What We've Been Writing #20: Wait, this is triggering a memory in me
I gave up on sticking to a theme for this month's digest, because there's just so much good writing to get into. And then it all comes together...
I’m putting this month’s digest far later than I should. It has been a pretty hectic couple of weeks. Between the rains and the impeachment trial against the vice president; between my day job and the most recent Stack Natin Hangout just last weekend—it feels like I just haven’t had the time to sit down and actually do the picking.
What I’ve spent a lot of time on is deciding on a theme. The thing is, this can get in the way of what I’m actually trying to do, which is feature some noteworthy writing from the Filipinos of Substack. And there’s a lot of them these past few weeks, on a wide range of topics, so wide that mustering a connective thread was harder than I imagined. So, for this month, I won’t try. Let’s just group everything in sets.
In the water
First off, a couple of pieces taking off from the tragic deaths of two members of the Ateneo Blue Eagles, Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili. Their deaths—drowning off the shore of Aurora during a team-building exercise that authorities have determined would have determined the team’s final roster in the upcoming season of the UAAP, justifying their decision to charge members of the team’s staff of hazing—have captured the Filipino’s imagination, mostly down to Baterbonia’s mother’s grief, and the fact that he was widely seen as the hope not just of his family, but of his town.
A month on, and something unique is happening: some Visayan content creators have continued milking Baterbonia’s death specifically in a bid for views and engagement. I’ll let arquilian describe it.
People started talking about him like he was being processed for sainthood or whateva like, full canonization energy.. I mean, gurl.. the Vatican hasn’t even been notified.
Complete strangers were leaving comments with the authority and intimacy of lifelong friends, which, to be clear, they were not, could not have been, and everyone seemed completely unbothered by the gap between those two things. But the parasocial architecture had already done its work. The brain had already filed him under known. And when the other half of that relationship disappears, the audience doesn’t grieve less. They grieve louder.
Now, of course it’s perfectly normal to grieve the loss of a young boy we most likely hadn’t heard of until he passed. That was me, mixed with my frustration at how badly Ateneo leadership tried to handle, and eventually mishandled, the situation. But how far does the expression have to go if you’re not family and friends? And also, Kian is keen to point out:
Rene went viral. But Divine Adili, who died in the same water on the same day, didn’t. He was a foreign student athlete and the algorithm simply had less use for his grief. Which is a sentence that should not be possible to write about a person.
On the other hand, I’ve had an essay from John Pucay in my head these past few weeks, published around the time the tragedy first emerged, in which he tells of a similar situation he and his friends faced.
At first, we tried to swim back. But the sea, which used to be calm and quiet, suddenly roared to life, like a spider that sensed prey caught in its webs. The waves crashed on us, one after another, pulling us further and further from the shore.
I’m not a “real” swimmer in the sense that I can only float and move slowly in the water. I thought about how one shouldn’t swim against the tide. But I was also afraid the waves would carry me too far out that I wouldn’t have the strength and stamina to swim back.
My thoughts paused when I noticed that one of our friends, Geimai, the shortest among our group, at 4’10, had disappeared.
Considering how we eventually saw, for some reason, drone footage of the Ateneo players being rescued from the rip current in Aurora, reading this piece felt a little more visceral than it was designed to be.
On a seesaw
Now, a couple of posts around the release of Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love—on our Independence Day, no less. It’s as good an opportunity, as any, to be proud of our Filipino heritage. Well, there’s also Alex Eala’s success at Wimbledon, but this one, you can sing along to.
Here’s a piece from Jeanne Paulino on relating to a fellow Filipino-American making waves in the world:
I wish I had Olivia Rodrigo growing up. Growing up, I had ambiguity. High School Musical, a revolution for 2000s Disney kids, featured a vaguely diverse cast including the romantic female lead Gabriella Montes. Her last name alludes to Latin roots, obscuring the fact that the actress her plays her, Vanessa Hudgens, is part Filipina. I had uniformity: standards of beauty were strictly and cogently thin, blonde, and pale. I had whitewashing. I owned Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku perfume and thought the fashion at Coachella (which, ironically, Hudgens was hailed the queen of) was trendy rather than culturally appropriative.
Dave Cortel Legalisa goes just as far, talking about how Olivia’s Sour has soundtracked a situationship then… and, thankfully, not now, not the new album, although it does bring back all that into focus:
The heart is not a reasonable organ. The heart is, in fact, the least reasonable organ in the body, and I have a gallbladder, so I know what unreasonable organs look like. So when Olivia Rodrigo releases an album called you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love and admits her songs always come out “laced with a little melancholy” — I receive this as a direct transmission. She is not speaking to a general audience. She is speaking to me, specifically, twenty-eight years old, in Samar, eating dinner with the person who once made me feel like an optional line item in his emotional budget, still feeling things I have every theoretical tool to stop feeling and zero practical capacity to stop feeling.
Under the rainbow
Pride Month was last month, and of course there are a lot of pieces marking it. Know what, I could’ve devoted a whole digest to it… but then I thought it’d go live two weeks after Pride Month. Also, I’d like to begin with a piece from last May: a nifty piece of music criticism from leiv connecting Fitterkarma’s hit “Pag-Ibig ay Kannibalismo II” to the travails of the LGBTQ community in the Philippines.
Because the hunger of the secret is so heavy, you learn the currency of the closet very quickly. In the context of the song’s playful horror fantasy, the line “Huwag ka lang magsabi ng totoo” reads as a joke. But it lands differently if you have ever grown up queer in the Philippines. Not saying the truth is not a joke.
Don’t say the truth just because this alone-time with your Dad made you feel closer, and suddenly, brave. Don’t say the truth in the confessional box. Don’t say it anywhere it could cost you something—because in this country, it can always cost you everything.
Here, silence is a form of protection. But protection, sustained long enough, starts to feel like suffocation. What the silence leaves behind is not safety; instead, it is a ghost town of everything you refused to let yourself feel.
Next up, writer Noelle Capili-Ruiz talks about how their parents dealt with their sexuality. It’s a fun story, honest. (I did spend too much time figuring out Noelle’s pronouns and not finding answers—I am so sorry!)
Noong grumadweyt ako ng kolehiyo, doon ako nag-out sa magulang ko. Inunti-unti ko sila. Nauna kay Mommy syempre kasi parang BFF ko na siya. Si Daddy, ineeducate ko. Ineexplain ko yung mga bagay na hindi niya gets. Basta nung nakakita siya ng Pride Flag sa IG ko at nung nalaman niya na magho-host ako sa 2016 Metro Manila Pride, doon niya na na-gets na badeng ang anak niya.
Nakakatuwa rin ang mga magulang ko kasi kapag nagbabakasyon sila sa ibang bansa, nagse-send sila ng photos ng mga may Pride Flag or may kabaklaan! Minsan, nagda-drive sila sa Casiguran, Aurora, bigla nilang shinare sa akin na kulay “LGBTQ” daw yung mga semento. Nakakatuwa kasi hanggang ngayon, suportado nila ako, lalo na ngayong may asawa na ako (si BB AK). Palagi pa nga silang bumibisita sa tahanan namin ni BB AK!
Finally, we return to Evan Ⓥ (he/him), reminding us of the undercurrents of why Pride has to exist to begin with: a continued assertion from the community to exist and be accepted. That’s gotten a little more difficult these days, he says:
Could I be honest, if only for a moment? The discourse is exhausting. Not that I believed that the few articles I wrote years back would change public opinion instantly, but I had hoped, back then, that the arc of the moral universe was unstoppably bending towards justice. But seeing this hate online, not just in the Philippines but in other countries too, felt like things had snapped back.
I clearly understand that this is a marathon, and what the trolls want is to wear us out and divide us into smaller and smaller fragments — queer in-groups fighting against other in-groups over the most insignificant issues. This makes it easier to extinguish our voices.
It’s all a numbers game: time, resources, energy. For a minority like our community, this can seem an insurmountable task. How can we win when we’re but a small part of society? This fear is also a useful tool to silence us.
The more we feel insignificant, the quicker we are to police ourselves before they do.
Amidst all the memories
Finally, a couple of more personal pieces that really caught me unawares.
First off, mon talks about learning what has become of her ex since they parted ways… and the whole thing about the people you used to know, but no longer do. I mean, of course, this would resonate with me.
Last I saw of him, before our twists and turns tangled into one big Gordian knot, that was exactly what he was doing. I distinctly remember scrolling through my feed one day about a year ago when I stumbled upon his angular features smiling menacingly up at me—as the face of a sunscreen ad. Which, unwelcome jumpscare aside, was not a bad gig at all.
But climbing instructor feels borderline absurd. Like a fact that had been garbled in transit. This can’t be the boy I once knew.
Except it is: one cursory look at his Instagram account—which I’d long since muted—reveals a wall of posts filled with colored stones and chalked hands and sleeveless shirts. And, of course, his super hot, vaguely masc-presenting girlfriend, who seems to climb better than he does.
Finally, I’m keen to give the final word to Yannah. There’s this one piece of hers that I had pegged for a digest a few months ago, but decided against it because it felt too personal for me to quote like this. And then she writes another one and, yes, I’m as confronted, and no, I’m not doing what I did before. You go see it, if you haven’t yet.
I remember the excitement in you, the eagerness, the way you shoved me onto your bed. Your spit flew. You were screaming. Is this what they taught you in that prestigious academy? Is this how they taught you to raise a daughter? I was a frozen girl child, frightened and still, stone-faced, stone-faced. I stayed there for what felt like an hour while you threatened me, and before the blow could land—I was already clenching my ass, balling my fists—you seemed to remember who I was. Who you were. That I was a daughter and you were a father, and you didn’t want to feel like your piece of shit patriarch.
You backed off, Dad. Good for you. But I need you to know that I was raped the same way. This is your penance. You need to keep reading. You need to look at me, you need to look at what you had a part in.
Between the last two Stack Natin Hangouts I note that a lot of the younger generation are coming to this platform and turning it into a space all their own. Substack was built as a newsletter platform for media types; now it’s becoming a blogging platform with a social media element, and all these confronting and raw and unfiltered pieces. As a 37-year-old, I’m not always sure if I should be reading these, much more amplifying them for the world to see. But I feel now that I have to. Good writing aside, it reminds me that the kids are all right. Maybe they can fix what we couldn’t when we were young.
Wait, wait, wait. Did I just stumble upon a theme for this digest? Look at all that what’s going on has triggered in them. It happens to us all the time. And the strength to turn them into essays and sharing them with us… it is a theme, right? I’ll stick with it, right. I’ll stick with it.
Before I wrap our longest digest yet, a shoutout to the newest sign-ups on the directory: Bry's Internal Monologues, Camille, Ivan Jose, Jill, mon, Norvin B. Cuentas, Pamcy, Richard Johnson Angay, Roanne and sage ꩜! Want to join? Sign up here. Want some inspiration? Browse the directory and find your next favorite read. And now, I shall rest, before I try figuring out Discord…