It is June, and in a few weeks half of this year would be over, instated only as memory. This has been the quietest I have been on Substack ever since I started writing here, and yet these have also been the busiest couple of months. I come here not knowing what to say, where to begin, how to form my thoughts into something coherent. But perhaps, as my friend E. told me, this is a very human response to human things.
There are only two seasons in the Philippines: the wet and the dry season. The latter is usually known as ‘summer’, although here it is effectively always ‘summer’ because of humidity and a temperature that never decreases enough to be considered cool weather in Western standards. Now, we have officially entered the wet, rainy season. This year’s first potential typhoon—in a country that is ravaged by an average of twenty typhoons yearly—caused by the low pressure area that entered the region last Friday brought hours of heavy rain last night. I was awake until past six in the morning. These days, this sleep time is normal.
I have deleted my Instagram account from my phone again—a defensive response to overwhelm, but also a guilty response to feeling helplessness in the midst of this global downfall. In real time, collectively, we have been watching the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza through our phones for over twenty months now.1 In the US, undocumented migrants are hunted like animals to be deported to god-knows-where; in Los Angeles, street protests have ensued as ICE officers executed arrests in schools, food shops and retail stores.2 In Australia, another Indigenous man dies in police custody.3 Russia launched its biggest drone attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.4 In the Philippines, HIV cases skyrocketed to 500 per cent in the Gen Z age group.5 Within minutes, I could scroll through children being bombed while transporting bags of food aid, mothers on their knees wailing for help, a group of Orthodox Jewish men threatening rape to a mistaken protester in Brooklyn6. Over and over and over again, an endless barrage of variations of these images, conveniently spliced with a poem that I can’t adequately appreciate, a sponsored ad to a dance masterclass, the Women’s Prize shortlist, crowd work at a standup show. I have chosen to turn it all off—that, in itself, is privilege. I can continue living my small life and not look at the news, and still seethe in anger for being a bystander whose reach of meagre power can do meagre things.
In April, I finished writing my first novel, a project that I had been working on for almost half a decade. I finished writing it on the top of a bunk bed, the same bunk bed I’d had as a child, as a teenager who was so lost in her path, who wrote crappy poems on a blog and through that, grew confidence that was strong enough to make me think I could make it as a writer. I haven’t ‘made it’ yet. Not as a writer, or as anything. I couldn’t quite comprehend this lack of feeling. Yes, I bawled my eyes out when I typed the last word in my manuscript, but then, a sort of emptiness followed. There I was, a woman with a book, my long-awaited dream, alone on a bunk bed in a city where I couldn’t share my happiness with anyone. I messaged my friends, talked to some of them. I was on the phone with A. and he congratulated me. In the weeks that followed, I felt debilitating sadness. Now what? I was—am—still me.
In May, two of my relatives passed away within weeks of each other. Theirs were the second and third funerals I’d attended ever since I returned to the Philippines in February. Three funerals in less than two months. I watched people gripped with their grief. I reacquainted myself with it. I felt the fabric of my relationship with my family tested in ways, and counted myself lucky for having a huge family, and counted, too, the curse of being in one. But to have a family at all to turn to, despite its many shortcomings, which I gather to the point of the knife and thrust in my chest on my worst days.
It is very lonely to be surrounded by people and feel alone. It is very lonely to have something to celebrate and not have anyone to celebrate it with. It is very lonely to watch an imagined life happen somewhere else, to have it be ripped away—both in fantasy and reality—and to reckon with its consequences. I think, for the longest time, I’ve warded off the loneliness by staying positive, by telling myself that the state of things are temporary, that I’ve never really managed to fall into the depths of my sadness, to really feel the pulse of its bleak body that when it came for me, as it always does, it is like I am grieving the full extent of my life. Not just this current moment, but all the moments that led me here, which are many, which are beautiful and painful, which are exhausting and completely avoidable, if I had only been a completely different person.
And even so—how useless it all is. That is what I think about when I look at what I have accomplished—which is very little. I am complicit in more ways than one in other people’s suffering, least of all my own, and all I can do is nurse myself back to existence. In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino writes: ‘People are so busy just trying to get back to zero, or trying to build up a buffer against disaster, or trying to enjoy themselves, because there’s so little else to count on—three endeavors that could contain the vast majority of human effort until our depleted planet finally ends it all.’ As my friend S. said, Life is hard these days.
I don’t want to be a pessimist. I truly am not. Behind my gloom is profound hope. Or perhaps I’m just too stubborn to ever give up. But it is hard—incredibly hard—to have a sense of a future, a good, positive one, when the present is clouded with smoke. What questions should I ask this time? What would carry me through it all? Why continue in the midst of all this? Could I make a life still, even one that is so hard to envision, even one that I rail against, even if it is difficult and I am very late? What is the bottom of hope? Is it more hope? How can I make use of myself for others when I can’t make use of myself for myself? Is that a selfish thought? How do I become less of a burden, then? What kind of future is possible within my means? How do I uphold dignity? How do I not falter? And if I falter, how do I get up? And if I get up, what can I do next? Who am I in this landscape of cruelty and affront to civil liberty and nothingness? What small can I do? How can I make a life? Here. In this space.
It is now past three in the morning. I haven’t seen most of my friends in almost eight months. I miss our dog. I miss my bedroom. I miss the sounds of Melbourne. Maybe, after all, that is all I want to say.
The Associated Press. Global News.
Taylor, Josh. The Guardian.
The Associated Press, The Guardian.