A Wardrobe of Identities
My maternal grandfather has great taste in patterned shirts– plaid, striped, flower-patterned designs of various bursts of color. He loves color: the more vibrant, the better. ‘It’s the colors that I wear more than the clothes themselves,’ he always says. It is simply a way for him to commune with the world without words. The colors speak to him, then speak for him once he puts them on, each hue a part of his personality– what he likes and what he’s like.
Unlike him, I don’t have a colorful wardrobe. Most of my clothes are either hand-me-downs or bought from ukay-ukays. But I do have a different kind of wardrobe and its contents speak to and for me, too– one comprised of books, a collection of roughly 300 works of fiction, with splashes of nonfiction, philosophy, psychology, and history here and there.
‘Have you read all of these?’ is the usual question my friends ask whenever I show them my collection– displayed on a makeshift bookshelf in my sister’s bedroom, overcrowding a nook near the upstairs window, filling a huge balikbayan box to the brim in my brother’s room, and littered in stacks along our wooden stairs. The question somehow swells my spirits with pride. I’ve always viewed the shelves of paper and ink as an extension of myself, like my grandfather and his clothes.
In fact, I was told I craft a Self from the fictional characters that speak to me the loudest, pulling out garments of personalities that I mix and match to present what I hope passes for an identity.
My response: I had to. It’s a way to relearn myself, I told him, to go back to where I started or, at least, figure out who I am comfortable enough to be.
“Like you said,” I told him, “‘We can’t really make a perfect copy of those we imitate.’” But a part of me still asks, Will I ever find an identity I will consider original? My own?
I feel like somewhere along my growing up, I kinda lost sense of who I was (or maybe I never really got a firm idea of the identity I want to create). So I find solace in absorbing fictional identities to ‘retrace my steps’ in hopes that it will help me move forward.
Maybe, in this psychological closet raid, a consistent “style” reveals itself, at the very least.
NOAH SWEETWINE
Currently, my favorite garment in my wardrobe, the one that always sits closest, is Noah Sweetwine from Jandy Nelson’s I'll Give You the Sun. He’s this eccentric boy who claims he can see people’s souls as animals. Colors speak to him. He’ll get along well with my grandfather. He has an ‘invisible museum’– a psychological archive of surreal painting ideas inspired by his own life. He’s not afraid to be as sensitive, romantic, and as weird as he can possibly be. I like him. I want to be like him.
A friend I made online introduced me to Noah. ‘You remind me a lot like him,’ she said. She sent me the book for my 19th birthday with a note that read: “Happy birthday, Noah. Read about yourself.”
At first, I was hesitant. I was in the middle of trying to fight against the introjecting thing by enforcing a year-long reading slump. At that time I was already aware of my tendency to obsessively internalize and anchor myself to the personalities of fictional characters, trying to live their lives to cope with my struggles with reality.
For months I put off reading the book until eventually, my curiosity got the best of me. I fell in love with the book, although I didn’t really see myself in Noah when I first read it. Or at least I didn’t choose to see it.
But some lines resonated with me:
1. “'...maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,' I say. 'Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.'”
2. “A broken heart is an open heart,” and,
3. “Quick, make a wish. Take a (second or third or fourth) chance. Remake the
world.”
It gave me a different perspective when it came to using my wardrobe of identities. The book became my bible. Every time I started the book over for my favorite lines, I saw more and more of what my friend meant about seeing Noah in me. There is a part of me that Noah’s character tries to make me remember, a Self I lost and am trying to find again. He encourages me to be true, to be honest, and authentic, which for some time I have failed to be.
READING SLUMP
Between 2014 to 2015 I had lived a lie. I pretended I still went to my classes as an engineering student, meanwhile spending the money my parents gave for my tuition to buy more and more books to fill the emptiness I felt inside.
I submerged myself in fictional worlds– Panem, Narnia, Hogwarts, Lorien, Mirrorworld, and Inkworld, to name a few– to escape the reality of the horrors bestowed upon me each morning. I scrambled through pages, looking for bits and pieces of myself I couldn’t seem to form properly. What kind of person would my family, my peers, strangers, would everyone like? The books piled up, until I became a Frankenstein monster of fictional characters, made up of mismatched pieces of personality that barely formed a person.
And then my parents found out about my little secret. They stopped providing me with all sorts of support and I was forced to find work to look after myself.
But at least the lies stopped. I was free to be as miserable as possible without hiding myself under stitched-up pieces of identities. I just read books to pass the time, to live life barely stepping out of the house for three years, apart from work. Until I grew tired and enforced the reading slump.
LOVE ALWAYS, CHARLIE
That was in stark contrast to when I went back to the Philippines for college in 2013. I always kept a book with me because I was the only one in our batch of graduates from the Philippine School Doha who went to UP Los Baños. I knew people, sure, but they were from the past six schools I went to before PSD; I didn’t exactly have good memories with them.
The constant presence of a book in my bag was a reminder of my six friends in Qatar who reintroduced me to reading (I’ll talk about them later on, as I trace further back in my history with printed pages). They, both my friends and the books I read, had been my family when my biological one failed to be. They also had been the only people I could actually consider my friends.
That time I saw myself in Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Like him, I knew how it was to be the quiet kid who reads books and sees a lot of things. But the universe had its way of twisting even my twisted coping mechanism: I didn’t know introjecting Charlie would entail me to the same fate as him with a relative.
His tragic experience with Aunt Helen was reflected in Kuya Pablo, the seventeen-year-old nephew of my grandaunt’s husband. My experience with Kuya Pablo was the reason why I grew scared of virtually every person I saw around me (maybe also why I now identify as demisexual). Even the slightest touch sends my skin crawling (I was never comfortable with hugs since then).
I tried to find reasons not to go to class– to no avail. I got sicker and sicker by the day, both psychologically and physically, until going to class for the last few weeks of the semester became a nightmarish notion akin to Stephen King’s horrific imagination. Needless to say, I failed all of my classes in the very first semester of my college life.
My parents were furious. They wanted me to process my readmission as soon as I could, but I couldn’t even get out of bed to eat. I was in a constant loop of crying and feeling numb. But they firmly insisted.
Okay, I said. I’ll go back to school. Except I didn’t.
NICO DI ANGELO, THE GHOST KING
I never brushed my hair for as long as I could remember. My hair always fell down across my forehead and is never brushed up.
I had messy curls, dark eyes, and a constant sullen expression, like Nico di Angelo from the Camp Half-blood books by Rick Riordan. I imitated Nico since I met him in Titan’s Curse, probably because I saw myself in him to some degree. He was once an enthusiastic, lowkey annoying kid who loved his older sister, Bianca. When– Spoiler alert!– Bianca died, he became this silent, reclusive presence shrouded by death (he’s the son of Hades) and mystery.
Like him, I was supposed to have an older sister, too. The difference was my mom lost her due to a miscarriage. Unlike him, I never got to know my sister but I desperately wished I had the chance. Since I learned of this information from my grandmother when I was nine, I always imagined what it would be like if my sister were alive, and wondered if maybe the reason why I found it so hard to be the eldest child was that I wasn't supposed
to be.
Like me in the first few years of high school, Nico found solace in solitude and chose to stay away from most of the people from Camp Half-blood, until he realized he had unlikely friends there.
And so he decided to give things another go, to start over.
SILVERTONGUE MEGGIE
‘It’s okay, ‘nak. You can just start over and be anyone you like.’
This was what my mom told me whenever I transferred to each of the seven schools I’d been to before college. I took the advice close to heart. For my senior year in high school back in 2012, it took months and a lot of hit-and-miss for ‘anyone you like’ to mean someone who had actual friends, because for the longest time I had avoided it. I used to think, “Why bother? I’m going to leave this school soon enough anyway.”
But when you live in a place where mountains and trees are replaced by sand dunes and wide roads that stretched for miles, keeping everyone at a distance and shrouding yourself in mystery wasn’t very ideal. We had to go to Qatar in 2012 when my parents made up after twenty-two years of separation. I was fourteen.
Everything just felt dormant and stale. I started to lose myself– my identity, my mental health, and my attachment to what was happening in reality. I knew no one apart from my own family, and my relationship with my family at that time wasn’t exactly friendly. I had a hard time seeing eye-to-eye with my father, who I barely saw until we moved with him. My mom grew more distant and indifferent to this civil war, too, once more consumed by her new work.
I started acting out. I got jealous of my siblings, who were each a parent’s favorite. Our family developed an unspoken agreement that I would always stay in the house whenever the family went out. That way everyone won. The downside was that I was always alone with my crippling thoughts.
It’s okay, my mom said. In truth, it wasn’t. I didn’t feel like ‘anyone I liked’ at all. I was a ghost walking in and out of rooms– there but barely existing, barely living.
So for senior year, I decided to change that, to wiggle out of that shell of mystery, to ‘start over’ as my mom taught me. I managed to include myself in a circle of friends. Together we formed a sort of weird, reverse Breakfast Club. We were this band of loud, obnoxious geeks who hoarded seven spots out of the class’ top ten and whom no one really made fun of because geeks were somehow cool in the desert. Go figure.
Finally, I felt like I belonged somewhere.
They were the ones who reintroduced me to books. We had a year-level competition for the school’s Reading Week. Each section was supposed to build a reading nook. Of course, our little group took charge of most of it. Janella, the de facto leader of our group, and Natalie assigned people to bring as many books as they could. Evan let us borrow a spare bookshelf. Dian and Sarah brought a carpet, beanbags, and a bunch of plushies. I took care of the decorations since I had a knack for crafts.
Students from other sections can borrow from each other’s nooks. People opted for Harry Potter first, of course, so I never really got introduced to it in book form till much later.
The first book I held in a long time, though, was a book no one grabbed from the nook: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. It's a story about a man who could read characters and objects out of books, but never managed to read something out of what he himself wrote. This ability manifested instead in his daughter, Meggie. She was the only known “silvertongue” who could read things to life out of her own writing because she had such a beautiful imagination.
I liked her. I saw a part of myself in her character, a part I didn’t even know I lost. I was reminded of the storybooks I used to read with a childhood friend, who until then had eluded my memory; how the scenes seemed to come to life all around us before we transitioned from reading to roleplaying to relive the stories. It felt as if, for the longest time, I was holding my breath and only now broke the surface.
Meggie sucked me into the world of fiction.
I asked my friends for book recommendations, and what they liked since I was relatively new to this bookworm thing. They introduced me to Percy Jackson. Everyone fawned over his dorky, rebel antics. Especially Natalie, whom I had a huge crush on since the first day of senior year. I devoured the Percy Jackson books because of her and studied what Percy was like. He had green eyes, windswept hair, and kind of a naive persona. I could never have green eyes so I settled for other things. I grew my hair longer and tried acting smart yet clueless to impress Natalie. Weird and cringe, I know. In a way, though, it worked, if only because I looked stupid, which made Natalie laugh. Natalie said I didn’t have to copy Percy for her to like me. Great, I thought, I knew I could never look as great as Percy anyway.
I was actually more like Nico di Angelo from that same book series.
UNFAIR BOOK FAIRS
I’ve always snarled at the idea of books when I was in elementary school, though. Especially whenever the annual Scholastic Book Fairs happened. Students were given bonus points in some subjects if we bought books from the Fair. My classmates bragged and compared their hauls and the stubs that flaunted their additional grades. I, on the other hand, who only had twenty pesos every day (fifteen if the day was shortened) had to settle for working my ass harder to match the grades they bought.
I guess I associated the presence of printed pages with the kids who were the reason why:
1) I never went near a basketball court since I transferred to Maquiling School in Los Baños at eight, because some of my sporty classmates used to throw a basketball at my head since I wanted to be like Troy Bolton so much. ‘You’ll be fine,’ they said. ‘You have all this fat protecting you like a shield.’
2) I stopped wearing my hair up or running it with a comb when I was five when I transferred to another Christian School in Brgy. Real, because 'Sure,
you can be as smart as Jimmy Neutron; you had the same foreheads, anyway.'
3) I stopped singing in front of most people when I was four because I shouldn’t like being a melodious, vibrant, and enthusiastic mermaid like Ariel.
I can’t exactly pinpoint when it started, but one day between all that and so much more, I stopped being ‘anyone I liked’ like my mom told me and opted to be someone people can’t entirely figure out. I started talking less and controlled the expressions that once had been so plain to read on my face. I put on this cloak of mystery around myself to keep everyone at a distance.
What’s interesting was my classmates seemed to drink up the facades I made. So I banked on that. Sometimes obscurity is a comfort zone. I put it on when I started high school in Letran and when I transferred to Tagaytay City Science National High School the following year.
STORYBOOK BEGINNINGS
Some studies say all kids start crafting their identities by introjecting ideas and attitudes from their parents, or at least parental figures. Growing up, I never got to experience that. My dad was absent for the first fourteen years of my life. My mom did what she could, hopping from one job to another that offered a better salary that could support me, my two younger siblings, and her parents. She was more used to being an office girl. Back then, Daddy Bing, my vibrant grandfather, had also worked as a van driver in a terminal in Balibago. I’ve always been under the care of Nanay Mely, Daddy Bing’s wife, but she never really liked kids much; she simply left me to watch cartoons or look at pictures in storybooks while imprisoned in my crib.
I guess since I was a kid, I didn’t really mind. I was busy being too curious about everything. I’ve always brought them pride by being a quiet, ‘behaved’ little ball of fluff (who, occasionally had the worst temper tantrums).
If not for relatives, kids could learn about themselves by making friends. But then I never really had a stable set of friends for the most part, except for my six friends from Qatar and this little boy whom I consider my first-ever friend.
He lived across the street from our house and used to climb down the nine-foot wall of soil that distinguished the wealthier part of the neighborhood where his house stood, from our part of the subdivision where the two-story houses fit snugly side by side. Since I can remember, we played together every afternoon and read the storybooks I grew up with. We even were seatmates in the subdivision’s Daycare center.
We were inseparable. He made me promise we’d be classmates till we graduated elementary school. Of course, three-year-old me agreed.
But then my mom transferred me to another preschool after my first year in Daycare, and this little boy, who I considered my best friend, stopped talking to me when I invited him to read storybooks with me on the first day of classes.
From that moment, hence, my mom made me transfer schools whenever she felt like I wasn’t getting the right education she paid for. I’ve hopped schools the way she hopped jobs. She just wouldn’t stop chasing the next best thing, which meant I never really got the chance to make actual friends, much less best friends.
I never touched my storybooks again for the majority of the following years because they reminded me so much of the friends I had lost. I didn’t want to be anywhere near printed pages. I didn’t want to be reminded so much of what I’d lost.
BE ANYONE YOU LIKE
It’s okay. You can start over and be anyone you like, my mom always told me. I realize I only took half this advice to heart. I always knew how to start over and over countless times, but only now am I starting to realize what it means to ‘be anyone you like.’
What kind of person do I want to be? I don’t completely know yet. But I’m learning how to make my own garments, to start from scratch, or at least take bits and pieces from the things in my wardrobe of identities that will match and will speak for me.
I went back to school and actually pursued a degree program that would make Meggie, the girl who writes magic, proud (I’m a writing major in the UP Los Baños Communications Arts program). I’m painstakingly slowly patching things up with my parents and siblings. I’m accepting that brokenness is not equal to worthlessness. And when something doesn’t work, I remind myself: It’s okay. I can just start over and be anyone I like.
It’s a process, but I’m getting there. I want to go back to that little kid who had a constant look of wonder in his eyes and who had a friend he hasn’t lost yet.
I still see that boy whenever I go back to Calamba on weekends, but I still haven’t gotten the chance to talk to him again. Maybe one day. If ever that happens, I can’t wait to tell him stories I’ll pull out from the wardrobe of multiple selves.
Unlike him, I don’t have a colorful wardrobe. Most of my clothes are either hand-me-downs or bought from ukay-ukays. But I do have a different kind of wardrobe and its contents speak to and for me, too– one comprised of books, a collection of roughly 300 works of fiction, with splashes of nonfiction, philosophy, psychology, and history here and there.
‘Have you read all of these?’ is the usual question my friends ask whenever I show them my collection– displayed on a makeshift bookshelf in my sister’s bedroom, overcrowding a nook near the upstairs window, filling a huge balikbayan box to the brim in my brother’s room, and littered in stacks along our wooden stairs. The question somehow swells my spirits with pride. I’ve always viewed the shelves of paper and ink as an extension of myself, like my grandfather and his clothes.
In fact, I was told I craft a Self from the fictional characters that speak to me the loudest, pulling out garments of personalities that I mix and match to present what I hope passes for an identity.
My response: I had to. It’s a way to relearn myself, I told him, to go back to where I started or, at least, figure out who I am comfortable enough to be.
“Like you said,” I told him, “‘We can’t really make a perfect copy of those we imitate.’” But a part of me still asks, Will I ever find an identity I will consider original? My own?
I feel like somewhere along my growing up, I kinda lost sense of who I was (or maybe I never really got a firm idea of the identity I want to create). So I find solace in absorbing fictional identities to ‘retrace my steps’ in hopes that it will help me move forward.
Maybe, in this psychological closet raid, a consistent “style” reveals itself, at the very least.
NOAH SWEETWINE
Currently, my favorite garment in my wardrobe, the one that always sits closest, is Noah Sweetwine from Jandy Nelson’s I'll Give You the Sun. He’s this eccentric boy who claims he can see people’s souls as animals. Colors speak to him. He’ll get along well with my grandfather. He has an ‘invisible museum’– a psychological archive of surreal painting ideas inspired by his own life. He’s not afraid to be as sensitive, romantic, and as weird as he can possibly be. I like him. I want to be like him.
A friend I made online introduced me to Noah. ‘You remind me a lot like him,’ she said. She sent me the book for my 19th birthday with a note that read: “Happy birthday, Noah. Read about yourself.”
At first, I was hesitant. I was in the middle of trying to fight against the introjecting thing by enforcing a year-long reading slump. At that time I was already aware of my tendency to obsessively internalize and anchor myself to the personalities of fictional characters, trying to live their lives to cope with my struggles with reality.
For months I put off reading the book until eventually, my curiosity got the best of me. I fell in love with the book, although I didn’t really see myself in Noah when I first read it. Or at least I didn’t choose to see it.
But some lines resonated with me:
1. “'...maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,' I say. 'Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.'”
2. “A broken heart is an open heart,” and,
3. “Quick, make a wish. Take a (second or third or fourth) chance. Remake the
world.”
It gave me a different perspective when it came to using my wardrobe of identities. The book became my bible. Every time I started the book over for my favorite lines, I saw more and more of what my friend meant about seeing Noah in me. There is a part of me that Noah’s character tries to make me remember, a Self I lost and am trying to find again. He encourages me to be true, to be honest, and authentic, which for some time I have failed to be.
READING SLUMP
Between 2014 to 2015 I had lived a lie. I pretended I still went to my classes as an engineering student, meanwhile spending the money my parents gave for my tuition to buy more and more books to fill the emptiness I felt inside.
I submerged myself in fictional worlds– Panem, Narnia, Hogwarts, Lorien, Mirrorworld, and Inkworld, to name a few– to escape the reality of the horrors bestowed upon me each morning. I scrambled through pages, looking for bits and pieces of myself I couldn’t seem to form properly. What kind of person would my family, my peers, strangers, would everyone like? The books piled up, until I became a Frankenstein monster of fictional characters, made up of mismatched pieces of personality that barely formed a person.
And then my parents found out about my little secret. They stopped providing me with all sorts of support and I was forced to find work to look after myself.
But at least the lies stopped. I was free to be as miserable as possible without hiding myself under stitched-up pieces of identities. I just read books to pass the time, to live life barely stepping out of the house for three years, apart from work. Until I grew tired and enforced the reading slump.
LOVE ALWAYS, CHARLIE
That was in stark contrast to when I went back to the Philippines for college in 2013. I always kept a book with me because I was the only one in our batch of graduates from the Philippine School Doha who went to UP Los Baños. I knew people, sure, but they were from the past six schools I went to before PSD; I didn’t exactly have good memories with them.
The constant presence of a book in my bag was a reminder of my six friends in Qatar who reintroduced me to reading (I’ll talk about them later on, as I trace further back in my history with printed pages). They, both my friends and the books I read, had been my family when my biological one failed to be. They also had been the only people I could actually consider my friends.
That time I saw myself in Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Like him, I knew how it was to be the quiet kid who reads books and sees a lot of things. But the universe had its way of twisting even my twisted coping mechanism: I didn’t know introjecting Charlie would entail me to the same fate as him with a relative.
His tragic experience with Aunt Helen was reflected in Kuya Pablo, the seventeen-year-old nephew of my grandaunt’s husband. My experience with Kuya Pablo was the reason why I grew scared of virtually every person I saw around me (maybe also why I now identify as demisexual). Even the slightest touch sends my skin crawling (I was never comfortable with hugs since then).
I tried to find reasons not to go to class– to no avail. I got sicker and sicker by the day, both psychologically and physically, until going to class for the last few weeks of the semester became a nightmarish notion akin to Stephen King’s horrific imagination. Needless to say, I failed all of my classes in the very first semester of my college life.
My parents were furious. They wanted me to process my readmission as soon as I could, but I couldn’t even get out of bed to eat. I was in a constant loop of crying and feeling numb. But they firmly insisted.
Okay, I said. I’ll go back to school. Except I didn’t.
NICO DI ANGELO, THE GHOST KING
I never brushed my hair for as long as I could remember. My hair always fell down across my forehead and is never brushed up.
I had messy curls, dark eyes, and a constant sullen expression, like Nico di Angelo from the Camp Half-blood books by Rick Riordan. I imitated Nico since I met him in Titan’s Curse, probably because I saw myself in him to some degree. He was once an enthusiastic, lowkey annoying kid who loved his older sister, Bianca. When– Spoiler alert!– Bianca died, he became this silent, reclusive presence shrouded by death (he’s the son of Hades) and mystery.
Like him, I was supposed to have an older sister, too. The difference was my mom lost her due to a miscarriage. Unlike him, I never got to know my sister but I desperately wished I had the chance. Since I learned of this information from my grandmother when I was nine, I always imagined what it would be like if my sister were alive, and wondered if maybe the reason why I found it so hard to be the eldest child was that I wasn't supposed
to be.
Like me in the first few years of high school, Nico found solace in solitude and chose to stay away from most of the people from Camp Half-blood, until he realized he had unlikely friends there.
And so he decided to give things another go, to start over.
SILVERTONGUE MEGGIE
‘It’s okay, ‘nak. You can just start over and be anyone you like.’
This was what my mom told me whenever I transferred to each of the seven schools I’d been to before college. I took the advice close to heart. For my senior year in high school back in 2012, it took months and a lot of hit-and-miss for ‘anyone you like’ to mean someone who had actual friends, because for the longest time I had avoided it. I used to think, “Why bother? I’m going to leave this school soon enough anyway.”
But when you live in a place where mountains and trees are replaced by sand dunes and wide roads that stretched for miles, keeping everyone at a distance and shrouding yourself in mystery wasn’t very ideal. We had to go to Qatar in 2012 when my parents made up after twenty-two years of separation. I was fourteen.
Everything just felt dormant and stale. I started to lose myself– my identity, my mental health, and my attachment to what was happening in reality. I knew no one apart from my own family, and my relationship with my family at that time wasn’t exactly friendly. I had a hard time seeing eye-to-eye with my father, who I barely saw until we moved with him. My mom grew more distant and indifferent to this civil war, too, once more consumed by her new work.
I started acting out. I got jealous of my siblings, who were each a parent’s favorite. Our family developed an unspoken agreement that I would always stay in the house whenever the family went out. That way everyone won. The downside was that I was always alone with my crippling thoughts.
It’s okay, my mom said. In truth, it wasn’t. I didn’t feel like ‘anyone I liked’ at all. I was a ghost walking in and out of rooms– there but barely existing, barely living.
So for senior year, I decided to change that, to wiggle out of that shell of mystery, to ‘start over’ as my mom taught me. I managed to include myself in a circle of friends. Together we formed a sort of weird, reverse Breakfast Club. We were this band of loud, obnoxious geeks who hoarded seven spots out of the class’ top ten and whom no one really made fun of because geeks were somehow cool in the desert. Go figure.
Finally, I felt like I belonged somewhere.
They were the ones who reintroduced me to books. We had a year-level competition for the school’s Reading Week. Each section was supposed to build a reading nook. Of course, our little group took charge of most of it. Janella, the de facto leader of our group, and Natalie assigned people to bring as many books as they could. Evan let us borrow a spare bookshelf. Dian and Sarah brought a carpet, beanbags, and a bunch of plushies. I took care of the decorations since I had a knack for crafts.
Students from other sections can borrow from each other’s nooks. People opted for Harry Potter first, of course, so I never really got introduced to it in book form till much later.
The first book I held in a long time, though, was a book no one grabbed from the nook: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. It's a story about a man who could read characters and objects out of books, but never managed to read something out of what he himself wrote. This ability manifested instead in his daughter, Meggie. She was the only known “silvertongue” who could read things to life out of her own writing because she had such a beautiful imagination.
I liked her. I saw a part of myself in her character, a part I didn’t even know I lost. I was reminded of the storybooks I used to read with a childhood friend, who until then had eluded my memory; how the scenes seemed to come to life all around us before we transitioned from reading to roleplaying to relive the stories. It felt as if, for the longest time, I was holding my breath and only now broke the surface.
Meggie sucked me into the world of fiction.
I asked my friends for book recommendations, and what they liked since I was relatively new to this bookworm thing. They introduced me to Percy Jackson. Everyone fawned over his dorky, rebel antics. Especially Natalie, whom I had a huge crush on since the first day of senior year. I devoured the Percy Jackson books because of her and studied what Percy was like. He had green eyes, windswept hair, and kind of a naive persona. I could never have green eyes so I settled for other things. I grew my hair longer and tried acting smart yet clueless to impress Natalie. Weird and cringe, I know. In a way, though, it worked, if only because I looked stupid, which made Natalie laugh. Natalie said I didn’t have to copy Percy for her to like me. Great, I thought, I knew I could never look as great as Percy anyway.
I was actually more like Nico di Angelo from that same book series.
UNFAIR BOOK FAIRS
I’ve always snarled at the idea of books when I was in elementary school, though. Especially whenever the annual Scholastic Book Fairs happened. Students were given bonus points in some subjects if we bought books from the Fair. My classmates bragged and compared their hauls and the stubs that flaunted their additional grades. I, on the other hand, who only had twenty pesos every day (fifteen if the day was shortened) had to settle for working my ass harder to match the grades they bought.
I guess I associated the presence of printed pages with the kids who were the reason why:
1) I never went near a basketball court since I transferred to Maquiling School in Los Baños at eight, because some of my sporty classmates used to throw a basketball at my head since I wanted to be like Troy Bolton so much. ‘You’ll be fine,’ they said. ‘You have all this fat protecting you like a shield.’
2) I stopped wearing my hair up or running it with a comb when I was five when I transferred to another Christian School in Brgy. Real, because 'Sure,
you can be as smart as Jimmy Neutron; you had the same foreheads, anyway.'
3) I stopped singing in front of most people when I was four because I shouldn’t like being a melodious, vibrant, and enthusiastic mermaid like Ariel.
I can’t exactly pinpoint when it started, but one day between all that and so much more, I stopped being ‘anyone I liked’ like my mom told me and opted to be someone people can’t entirely figure out. I started talking less and controlled the expressions that once had been so plain to read on my face. I put on this cloak of mystery around myself to keep everyone at a distance.
What’s interesting was my classmates seemed to drink up the facades I made. So I banked on that. Sometimes obscurity is a comfort zone. I put it on when I started high school in Letran and when I transferred to Tagaytay City Science National High School the following year.
STORYBOOK BEGINNINGS
Some studies say all kids start crafting their identities by introjecting ideas and attitudes from their parents, or at least parental figures. Growing up, I never got to experience that. My dad was absent for the first fourteen years of my life. My mom did what she could, hopping from one job to another that offered a better salary that could support me, my two younger siblings, and her parents. She was more used to being an office girl. Back then, Daddy Bing, my vibrant grandfather, had also worked as a van driver in a terminal in Balibago. I’ve always been under the care of Nanay Mely, Daddy Bing’s wife, but she never really liked kids much; she simply left me to watch cartoons or look at pictures in storybooks while imprisoned in my crib.
I guess since I was a kid, I didn’t really mind. I was busy being too curious about everything. I’ve always brought them pride by being a quiet, ‘behaved’ little ball of fluff (who, occasionally had the worst temper tantrums).
If not for relatives, kids could learn about themselves by making friends. But then I never really had a stable set of friends for the most part, except for my six friends from Qatar and this little boy whom I consider my first-ever friend.
He lived across the street from our house and used to climb down the nine-foot wall of soil that distinguished the wealthier part of the neighborhood where his house stood, from our part of the subdivision where the two-story houses fit snugly side by side. Since I can remember, we played together every afternoon and read the storybooks I grew up with. We even were seatmates in the subdivision’s Daycare center.
We were inseparable. He made me promise we’d be classmates till we graduated elementary school. Of course, three-year-old me agreed.
But then my mom transferred me to another preschool after my first year in Daycare, and this little boy, who I considered my best friend, stopped talking to me when I invited him to read storybooks with me on the first day of classes.
From that moment, hence, my mom made me transfer schools whenever she felt like I wasn’t getting the right education she paid for. I’ve hopped schools the way she hopped jobs. She just wouldn’t stop chasing the next best thing, which meant I never really got the chance to make actual friends, much less best friends.
I never touched my storybooks again for the majority of the following years because they reminded me so much of the friends I had lost. I didn’t want to be anywhere near printed pages. I didn’t want to be reminded so much of what I’d lost.
BE ANYONE YOU LIKE
It’s okay. You can start over and be anyone you like, my mom always told me. I realize I only took half this advice to heart. I always knew how to start over and over countless times, but only now am I starting to realize what it means to ‘be anyone you like.’
What kind of person do I want to be? I don’t completely know yet. But I’m learning how to make my own garments, to start from scratch, or at least take bits and pieces from the things in my wardrobe of identities that will match and will speak for me.
I went back to school and actually pursued a degree program that would make Meggie, the girl who writes magic, proud (I’m a writing major in the UP Los Baños Communications Arts program). I’m painstakingly slowly patching things up with my parents and siblings. I’m accepting that brokenness is not equal to worthlessness. And when something doesn’t work, I remind myself: It’s okay. I can just start over and be anyone I like.
It’s a process, but I’m getting there. I want to go back to that little kid who had a constant look of wonder in his eyes and who had a friend he hasn’t lost yet.
I still see that boy whenever I go back to Calamba on weekends, but I still haven’t gotten the chance to talk to him again. Maybe one day. If ever that happens, I can’t wait to tell him stories I’ll pull out from the wardrobe of multiple selves.
About the Author
Gershom Mabaquiao is a 25-year-old writer from the Philippines. He earned his bachelor's degree in Communication Arts from the University of the Philippines Los Baños. His works have been published in Tint Journal, Inquirer Young Blood, Adelaide Literary Journal, The Unconventional Courier, and Circles Magazine. In his free time, he collects and reads books, tries one new thing each week, and works on being a better advocate for people like him who are queer, living with HIV, and battling mental health issues.