Most teenagers are inclined to find themselves drawn
towards a figure they can look up to. Mostly it comes in the form of popstars. I
was sixteen when I etched it upon the persona I was building for myself that Taylor
Swift was my popstar of choice. Well, I suppose it was because it takes one girl
suffering from the special snowflake syndrome to know another. Taylor established
herself as an outsider with her guitar as a bestfriend. I was an outsider trying
to befriend the pen.
I was drawn to her because of her lyrics. She has
said that songwriting has become a way for her to understand her feelings, that
there are certain feelings that she only begins to understand after finishing a
song about it. I think I fully understood what she meant with this during this
one time when I was writing a paper for my Philosophy class. I never really saw
the bigger picture of the ideas taught in class until I was in the
process of writing about them. (Ang pilosopiya ay ginagawa, you see!)
I used to want to be a writer (whatever that means)
until I didn’t anymore because I realized how much I was romanticizing. I still
love the written word, though, because speaking out loud is something I never
got right. There is probably some sort of memo out there that talks about some
shared rules on speaking, but I never got it.
The problem lately is that I haven’t been getting in
touch with my self. There are so many things that I can’t confront and
can’t tell anybody, not even myself. I can’t bring myself to write because I
can’t face all of those things. If I do, I know they’re going to tell me to
grow up and I’m not sure I know how to do that.
I turned twenty April this year and I’m graduating
from college March next year. Whatever the proper qualification is to be
considered a proper adult, I’m more or less walking along the lines of that.
Being in the position that I’m in, age-wise, I’ve realized that growing up is
about learning to make your world less about you. It is coming to terms with
the fact that it has never been about you. In the TV series Once Upon a Time,
it was revealed that the Peter Pan character was an even bigger villain than both Rumpelstiltskin
and the evil queen. I did not understand it at first. People always say that we
should never lose the child in us. But as I continued to watch episodes after
the other, it made a bit of sense to me that the one who refused to grow up
would turn out to be responsible for a lot of bad. There’s only a certain
quality of children that must never leave us, not all.
I have a theory that I act all shy and quiet and
passive because I’m protecting my ego from blowing up. I can’t allow myself to
think that I’m any good because I’m afraid that I’ll put that to the extreme.
You see, the reason why I dislike myself so much is because I like myself so
much. The more you hate, the more you love.
I’m trying so hard to be balanced and stable and to
stop being the weirdest person ever and to stop liking thinking of myself that
way. I’m struggling so much with myself and I’ve been feeling restless. I
honestly believe I know the cure to this kind of restlessness. I have to rest
on God. I’m not writing this as a way of relying on figuring things out on my
own. I’m only writing because I feel as though I have a responsibility to stop
stacking unfathomable feelings up inside me and letting them rot and ruin me. I
need to grow up. And because the manner in which I speak words out loud sometimes
freaks people out, I think one way that I could stay sane is to go back to
writing more.
