the fluctuation of two barbies

My Barbie dolls from childhood were pampered like real human beings who were somehow always in our house to hang out with me or blankly heed whatever I command them to do: tend to the kitchen set they have, give their poodle a bath on the pink bathtub (which is partnered with a mini shower that squirts out water when you press a button from the little water dispenser, or play dress up and change their clothes with the other Barbies at bay. I forgot how many dolls I had back then, I lost count. Like girls my age before, I also loved performing ritualistic changes on them, verging on “surgery” because I wanted to play doctor, or “salon” trips that would eventually need some washing for their fragile China-strand hairs. 

I didn’t grow up hating my dolls, nor Barbie herself. Not even the brand. In fact I owe most of my childhood years to it, and without which would have been bleaker considering how my family life panned out for me. I didn’t have the semblance of desire to become like her, or the dream of having her blue eyes and straight hair. Maybe I could say that I wanted to have my own Dreamhouse, or the Cher Horowitz-esque wardrobe choices.

When the Barbie Career Dolls came out, I was ecstatic. I had one ultimate dream back then as a child, and that was to be a doctor. If I remember clearly, the Doctor Barbie looked stunning. Donning her white robe and a tiny stethoscope around her neck, the look embodied a medical professional complete with her clipboard (physician’s clinic sold separately). I didn’t get to have that one, though; I never asked my parents to buy me one, not even the other “Careers.” I just didn’t find the need to have one. Instead, I still gunned for the other Barbies, the one I considered more me or those from the normal series. I still didn’t know then what “self-concept” meant or what knowing yourself is but in picking which Barbie dolls I should own somehow dictated that already. I wanted the ones wearing summer dresses, those that look like they’re going to the mall, or just the casual ones that do not play any “role.” In present day lingo, this Barbie is normal. Local, even.

If Barbie manifested a certain type of life that the thousand versions she portrayed in the many iterations Mattel introduced in the market all these years, then conversely, it also launched a thousand archetypes of girlhood–and womanhood, eventually–that many young people subscribed to, that I subscribed to. Suddenly it became less about acquiring a profession that she was marketed as, but more about the growing want to become better than her and the plasticine ephemera that came with the boxes she was sold in, to kill whatever stereotype her birth in the toy sphere brought. If she can become a lawyer, then I, too, can lead a life that I have authority over. Barbie’s made by businessmen; I’m raised by the internet. 

Photo by Carlijn Jacobs

There’s a double-edged sword somewhere here, the way Barbie is both role model and competition to me. Growing up, I didn’t have a sense of self-image, or what I should do to feel satisfied enough to have confidence as a young girl. But I was insecure, and that’s that. I didn’t have the desire to have the same body as hers (which is, a millionth time we’re reminded now, is unrealistic and physically threatening to try to achieve). But what grew in me was the desire to be just like the other girls who embodied a Barbie-like everything. Svelte bodies, a variety of clothes to choose from on the daily, a nice Malibu pink apartment that has all the pretty things a girl like daydream of: quality furniture, cute pets, delicious food. 

Buy, get tired, buy another

In my adult years from age 21 to present, I built a certain relationship with the objects I’ve acquired over the years. The feeling of impulsively buying something I don’t need vehemently elicited a feeling of superiority over my complaints and other personal woes. Going out for coffee or eating out at restaurants with friends also evoked a similar feeling of authority, something Barbie couldn’t do because, obviously, she is a doll. But there was some resentment that came with it, me vicariously living through socializing and buying shit. I felt like I'd made it when I bought my first fridge, my first couch, my first bed frame and mattress, my first cabinet, my first bookshelves, my first work desk, my first MacBook Pro. The bond I shared with these material things I’ve acquired borders on intimacy sometimes, but there was also a resentful version of me hiding somewhere deep, someone who has had moments of regret for investing so much money on furniture that she didn’t feel anything when she had to let go of some before moving. It’s not like I was forced to let them go, though. The circumstance just required a bit of “sacrifice”; it, however, felt like a breath of fresh air when I no longer saw them within my periphery for the past five months. 

I didn’t so much model myself as a Barbie or as someone who had her life together, someone who embodied feminine prowess. There were girl power moments when I felt more free than I normally do, sure, but it felt stunted, like something big is barring me from feeling a hundred percent content with whatever I have now. Somehow the intimacy I felt towards the objects I acquired when I started living alone felt like movie set props, like the past two years had been a farce with the fake fridge, fake couch, fake bed, fake cabinet. I lived in peace away from the people who tormented me daily but the oasis I built for myself over the years now seems to be a reminder of how trivial it all was. I cannot grasp the feeling now but looking back on it, all I feel is being imprisoned. I was coaxed by my own desires of being independent so much that the bliss I felt was manufactured and scripted. I can’t explain why I felt so, and why it’s been a recurring feeling for so long now. 

Seeing TikTok flourish with influencers who vlog about how their day went or what they eat in a day didn’t help either. There was a moment when I began aspiring to be like those girls who seemed to have their lives together just because their mornings were as productive as I dreamed of: a morning self-care routine with skincare brands that seemed to always work for them, a clip of their Nespresso machine spurting out luxurious liquid gold, and finally, eating an avocado with egg toast on a white ceramic plate speckled with black ink blots. It crushed me, having thought of many ways to belong in the “That Girl” trend on TikTok, totally disregarding the fact that it’s not fucking serious. I would’ve droned on about how the internet fed my social insecurities but that’s a conversation for another day. Point being, Billie Eilish really struck a chord when she liltingly asks everyone what she was made for, because I, too, am a teenager in her late-20s who wants to do something but couldn’t even name one thing to start with. My pseudo-corporate girlie vlogs on TikTok are neatly edited, but deep down all I feel is dread because I feel I’m still not doing enough, and that I should always be this and more. The sense of self I am carefully gathering through every video I post of me recording my outfit is like a cry for help, for self-validation just so I could always remind myself that everyone’s on a different path and that me having my own is already enough in itself. But it’s always easier said than done. 

Maintaining Barbie and her reputation

Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie'' carved it out perfectly when Margot Robbie’s character started questioning everything she came to know in the Barbie world. Her own Dreamhouse didn’t feel like home a day after she thought about dying. She can’t walk properly on her shoes, and her shower’s temperature tends to irritate her. The movie began with the focus on the ultra-glam and bright world of Barbieland, the pink-everything world where Barbies of all kinds, sizes, and color are engaged in what their ‘versions' require them to do. There’s a lawyer Barbie, a doctor Barbie, a mermaid Barbie, even a pregnant Barbie–everything. Indeed anyone can be anything. It’s when the Barbieland continuum gets disrupted when Barbie starts dealing with reality–in this case Los Angeles. 

She then started doubting her own body, the perpetually glorified image in media as having the perfect dimensions. There was a part when Helen Mirren ascertained that Robbie might not have been the best choice to portray insecurity in a woman. She definitely wasn’t, but the movie articulated her “struggles” later on, which was met with a warm realization that she’s just like us. Suddenly even her house and the community she shared with the other Barbies had this coarseness to it. It looked like it was still hers, but marred by edges that used to be soft corners. And like clockwork, her insecurities morphed into fear, fear turned to despair. The Barbie who used to bleed confidence, who was so sure of herself and the environment she lived in, is now forced to confront her reality and what, or who, lies on that plane. 

Cinched between the realities of an ongoing bout for who deserves more rights than who are Weird Barbie and Barbie. Weird Barbie acted as sage to Barbie’s growing concerns within her sphere: cold showers, burnt waffles, feet flattening, cellulite. Weird Barbie has gone through the same thing before too, only that she seemed to be unable to transform herself back to “normalcy”–she stayed weird, deformed, and defamed. Her whole get-up says it all, compared to Barbie’s bubblegum pop wardrobe frothing with attractive colors that never go out of season. Weird Barbie wears the same colors too, only in patchworked manner with colors in less-than aberrant placement. It’s as if Weird Barbie struggled through so much, so in return she’s like the god of decisiveness. For the price of wisdom and personality, you must deal with the cruel cards of fate, while the sheltered Barbie must stay prim and femme so those who struggle must have someone to look up to and aspire to be. This only tells me that women are perpetually separated in two archetypes, if not oscillating between being insane and being stable. There can only be one, always. 

Photo by Carlijn Jacobs

But Weird Barbie, no matter how many times we eye her choice of appearance compared to the intentional Chanel-clad Barbie, is all  of us without the glare of the public eye, most importantly our own eyes. We sell ourselves in palatable chunks of Instagram stories and posts so the Weird Barbie barely shows on the surface, lest we are perceived as struggling pill poppers–and I’m guilty of partaking in this criminal vocation that is self-effacing. All the pent-up frustration I had growing up due to being bullied for my looks can now be erased, in exchange for my sanity and my healthy relationship with food. What used to be an arm’s length rule for material things turned into an obsession that ruefully blinded me of what really constitutes contentment and what made me feel full. How do you pull yourself back up from that kind of self-destruction, something so complex, something that almost all people can relate to because they had a rough childhood? Can a movie heal that part of us that stopped functioning after a certain event forced us to conclude that buying something or weighing less and less by the week can make us forget about the horrors? 

When Barbie was told she can be anything she wants to be, I wanted to scream. I didn’t have that choice like she did, but the movie still felt all the more like a quiet hug after three months of ruminating on it since it came out. I still find myself going back to that part where Barbie sees an old woman and spends a minute looking at her, telling her how beautiful she was. Of all the parts that had a pull on me, that one, next to the montage of women doing things that made them happy, could be one of my favorites. Women having choices and being happy with the cards they’re dealt with is such an alien concept that being shown the bare minimum enjoyment on screen is already so momentous in itself.

The face of ‘this or that’

There were a lot of moments of reckoning for Barbie in the movie, most particularly her jump from being the Barbieland muse to being just her, Barbara, a woman who chose to have a life of making ends meet to find herself. But the unintentional exclusion of Weird Barbie as an end-all and be-all for most, if not all, Barbies appeared as a preclusive framing of women as the perpetual good egg and bad egg. I say unintentional because her arc ended in her den, acting as an ornament of the pseudo-feminist revolution hatched by the other Barbies trying to straighten out the wrinkle that is patriarchy and horses in the fabric of Barbieland. Whatever happened to her, we cannot decide. Does she remain a learned yet struggling being in her world? It’s as if the Weird Barbie was vilified via banishment from Barbieland–and it’s not even consequential; her “owner” did too much ruinous experimenting with her, garnering her too rusty for the bubblegum world of Barbieland. 

If the Barbie movie represented a caveat while in the throes of womanhood, it’s how much Barbie’s tears enshrined itself as a currency in her world. Her first encounter with crises began at her own home, which she felt warranted a cryfest in front of the other Barbies. This isn’t to say that her outburst was her throwing a fit, nor was it bad even if it fell on that classification. But much of her “suffering” in the movie was framed as a vulnerability vis-a-vis her birthright as the “main” Barbie, rather than bodying the culpability of her disruptive thought process that highly involved her whole community. We are forced then to reconcile with a band-aid-solution monologue about womanhood which in itself also felt skewed towards a critique that feels regurgitated.

Photo by Carlijn Jacobs

All of us, who aspire to be like Barbie who realized and accepted full humanity, are not wrong to have done so, though. But if we look at it closer, if we allow ourselves to squint just a bit for the bigger picture to make more sense, a lesser, smaller portion of the threshold of success for Barbie’s ultimate humanity lies on the sacrifices Weird Barbie had to endure. In the real world, there will always be women who act as a catch basin of all the “Make sure you study hard so you don’t end up like her,” threats, and the overbearing “Chanel versus Walmart” comparisons between a corporate woman and someone who works a full nine-to-five shift at a McDonald’s. 

I enjoyed the privilege of having access to basic needs like food, shelter, and education. I was able to have a choice, somehow, despite having to struggle for the things I am reaping right now. But there will always be Barbies who are going to be more comfortable with their lives, whose tears can solve every crisis they have thanks to the less-than glamorous Barbies surrounding them, teaching them a thing or two about numerous realities. I’ve thought about this hard enough but the movie, though having all intents and purposes to bring forward a story about female triumph, felt like a navelgazing project, if not God-complex. I loved the movie. I would want to watch it again for comfort. But it’s now less personal in a way that it milks the woman as a fragile media darling, not as a confidante or model of the selfsame bravery translated by Weird Barbie’s experienced panache. Are women doomed to be compared in all art forms for all eternity? Am I meant to always view someone as a lesser woman than I am because I used their story as a motivation for me to be better at my career, finances, and relationships? Is that justice?

The Barbies of my life while growing up were all women I wanted to be, in the many stages of my life. But I’m not so sure if I ever fit the mold of these women who made it look so easy, getting and living the lives they lived. Somehow, there will always be something missing. I want this Filipina businesswoman’s condo unit with boutique mid-century furniture. I want this influencer’s wardrobe teeming with timeless pieces that I know would also look good on me. I wish to have this TikToker’s makeup collection that could be likened to a shop building up in her BGC condo unit’s living room. This lowkey vlogger’s book collection, plus her niche set of Bottega bags, plus her random travels to Europe with her friends and boyfriend, plus this Instagram model’s body and her bikini collection, everything. And it all makes me feel bad, the way I’m desiring for everything to be mine. And it’s not wrong. It’s just tiring, when your life closely resembles a mortgage you’re required to keep under your name through your purchasing power as a woman because if not, then who am I?

Maybe what constitutes being a woman sprawled with the blanket of capitalism over her is the endless search for contentment and validation through the many lenses she’s viewed with by the varying sets of people she meets in her lifetime. Because no matter what we do there will always be comparisons not just with our male counterparts, but also with the women who are doing more, and those who are doing less. And it’s a weakening thought, to realize that while we are bound with these circumstances until we reach our deathbeds, we are also completely tethered with the throes of capitalism’s affective touch on our fantasies, never mind if it includes spending money or not. I’m not really sure now if “Barbie” really disrupted something; to me it’s more like a feminism skewed towards an exclusionary ideology that only caters to the educated, to those who have access to the ever-changing models of popular culture, a.k.a. those who have WiFi and smartphones. 

While “Barbie” was a tremendously entertaining watch, packed with social commentary disguised as comedy and the whatnot, its social critique begs to be more sincere and original. Gerwig wished for the film to push back on the presently hazy state of Hollywood for women, yes, but we cannot disregard the fact that “Barbie” is from the same vehicle that runs over women from minorities–a self-explanatory fork in the road. 

I’ve gone on a tangent here, really. I was only ever meant to write a wistful piece about the years I spent with my Barbie dolls, but it turned into an unsolicited rant about the two Barbies I’m trying to nurse inside me. 

Vignettes of my life in Asian film (awow?)

I always wondered why Asian movies had this gravitational pull on not just me, but most of my friends. It always felt like there’s a personal touch to it that captures struggle and makes it universal. Or, I’ve always known that, but I just seem to forget to be weird about it a.k.a. lose all semblance of being normal and have unsolicited commentary about how it (like this entry). 

I’ve since resuscitated this blog with the vigor of a girl who has just been given her first lipstick (which was last week, when I went on a bender and decided to Write Again), 

I think it’s okay-ish for me to preface my comeback with a list of films, a la-2014 Audrie sans the unnecessary keyboard smashing and Twitter-speak I used to think were cool when writing essays. (But I’ll never let go of typing ‘anyhoo’ because I profusely depended on New Girl and Jess lingo during my formative years and 2023 is the year of embracing the cringe to entrench freedom.)

Anyhoo, this is another unprompted opinion-slash-discussion piece on my favorite Asian films, excluding the ones from the Philippines because it deserves a stand-alone spotlight of its own. As a Hilda Koronel stan I think I’m doing myself (and this planned “piece”) some justice.

Around two years ago, I moved out of my family’s house because my first job after my (quite long) stint at the newsroom required us to work on-site in Makati (and personally I wanted to be on my own after deciding that staying in that environment burned me out). A lot of shelving out money from my savings had to be done so it really felt major and big girl-y. It wasn’t until a year after that when I found One Million Yen Girl (2008), where a girl moves out and finds an apartment every time she earns one million Yen. Through the menial jobs she manages to get hired for, Suzuko, the protagonist, always finds it either too hard to live or too suffocating due to the people she meets along the way.

In one particular scene, Suzuko is seen writing down her budget computation as she tries to make ends meet and, of course, to earn her next million. This, I believe, spoke to me on so many levels, along with the part where she idly waits at the coin laundry station for her clothes. So many of my days when I started living alone moved along those same lines–the mundanity of errands, the peace grocery shopping gives me, and the overall mixing of peace and chaos. I could be lying in bed in silence but in my head are endless computations of my monthly bills. 

My childhood always felt like everything was on fire, deeming everything I do to be urgent, even when playing or studying. I still couldn’t explain why it was so, but that’s how I would describe it if someone asked me to say what’s at the top of my head. I always wished for it to be otherwise, where an emotional crisis is unusual.

(If this movie embodied something that always felt beyond my reach, it’s the ever so hard dealings of Philippine bureaucracy and overall system. This is hardly the point why I thought of writing about this but life in Japan seems so smooth and serene, completely the opposite here. It would’ve been easier to romanticize what I was going through during my first few months of independence if I had the same setting as Suzuko: the many moments she felt alienated but hushed and consoled by the sceneries, the bike lanes, the peach-picking moments, the crickets humming in the background. I’m going out of tangent here but as a domesticated woman who relies on her home routines to keep her sanity, these things are of unmatched caliber.)

It’s not that I am her, of course. I still come from privilege because I had job security and despite my financial woes I still managed to float through the bills and other finances a.k.a. impulsive purchases of books and snacks, whereas Suzuko wass always chasing something just to fend for herself and survive daily struggles without starving. It is so easy to blame Suzuko for much of her problems, to vilify her for the choices she made but we are remarkably forgetting that she is stripped of the privilege to choose. Most of us tend to decide on the next best option if the first one is unattainable. 

My attachment to this film, I digressed, was how it limned on mundanity and purpose, both coinciding as a call-out to those who are always given the option to choose (a privilege!) and not feel any burden nor obligation to be responsible for–something people my age tend to just gloss over and take for granted. This was heightened when TikTok became my pastime and I kept seeing people who can have whatever they want in one click, materialized in 30-second or one-minute vlogs about recent purchases or hauls. One time I got upset over how this girl (a student, obviously younger than me) went grocery shopping for snacks to fill her fridge, explaining through a voice-over that she doesn’t have a certain budget for food because she doesn’t want to deprive herself of good snacks to munch, all the while living in a luxury condo in a major CBD in Taguig. In one scene, Suzuko can be seen mulling over which vegetables she could check out, careful to not toss her budget up a notch. In another, she is seen listing down her expenses while tapping on a calculator. Things like this made me oscillate between my reality and hers: it felt like a hug that authenticated my struggles.

To an extent, another tremor that triggered my liking to the plot’s seamless portrayal of yearning was her relationship with her younger brother whom she leaves behind with her parents. I priorly didn’t want to go down that path but that tenet of my life begs to be volumized, not shrunk. Leaving home meant leaving my siblings behind. Shielding myself from the anxieties I felt at home meant shielding me from my siblings’ love and bond. I’ve shared a daily life with them since they were born and to decidedly be peeled off of it is gut-wrenching. Years after that big move, this year, I only saw them once. But contrary to the movie, the longing for my kid siblings couldn’t, for all my efforts, precipitate a return to my family. 

Much of this narrative about returning and leaving was also dominant in another favorite, Microhabitat (2017). When my dream of being independent was fully realized, a compromise between needs and wants also took place; I wrestled between giving up survival essentials and clinging onto the worldly matters that (I thought) would be sources of perpetual joy, as long as I kept them and saw them everyday, scattered around my apartment. 

The protagonist, Mi-so, is a thirty-something year old woman who (alarmingly) gives up basic necessities (read: her rent) to keep close to her most prized luxuries: cigarettes, whiskey, and sometimes her boyfriend, an aspiring cartoonist who’s also economically challenged like her. Working as a housekeeper, Mi-so’s income is obviously not enough to cover her expenses, not to mention the fact that she has to regularly issue herself a medication for a rare syndrome that makes her hair turn gray. When her landlord decides to raise her rent, Mi-so arrives at a head-turning decision to keep afloat her priorities: she gives up her apartment, makes a list of her old bandmates-slash-old-friends, and contacts them one by one to stay with them at short intervals of time, ultimately a house to house project of hers. All this just for her to afford cigarettes and whiskey.

During her stay with her friends, Mi-so was met with differing welcomes. Mi-so becomes the static pole of the narrative in a sense that these people she encounters have all made decisions that propelled a 180-degree turn lifestyle; Mi-so is still unable to comprehend how money changed them, and how money can change her and her lifestyle. Conversely, the bandmates can’t wrap their head around how a person like Mi-so rawdogs a life devoted to smoking and drinking. 

I can’t exactly say that I was once her, nor am I planning to delightfully pursue her sojourn across cities for a bed to sleep in. But I grew up moving a lot due to my parents’ erratic relationship. I went from house to house, with different people looking after me. There were weeks where I’d spend my time just floating across Metro Manila and sometimes outside the capital, thanks to my mother and grandmother’s multiple relatives whom I don’t remember at all now. It felt nomadic and exhausting on my part, and I carried that with me until earlier this year, when I moved in (and out) of my third apartment in two years. Sans Mi-so’s questionable choices, it felt familiar for me; there were so many spaces I slept in, yet so very few of it felt necessary because I was too young to reckon any of it as a formative moment. I grew up seeing my imagined perfection of a life lived by others around me: a stable, functional family, without the leaving and packing of bags and riding buses to escape something I couldn’t wrap my head around. 

Microhabitat might just be one of those viewing experiences where it isn’t subtle on reinforcing a realistic ethos of an economy–South Korea is refreshingly painted as not a cradle of cutesy haven of quirky cafés and verdant walkways and parks, but an unromanticized terrain of reality: rent is impossibly unattainable, and is completely the opposite of what K-dramas typified as the norm in the country. The film stands as an important reminder on situational independence and financing yourself, but without coming across as preachy. In contrast to those who have it “easier” than Mi-so–her former bandmates having the luxury of living in a home, the promise of a hot, home-cooked meal at any moment, and the option to be materialistic–they, too, have the forced practicalities they have to take into account. The ballooning amount of housing loans, the lack of kitchen skills and having to rely on someone to cook, the inability to clean and be organized–all addressed by Mi-so who seems to be the catalyst who unconsciously teaches us (them) a top-billed reflection in Not Having it All in Life.

Subtleties aside, it’s a kind of self-introspection that necessitates a moment to portray one’s own reality; it’s most definitely not the corny execution of the adage “be grateful,” but more of an entertaining yet reflective aide-memoire that is “you’re next.” As someone who lives in an economically challenged country, it’s either the homelessness I can suffer from, or the emotional turmoil of being dealt with by either of her bandmates’ personal crises. Adding to that would be what my friends always talked about when the topic of money and careers comes up: “I’m one hospitalization away from bankruptcy.” It rings true and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it everyday because accessible, if not free, healthcare in this country is elusive and will probably remain so in the forthcoming years. 

Shirkers (2018) almost twists the knife in the same manner One Million Yen Girl carves out a girl’s mission to address their derailment, within the creative industry, a repressive family, an abusive system, or just life in general. In this auto-documentary, Sandi Tan, its writer, director, producer, and editor, revisits and attempts to trace back where her lost titular movie had gone after a white  man seemingly stole it. It might have seemed to be intended as a meditative exhibition of girlhood, friendship, and creativity,, but a movie about such subject loses its meaning when themes of heartbreak, the unraveling of pasts, and unpacking the self is excluded–and Tan perfectly captured it in this caper of a flick, a semi-detective movie that I’m very endeared with in spite of its hard-hitting intimations of Asian resilience preceded by frustration.

The dreamy cinematography itself gives it away: it’s a hazy recollection of a youth filled with guileless vigor and blind idealism. In the picture, Tan, a bespectacled teen in 1992, is a recurring figure of commitment and boundless grit for anything cool and youthful to help her build her career in the creative industry. For Tan, making a movie was the very apex of that ambition as a youngster. During the production, though, Tan was under the influence of an American who fooled her and her friends-colleagues, ultimately stealing the movie from them. Years later, the movie’s raw footage resurfaced–but the sound that went with it was lost, leaving the film unfinished forever. Shirkers was the product of the search for the film’s missing parts.

The melodrama that surrounds the documentary couldn’t be more perfectly described as Tan’s attempt to locate a part of herself, of her life. Lest she wants to live within the disaffect, Tan would not have gone to such great heights in the making of this project. She ultimately earned it by the end of the documentary. The American man (whom I refuse to even name here despite the specter of this presence that loaned the documentary its jarring, dark themes) may have caused the girls the project of a lifetime, but they ultimately got it back, named the narrative back as theirs. The white man no longer has the last laugh on Shirkers. The girls do. 

Reclaiming something you know you own isn’t always a creative journey, nor dreamy and romantic as Shirkers. But it is momentous and is built on the remnants of what was once taken. I personally cannot name anything about myself that I need to reclaim, nor can I point to anything in particular that deserves any fuss or attention like Shirkers. I would say maybe my girlhood but I’d sound like a broken record. I’m not downplaying anything remotely about my past life as a bouncing little girl; I’m still living through some things I know I’ll eventually need to move on from. Maybe my Shirkers moment would come later in my life, I’m not sure.

I’m not an overlooked artist in the creative industry either, so there’s nothing I could claim mine, except maybe this blog and my journals (that will remain private until I leave this mortal plane). If there’s anything, though, I think it would be my personal view of myself and how I used to treat myself. I believe I’ve outgrown many things now, like religiously watching around ten films a week even on school nights then proceeding to write about it, mixtapes, and finally, even dreaming of a creative career that allows me to do Creative Things that are, frankly, almost always elusive for ordinary Filipinas like me. 

Like the girls in Shirkers, unless you have the right surname and the right funds, you’ll make it big. It’s the saddest reality I’ve long trained myself to swallow and move on from. They didn’t have much power then over the opportunist American who took away their dreams, much less the money and other means that could have helped them foreground the man’s culpability. Years after graduating, the glittering novelty I used to attribute to writing faded into a silent resentment for quite a while now because it has felt more like a thankless job, and less as a refuge. I put it aside not with fierce indignation for the prospect of “greener pastures,” or because I was just being “smart” with my career choices. I absolutely hated it and dreamed of being anywhere but wherever I was (at a newsroom and eventually under print broadcast). 

But in those years also (somehow) grew an anti-vulnerability against the frustrations I had towards creating. I guess. I mean I found the drive to revive this blog again. I found the time and energy to save this essay again on a newly organized Google Drive. I’m back on Mubi (not yet subscribed) to browse more films I know I could trust to give me a good time–and a learning experience. I’m committed to new activities and hobbies like getting stressed over F1 and saving money for Sonny Angels. In Gen-Z speech, I’m back on my bullshit, whether new likes or old loves. 

Reclaiming is funny business, I gather. Mostly necessary, as it compels me to fall back on something inside me that’s always been there that (re)surfaces at different points of my life. I’m glad I thought of this, relating all these emblems of myself in Asian movies, just like old times: 2014 afternoons at the fifth floor of UST Library as a starry-eyed college student who had a million selves she’s trying to serve and honor. I hope she fares well moving forward. There’s so much to write about, and reclaim. 

mumbling "i'm just a girl" for the remainder of 2023

I got my own copy of Rookie Yearbook 3 yesterday from the mail and I couldn’t explain what I felt while leafing through its worn pages. Wistfulness, if not nostalgia, dominated–there’s still this rager inside with whatever’s left of what was extinguished when reality compelled me to be practical. I had a good eye scrolling the other week; If it weren’t for a friend's post saying that she bought one, I wouldn’t have arrived at this Conclusionary Emotion (It’s from a warehouse sale I ordered from and I only got it for P99, a total of only P137 including the shipping fee. If you told 16-year-old me that I’d get it for more than quadruple of its original price nine years on, I would have laughed; one copy used to cost almost P3,000, excluding the shipping fee.) 

The year was 2008 and I’ve just been given my own PC set at home, complete with an internet connection. It was the peak of Windows Vista and I always had the best time coming home to it from school; weekday afternoons meant scrolling thoroughly across varying gaming platforms, poring over Disney edits on YouTube (my favorite was High School Musical edits of Troy and Gabriella while a cloyingly sweet pop music plays in the background), and of course the endless pages of blogs I’ve read. I read opinion pieces, pages upon pages of fanfiction, learned how to copy-paste articles from international websites in lightning-speed mode before the paywall activated the scroll-canceling screen of grey on my face. All these efforts, all the hours owed to being online, fortunately–if sometimes regrettably–built my long-standing claim that I want to write, I should write for a living, I will die a writer. It's flooded with cliche, that thought process, considering how my career trajectory over the years spouted from me resenting everything I did to save face and be perpetually known as a writer. I actually believed that being “raised by the internet” garnered me the right to document whatever there is to document. I'm literally the most embarrassing person I know.

I have Tumblr to thank for that part of my pre-adolescent years, my cliche grrrl-power arc–I saw people my age get too in-depth with how they felt toward something so trivial, like their lunch food, wax poetry over an episode of a sitcom, or express this kind of glow they feel for a song, a poem, or a book. It influenced me to be an introspective 12-year-old who would yap about her crises: are mismatched Chucks cool? Is cutting my own bangs rebellious enough to send my Dad into a frenzy of remorse for not allowing me to go to a Mayday Parade show? Am I tweaking my Greying by Gabrielle Wee Tumblr theme enough for people to find me laid-back but still cool and a bit rough on the edges because I listen to The Strokes and The Psychedelic Furs? There was always something inside that needed to punch its way out to be seen, to be heard, to be read. What started as a penchant in asking my mom to buy me the newest Total Girl or Candy Mag issues ended up being a stepping stone to a girlhood owing its shelf life to dreaming of a life à la-Andy Sachs.

Then came Rookie Mag, a virtual dream that I treated like a best friend, a sister I come home to every afternoon after school with a few simple clicks. It was a refuge of all sorts, an educational trip to survive girlhood and how to actually live it in the style of kitschy, dreamy zine. It became my first online friend, my own garden of plans as a teenager who wished to be like Tavi Gevinson: a self-serious online savant, a genuinely cool word fairy, always knew what to say and how to translate it as doodles and collages. Much of what I know now about pop culture–Greta Gerwig, Broad City, film photography, Sonic Youth, and the Fanning sisters–and life’s in and outs, I learned from Rookie during my formative years.  

My wild guess on its personal pull on me is that it somehow serves as a reminder that my 26-year-old anxieties could still be weathered by parsing through material that serves as guides for 12- to 15-year-olds. That version of me, an older cohort-slash-reader of this record of eternal youth, could be likened to finding a puzzle piece that completes the navigation process of Growing Up and Making Decisions.  

Every time something from my childhood (or teenhood) resurfaces, I sort of ruminate, limning on the identities I'd had over the years, hence the moments (days) I pored over this thick book that bridges me to a life I used to have, which I lived through a bit too fast for my liking. And that’s all there is to having this book with me: seeing glimpses of my past quirks like mixtapes and artists from my young adult years: deciding that it has been too fast, too quick for me to see the ending of. So owning a piece of my past can be a bit of a special montage-viewing experience.  

Being in a corporate job is not always gratifying. Sometimes it’s thankless, sometimes you’re just thankful to end the day because you know it’s gonna reflect in your next paycheck. What I treat as a highlight may not be the same for those who do it by heart, with purpose. For me it’s not an office day without doing my makeup, arriving at the office in style (mostly, if not everyday), drinking my coffee in my favorite insulated mug, and admiring my desk setup with my three Sonny Angels. I do my tasks diligently and never miss a deadline, but I may be the shallowest, most useless fixture in this setting. Nobody has to remind me that I was handed this job because of my privilege; I remind myself of the fact everyday so I try to be good at it and not appear like an ingrate. It felt like implanting my own agency when I started entering free Google courses on mastering Microsoft Excel, planning corporate strategies and branding. I wanted to be relevant, I wanted to be useful, I wanted to stop believing that everything I do should be glamorous and cutesy, Lisa Frank-esque. The only time it should be will be how I decorate my desk, hence the Sonny Angels on my right to “watch” over me.

There’s no contextual meaning behind why I added this anecdote. Maybe I wanted it to sound like a situation-versus-desire scenario; it’s not. I’d like to think that this is me heralding my girlhood with respect to how my late-twenties panned out. Not totally what I envisioned, but somehow just floating with lots of looking back on the island of teenhood and how it feels fast-forwarded with circumstances that I couldn’t help. 

Revisiting my past like this, even writing extensively about it, feels like a taxonomy of sorts filled with feelings that will once become previously-felt emotions too in the long run. Teenhood lasted me a full lifetime, but was still so fleeting, so limited and short-lived. There have been numerous moments I remember from those years, and like most adults my age, I would give anything in exchange for me to be young again and be free from the limitations set by myself and the environment I grew up in. 

Coveting youth, taking ownership of my past, and establishing my self-will on all things ‘me’ didn’t always have to be sad. I thought otherwise when I first laid my hands on this particular Rookie book. It felt like I was gonna mourn what once was, the first time I held it, and grieve the lost time I used to spend on reading old material or collecting magazines. But it didn’t feel like grief at all–it was still the same, still a bit rusty on some parts but wiser nonetheless, with the age that came with it.

So the reflection and recording, the writing of a whole ass essay on finding a piece of myself and how I felt about it, is me finally paying back what I owe myself all these years: a space for acknowledging every stage of my life, both the good and the bad, the dumb and the wise (mostly clueless). In the different stages of life I’ll arrive at, there will always be little Forevers that will accumulate, which I will, most probably, come back to and rewatch like comfort episodes from a comfort TV show. 

I’ll always end up looking back on my younger years, and be emotional over it. Never in a Fuck-Time-Passing Vibe, (although it would’ve felt as such if this were in 2018) but in a Life-Is-Funny Vibe. I’ll never be that kid again, and I’ll never be that woman again–all pertaining to particular stages of my life. Transitioning is not as scary as it did before, awful parts and all. Somehow knowing that everything in life has a temporal aura is a comforting thing. Yes, I’d always be pining for certain parts of my life to happen again, or to have some semblance of what it felt like before when the world wasn’t as crazy as it is now, but it is what it is. I can be cold and bitter over the fact that time is not slowing down for me, not for anyone, but it’s up to me if I want to roll with it with my 14-year-old mind, or be present for my nearing-her-30s self, while still carrying my 14-year-old heart with me in the shape of a book I received not over a week ago. 

Allison from The Breakfast Club said that your heart dies when you grow up. I used to always carry that with me, through high school and college. But I wish some time machine could take me back to that moment of pure belief and whisper to my young ear that no, it’s not fully true. Maybe sometimes it brings some truth to it, but most of the time it’s just me being upset that the world is too real for me to receive what I want, or for me to experience some tenderness when everything feels cold and concrete-hard. I was a cynic growing up. I thought being that way cushioned whatever heartbreak I’d experienced and saved me the pain and hassle of being human, excluding myself from the time it exhausted for complaining. I bemoaned the fact that the Vans Warped Tour never reached my country, but I’ll never cry over a boy, I thought. I was dead wrong. Heartbreak shaped me and taught me so much about myself, partially thanks to Chiquitita by ABBA. 

There may still be moments where I wish I understood what my teenhood was about, and most especially why it happened the way that it did. But I no longer wish to stay there, as it kind of lessens its impact in my (present) life, all the while losing the sincerity I feel towards it. There is nothing for me to forgive from those past selves I came to know and sit with, for there was nothing wrong with how I let it happen; not even the lack could cancel out the full and good ones. More importantly, I don't need to understand all of it. These books, archived websites, glossy magazines replete with tutorials on how to make beaded bracelets or homemade hair dyes, and the monthly updates of Batrisha Comics, old journals and keychains, are minutiae that serve as a reminder of an era whose lifespan lasted as soon as I started Googling about sanitary pads and what diets should I practice to be thinner. My world suddenly became scary wide then, a bit too loose in some parts that I found hard keeping close and tight around me–and it was supposed to be that way. I can’t always chase after an outcome that best fits the scene in my head. This is what my whims, quirks, and hobbies are for, to pad whatever disappointment I choose to moan about and to retreat to. If it weren’t for my (rather shallow) crises, I wouldn’t be so committed to any of these. 

I was wrong to assume that being a writer is a glamorous choice, or to decide that anything I partake in would come easier, notwithstanding my degree or the university I graduated from. In college I thought it was gonna be a breeze, because I spent two years in the school organ having my own desk, having free rein over the choicest coverages for the arts and culture beat. It gave me no chance to thwart my expectations in the coming years as a journalist by practice. The movies I watched and the TV shows I spent my time absorbing were all wrong, and admittedly I lacked the contextual knowledge about the real world. And it’s thankfully so, as I can confidently pronounce now as a 26-year-old that it's okay, I turned out okay. Not everything is as it seems, and I continue to be grateful for that.

Remembering should suffice, always. I owe that to myself (I think), if I can’t remotely fulfill any dream or plan I had for myself. Every recalled song, movie, or pop-culture event that I closely followed then, is an act of pouring what I can for my younger self in the form of chronicling a single feeling and expanding it into vast meanings, as wide as the ever evolving world (and life) I used to be scared of. Re-telling is a form of self-love, I believe. It can’t change the world, no. I don’t certainly contribute anything useful for society by writing this down; I’d be delusional if I believed so. But maybe this is me doing myself a favor by recognizing that I can never be anyone else, and that this little piece of writing belongs to me, along with the time and emotions and other pieces of media I claim to love. 

Several years ago, I used to always check prices of every Rookie Yearbook that came out, even months after its first press came out just to imagine if I could afford them. As expected, my parents didn’t agree because it cost a fortune. Understandably so, because as a working class family, buying a P3,000-worth book couldn't be justified. I wish I knew back then that I’d only have to wait around 12 to 13 years to physically own and hold one in my hands (and a signed copy at that!). And that the time it took was an ultra necessity for me; the in-between years served as a prologue.

It’s all in good faith, and timing, this little, minor moment in my adult life. A mere blip in the radar, but consequential nonetheless. And because this is the first time in years that I wrote something for myself.