here is the starting line

a gentle prodding into who i could be

A strange sort of stillness always muffles the days right after Christmas and the morning of New Year’s Eve. For me, it actually starts in the evening after Christmas festivities. There is an unspoken program my family follows each year, one that starts at lunch as the different nuclear family units arrive at a single house (we’ve given up trying to set a fixed hour as everyone runs on Filipino time anyway), usually my aunt’s, which is only a few blocks away from where I live. After lunch comes the afternoon drinking, with my aunts usually sipping on vodka sodas with a citrus fruit coloring the drink and its flavor, while my uncles are pouring whiskey into lowball glasses or popping the caps off from sweating bottles of San Miguel beer. Then comes the giving of gifts, something I have not took part in for a while now as I have grown past the age where my older relatives still have an inkling of the kind of material gifts—ones that they can buy easily from a trip to the mall and do not have to spend  more than ten minutes deciding on as they have other things to buy and prepare for the holidays—I want to find sitting under the tree with my name on it, waiting to be unwrapped with clumsy and overexcited hands. 

After that are some party games, usually involving money; this year we tried the trending one where someone is blindfolded and attempt to scoop money from a pile into a bilao or a plate using only a spatula. (I have to admit that one was quite fun to watch, especially when someone manages to snag a yellow or blue bill from the sea of purples and reds.) Then the children and teenagers and young adults line up, single file, as they wait for the auntie or uncle wearing a Santa hat and holding a thick wad of bills that would grow thinner each time someone leaves the line. By that hour, the day has made its course, full of laughter and gossip and good food. But it also leaves a sort of haunting, the kind where you feel that something has gone by too quickly before you could even process it; you were in a moment, caught up in everything and you’re intoxicated from all these different sensory experiences and emotions coursing through you, until it dwindles and you come down from your high. Now it only exists in a bleary memory, existing mostly in a sense of nostalgia.

I don’t like that hollow echo feeling, not when I’m still trying to take in the events of Christmas morning and lunch when my grandmother was already making the rounds in my aunt’s kitchen, packing leftover food into tupperwares and instructed everyone to bring home a slice of cake or big portions of certain dishes because one of her grandchildren likes it best. When I was counting my Christmas money and joking around with my siblings and cousins, the house staff were already taking down some of the decorations laid out for the day, folding soiled table cloths as glasses clinked together and plates were being piled high and brought to the sink to be washed. Weeks of preparation have reached their culmination, served their purpose, and gave what was expected. The nuclear family units return to their homes after saying their goodbyes and promises of seeing one another soon. Then the real stillness comes, that quiet exhaustion seeping into everyone’s bones and keeps them in bed until late into the morning of the twenty-sixth. But the lull stretches itself out unto the following days, blankets the hours in a sort of lethargy that leaves me disoriented and confused. As I write this, it is the evening of December 30th. My body is stuck feeling like it’s the twenty-sixth. Time is warped: crimped into short bouts of energy, drawn out in the hours lost in doing an activity to pass the time, fleeting in its presence, yet stagnant all the same. It’s been quite the week. 

I only talk about Christmas because, well, in the absence of a routine structured around schoolwork, I don’t have much going on with my life right now. I have been on break for two weeks now and I have played more hours on Genshin Impact than I have in months, I finished two books, picked a film to watch without much thought (or background reading), and then got sick and had to cope with some loss of appetite. My mind is constantly running on some static frequency, buzzing with everything and nothing all at once. I try to reflect on the past year and usually come up blank, sometimes angry or sad with everything that I’ve been through. But for the most part, my brain has turned itself off. Attention is a distant friend, one I am hoping to rekindle my connection with and tether myself to, as I struggle to take in most of the things around me. I do not remember what I eat for breakfast on most days, and I am not quite sure what to make of the coming new year. Thinking about the arrival of 2022 makes me feel indifferent, as I do have hopes and wishes for myself and the people around me, but I become hesitant to bank on the things that I want because of looming uncertainty. I have no clue what the new year could look like. Given that I was not bestowed with any gift of premonition, in the previous years my desire to greet a new year with the best intentions could easily quell any shadow of doubt I had, as it’s inevitable that wanting and desiring is coupled with some uncertainty. But with everything that has been going on since 2020, at times I find myself thinking it feels safer not banking on anything at all. While there are a lot of opportunities for good things to happen or begin with the coming of a new year, it can also establish fears into reality. Will it bring another variant of the COVID-19 virus to add to the growing list of caution? How would the national elections go? Will I have enough resilience to shape myself into the kind of person I want to become? How is the climate crisis? Why aren’t people helping other people? Is compassion just another abstract concept people use in rhetoric, but never in practice? Will I be able to go back to campus? What kind of person do I want to become? Can I become the person that I want to be? I want to do so many things, want to exist as different versions of myself, want to do more and learn better; be better. But the doubt lingers and patterns itself to the shape of me. 

Marta Zamarska. A Railway Impression XXXI, 2015.

Yesterday, I asked my brother what his resolutions were for the new year. He gave it about three seconds of thought, his eyes rolling upwards as if trying to look towards the inside of his brain for an answer. My brother just shrugged at me and said, “I want to train and play basketball in the high school varsity team. And play more games with my friends.” Simple as that. I envy my brother sometimes, for his bliss and security in what he wants and who he is at the moment. Sure, I know who I am at the moment, I have my identity markers that are affixed to my personhood and the impression people have of me. But sometimes I chance upon someone doing things with their lives that make me question what I’m doing with mine. An old friend currently doing her Master’s under an Erasmus grant, I encountered a lot of people in the past year who are kinder than I will ever be, the friends I grew up with slowly filling into roles and recognitions that give them a marker of achievement recognized by other people. It does not fill me with envy, seeing others do the things I had never really hoped for myself. But it does let frustration wash over me, drown me in the thought of why I never thought of doing certain things, of improving myself and my skills and my heart to match those around me and give back the same way they’re giving. Truth is, I don’t even want to do most of the things I see others doing; I don’t even know what to do with myself or my life for the most part. I only have an inkling of what I want, perhaps that is why I cling to the sense of achievement other people have; hold onto their acts of kindness in hopes of being able to do the same with myself. It’s a self-deprecating cycle, one I admit to falling into quite often. I want to change that. I recently went through my Tumblr tags, hoping to find a quote to stimulate my otherwise sluggish mind into writing this newsletter, and happened to chance upon this quote from Simone Weil:

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

As well as this passage from Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Polly:

You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, how to relish the feeling of building a hut in middle of the suffocating dust.

I cling onto the last sentence of that excerpt, as it talks about the active, stubborn choice of not submitting to the festering thought of doubt and opportunities not being met. There is something quite coarse and ugly about improving one’s self, a facet that is pointedly ignored by a lot of self-help books and Instagram influencers and whatnot. It’s been said that sometimes the only way out is through, and I believe it is so for the most part. Sometimes self-improvement is doing something petty or mean first before recognizing how this kind of behavior does not benefit anyone at all, especially the one doing the act. Sometimes getting better means doing the things we don’t want to do: confronting a scabbing emotional wound, dealing and adjusting with change, or to stop resisting what’s good for us because there’s this nagging impression that we are undeserving of it. Sometimes being better means simply existing and caring for yourself without needing an end goal or a concrete plan of action. These things seem pretty standard, but you’d be surprised at how much these kinds of things are neglected in favor of detachment or sticking to what is familiar, even if it starts to hurt. 

This coming new year, I do hope that you’ll be able to take the time and do things for yourself to make 2022 a comfortable and fulfilling year. Have you set goals for yourself? Any resolutions? I tried to make a list, but right now the only goals I really have is to write 80,000 words (non-academic writing, hehe), read 40 books, watch 2 films a week, and keep writing for my newsletter. For the most part, I am so grateful for everyone who has given my newsletter a chance, and I hope you know any response is most welcome. Here’s to the new year, to future victories and defeats, to self-improvement and self-forgiveness, and being ourselves. 

Cheers, 

Gabrielle