to do to make my performance work, on my own, made the blood rush to my head that I thought for a moment, I can still back out…right? I mean, it’s a free country. Right?

Start winging it, Michelle had said. Somehow it sounded no different to me than if she had told me to jump off a building without my Spidey suit.

The fear that that injunction struck in me, however piercing, was short-lived. By then, I’d already come to see that every endeavor I’ve ever attempted, especially the ones that meant a great deal to me, ends with the same final requirement for its completion—Jump! It’s been that way with my romantic relationships, with my work, with the places I’ve dreamed of traveling to…There would always come a point in my wishing, planning, researching, analyzing, visualizing, talking endlessly to friends and family about this thing that I really, really want to try where the only thing left to do would be to actually go do it already with conviction. To not try to control or second-guess the outcome or dwell too much on doomsday what-ifs and just go for it.

Two weeks before my stage debut, I felt the lesson over the past several years repeating itself to me yet another time:

We can keep practicing and practicing, train for months (even years) in order to prepare ourselves for The Big Day, for The Moment of Truth. We may know all the facts, memorized all the lines, learned all the necessary skills, argued the case and analyzed the issue from every possible angle, but in itself none of that will amount to anything. None of that will get us what we want or bring us where we want to be…unless we let go of our crutches and trust that we already have within us exactly what we need to make it. That we are on our own precisely because we are capable of being on our own. That whatever the results, whatever the outcome, we can hack it. So, you know…jump already.

I have to admit in here—as I did to the props person who later came to the dressing room, pale and apologizing profusely about forgetting to put the lighter on the table onstage—that not seeing that lighter was the best thing to happen to me that night. In fact, I saw it as an answered prayer. Being the kind of non-smoker who simply cannot stand cigarette smoke, I was worried that, despite having feverishly practiced my smoking for days, I would not be able to pull off authenticity onstage. I was anxious that my discomfort would show. One smoker friend had watched me, bemused--and more than a little alarmed--as I struggled with a lighter and anxiously, unconvincingly, puffed away. As performance night neared and I still was nowhere near feeling like a real smoker, I did the only other thing left for me to do: I let it go. Bahala na si Batman. Bahala ka na, Lord (haaaaaay, Lohhhhrd…pleeeeeazzzzz….)

“To have control, you have to lose control,” Billy Bob Thornton’s character tells John Cusack’s in Pushing Tin, a film about spiraling-out-of-control air traffic controllers. For me, that paradoxical line is precisely what “winging it” means: to not try to control everything. To acknowledge that some things in our life will always remain mysterious, unseen, hidden--beyond the grasp of even our most sharpened senses and our rational, logical brains. So that however meticulously and determinedly we visualize and plan our lives, it won’t always go exactly the way we want it to go. That is its way of reminding us—a reminder that hurts the more we resist—that we just aren’t in control. Something bigger, something infinitely wiser and more powerful, is. And that it will always out-plan, out-smart, out-strategize, out-visualize us.

And so the only way to handle this mysterious, unseen, hidden aspect of life is to trust it. To trust that it’s working for us, not against us; that--and this seems to be the toughtest thing for many people to accept--it is working within us, so, of course, it only has our best interests at heart. To be absolutely certain that it doesn’t seek to thwart our most beloved plans nor to frustrate our most cherished dreams, but to deliver them to us in the most expedient, most startlingly fuck!-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that? genius way possible.

I couldn’t thank the props person enough for the missing lighter. When I thought about it later on, pretending to smoke actually worked better for the monologue because the character was imagining herself in her own movie and had been miming scenes in her tiny apartment since the beginning of the act. Plus, not having to pretend to like smoking—which, I realize, might tax my beginner’s acting skill more than it can handle—made me even more relaxed and my performance, I felt, more natural. So for my second performance night, I incorporated that fake-smoking move, all the while marveling at the sheer genius of it--“Fuck! Why didn’t I think of this myself?”

So it didn’t go the way you have planned, the way you have imagined it--so what? Make it work. Do what you need to do to make it work.

I realize that I have been winging it for several years now. I have been adjusting my responses according to the particular requirements of a moment. I have, in other words, been making my life work for me, no matter what. My life has not at all turned out the way I had originally planned—it has taken turns in a way that I never imagined or thought I’d have the constitution for. Let me put it this way: the ideal life that I wrote about in my grade school slum book (Ideal Age for Marriage: 25, Ideal Mate: Tall, dark, handsome, Ideal Number of Children: 3 to 5, Ideal Profession: President of Coca-Cola—I’m not kidding ☺)? It is sooo NOT the life that I have now, and yet I look at what I have and think, in amazement, Wow, that’s really me. It’s so uniquely mine. Every single part in it I chose. Even the ones that seemed to have landed on my lap, that seemed to have chosen me, I chose back, I embraced. There’s not one thing in it—and this isn’t something that I would have been able to say in the past—that I regret or would have otherwise.


Here’s another thing I wouldn’t have been able to say before, either: I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone else’s in the world. (Hmm…OK, except maybe for Angelina Jolie’s or Kate Winslet’s or J.K. Rowling’s ☺.)

“We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “Everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.” My life so far has certainly proven to me countless times that it is not limited—nor can it be limited—to scenarios or situations that I’m used to or comfortable with. It is not limited to things I’ve learned from the family, the religion, the culture, the society that I grew up in. Life is much bigger than all of that combined. Some new surprise, something I’ve never encountered before, will always spring out at me. Curveballs will always zing towards me from seemingly out of nowhere. The question is: do I develop the flexibility, the mental and emotional openness and agility to adjust my stance—adjust my perceptions and recalibrate my responses--in order to catch it? Or do I stubbornly root myself in my old position—in my usual thinking, in the way I’ve always done things—and helplessly watch that ball painfully hit me on the head yet another time?

I’ve learned the hard (a.k.a. painful) way that just because a situation or an event is something I’ve not seen nor experienced before doesn’t mean it’s “impossible” or “wrong” or “a mistake” or “not for me”. In other words, I have come to embrace the reality, the fact, that anything can happen, anything at all is possible. And while that idea used to scare the shit out of me, it is now the one promise—the one constant--in life that I rely on, that I know I can always count on. And that no matter what other new, unprecedented things life may throw at me, I know—with absolute certainty--that, as my friend Erin (in Barcelona now, hyper-consciously experiencing this whole concept) says, “it’s going to be awesome.”

I know because, well…it already is.

Getting A Kiss (And Other Things) Right

When I was a college junior and beginning to seriously consider having my first boyfriend (yeah, yeah, I was a late bloomer, OK?), I consulted with my friend Jordan—who is also my harshest critic and one of my dearest, oldest friends. I was worried—no, I was beside myself with anxiety—about having just held hands with this guy that I liked before he even said anything definite about wanting to be a couple.

Oh. Em.Gee.

I wrote my friend saying I will never let that guy get near me again until he knew what he wanted and backed it up. Like a “real man”. In that letter, I detailed in righteous indignation (“How dare that confused man touch me!”) all my reasons for my decision.

In response, this is what that biyatch friend of mine said in a letter to me:

“So what if after HH he changes his mind? It’s not like he took your maidenhead, dammit! So what if he’s playing safe by not saying anything? Crucify him if you want. But does he have to marry you just to HOLD YOUR HAND?”

I thought, And why ever NOT???

For a good many years, my frame of mind was always, Why waste my time being with a guy (going out to dinner, watching a movie, hanging out and eating fish balls at one of the UP fish ball stands) if I can’t imagine marrying him? All my romantic decisions were hinged on the question of whether or not this was the guy I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. (Which actually explains why I had my first boyfriend at the marriageable age of 20. Ack. And why every romantic relationship I had been in felt like a marriage. Doube ack.)

I looked upon every little romantic gesture as a major step leading up to happily ever after. And so everything that I shared with someone in the name of romance, I also did in the higher name of forever-and-forever. Everything was BIG. INTENSE. OVERBLOWN. OA.

I tell you, I had sleepless nights over that hand-holding thing (“with someone who wasn’t even my boyfriend!”) as if I had surrendered my “virginity” to a complete stranger in the Sunken Garden or something.

If the safe, sweet little gesture of holding hands kept me up nights, you can just imagine what kissing did to me. Somehow, every kiss was invested with all my hopes and dreams and images of our shared genes (“Ooh, we’re going to have cute kids!”)

In the beginning of my last relationship, when I found myself replaying over and over in my head at a client presentation the kiss of the night before, with my throat suddenly as dry as the Sahara and my needing to get up for yet another glass of water and not hearing nor caring about what anyone in that room was saying because now I also pictured the little chapel on the hill (or the beach) and heard the vows (lines from a Pablo Neruda poem—but, of course) and saw the children and the preschool and the---waaaaahhhh!—I began thinking, Surely there must be another way—a saner, cooler, healthier way--of going about this.

For far too long, this almost insane reaction to a kiss has been the cause of my downfall. I just lose it. I forget that I had plans, that I actually have things to do with my life. Sometimes, I even forget my name. I don’t know, but my brain seems to short-circuit when I am in that early stage of a relationship where your lips are so busy making contact that if you didn’t come up for air you could actually die. So that no matter how impossible the situation or how potentially messy, I always think (in some kind of delirium, now that I think about it), Oh, it’s all going to work out. It’s all going to be perfect.

It’s not that I wished I’d rather be casual and flippant about things, especially with something as mysterious as a kiss—that is, when much of our physical responses to it are still a mystery to most of us--because I honestly don’t think that’s possible, even for the most cold-hearted play-yah. While I would never delude myself into thinking a kiss could actually be “wala lang,” I wished that it didn’t have to spell the meaning of life for me, that I didn’t come undone every time. I prayed (dear God!) that I could actually manage to share this form of physical expression without feeling that I folded up my heart, wrapped it with my soul and Fed-Exed the whole package to the other person. (Do you realize how expensive the minimum Fed Ex package costs?)

I just… wanted…to be able to bet on a little kiss without feeling that I put every. Friggin’. Thing. On the table.

That right there was my problem: I didn’t know how to make anything mean something without it having to mean everything.

Jordan laughed out loud at that line over the phone tonight. I said, Oh, that’s funny?

It is, he said, still laughing. Wow, it took you sixteen years to get that!

(Yes, he can be pretty smug, too. Especially now that he’s a Jesuit.)

My God, sixteen years. Sixteen years for me to get that I don’t have to marry the next guy whose company I really enjoy. Whose life story fascinates me. Whose corny/crazy jokes make me laugh. Sixteen years for me to get that even if all we share together is one season or one year or just one afternoon conversation—or yeah, OK, just one kiss--and never see nor speak to each other again, it is enough. It is neither less nor more than anything, not even my longest relationship. It just is. Whatever we imbue with attention and honesty and consideration is valid and precious and worthwhile, no matter how short or seemingly small it may be. People, relationships, events are fine, are perfectly valid and legitimate, just as they are. They need not be anything more—or less—than that. So I do not have to turn them into anything “more”.

Sixteen years for me to get that a moment need not lead to anything else, to anything “bigger” or “more important”. That this now, this time that I’m sitting at my desk tonight writing this is enough, is precious and grand in itself—even if I never post it or if no one else other than me gets to read it. It need not be anything other than what it is.

"Trying just to focus on the good...I'm tired of diving for the pearl," Glen Hansard of (the Irish band) The Frames sang in "Song for Someone". I've been playing the song over and over for the past year, as if by repeating the lines, I'd get it.

Focus on the good, focus on the good....I'm learning, Glen, I'm learning.

“Strive to be happy, my friend,” Jordan wrote toward the end of that letter, dated August,1993.

I called him tonight, yanked him out of his Jesuit duties (whatever those were), to tell him that I am happy. In the real, honest-to-goodness, can't-take-this-away-from-me-EVER kind of happy. Finally.

I would have kissed him, too, out of this sheer, sane, hard-fought yet surprisingly easy, no-drama happiness (sixteen years in the making!) if he were right there in person. But thank God (well, thank Jesus) he wasn’t because I might have started thinking, So what if he’s a Jesuit and that we’re not each other’s type? I’m sure it’s going to work out. It’s going to be perfect.

The Good Fight

I got into a fight last week.

I took on an aunt for having mistreated the family driver. You see, our driver is one of the most non-threatening, delicate souls I’ve ever met. The sort of person Atticus Finch would call a mockingbird—a bird that just perches on a branch and sings, someone who wouldn’t know the first thing about harming another person. A very kind, shy man, our driver is usually able to shrug off or smile away brusqueness, bitchiness or meanness, especially from my mom’s angry-girl helper and high-strung sisters (my other aunts). But my aunt’s yelling over the phone to him and accusing him of things he did not do (all the way from Baguio, where my whole family and other relatives were vacationing) must have crossed the line of what was acceptable to this man’s dignity or sense of decency that he told me he was resigning before breaking down in tears. I had to ask him to please stop the car first and try to calm down instead of driving while wiping away his tears. He was so shaken he couldn’t even bring himself to repeat to me exactly what my aunt told him over the phone.

This is the aunt who has a difficult time keeping her maids and drivers. She tends to verbally abuse them until they feel their only recourse is to leave. (And that’s why she ends up borrowing my mom’s driver). This is a trait of hers that has always baffled me; she’s so thoughtful and generous with the family and with her friends, and she’s fun to be around—except for those times when she morphs into a monster and lashes out at people, particularly her employees. The things she says to them and how she says them makes my skin crawl. I don’t know how she is able to justify such acts to herself.

Whenever she does that, the people around her just try to change the subject or smile nervously or get up to use the restroom. (Angry blow-ups run on my mom’s side of the family.) I’ve always wanted to call her on this, except that I didn’t know how to do it or where to begin. I wasn’t sure if it was my place to speak to her about it. I had become aware early on in my childhood that the “adults” in the family didn’t take too well to being opposed, especially by the younger members—the hierarchy is well-defined, seemingly set in stone. If you’re a parent or an aunt (the uncles, especially on my father’s side, always seemed much cooler) or an older sibling, there is no way you can be wrong. To disagree with them was, as far as they were concerned, the height of disrespect. If you voice out your disagreement, you might as well have picked a fight. And in this family, nobody seemed to know how to fight without it turning ugly. I’ve gotten myself banged up and bruised quite a number of times for daring to question an existing “rule” or for saying “I don’t want you to yell at me again”. (And I have beaten up a younger sibling for daring to cross me. Yeah, we can be a violent bunch. But, thankfully, people seem to be maturing.) Which is probably why most of the people in my family try to avoid fights and any sort of confrontation at all costs. Even if it means looking the other way at certain injustices, pretending nothing’s wrong or should be corrected. Instead of speaking out, most of the people in my family choose to shut up “para wala nang gulo.”

For years, I’ve wanted to learn how to fight the good fight—the kind where you know you’re in the ring opposite someone in the same weight division and you honor the rules of fairness, where you know that you and other person are both elevating each other to a higher consciousness and sense of awareness by bringing out the best in each other rather than just tearing each other down, when you know that the urge to engage each other in this way comes from somewhere deeper than the ego.

Because I’ve had the good fortune of having really cool boyfriends, I’ve had practice in such good fights over the past fifteen years. They weren’t all good fights, of course—I mean, that’s difficult to pull off when you’re in your angsty 20’s—but we really tried to fight fair and decently as much as our maturity allowed, I could see that. When a fight comes from an honest desire to love better—from a desire to be a better human being--it always leaves one feeling noble, like a knight or a samurai. And I have felt both like a noble knight/samurai as well as a monstrous Grendl in past battles to know the vast difference between a good fight and a bad fight.

Last week’s encounter definitely fell under the knight/samurai category for me. I felt that a mockingbird had been the target of some indiscriminate hunter’s rifle and it naturally brought out the Atticus Finch in me—that part in us that feels compelled to defend those who cannot defend themselves.

I had apologized to our driver on behalf of my aunt, but I asked that she do the same herself when she came down from Baguio. I wanted to make sure she knew that her behavior was unacceptable to me and to him. When she balked at the prospect and was poised to get into an ugly argument, I told her I wouldn’t speak to her until she learned to treat people with respect. Of course, to my jittery non-confrontational mom, I had gone too far. That aunt of mine and I were really tight—we were more like buddies than aunt and niece. But I felt that I was doing it for all three of us—for her, for the driver and for me. I felt—and still strongly feel—that there is a standard of decency and respect we all should uphold. And that we should all hold ourselves and one another accountable. I believe that the more we love someone, the more we should hold them to higher standards. In other words, we shouldn’t allow people—especially those we love--to be assholes. Even if they’ll hate our guts for it.

I saw what her action did to him—and it was waaay below his and my standards. Nobody deserves to be treated that way. If I just stood by and said nothing, I would be less decent than I hoped to be; I would be mistreating him with my cowardice. My silence would be my colluding with my aunt in setting the bar for decency shamefully low. I would have made an ass of myself, too, in the passive way.

I read somewhere that people often make the mistake of thinking that all must be harmonious—but “never harmony if that means your life-music being adapted to the mood and music of the world.” Sometimes, a desire for “harmony” is what blinds us to the ills around us, not realizing that the harmony we seek to have or preserve is a shallow, fake one. We go along with the way things are because we don’t want to rock the boat, we’re afraid of any kind of unpleasantness, we’re afraid of upsetting anyone by pointing out something we feel isn’t right. That’s how it’s usually been in my extended family—aunts, uncles, cousins smiling and not saying how they really feel, sweeping unpleasant things under the rug, giving the impression that we all get along and that all’s well in the tribe. But underneath that surface harmony seethe darker, more honest emotions that threaten to explode at the slightest trigger.

It’s been a week that my aunt and I haven’t spoken and my mom still wishes I had done things differently—meaning, that I had just kept my mouth shut and let things slide, for the sake of family harmony.

But I have foregone family harmony for my beliefs and my values before. And I hope I will keep doing it, no matter what.

So, no. I don’t think there will be any quick-fix let’s-all-just-get-along reconciliatory embrace anytime soon. Not for me.

Sorry, Mom.

Movie Moment

Just indulge me this, OK? :)

I had a little pang-sine moment this afternoon…

I was on the elevator with the assistant stage manager of our play, a nice bright-eyed young man named Brian, coming from rehearsals at our director’s apartment unit. It was the first time I met Brian who, it turns out, is a second year Broadcast student at UP.

“Hey!” I said. “That was exactly my course when I was in UP.”

He looked at me quizzically. “You graduated na?”

“Yeah”, I said. “Years ago.”

His puzzlement seemed to deepen. “Why? When did you graduate?”

I couldn’t remember. At least, not instantly. But what I did instantly remember was that I am 35 years old. So I said, “I’m 35”, and let him do the math.

His jaw dropped—I’m not kidding. Quite the theatre guy. “You’re 35?!”

I smiled one of those smiles that I really mean to be a neutral one but I think comes out as kind of uncertain. I never know if a person is going make a fuss about how old I am or…“Yeah…”

“Talaga?” Brian was still reeling when the elevator doors opened and a Caucasian man and two little boys got in. “Nooooo. I can’t believe you’re 35.”

I stepped closer to Brian, tapped his arm lightly and requested, under my breath, that “’Wag mo namang i-announce”, hoping that by saying it in Tagalog, I could limit that awkward conversation to the two of us.

Too late. The Man with the Little Boys bowed his head a little and tried to keep his chuckle to himself. But it was too late for him, too, because I heard him—we were in a small, enclosed space, after all. Plus, I saw his expression in the elevator mirror.

“Did you get that?” I asked the Chuckling Man.

He looked up, saw me in the mirror and nodded, smiling.

“Ok.” What else was I supposed to say, right?

The elevator doors opened on the third floor--perhaps the pool area--and the man ushered his two little boys out. When he stepped out himself, he held the elevator door open with one hand to give this parting shot: “If it’s any consolation, you look 21.” Then he smiled. And the elevator doors slid shut.

Hee-hee ;). Twenty-one…

Second Teenhood

Let me say this now: I am having the teenage life I always wished I had. At age 35. To my parents’ utter horror.

My younger brother and I are the only ones currently living with my parents; my three sisters each have their own apartments, two of whom have a roommate. While my brother still clings to the idea that he is a self-sufficient grown-up by sometimes handing over “rent” money to my mom (and you see the pain written all over his face) when she reminds him that he once promised to help out with the bills, I have completely abandoned all pretense. For the past year, I have conducted myself as a shameless teenager—never once volunteering to pay any sort of house bill; blinking wordlessly, unhelpfully, from my mom to my dad to my brother as they discuss which adult is going to do what adult chore that day while I eat my breakfast and burp; then locking myself in my room to read, write and listen to my iPod…only coming out to stand in front of the open ref surveying the food, eat again and hang out.

I often sit in the garden in the afternoon, with my feet up on a chair, drinking my mom’s orange juice, thinking, What did I ever do to deserve this, God? (Burp.)

I remember doing the exact same things when I was an actual teenager, but I do not recall also feeling this light and free and fortunate—the feeling, I imagine, of one of those medieval, docile prisoner-slaves carrying huge, heavy sacks on their shoulders as they climb a hill and who are finally unchained and miraculously set free. Except that I wasn’t a very docile prisoner-slave. I was, rather, of the rage-against-the-machine mold.

As a teenager, I refused to accept that simply because of my age and my material dependence on my parents, they had the power to deny me certain basic civil liberties. Such as the liberty to go and watch my crush compete in a skateboarding competition. Or to stay at a party past 11:00 PM. Or to watch a concert with friends. Or to not attend mass—or pray the rosary--when I didn’t feel like it. Or to wear torn jeans and a t-shirt without my dad going stark raving mad ala Dr. Bruce Banner and end up cutting those jeans to smithereens in his own fit of rage when I refused to change to “more decent clothes”.

I felt burdened and oppressed. And my reaction to this was to be defiant, defensive, combative, angry. I seemed to be in a constant state of “Fuck off, fuckers!”

As if.

A prisoner-slave can bang at her cage and rattle her chains all she wants, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s still just a prisoner-slave who is exactly where her masters want her to be: rooted to the spot and within their line of sight.

I saw teenhood as a prison, a slave ship, and so there was nothing I wanted more than to break free, to jump overboard—to be done with high school and go off to college or to get a job already, move out and not have to live by anyone else’s (house) rules but my own. I couldn’t wait to get to my 20’s, which I came to view as the Promised Land. To my mind, my life in my 20’s would be an existence populated by mature people—people who were kind and secure enough with themselves to never impose their beliefs and opinions and will on others, who never think themselves better or worse off than anyone, people who gladly live and let live. It would be a life, in other words, where I wouldn’t be seen as just a dumb rebellious kid who didn’t know what was best for her; and I wouldn’t have to fight so much to have my opinions heard or my choices respected.

I thought that when I hit 20, the attitude towards me of the adults in my family would magically change. No such luck. For years I’ve wondered about this. Why was it, I wondered, that no matter how mature and capable and grown-up I feel at work or with my friends, all that disappeared and I would find myself regressing into the angsty, juvenile, “rebellious” teenager that I had been years ago whenever I was surrounded by my parents, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, even my siblings and cousins. It was as though all my hard work at trying to reach the level in which the adults treated me like an equal meant nothing. It almost seemed like it didn’t matter that I was already living on my own, paying my own bills, cooking my own food and basically fending for myself. I don’t think anything frustrated me more. Many times, I’ve been tempted to throw a fit at one of the frequent big family gatherings—you know, kick and pound the floor with my fists, screaming at the top of my lungs, “I’M A GROWN-UP, GROWN-UP, GROWN-UP!!! Treat me like a GROWN-AAAAAAAP!!!!” 

Then, a couple of years ago, a miraculous clue (what Oprah refers to as an “Aha! moment”). I had borrowed one of my sisters’ copy of Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul  and I came across this passage: “The more we try to cover up our ignorance, the more it is displayed. The more we try to act cool and suave, the more obvious our inexperience. The more adult we try to be, the more childishness we betray.”

Aaaahhhh…Ha!

Over the following months, I slowly realized that there was in me a teenage girl who felt robbed of her youth because I was in a hurry to make her grow up, to be “mature” and “responsible” (so that she could hightail it out of her parents’ house already). I was pretty tough on her--didn’t allow her to make mistakes, to be wrong, to ask for help or to admit that she was scared of many things. I didn’t even allow her to have a little kiss with a boy she liked (“Do you want to get pregnant? Be a hapless teenage mom who never gets to go to college or do anything with her life except feed the baby and fight with your equally hapless teenage husband? That is, if he even marries you.”) nor to have a boyfriend because “all teenage relationships are juvenile” and God forbid if I’d let her be anything but serious, thoughtful, mature, responsible, selfless, independent, strong. No wonder she rebelled, showing up as much as she could in my 20’s and 30’s--defiantly wearing a t-shirt, jeans and sneakers, refusing to learn to wear make-up or my mom’s “real” jewelry (instead of the beads and “friendship bands” and Kabbalah string that adorned my neck and wrists) because they looked like something older people wore—demanding, “I want my time! Give me my time!”

I began to suspect that she—this incredibly disgruntled, disenfranchised teenage part of me--was the reason I couldn’t truly progress in my life, the reason I couldn’t honestly see myself as a grown-up. There was just so much unfinished business there, and her outbursts and juvenile antics were betraying my immaturity at every turn. In short, the girl was cramping my style.  

So last year, I finally decided to give the rebel-biyatch her time. Swallowing my pride, I asked my mom if I could move back home and be her and my dad’s dependent for a year. I promised myself I would not give me a hard time about not earning any money, about not contributing to the expenses at home and to just happily, gratefully be “selfish” and “irresponsible”. Meaning, I would just do what I enjoy, do what feels natural to me without any sort of guilt or anxiety or worry or judgment about not doing what I am “supposed” to be doing. No more overly self-critical speeches of “By now, at this age, you should already be this and that, you should already have this and that…” No more crazy-impossible expectations of myself (i.e. being everything I ever wanted to be RIGHT NOW) .No more being my own restrictive parent. No more raining on my own parade. No more getting in my own way. No more swatting my parents’ hand away when they try to help me out—no more arrogant and defensive I-can-take-care-of-myself-thank-you-very-much.  

Hay, please, enough of that. In other words, nagpakatotoo na talaga ako--the full-blown, all-out version.

Since fully embracing my teenage self—that part in each of us that needs to be free to make “mistakes”, that doesn’t know all the answers and is OK with that, that does things just because it wants to; that part of us that eternally lives on the exciting border between childhood innocence and wonder and adult knowledge and strength—my world has really opened up for me in ways that I had only wistfully imagined for years. More than ever, I feel that the life I’ve always wanted for myself is becoming real.

Just a month ago, I finally did something I’ve always wanted to do in high school but never found the nerve: I auditioned for a play. (Scary hyena delirious grin here.) It’s not something the adult me would have done—acting in a play was way too self-indulgent for her; even more self-indulgent than writing. Besides, the adult me had too many inhibitions, too many what-if-I’m-doing-this-all-wrong concerns cramming her head. She would have successfully talked me out of even thinking about auditioning. Lucky for me, I had already vested my teen self with equal, if not more, muscle power. And so off she went, determined to just enjoy herself.

A week later, I got a text message from the theatre company telling me to check my email. In it, I was told that I got the part. Rehearsals to begin in January 2009. I tore through the house screaming. Edith, our household help, thought I had been possessed by one of the elemental spirits that live in the mango tree at the back of our house.   

I can’t believe how free I feel right now. Everyone, I think, should give themselves the chance to revisit the part of their lives that feels a bit off, that makes them wish it were somehow different, and then make those changes. In no part in a person’s life is that possible than adulthood. In fact, I think that’s what adulthood is for—to allow ourselves second, third, fourth chances at childhood, teenhood, even adulthood…or as long as it takes to get it right, to feel that our lives are exactly the way we want it. We’re now in a position to acquire the tools needed to fix what we think needs fixing or to give  ourselves what we need.  

I realize that the reason I was so resentful of and defensive around my parents’ and other people’s expectations of me was that they merely mirrored my own impossibly high expectations of myself. I couldn’t stand their disappointment with me because I couldn’t stand my disappointment with me. I needed to find a way to be kinder to myself, more compassionate and accepting--more than I already thought I was being. 

My mom used to always ask me this question, “So what are your plans?” It was always such a tricky question, like a bomb that could go off any moment. I never knew how to negotiate it. It made me feel that the life I was having at the moment wasn’t legitimate or valid enough and that having “plans”—future prospects—was going to make it so. So then I’d either go into a full detail of my “plans”, my dreams, and then feel my mom’s attention drift off, which I always took as her unbelief in what I was saying and then I’d end it with a curt, “Forget it, it doesn’t matter”, or I’d feel cornered and, thus, give a defensive “Basta.”

But when I made the decision to free myself of unhealthy, killer expectations—and to just let things flow naturally by embracing everything that I am, to just be—I found that the most liberating, most empowering answer to my mom’s question was, “None. No plans.” Then, with a grin, just because I couldn’t help it: “Oh, there’s one: I plan to stay in this house forever.” It is such a perfect conversation ender; my mom rolls her eyes, sips her tea and totally drops the whole thing.

These days, the happy, grateful, angst-free teenager that is me goes with her dad on regular movie dates—his treat, always; my mom leaves baon for me, without my ever asking, when she goes out of town; and they no longer insist that I attend mass with them. In fact, my dad tries—unsuccessfully--to bribe me into attending their Catholic group’s frequent lectures/seminars (“After that, we’ll have midnight snack…at Pancake House!” Nice try, Pops.) I tell him, “Sure!…if you come with me and hear service at my church this Sunday”, to which he makes a face and stomps away…possibly being his little boy self.

I can’t really say I blame him. After being a parent for the past thirty-six years and trying to be an "adult" all that time, the guy needs a break sometimes.

 

My Thing With Money

One funny thing about the worldwide economic crisis (yes, I actually found one thing) is that I find I am as unruffled about it as, I imagine, Warren Buffett. And all because I occupy the opposite extreme of the material wealth spectrum: while Mr. Buffett floats high above the hullabaloo on account of his being the second richest man in the world (second to his close friend Bill Gates) with a net worth of $41 billion, I am swimming waaaay below the ugly debris on clear blue waters on account of my being the second poorest to—oh, I don’t know--the sewer rat?

It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, even if it may come off that way. But, you know, I am very careful to refrain from self-pitying thoughts because I do live in a very poor country. Which means that, much as I can’t afford certain things at the moment (like a Chai Latte at Coffee Bean), there are many, many people—millions, in this country--who can barely afford to feed their family. That picture in my head usually steers me away from the door marked This Way to Complete and Utter Despair.

That’s why I don’t. Despair, that is. I don’t despair the fact that I have no bank account, no savings, no insurance, no credit card, no regular income and that I’ve been mooching on my parents for the past year. In fact, I take an almost perverse pleasure and a weird sense of achievement that I am actually bereft of the things I supposedly cannot live without. My life has been pretty basic but I am very grateful that I do have what I need right now: I eat three meals a day, I have my own room, I have family to share things with and who by now know enough when to leave me alone, I can write in peace. Food, space, company, solitude, a form of expression—sounds good to me. I want to say I’m doing fine, that I’m actually quite content, but I’m almost sure no one is going to believe me (No credit card? Come on, how can you be content?) I’m thinking, If I were not me right now, I wouldn’t believe me, either. So I won’t even try to convince anyone here.

I just want to marvel at how I got to this point--the point where money has little to no say in the decisions of my life.

It’s not that I hate money or that I’m afraid of it, as a friend once assumed. I just suspected it was overrated, over-hyped, like sex with a Latino lover (not that I’ve had one—I promise to get back to you on that when I’ve had that experience. Oh, that would be so nice…). Anyway, like I said, it was just a suspicion. There was just something about how people tended to go on and on about how things weren’t possible without money—lots of it—that made me question its supposed overwhelming power. I know it’s important—I won’t take that away from money—but I felt that people were giving it way too much importance, assigning it such a central role in their lives that I just didn’t think it deserved. People were waiting for it—via a winning lotto ticket, a one-time-big-time deal, an “unexpected” windfall—with the ardor of the faithful awaiting the Second Coming of the Messiah, as if to deliver them from the “quiet desperation” and monotony of their lives. “As soon as I have the money…”, “Magkapera lang ako…” I hear people—smart, educated ones—say all the time, as if only by the arrival of The Money can their lives finally begin.

I couldn’t buy into that thinking because, for one, I was impatient to begin my life. I didn’t want to have to wait to become a millionaire to start writing my books, making my films, staging my plays, traveling to all those countries I wanted to visit. I wanted to start doing all those things NOW. Not later, not after I’ve worked my way up the corporate ladder or saved a sizable amount of money or raked in returns from investments. Now.

I was gripped by a sense of urgency, by a painful awareness of time’s passing, to bother so much with whether or not I had enough material resources. There was so much I wanted to do and I was aware that I was given exactly the same number of hours a day as everyone else. While I could negotiate or work harder and longer for more money, these strategies just didn’t work with time. There was just no way to make more of it. The only realistic thing, actually, was to make the most of it. It became pretty clear to me that between time and money, the former was just infinitely more valuable, if only for the fact that it was non-renewable—once it was gone, it was gone forever.

I decided early on that I was going make the most of this valuable time, to spend it only on things that mean something to me. Which meant that, if I could think of five other things I’d rather be doing, no matter how much I was getting paid to do whatever it was I was supposed to be doing at the moment, then I’d just drop the whole thing. 

And so it seemed (or seems), to my friends and family, that I didn’t—or still don’t--care about money, that I dismiss it, that I am not realistic or grounded enough to bother with it. Which just isn’t true. I do know money is valuable—I mean, how else am I able to pay for my books, my travels, my movies, my tea, my, um, bikini wax? It’s just scary how people have confused it to be the most valuable thing, how they’ve ceded so much of their own personal power to it, driving themselves to the ground for it. I’ve seen how easy it is to be paralyzed by a lack of money, to believe that nothing worthwhile can be achieved without it—and it was an idea that I just couldn’t ram down my throat. My mind and my whole body strongly resisted this notion. I wanted to know for sure whether my suspicion about money’s overblown sense of importance was true, and the only way to know that was to go and live my life with it only on the sidelines, kicking it out of the way as much as I could.  

Of course, I may have overdone it. (No bank account, no savings, no insurance, no credit card, no regular income…Ok, so I have overdone it.) But I just needed to make sure that money was in its proper place in my life, that it played a supporting role in it rather than the lead, that it wasn’t front and center. I needed to make sure I was calling the shots, telling it what it can do for me instead of the other way around. In that sense, I can say I was successful. Very, very successful. I had systematically removed myself from the complex financial network, where I felt like a fly trapped in a spider's web--left the world of the regular job and its regular pay, cut my credit card as soon as I paid off all my debts, stopped paying for my insurance altogether (never mind if everyone said it was sayang), closed my bank account. Financial crisis, you say? Shouldn’t one have finances, to begin with?

There is another thing, too: Sometimes, I think people use money as a scapegoat—a convenient thing to point a finger at when their courage fails them. They can hide behind “Kailangan kasi kumita, eh” for not doing the things they dream of doing. It seems more acceptable, I guess, than “Takot kasi ako’ng sumemplang, eh”.

This is not to say I am above being driven by fear. My friend Cecilia, fond of trying to read people, declared to me once, after fixing me with the unsettling penetrating stare of a manghuhula, “You don’t have any fears.” She sounded awestruck. I said, “Everyone has fears, Cecilia” as my mind quickly ran through its “Fear” file. Then she gasped, and I could almost see the light bulb switch on above her head. “Money!” Her eyes grew large and questioning. “You’re afraid of…money? Why?”

I explained to her that it wasn’t money I was afraid of—that it was people’s perception of money that scared me. It was so potent, I worried it might infect me one day. Later that night, I dug deeper than that and realized that my real fear was the idea that, if I wasn’t vigilant enough, something—including money--could actually hold me back, could keep me from going after the things that I want. I was afraid of being weighed down, of feeling trapped in a certain kind of life the way I had seen it happen with other people just because they bought into the notion that they absolutely cannot live without certain things. And that fear was strong enough to make me hack away at potential shackles around my feet.

The first to go, as it happened, was money.  

That Damn Vampire Movie

I’m perhaps one of two people in the world who have not read Twilight. (The other one being my dad). At least, that’s how it felt to me yesterday when he and I found ourselves in a theatre full of 12- and 13-year-old female fans of the book series, the first of which has been turned, ala Harry Potter, into a blockbuster movie. The girls were squealing, writhing in their seats and clutching one another in impossible-to-suppress kakiligan. My dad would laugh out loud every time they did that. These kids knew all the characters; they whispered their names in recognition the second a new character appeared onscreen. It was as if we had stumbled into a book club, except that the book was projected onscreen.

Much as I would have wanted to keep my been-there older-woman composure, it was hard not to be carried away by the highly charged youthful romantic energy in the darkened theatre. I was with girls who had probably not been kissed yet (although I wouldn’t really delude myself about that) or, at least, have not yet had their heart stomped on, kicked around and left in the dust by a heard of African elephants; their greatest loves—and the attendant greatest heartbreaks--were still ahead of them. They were still at that stage where everything is possible—yes, even the idea that they could be swept off their feet by a gorgeous, brooding vampire who would be heroic for them. Before I knew it, I was squealing along with the girls, clutching my dad’s arm whenever I got sooo kilig, aaaaaaah!--and he was laughing at me.

Throughout dinner last night, I couldn’t help dissolving into fits of kilig-induced girly giggles, causing the grown-ups (my dad, my mom, my sister) around the table to give me pointed looks. But even as my body was shaking with giggles and the grin on my face was beginning to make my face hurt, I was thinking, What’s going on? Have I perhaps lost it? I felt like…ah, shet. I felt like a fucking teenager.

In an attempt to shake off the excess romantic teenager vibe I seemed to have carried with me out of the cinema, I popped a “grown-up” DVD into the player—Then She Found Me, a movie written, directed and starred in by Helen Hunt, who plays a 39-year-old woman whose husband leaves her. I thought, OK, that should sober me up with a dose of reality.

But, no.

Soon after her husband (Matthew Broderick) leaves her, a stressed-out yet utterly adorable single dad (Colin Firth) comes into the picture. And so there I was again, screeching and writhing and kicking in my seat like a retard—Aaaaaaah, he’s so cuuuuute! I had no excuse this time. There were no more teenaged girls around me. I had to face the fact that, yup, all this silliness was just me now. All me.

I would have thought that after more than a decade of being in relationships and having my romantic notions knocked about by the daily reality of being with another person and trying to work it out, I would no longer feel this excited about the possibility of falling crazy in love again. I mean, shouldn’t my attitude about love and relationships by now be a flippant “Yeah, sure, OK, why not?” Haven’t I earned—and learned--such sobriety? Why do I still suspiciously sound like that high school girl who fell madly in love with the character of Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves and said, “I want a man just like that”, and honestly believed someone exactly like that would saunter into her life? Why did I sit in that dark theater, cheering on Edward (the vampire) and Bella (the human) with the fervor of someone who felt personally invested in their love story? Why did I beam as Helen Hunt got her happy ending with Colin Firth as if it were my happy ending?

Surely, by now, I should have already outgrown all that teenaged optimism and romanticism, right? I’m not young and wide-eyed and innocent, anymore. I no longer have the excuse of youthful inexperience and ignorance to believe the cliché notions about luuuurve.

Having some kind of romantic crisis after watching a vampire movie was the last thing I had expected when my dad and I, the most film-crazed members of our family, left everyone at home and headed for the neighborhood mall’s cinema. But there I was, leaning back in my chair in the living room after I’d finished with the Helen Hunt DVD, pondering my situation, feeling a sensation that seemed like fear except that it was accompanied by something resembling…stubbornness. 

I was afraid that I had not changed at all, that I had not learned anything from my experience with being in relationships for the last fifteen years, and that I would throw myself at the next one with the same all-or-nothing (a.k.a. kamikaze) attitude. At the same time, I felt stronger—and in fact, more militant—about my mindset. Instead of experience tempering me, sobering me up, I felt emboldened by it even more. Sure, experience showed me that love and relationships can ask impossible things from you, but getting in the ring every time, slugging it out for all I’m worth also showed me that I can do the “impossible”.

“You can get good at what you need to to serve what you believe in,” wrote Po Bronson. And, man, do I believe in big things. Yeah, like loooove. J And I believe you don’t shrink it, you don't make it small and insignificant just to match what you think of as your current capacity—you have to expand your capacity to make more room for it, rise up to it, get good at it, do whatever it takes to be as big and bold as it is. We never really know what we’re made of until we’re tested, until we pull ourselves out of our comfort zones and throw ourselves into the deep end. Frankly, I don't know a lot of things that are worth all that trouble. 

As I sat there in my chair, absent-mindedly swirling my cranberry juice in a long-stemmed glass as if it were wine and listening to Dave Matthews serenade me with Joyful Girl, this truth rushed to me: I will always be that girl who skipped the prom in high school just because she had an idea in her head about what that night should be like for her—and if it couldn’t be that, then she’d rather have none of it. They can have their prom. I had not outgrown that girl at all…nor, I suspect, will I ever.

It was really nice to discover that, no matter how many legitimate reasons I have for being otherwise, I will always be that idealistic, romantic girl who would hold out for the real thing—for the thing that was real to her. Because she had decided long ago that nothing less is worth it.

I had to smile at Dave Matthews. His timing was perfect. “Would you prefer it the easy way?” he sang. I shook my head. “No? Well, OK, then, don’t cry…”

Funny what a seemingly harmless teen vampire movie can do to make someone like me feel hopeful and scared and strong and right all over again--like one of those wide-eyed, too-excited-to-keep-still 12- or 13-year-olds I sat with in the theater whose first kiss was still ahead of her. 

But then, maybe I should just leave those blood-sucking creatures alone and admit that this may just be me. All me. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do the Write Thing

Except for Conrado de Quiros, I usually am not able to muster the patience to read the local papers. So I took it as a weird sign that, as I was moving my parents’ Philippine Daily Inquirer out of my way on the breakfast table this morning, something on the front page actually caught my attention.

It was a call by Juan V. Sarmiento Jr. to readers to “let us know the measures you are taking to get you through the rough times. If we are together, we can tough it out. Send suggestions to jsarmiento@inquirer.com.ph”.

Oh, Juan V. Sarmiento Jr., are you sure you want to hear from me?

I’ve been down with the flu the past couple of days and everything—even reading a travel book in bed—felt like work. So I had two-days’ worth of pent up energy that was unleashed when I began hacking away at a letter to Mr. Sarmiento—putting forth the “measure” I am taking in these “rough times.”

This is how it came out (and I’m uploading it here in case Mr. Sarmiento feels I was just mouthing off in flu-induced delirium and decides to chuck out my letter):

Hello, Juan.

I am writing in response to your call for “measures you are taking to get you through the rough times.” My suggestion is not exactly what one might call “practical”—or one that yields instant, dramatic “voila!” results--but it’s always been the most effective tool in my arsenal—the one thing that has pulled me out of rough periods and one I strongly believe will help others: writing.

Allow me to expound.

The “rough times” that we are going through is, I believe, a direct and natural consequence of people’s relying too much on institutional or group thinking and not enough on individual thinking. It’s the result of our putting too much (blind) faith on institutions—the government, the financial institutions, the church, schools, and yes, even the family—and not enough faith on ourselves, forgetting that institutions are, in fact, made up of individuals. And that these institutions are only as strong, healthy and effective as the individuals that comprise them. 

Our ideas of what is “right” and “wrong” or “acceptable” and “unacceptable” come from what the institutions pronounce as “right” or “wrong”, “acceptable” and “unacceptable”. We’ve stopped questioning why things are a certain way and have lazily accepted many things as they are.

I think because of that, we’ve lost—or, at least, have been severed from—our ability to think for ourselves. We lack that honest, abiding and necessary trust in ourselves—in our instincts, in our intuition and in our capacity for critical thinking—that makes someone like Warren Buffett, second richest man in the world, when asked who he turns to for advice, quip, “Usually, I look in the mirror.”

No, we look too much outside—on what everybody else says is “right” or “true”--and not enough inside ourselves. Thus, the homogenized thinking that we have now, everybody thinking—or not thinking--the same thing. For instance, rather than encouraging one another to find and then follow our passion, we scramble, like a herd of sheep, towards the “lucrative” jobs/industries at the moment: nursing and working for call centers. This is not to say that there aren’t people who genuinely feel that their calling is in the nursing or call center profession, but I find it such a grave disservice to our young people that we push them to go for the “sure thing”, the quick buck, the instant gratification, discouraging them from taking risks, from experimenting, from making and then learning from their mistakes. And so we are producing a generation of cookie cutter people—people who think and act and do the same thing and tread the same safe path not unlike first-generation robots—and not real individuals with their own unique gifts and views and opinions and strengths.  

It’s a cynical, desperate way of being—one that completely disregards some of the best attributes about being human: our imagination, our creativity and ingenuity, our passion, our faith, our hope, our will. 

Our institutions have failed—our government and our financial institutions, in the most dramatic, resounding way—because the individuals within it have failed. We’ve failed by allowing our institutions to define us instead of us defining our institutions. We’ve failed by allowing our government to say what kind of country—and what kind of life we are to have in this country--rather than us demanding what kind of government we deserve. By allowing our religions to define what faith means instead of us bringing our own personal experiences, our own judgment to the table and defining our faith, and thus, our religions. By allowing the institution of marriage and family—and the way many others live it—to shape our idea of them instead of allowing our own personalities, our own history, our own sensibilities, our own aspirations to define what sort of union with another person and community we are going to have.

In short, our institutions, our society, have not evolved—have imploded--because its most basic unit, the individual, has not evolved. Our present collective consciousness—Filipinos lacking a healthy self-esteem, being content with mediocrity and “pwede na”, living in desperation and cynicism, taking only for themselves because of a belief in lack and the thinking that “there’s not enough to go around”, hailing as noble the subservient “pasan-ko-ang-daigdig” mentality, scarcely allowing themselves to hope for great things–is only a reflection of the individual consciousness.

Our circumstances will only change if we ourselves change. The “rough times” will not get better unless we get better. It’s very easy to blame outside forces—the government, the financial sector, the rich people, the poor people, our culture, our religion, our bosses, our families, our partners, etc.—for everything that’s wrong or not working well in our lives, and that is why we do it. It’s easy. But we can no longer afford to go down the easy road. The present times urgently call for us to do the difficult thing: to start taking personal responsibility and accountability, beginning with asking ourselves the tough questions and then finding our own answers. In short, we need to work on ourselves. As the Greek philosopher Plutarch wrote, “What we achieve inwardly changes outer reality.”

How do we begin to strive for that inward achievement?

The answers to that are as varied and unique as there are people in the world. For me, the answer has been…to write. And to write as honestly and as reasonably as I possibly can. 

Theodore Roosevelt said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” So as much as I’d like to draw up more effective and progressive economic policies that don’t favor the very rich in this country too much—which has really caused the severe economic imbalance—or to institutionalize personal finance literacy classes into every high school and college curriculum, I’m simply not equipped to do that. It’s not what I do—at least, not at the moment.

I can, however, be honest and open about my struggle to find out what I believe, what I most value and how I've been trying to live from that knowledge in order to be a more authentic and useful member of every community I belong to and to the larger society.

What I’ve learned from being a professional writer for the last thirteen years--and a journal- or diary-writer for the past twenty-five—is that when you write or practice an art form (or do something that you truly enjoy on a regular basis) it is very difficult to remain a cynic. It is very difficult to continue thinking “That’s impossible” or “I can’t do that” or “It can never be done”. Because you’ll discover so much about yourself—the unflattering, sure, but also the many stellar attributes you do possess, not least of which are the utter belief and trust in those stellar attributes.

It’s taken me a while to figure out why I write (I’ve learned that not knowing why, but just having a feeling for something and doing it is an early step in the creative process), but now I can say this: I write because it puts me in touch with the best part of me. It connects me to the joyful, the imaginative, the hopeful, the bold, the brave, the strong parts of me. It helps me find surprisingly real and effective solutions to my problems that I wouldn’t otherwise have if I was running around in panic or asking a lot of people for their advice. During those solitary writing times, I can’t help but think that anything is possible and that I can summon the will, the strength and the fortitude to make it happen.

I write to remind myself of what I’ve learned the hard way: that we are not victims of our circumstances, that our lives are not meant to merely be imposed upon us, without our consent. Rather, our circumstances are there for us to rise above. They are there to take into our hands and to mold into the kind of life we envision for ourselves. I write with the hope that those reading my writings will want to choose to learn their lessons—because the hard-fought ones are the ones that stay with us and which we value the most. They’re the ones that shape our character. And character, as we’ve been told, is destiny.

Not everyone is meant to be a novelist or some other kind of professional writer, but I do believe that everyone is meant, as Po Bronson wrote in his book What Should I Do With My Life? (True Stories of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question) to find out “what we believe in and what we can do about it.”

Writing regularly in a journal, I’ve found, is one of the cheapest, most no-frills tool to do this. It is, as I’ve read somewhere, “one of the cheapest forms of therapy.” I believe in its ability to bring out the truth in us so much (remember, the thing that sets us free? From our fear, from our panic, from our cynicism and pessimism…)—as I’ve seen it work in my life in terms of keeping my sanity, my calm and optimism in tact, no matter what—that I’ve made it my job (in a word, nangareer) to encourage people to take up the practice.

Aside from my own blog (where I basically let it all hang), I’ve set up a blog (www.ts-writingcoach.blogspot.com) that will guide the shy, inhibited or “walang budget” ones on their own writing projects, beginning with the personal essay.

But lest anyone--including myself--begins thinking this is purely altruistic, let me be honest here: it is also incredibly selfish—yes, that inherent trait of an individual, the one that our religions have all but demonized and what everybody advised us against being when we say we want to do something that makes us happy. “Don’t be selfish”--to our desire to make films instead of going to law school. “Don’t be selfish”--to our wanting to write or paint or experiment with our own restaurant instead of working for a multinational company. Well, selfishness is part of what drove me to do this—I wanted to do something that made me feel productive and useful, in my own terms. I wanted to do work that reflects who I am, that matters to me. One cannot afford to be genuinely altruistic—or authentically selfless—unless they first have a healthy self, to begin with—one that they nurture and protect; unless they are first, in other words, selfish. We cannot be a strong, healthy society—and we aren’t, that’s why we’re still in the Third World--unless we encourage everyone to be strong, healthy individuals. 

In these rough, chaotic times, the solution I propose isn’t “practical”—as we’ve come to view things that yield instant, dramatic “voila” results. But it will help us recover the most valuable things we’ve lost--our imagination, our creativity and ingenuity, our sense of independence and sense of community, our passion, our joy, our hope in ourselves and in others--in our pursuit of the things we don’t really need so much of—money and all things material, the good opinion of other people. It will help us recover all the things, in other words, that will pull us out of the dark.

It all begins with sitting still, taking stock of our situation, and developing some much-needed self-awareness. So pick up pen and paper (or open laptop or switch on desk top) and start doing the write thing.  

The World Is Changing

I’ve not had the words for days now. I’m still so overwhelmed, letting it all sink in.

My friend Chi, all the way in Dubai, who reads my blogs regularly (“cracks the whip” is actually the more accurate description of what she does with me regarding this blog) demanded over Facebook last week: “Tweet Sering, where is this week’s?”

I promised I would upload a new one. But at that time, with the US election just days away, I couldn’t sit still long enough to organize my thoughts on my computer. I was too excited. And too scared, actually. What if—shudder--Obama doesn’t win? The idea was as horrific as Gotham City without Batman. Except with this, I couldn’t walk out of the darkness of the movie theatre afterwards—I’d still have to live in a world that was beginning to plunge ever deeper into hopelessness and chaos and darkness.

I’m still so buzzed. This has been an amazing week. My sister Jof, the new island girl (she’s now working in Boracay, lucky biyatch) texted me this the day after: “The world is changing! J I’m so excited. Obama rocks!”

Many people have wanted to “change the world”—and, in fact, many have been and still are changing the world. But the election to the highest office in the most powerful country in the world of an African American--the race that, only four decades ago, was fighting to rid itself of the last vestiges of slavery, was such a resounding, dramatic proof that the world is changing, that the human race is evolving--despite the wars and the poverty and the environmental degradation and the climate crisis that suggest otherwise. Yes, there is that. And it would be downright dangerous to even think that that part is getting better because it is, in fact, getting worse.

But what the Obama win showed was that the wars, the poverty, the environmental degradation and the climate crisis are not all that is left in the world. It’s not all hopelessness and cynicism and apathy. Obama’s triumph showed that there is still enough hope and passion and a sense of responsibility left; at least, that there are people who still have these in them enough to get him—the unlikeliest candidate, but the one with the strong message of hope and change—elected…by a landslide. There are still enough people fired up to, as Angelina Jolie put it, “roll up [their] sleeves and take on what [they] care about”. There are still a great number of people who, like John F. Kennedy, fervently believe that “our problems are man-made. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.”

All together now: “Yes, we can!” J

I’ve been camping in front of the TV, hungry for more news and analyses on the historic event because, as with some of the most profound experiences—as this one definitely was—I have been at a loss for words. So I’ve been letting other people’s words—the CNN, BBC, Bloomberg and Al-Jazeera anchors and political analysts (what, no Fox News? Hehe), the nytimes.com columnists, Oprah on her website, my friends from all around the world with their giddy e-mails and Facebook posts—wash over me. I just wanted to take it all in and sit with it. About the most articulate thing that came out of my mouth the past days was “AAAAHHHHHHHH!!!”

Today, I progressed to “AAAAHHHHHHH LAAAAAVEHHHHHHHT!!!”

Which, thankfully for me (Chi, eto na!), paved the way for the above entry.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Some of the words from other people that I sat with the longest and savored the most:

“As he looked out Tuesday night through the bulletproof glass, in a park named for a Civil War general, he had to see the truth on people’s faces. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, he liked to say, but people were waiting for him, waiting for someone to finish what a King began.”– Nancy Gibbs, Time Magazine, as quoted by Gayle King on Oprah.com

“I was sobered by his calmness when he came out. Because he didn’t walk out triumphant. He was humbled and steady.”--Oprah on Oprah.com

"The most important thing that Barack Obama brings to the presidency is his willingness to reason. He won his presidency not as a black American but as a reasoning American who happens to be black."--Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize-winning economist, in TIME magazine

"Early-voting lines in Atlanta were 10 hours long, and still people waited, as though their vote was their most precious and personal possession at a moment when everything else seemed to be losing its value."--Nancy Gibbs, TIME magazine

“Hope has to keep winning.”--David Gergen, CNN Senior Political Analyst on Oprah.com

"We felt we could have talked burgers--and places and books--with him all day. But you expect that of a politician, whose livelihood depends on winning hearts. The more remarkable thing, we both felt, was that this sparkling stranger was so much like the kind of people we meet in Paris, in Hong Kong, in the Middle East: difficult to place and connected to everywhere."--Pico Iyer, writing in TIME magazine about a chance encounter with then Sen. Barack Obama in Hawaii in late 2006, a week before the new President-elect joined the presidential race. Iyer was with traveler and writer Paul Theroux.

"Never will an American election have excited in the rest of the world a hope at once so crazy and so reasoned." -- Bernard-Henri Levy, French writer and philosopher in TIME magazine

"My brother is not supposed to accomplish even half of what he has. It's meant to be impossible. It makes you wonder. Is this some force at work, the dynamics of nature and life? Is it God? We divided the world after 9/11. And the world said no. And through my brother, we can all connect again." -- Malik Obama, Barack's Kenyan half-brother, TIME magazine

"I believe Mr. Obama exhibits many of the best characteristics of our species in terms of intelligence, sensitivity, resolve and a willingness to reason." -- Richard Leakey, Kenyan conservationist, TIME magazine

"Obama's election is not an event we can comprehend fully right now. It portends a shift whose magnitude will only be realized as my daughter's generation comes of age. But it will change, forever, our assumptions of who can become what in this world." -- Ellis Cose, Newsweek

Back to Zero

In Yoga, there is a concept called “going back to zero”, which means going back to a state of rest, of stillness. Yogis believe that this state is a way of wiping the slate clean, erasing past regrets and “mistakes” as well as fears and anxieties about the future; there is no yesterday nor “earlier”, no tomorrow nor “later”. There is only today, “now”, the present moment—also known in metaphysics as “the point of power” or the point at which we are able to make things happen.

Like a blank canvas, focusing on the present, in the “now” (as in, “What do I feel now? What do I think now? What would I like to do now? Who would I like to be with now?) or “zero”, is a necessary state for creation to begin—for something new and vital to emerge. Nay, more: it makes creation inevitable.

Put more simply: If we just STOP for a moment—you know, just stop whatever it is we’ve been feverishly pursuing, incessantly occupying our minds with (that promotion, that salary increase, the esteem of our colleagues, the girl or guy of our dreams, the attention of our spouses, the respect of our parents and children…), we might actually see that we’re just trying too damn hard and we may proceed or start up again in a more relaxed, more intelligent, less do-or-die fashion. As Salma Hayek once said, “The universe doesn’t operate on desperation.” (As the lead and producer of the difficult-to-make Frida, she would know.)

Last year, without realizing it, I went back to this zero in a big way: Tired (OK, exhausted) from years of trying to live my ideal of the strong, independent, self-sufficient woman, I finally decided to give the whole thing—and myself—a much-needed rest. At thirty-four, I gave up my independent single-girl life in the city and temporarily moved back with my parents in the suburban south of Metro Manila. At that time, I already had a feeling that this homecoming was different from all the other ones in the past, when I’d show up at my parents’ door, bags of clothes and boxes of books in tow, feeling every bit the way my brother had summed me up: “Para ka’ng OFW na di pumatok sa Saudi.” 

Well.

All the elements of the big production called Tweet’s Return were still there—the bags, the boxes, my brother’s pang-asar—except for one conspicuous thing: the huge Balikbayan-box sense of failure at not having made it out there that I also used to lug home on such occasions.

As soon as I moved back into my old room in November last year, I marveled at how different everything felt. Instead of feeling smothered and defensive, I was surprised at how right it felt to be at my parents’ house--the house I’d been forever plotting to leave, to escape from. Although I suspected something like this would happen the moment I decided to go home, it was still something of a shock to realize how truly happy I was to be at the place that, as Pico Iyer called it, I had “always longed to flee.”

I was hyper aware of how grateful I was that breakfast would be on the table when I woke up, that I had no rent and utilities to pay and to stress over, that a laundry woman comes to the house every Friday to wash our clothes, that I have family to sit with me at the table and who I know will be there, ready to join me for tea and boiled bananas, when I emerge from my room after a day of writing. It struck me as silly that I had spent most of my supposed adult years running away from my family, pulling myself free of their clutches because they had seemed to stand in the way of my pursuit of complete freedom. But I suppose that was necessary then. My family seemed to have changed a great deal. I no longer felt them encroaching on my space, of feeling entitled to my time or sucking out my energy.

But while I knew something had definitely changed, I didn’t have the words for it then.

It wasn’t until I had been back in my old room for five months that a whole new way of looking at zero—that it didn’t necessarily equate “loser”--was introduced in Yoga class and I realized that something of a miracle had taken place: My mind had changed. (Woooow.) And so I had changed. That was it! While the act of coming home was the same as all the other times in the past, I was no longer the same person. No longer the same person who walked in her parents’ door with the long face of someone who felt and acted as if she were there by no choice of hers. No longer the same person who lay in bed sighing heavily, feeling the walls close in on her as if she were a prisoner. No longer the same feeling-kawawz girl who spent her days wondering when and how she’d be able to leave her parents’ house again.

Somehow, my perspective had shifted so that instead of looking at my situation as the depressing dead-end it always had seemed to me and, thus, was always something I was desperately trying to get out of, I now saw it as a beginning, a starting point. Of what, I wasn’t so sure. I only knew that I wanted to approach my family and my role in it differently. I didn’t want the old drama playing in my head, anymore. It was definitely time for a new script. 

Hmm…what was it about this place that made me want to escape it so much? What was it about my family that stirred up such strong mixed emotions? Why did I have such a great need to prove my strength, independence and self-sufficiency? Was I not convinced of it?

 Soon, it became clearer to me why I really came home: I wanted to stop running—running away from people, circumstances and feelings I didn’t like, on one hand, and running towards my ideal, on the other. I wanted to just stop and catch my breath for a while. To learn to be happy just sitting still, enjoying the calm. But old habits do die hard and I complained about this a lot in my journal. In an August entry, for instance, I complained about an unwieldy tendency: “Sometimes I still find myself looking for something to do, as if I don’t have enough to do at the moment. As if I’m not in the middle of a project. We really do tend to seek out the obvious highs and lows, and are suspicious about cruising calmly along. Some people are lucky enough to trust the calm. I’ve wanted to be one of those people for some years now…” I found it both poetic and practical that I learn to do that in the one place I had, for the longest time, been trying to get away from because I just couldn’t be peaceful in it.

It turns out that by coming home, by “going back to zero”—a place and a state of being that many of us have learned to fear and try so hard to avoid--I was actually, if subconsciously, setting the stage for new things to happen to me. Nay, more: I had made myself a blank canvas on which the creation of a new and vital (a.k.a. more mature) life now seemed inevitable.

 

The Personal Is Political

I’m feeling it. The November 4 US presidential election has got me nail-bitingly excited that I sometimes find myself having to walk off excess energy around the house, my mind swirling with fabulous images of an Obama presidency and all the amazing, ground-breaking effects that will have for the rest of the world.

It’s such an optimistic time. Even for someone like me from the Third World Philippines. For some reason, this election is very personal to me, especially when I began reading Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope”. I had become quite intrigued with the charismatic African American who was giving my girl Hillary Clinton some stiff competition and I wanted to know more. (When Hillary announced her candidacy with the now famous line, “I’m IN to WIN!” I thought her nomination was in the bag.) Soon, I found out I had more in common with this man than even Hillary, whose struggle to break glass ceilings I’ve always admired and cheered on and tried to emulate. (Although I really, really think she should have left Bill; he’s the one that’s bringing her down).    

Before Barack Obama, the only other political figure I felt this personally connected to wasn’t even officially in politics yet—Eddie Villanueva, during his bid for the Philippine presidency in 2004.

As his campaign platform, Villanueva called for a “revolution of the heart”. And while many people rolled their eyes at this, wondering what the hell kind of sappy Hallmark Channel call-to-action this was, I remember a strange feeling coursing through me and ending in my brain with this thought: This guy is the real thing. We have a true leader here.

So for the first time in my voter’s life, I found a candidate who I would not only vote for but would actively campaign for. OK, maybe “actively” is being slightly off the mark here because the truth was that I was rabidly campaigning for the man. I became one of those annoying people who had discovered something “so astig, tangina!” that they just couldn’t stop talking about it to anyone who’d listen—or to anyone who did not actually tell them point-blank to shut up.

And I wouldn’t shut up. I talked about Eddie Villanueva during meals, parties, gallery openings, and, when I mustered enough nerve, to some commuters on the MRT who probably thought I was some overworked yuppy who had experienced a meltdown and had gone mad. A friend and another Villanueva die-hard and I would hop in and out of MRT trains and stand outside bus terminals to hand out campaign flyers and brochures—all on our own dime. When we’d run out of campaign materials, we’d go to the Villanueva campaign office in Makati, get some more and efficiently walk out the door to continue our work. I even constructed a long impassioned letter, urging people to go to his website and read about him. I was sure that once they found out more about him, they’d feel exactly as I did.

The biggest stumbling block many people encountered about Eddie Villanueva was the fact that he was a pastor and the founder of a Catholic charismatic group, Jesus is Lord. I admit that my initial reaction to the news that a “Brother Eddie” was running for president was, What the hell--? Just when you think things couldn’t get any more bizarre in the Philippines…

But I also heard that this “Brother Eddie” accepted an invitation to a presidential debate organized by UP-Diliman and that he showed up alone as all the other candidates canceled their appearances. He could have left. And people were going to understand because he came for a debate, after all, yet there was no one to debate with. Instead of leaving, though, he bravely—and honestly, I heard—fielded questions from the notoriously cerebral, non-religious, skeptical UP student body until there were no more questions. Many in the audience were converted, I was told. (Not to the Jesus is Lord group or Christianity--let’s just make that clear--but to the idea of Eddie Villanueva as a real contender for the presidency.) One of them was my then boyfriend, an archaeologist and UP professor who was one of the biggest skeptics of organized religion—and politics--I’ve ever met. Yet when he came from that debate-turned-Q&A, it was clear the evangelist had made quite an impression on him. “Galing ‘yung Eddie Villanueva na ‘yun, ah,” I remember him saying in amazement. Which is what drove me to find out as much as I could about the man.

Obviously, what I discovered had me hooked. A former labor leader who resorted to armed struggle, he was on Marcos’ hit list, which drove him to the mountains. It was while he was in hiding that he began to question everything that he was fighting for, as well as the means by which he was trying to achieve them. Cliché as the following may sound (again, hello Hallmark Channel), but this is when he began to “turn to God” via the words of the Bible. He took those words to heart and because it was those words that “saved” him from his despair and sense of hopelessness, these were the words he wanted to save people with. And with the same energy that I imagine he must have shown when he tried to free laborers from oppressive labor practices, he went on and tried to free people from their own oppressive, limiting mindsets and their crippling fears. Indeed, as I once read, no one exhibits more zeal than the convert.

So when he spoke of the need for a “revolution of the heart”—or, as Gloria Steinem once put it, a “revolution from within”--these weren’t hollow words; they weren’t just a campaign strategy the way that most pronouncements during election time are nothing more than weightless words--I knew that he knew exactly what that meant. He had lived—and was living—those words. He embodied them.

Which is why I completely understood people’s skepticism about him—an overwhelming number of people who pepper their words with “God” or “Praise Jesus”  or “Amen” (sans irony) do not embody their words. They’re the ones at whom so-called “thinking” people roll their eyes exasperatedly. Their thoughts, words and actions have nothing at all to do with one another. They say one thing, mean another and do still yet another thing. The same goes for politicians--which is why nobody who isn’t on their payroll really trusts them. Eddie Villanueva’s running, then, seemed like a double-whammy.

Many of my friends and family questioned my choice of candidate, especially when there was another intellectual in the fray—the late Senator Raul Roco, a close friend and admirer of Eddie Villanueva. Both men took the same stance on most of the important issues (not that Philippine politics has ever been about issues; perhaps it was in the very very distant past, but certainly not when I was old enough to vote), but, at least, Roco was NOT an evangelist—and this last word was usually spat out, in disdain.

I’ve never seen the wisdom is separating my politics from my personal life. I believe that what you do in your daily life even when no one is looking is what you stand for, and what you stand for—that’s your politics. So when someone who shares what you stand for runs for public office, that’s who you should vote for. Not because of what the surveys or your religious affiliation or your family says. Michelle Obama, soon-to-be U.S. First Lady (please, Lord!) said in a magazine interview that “if folks don’t like what we stand for, then they shouldn’t vote for us.”

Between Roco and Villanueva, it was what the latter stood for that I loved and related to more. To my mind, electing him into office would bring to government everything I most value: decency, a healthy self-esteem, a belief in individuals—and individual growth and transformation--as the basis and driving force of any country’s growth and transformation, thoughtfulness and introspection, an openness to new and unprecedented things (a willingness to step outside convention and conventional thought), independent thought, a commitment to go out there and do what needs to be done, sacredness, living or practicing what you preach but never requiring anyone else to believe in what you believe.

This has once again affirmed to me that the ties that really bind people go deep. They go deeper than gender (I am a woman but I do not relate at all to our current woman president nor to the female vice presidential candidate of the US Republican party), than race (Barack Obama is African-American, so is Oprah Winfrey; Angelina Jolie, my girl, is white; yet I totally relate and connect to these people), than social and economic class (I’m middle-class and, obviously, the above three people are way out of my league in terms of economic status), than religious affiliation (I was raised Catholic, but the spiritual leader I most love, along with Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, is His Holiness the Dalai Lama). It’s shared values and dreams and vision that most holds us together.

Politics, I believe, should be as intensely personal as that. 

 

The Newest Member of A.B.E.R.

My youngest sister left yesterday morning to start her new job at a spa in Boracay--and, thereby, becoming an official member of A.B.E.R. (Asosasyon ng mga Babaeng um-Eskapo sa Realidad). At least, that is how my brother and his friends see it.

The unofficial group started when my brother and his guy friends noticed a pattern among their female friends: burned by a romantic relationship, the girls would flee to Boracay to recoup and would invariably quit their jobs (and their city life), find work in the island and relocate there. When enough girls from my brother's circle of friends had done this, the boys lumped the girls together and called them A.B.E.R. (pronounced ah-bear).  

I recently met one of the group's "pioneers" (the young woman that my brother's friend jokingly pinpointed as my sister's "recruiter") at a restaurant one evening when she had just returned from a trip to India for a Yoga teacher's training at an ashram. Tanned, toned and lithe, the A.B.E.R. grand dame glowed with a luminosity and vitality that I don't get to see very often. She had a lovely smile that she flashed generously, lighting up her pretty face so that my sister and I found ourselves naturally drawn to her like teenage girls to a Topshop store.

When she spoke of her India experience, her voice rang with barely contained excitement and her eyes twinkled (twinkled!) like those of a fairy tale princess talking about the prince she had met at the palace ball. My sister and I were transfixed. I thought, This girl don't look like no escapist to me. If anything, she looked like she went after something, brought it home with her, boiled it, chopped and pureed it, added some mint and honey and crushed ice and, I don't know, drank the stuff. She looked like somebody who was concocting her own life, her own "realidad", and deriving immense pleasure from it. She didn't just take it as it was--she was adding her own flair, making it into a palatable thing for her and was taking it all in, so that there she was in her thin-strapped dress and sandals, brimming with the effect of her own special concoction and inspiring at least two women at the table simply by being her fabulous self. My sister and I couldn't take our eyes off her. For my part, I wanted to fold her up, stuff her in my bag and prop her on my shelf at home.

People who are creating their own life in a way that makes it reflect who they are inside glow with an incandescent quality that stretches out and seems to switch on the light in others. I feel my own light switch on and grow brighter when I'm with such people, many of whom I'm lucky enough to call my friends. And that girl, with her wry humor and refreshing earnestness, did switch on some pretty bright lights in my sister and me that night at the restaurant so that we were glowing like...OK, a couple of scary Jack O' Lanterns. But still.  

If there were any lingering doubts in my sister's mind regarding her decision to step off the paved road of her burgeoning fashion design career and walk down one little dirt path just because it looked interesting, that night chatting with the Astigirl erased all of it.

There is always that kind of worry that is reserved for the youngest child who tries to strike out on her own, no matter how much self-sufficiency and level-headedness that child may exhibit. But perhaps because we're so much older now (that sister is 25, hardly a "child")--and my parents have gotten used to us doing what we will, anyway--the worry over my sister's move has been almost imperceptible. Still, it's there. So as an older sister, I'm glad to know she's in Boracay with that Astigirl and driven to the island by reasons that I suspect aren't that different from when the latter left the comfortable familiarity of her own city life years ago.

Perhaps people who up and leave a life that they are used to are escaping reality. But I think it's the "reality" of others--that is, other people's idea of what life is supposed to be and how it's supposed to be lived--that they are actually shedding, so that they can make space for the kind of life, a way of living, that takes into consideration the things that they most value. A life, in other words, that reflects who they really are.

I speak as a proud ate when I say I'm glad to see that my sister is making space for that kind of life now. ;)  

The List

Four years ago, in 2004, when my first novel came out, a surprising number of young women wrote me to say how much they related to the story, especially to a part in it that I call The List--a detailed, numbered rundown of qualities the heroine of the story wanted in a romantic partner.

A guy friend, who assumed that the list was actually mine, chided me about it, saying how exacting my standards were. I remember smiling and thinking, “Oh, you have nooo idea.” Because the fact was that, my real list, was actually longer—more exacting—than the one I lent my fiction.

I’ve been thinking about that list recently—the real one, because it was due for an update--and how anxious I was about sharing it with anyone for two reasons: one, I was afraid I would come off as, exactly like my friend said, too exacting (like, ang OA! Who the hell does she think she is?) and two, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stick to it, anyway.

But after four serious relationships (lasting three years, five years, eight months, and three years, respectively), in which I routinely closed my eyes at many of my partner requirements (and even chucked out some of them after rationalizing that I was being “too idealistic”) in the name of making the relationship “work”—giving “flexibility” a whole new cartoon-like meaning--I do believe I’ve developed the kind of forgiving self-awareness and sturdy backbone that only hard-core experience makes, to say, “This is my list. I’ve earned it. I am no longer going to contort myself into impossible freakish poses just so I can be in a romantic relationship and continue to stay there.” It does not help anyone—not me nor the guy, who was always wonderful until I tried to make him do the same contortions I was making so that our relationship could fit the mold of my ideal. And I’m so lucky to have been blessed with really wonderful boyfriends who treated we well—or as well as they could given that there was a crazed love-addict contortionist in their midst.

But I know this now: If a guy doesn’t fit ALL the requirements—no matter how much you love his laugh or his little-boy grin—then he JUST. AIN’T. IT. Quit trying too hard already. Stick to your convictions. And leave the poor dear alone.

So, in the spirit of my new-found conviction to hold out for what I really, truly want (a conviction that gets stronger with the sad end of one more relationship), I’m putting out my real, unabridged, bahala-na-kung-ma-old-maid list here as a reminder to myself. With friends and family—and even strangers—as witnesses. I’ve done the whole “compromise” route, which really just means “I don’t think I’m worth the man of my dreams”—a cop-out mindset that women can only afford to nurture in their 20’s (and ok, early 30’s), but I think is one we all should be able to outgrow…at a certain point, preferably in this lifetime.

I think I may have reached that point. (Ay, thank God!)

Things I Really, Truly Want in a Partner (reinforced and updated, in no particular order)

1. Someone with a crazy sense of humor

2. Sweet and malambing, loves to touch and hold me all the time

3. Has a profound, very personal spirituality and sense of sacredness

4. Passionate about his work

5. Courageous enough to pursue his dreams

6. Doesn’t smoke

7. Loves to eat good and healthy food

8. A little boy at heart, has a child’s innate trust in the world and humanity

9. Sweet to his mother

10. Fits in well or tries to (but not too hard) with my family

11. Appreciates my friends

12. Someone I can talk to about a wide range of subjects

13. Well-read, loves books

14. Loves to travel with me and see the world

15. Smells good

16. Has original ideas and is not afraid to share them

17. Remembers things I say, even ones I’ve already forgotten I said

18. Knows how to talk to--or to just be with—children; nurturing

19. “Heroically romantic”

20. “Romantically heroic”

21. Loves to make love and knows how to connect sexually

22. Loves to give me backrubs and foot rubs

23. Socially and ecologically aware and mindful

24. Fiercely loyal and trustworthy

25. Cares a great deal about “making the world a better place”, beginning with himself

26. Has a great deal of respect for women

27. Someone who openly considers me his best friend

28. Secure and comfortable with himself, can feel at home in any environment

29. Always looks after my welfare

30. Open-minded and inclusive

31. Inspires me to be the best I can be

32. Values integrity, truth, learning, freedom, family, friendship, compassion

33. Has a strong moral core, but is not moralistic, self-righteous, judgmental and/or preachy

34. Gives me peace of mind just knowing he is there

35. Lives out the idea that “attention is the most basic form of love”

36. Cultivates and nurtures a healthy self-love (as opposed to narcissism)

37. Someone I can trust wholly and wholeheartedly

38. Someone who actively tries to live a kinder, saner, more grounded, balanced life

39. Someone who can take care of himself and doesn’t need me to take care of him

40. Someone who gets it

41. Someone I know for sure will love me progressively as we grow older and who I know for sure I will love progressively

42. Thinks me the girl of his dreams ;)

So there.

I know. Good luck to me…;)

The Last Sweet Roro

A dear cousin is going through a long-drawn-out break-up. I only realized how deep into it she still is when, after declaring, “That’s it, I’m done” in the way that 22-year-olds channeling wise, worldly 35-year-olds (yeah, that’s me) tend to do, she camps in front of her TV set with a bottle of red wine in the hopes of drowning out the shameful, shameful thing she just did earlier that evening: She was in her room, going through old scrapbooks when she came upon photos of her ex—the one she was supposedly “done” with—which brought back old memories. Which weren’t that bad, apparently, because they prompted her to send him—gasp!--a text message. And—bigger gasp!—he didn’t reply. Kapow!

Indeed, how does one recover from such a blow?

A few years ago, I would have told her that the only solution would be to “stay strong, stay firm, cut him out of your life, erase his name and all contact details from your directory, pack up everything he’s ever given you (unless it’s an iPod or a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone or a Zara cocktail dress) and stuff that reminds you of him and throw it out. Then take up kick-boxing. Or jujitsu.”

But when you’ve become a more mature, more balanced woman (yup, still me), you now know better. You now know that while the aforementioned method is still a personal favorite (because it uses rage—a lovely emotion that gives your cheeks a nice, healthy reddish tinge and, as a bonus, keeps out unwanted company), there are, in fact, a wide range of getting-over-him/it weapons at your disposal, with yet more in product development. All you have to do is ask a woman. The older she is, the more she will likely have in her arsenal. And you are most welcome to employ any or all of them.

For my heartbroken cousin, I shared one of my favorites—a wonderful and surprisingly effective tool: a story. My girlfriends and I have come to know this story as The Last Sweet Roro. Two years ago, as I was in the throes of my own long-running, di-pa-rin-ba-tapos-yan??? break-up saga, my friend Kat told this story to me, which was told to her (during Kat's own dark days) by the story’s main protagonist herself, another good friend of ours. Like a precious family heirloom, I’ve passed on this story to my sisters and girlfriends, hoping that they would derive the same comfort and magic and sense of hope that I felt when it was handed down to me.

Here goes:

Once upon a time, in the south of the Philippines, my girlfriend was in a long-term relationship with her high school sweetheart. Then she got accepted into her first-choice university, which happened to be in Manila, and so off she went. As a wide-eyed, impressionable freshman, she caught the eye of an upper classman. He was smart, sophisticated, older—and on his way to taking up law. The girl was, naturally, flattered and quite impressed. When he asked if she would like to be his girlfriend, she promptly broke it off with her boyfriend and took up with the future lawyer.

Alas, two weeks into this new relationship, the girl realized that she was, quite possibly, with the biggest narcissist in the metropolis—the kind of guy who hooks up with much younger girls because they were the easiest to brainwash into becoming adoring fans/groupies. The “relationship” was all about him. And the guy just couldn’t stop yakking about himself. TOTAL mistake.

The girl left him in mid-sentence, so to speak, packed a few things, hopped on a bus that rolled into a Sweet Roro ferry and practiced her I-made-a-mistake-please-take-me-back speech to her sweet, sensitive, thoughtful ex-boyfriend. But when she tried to deliver this heartfelt speech to him, he refused to hear it. In fact, he refused to speak to her and to see her.Kapow!

The girl was devastated, but not discouraged. She rationalized that she had brought this upon herself, and she was willing to do whatever it took to win back his affection. Every month or so, when she had scraped up enough of her student’s allowance to afford a ferry ticket, she sailed on the Sweet Roro from Luzon to Mindanao, hoping against hope that this time, on this trip, he would finally let her back in. I don’t recall who said this, but it’s awfully on the mark: “What men will only do for God and country, women have always done for men.”

She had a goal—and to her mind, it was a noble one: love. She was going to be worthy of it again, and if that meant packing her quivering heart in her suitcase every few weekends, offering it to her stony ex only to once again watch it being tied to the back of a truck and dragged mercilessly along the Mindanao highway like Lito Lapid, so be it. At the same time, she wondered just how long she could do this, how much more humiliation and rejection and heartache she could endure.

Perhaps because we’re the gender assigned to experience the necessary violent act called childbirth—not to mention the agonizing nine months prior--women tend to have a much higher threshold for pain than men. The kind of prolonged intense physical pain and suffering that earns men medals and hero status, women experience all the time, as a simple matter of fact, without fanfare. And so this girlfriend of mine, by the mere fact of having been born female, was genetically predisposed to let it rip.

Eventually, she—and her poor, battered but brave little heart—stopped thinking, became numb to the pain and just went on her business of taking the blows. Kapow! Kapow! Kapow!

One day, she took her place in the queue towards the entrance of the ferry bus, the way she had done for the past year. (Yes—YEAR!) As she planted her right foot on the first step of the bus, it dawned on her, clear as a sunny day--“I’m done.” Just like that. No bitterness, no anger, no remorse. Just a sense of finality and…relief. And gratitude. She did her time, and now she was free.

She stepped back from the crowds, calmly watched the activity before her. And she stayed long enough to watch the Sweet Roro sail away and disappear into the horizon.

I think I got to my feet and applauded when Kat was done telling me this story.

The truly genius thing about going--as my siblings and cousins put it--“all out” is that it guards against that silent monster--regret. The regret of not having done enough, the whole pwede-pa-sana school of thought--wishing you had done more and wondering what would have happened if you had—that haunts your waking and sleeping hours, as terrifying to some as seeing dead people. I suspect this is the reason women stay longer than they should in situations that make them miserable. They want to face down their monsters now, when they still have energy left, and not run away only to have these monsters lurk around in their supposed happy and content future. They don’t want to regret anything; they don’t want to think they had “given up too soon”. They want to be sure. They want to be able to walk away and never look back. So in the meantime, as my sisters say, “Go lang nang go!”

Certainly, there will be none of that regret for you when you board your own Sweet Roro, when you choose to just ride out the excruciating pain—and humiliation. Even those have expiry dates. You will have known that you did give it—that job, that friend, that dream, that relationship--everything you had and found out that it just wasn’t for you. At that point, no amount of pleading or negotiation or argumentation or guilt-trip or even bodily threat can reel you back in. You’re sooo DONE. You can peacefully let the damn thing go already.

There is no way to accurately describe the rush of relief, the odd sense of victory and liberation at finally arriving at your last Sweet Roro. You’ll watch it sail into the sunset—that relentless drama boat that rocked you to the core—with the giddy knowledge that, finally, you’re not on it, anymore. You’re on solid ground.

Moving Out Of Warrior

Recently, I went to something called Bars Access Energy Therapy. The idea behind it is that the body’s illnesses aren’t caused only by an unhealthy diet or imbalanced (a.k.a. stressful) lifestyle, but also by negative thoughts and emotions. These negative thoughts and emotions block the smooth flow of energy throughout the body in much the same way that cholesterol blocks the easy circulation of blood. Bars Therapy is supposed to “unblock” bottle-necks throughout the body to achieve a smooth, balanced flow of energy.

Not only do I buy this idea, I sell it. I’m one of those staunch believers in mind-body connections and therapies, but when my friend Lizanne, who was so amazed at the insights she had during her own bars therapy, gifted me with a session for my birthday this year, I hedged.

Insights, I thought. Do I really need more of that right now? At that time, I was already five months at work on my second book and I felt I was drowning in insights as it was. So I waited. Two months later--and stuck in a whirlpool called my book’s introduction--I was ready for outside help.

The therapists—or healers—are a male-female team, David and Claudine, in a classic show of balanced yin-yang energy. David is a writer, Claudine, among other things, is psychic. I liked them both instantly.

After conducting a short ritual that would “open” me up—to the healing energy, I suppose--they asked me to remove my shoes and to lie, face up, on a massage bed. Both healers decided that David would take the lead (while Claudine would act as support) because, according to them, his energy was closer to mine than Claudine’s. “You’re both writers,” Claudine said in answer to my eye-blinking questioning face.

I expected them to bring out “bars”. And, for some reason, the “bars” I saw in my head were bricks. Somehow, when my friend was telling me about her therapy, I imagined red bricks being piled on her, depending on how stressed out she was. I wondered how many “bars”—bricks--I would require.

In any case, there were no such brick “bars”. The healers explained to me that this kind of therapy got its name from the points on either side of the head which connect to form an imaginary bar.

David pressed his fingers against these points in my head, mumbled some things and told me to “say ‘yes’”. So I said “yes”. He asked if I felt anything and I was tempted to say “yes”, but…”You know, I don’t think I’m really that sensitive…” Then he mumbled some things again and told me to “say ‘yes’”, so I said “yes”.

Meanwhile, Claudine’s lands hovered over my chest. She frowned. She addressed David: “Matigas dito…”

I didn’t understand half of what was happening, and I suspect I wasn’t supposed to. At least, not intellectually. I was practicing a new thing: trying not to think too much. So somewhere in the middle of the session, I stopped trying to understand what was going on and just sort of flowed with it. I don’t know if that inner decision had anything to do with it, but suddenly, there came—ta-dah!--the insights.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama says this about insight: “Even if you seek to help someone out of concern, without insight you cannot be very clear about what benefit will come of your efforts. A combination is needed: a good human heart as well as a good human brain. With these working together, we can achieve a lot.”

And, boy, did I want to achieve a lot, beginning with getting myself together. Which, I had come to realize over the past couple or so years, was already a lot of work.

Even David, who’s not psychic, seemed to think so. “You’re…well, I wouldn’t say you’re running on empty. But you’re running on one-fourth the energy you need. And it’s decreasing.”

Oh, wow. He knew this from pressing the sides of my head?

I don’t remember who asked about it but suddenly we were talking about the major break-up I just had early this year. How tough it was, how that whole relationship exhausted—depleted—me, and how it came to a point where I had to choose between the survival of the relationship or the survival of me.

“That bad, huh?” Claudine said.

“How do you feel?” David asked for the nth time.

“I’m OK,” I said.

“I mean, do you feel anything now…any sensations?”

“Um…I don’t know,” I said. “I feel cold.”

“Cold?” Claudine asked. She reached over and took my hand. “Malamig nga.”

“It’s the aircon,” I said, unconvincingly. I’d already been told by several doctors—both holistic and conventional—that my blood circulation was poor, which is why my body doesn’t react “normally” to changes in temperature.

“It’s not that cold,” Claudine observed, referring to the room, and I felt her making some connections in her head. She touched my feet. Even with my socks on, they still felt cold. “Hmm…”

David verbalized the connection Claudine must have been making between my cold hands and feet and my “rock hard” chest and solar plexus. He said that my body heat seemed to be concentrated in my torso, that my center was drawing heat from my extremities. As if it was protecting something…

“If you can visualize your solar plexus, what does it look like?” Claudine asked.

I didn’t have to think hard. In fact, I don’t think I thought at all because there suddenly was the image of a round thing with rays emanating from it. I described it to Claudine.

“What is it made of?” she asked.

“Metal.” Again, my answer was fast and sure.

“You’re protecting something,” she said, thoughtful. Then, a second later: “You’re protecting a child.”

Hmmm…

“You’re protecting your inner child,” she said.

Oooh…

“How old is she?” Claudine asked.

“Four,” I said, without hesitation.

“What happened when you were four?” she asked.
She asked if any particular memory stood out and I instantly saw this little girl with bangs and a high ponytail wearing nothing but frilly white underpants, socks and shoes. I had seen those photos of me. I was in the Surigao City airport with my mom, my maternal grandfather, lots of other relatives and family friends.

“People are telling me who I should be,” I said, and even I was surprised as I did so.

“Should…” Claudine was quick to take note of this. “Who are these people—your parents?”

“My parents, my grandparents, my uncles, my aunties, their friends—everyone.” I could actually hear them baby-talking to me, cooing, telling me I should be this and that because I’m so this-and-that. I felt my body tense up.

“Who do you want to be?” Claudine asked.

“Myself.”

“And who do they want you to be?”

I thought a moment. “Themselves.” More specifically, the selves they didn’t think they could be.

I had gone down this road before. Had written about it in countless journal entries over the years, went to psychotherapy as a way to answer the question of why the people in my life couldn’t seem to just let me be. Why they had such set notions about what I should do, how I should behave, who I should love and why, in God’s name, did I feel so threatened by it? As though they really had the power to make me into what they had in mind.

I had finally figured out the answer to the first part (the part where they felt entitled to say who I should be)—at least, in my head, I did—so, as a way to be fair to these “people”, whom I love very much, I explained to Claudine that I am the eldest granddaughter. So I became the natural focus of my family’s affection; that they also naturally projected onto me all the things they wished they could have been, the way people tend to do with a new baby—an assumed blank slate.

The attention was rather intense, me being the first granddaughter (my older cousin, a male, was in Cebu, himself undoubtedly being intensely fussed over by his maternal grandparents and relatives), and it was a habit that just got carried over until I was, oh, thirty-plus? As a reaction, I had become intensely self-protective. Practically all my energy was channeled to fending off meddlers, those well-meaning, sure, but thoroughly invasive, intrusive people who wanted to have a hand in shaping me as a person—those people who just couldn’t leave me alone, goddammit—and laid on the guilt trip. All that effort, all that energy solidified over the years into a “rock hard” torso—I had created for myself a veritable breast plate, not to mention breast cysts. It was exactly what my friend Cecilia, well-versed in the ways of the esoteric, told me just a few months ago, “You follow the truth inside your heart like a warrior. Problema…heart chakra. Forgiveness. Kasi nga warrior pose, eh. Rage is essential to maintain the energy to assert your personal integrity.”

So I told Claudine this. I said, “My friend says I’m forever in warrior pose. It’s my favorite yoga pose.”

“It’s my favorite, too,” Claudine said. “But ‘forever’? That must be so tiring,” she said sympathetically.

“It is,” I said, and I felt like crying. My God, it’s tiring. And, only recently, I also figured out the second part of my seemingly life-long angst (the part where I felt threatened by other people’s desire to mold me)—I was afraid I wasn’t strong enough to fend them off, that one day I’d succumb and live a fake life just to shut them up already, that I’d live a life that made them—but not me—happy.

“You know,” Claudine continued. “You may have kept people out, but you’ve also locked in your authentic self. Let it come out. It’s time you let it out.”

Then she said the words I realized I most needed to hear from another person: “It’s safe to be who you are.”

(If you'd like to experience this kind of therapy, you may reach Claudine Mangasing at +639178958191 or David Montecillo at +639178170396.)

Like Father...

Five years ago, I don’t think I would have ever admitted to myself, much less to anyone else, that I took after my father. I thought he was too stubborn for his own good, too proud to admit he was wrong or to apologize for a mistake, too rigid in his beliefs and so quick to judge others who did not share the same values as him.

Then beginning in 2003, my life fell apart so many times that I began to develop a most effective coping mechanism—looking inward. And I went poking about inside my psyche, inside my thoughts and motivations, as seriously and as determinedly as a CSI agent. Out of this inward curiosity, I discovered that there was inside me a too-stubborn, too-proud, too-rigid, too-judgmental person and that it was this part of me that was attracting and causing the pain and misery and confusion of which I was suffering. No wonder my father and I didn’t get along—we were so alike, we shared too many of the same negative traits that we clashed.

I decided I was going to change.

I willfully altered my habits and thought-patterns (repeatedly telling myself as a mantra: “You don’t always have to be right”) and before long the miracle happened: my father and I managed to stay at the same table without arguing. Looking at my father from a more open, more accepting vantage point—and not always trying to exert my own will--I saw that he was a kind, funny, irreverent, pure-hearted, deep, thoughtful, intelligent, honest romantic idealist who was always trying to do the “right thing”. And this allowed me to get in touch with the part of me that was all that, too. The more I liked my father, the more I liked myself. I developed such a deep, unwavering affection and respect for this man who happened to be my father—and what all that was doing for me--that I found a kind of peace that I never even imagined. And for a few years, we were doing fine. That is, until I fell in love with a man with whom my father was so violently opposed.

The new man in my life had been married before and had two kids from that marriage. For my staunchly Catholic father, who didn’t believe in annulment and who saw me as the loose, immoral woman who was coming between a man and his family, this was a definite no-no. I thought I could change his mind once he’d hear from me how happy I was in this new relationship. But in our first meeting after he learned (from my sister) that I was dating a “married man with kids”, he told me in his straightforward manner: “I just want you to know that if this relationship ends up in marriage, I don’t want to be there.”

It was too late to hate my father for that or to think that he was just saying it to hurt me. I had already seen a more complete picture of him—I could never go back to thinking he was just put on this earth to make my life a living hell. We were at an Italian restaurant, sharing a pizza while he sipped his cappuccino when I brought up the subject of my new relationship. Almost instantly, storm clouds gathered around him, his expression darkened. He looked like he couldn’t wait to get away from the table, from the restaurant, from me, from the whole idea that his eldest child was devaluing herself by being with a man who did not value marriage and family. He suddenly looked old and lost, and my heart went out to him. I found myself saying gently, “I understand, Pops.” The strange thing there was that I meant it. Knowing him, I did understand his position. He was consistent. He was acting according to his own strong personal beliefs, according to what he believed was right. He didn’t mean any harm. In fact, to his mind, he was trying to protect me from harm. He reminded me so much of someone—he reminded me of myself.

Right then I vowed to myself that I wasn’t going to change how I treat him. I would continue to respect his position and his beliefs even as they were the direct opposite of mine. I would treat him the way I wanted to be treated. I would never again try to change his mind. For almost a year, he refused to speak to me and I let him be.

During that time, I became a writing teacher and discovered that I loved teaching almost as much as writing. Teaching revealed to me my own capacity to be a safe place for my students, that I was a person with whom they felt free to be their most natural, authentic selves. I couldn’t help thinking it was my experience with my father that made me into such a person.

After almost a year of not speaking, my father turned up in one of my workshops. It wasn’t as dramatic as it may sound because he isn’t a very dramatic or sentimental person. He simply sat, matter-of-factly, in class and was the most enthusiastic student. Whenever I asked my students if they would like to share what they had written, my father would raise his hand like an eager little boy and proceed to spill his guts. In one heart-wrenching essay, told in his trademark straight-up, unapologetic, unsentimental, irreverent, funny and unflinchingly honest style, my father shared with me, his writing teacher, the story of his life—his dreams and disappointments and the peace he was trying to make with all of these.

It took us three drafts, a few more cups of coffee in a café and plenty of trust and respect on both sides to get us back on track.