sure. wait. what?

I WENT to my parents’ house to pick up whatever was left in my old bedroom. Mostly books, lots of books, and some clothes. I also found notebooks from my student days and diaries from my youth, some from as early as when I was 15. Then it hit me: I am more than twice as old now. Wow.

My diary at 15 is small and blue with pages bound to the covers by a black spiral ring. On the cover is a photo of Marilyn Monroe. Her bare back is facing the camera and her face is turned over her shoulder, eyes half-lidded and lips slightly parted in a smile. I have no idea where I got this notebook.

Reading the dispatches of my teenage self, I see that it is just like any other journal I own. It starts as a diary but soon becomes entangled with things that are not strictly personal. Between pages that hold my inchoate muni-muni on high school relationships, chilly morning showers, and Sophocles’ Antigone are my attempts at solving a discrete algebraic equation, the casting for our class’s presentation on Noli Me Tangere, and some notes on the different types of lead (also spelled lede, apparently).

The journal that I keep now as a thirty-ewan also features the same quirks. It is also hardbound, but instead of Marilyn on the cover it has peaches rendered in watercolor. I write about my personal life on this notebook too, but the margins bear other things: a scribbled proof that m3 = kL, the Ideal Gas Law, a checklist of paperwork to bring to a work trip. Work fuses with Not Work the same way School once melded with Not School.

It appears my brain is incapable of building unerodable borders between the different compartments of my life. The boundaries are always porous; everything blends into the Personal, and the Personal is everything.

I shouldn’t revel in this though, this centralization of me-me-me when I write.

Even in the context of a journal, a notebook that is by design personal, interior, and centered on the Self, I feel unease in acknowledging the subtle solipsism of it all. Sometimes I even think that retreating to a notebook and putting myself under my own private spotlight is un-Filipino. (I know it’s a reach, but bear with me here.)

In college, which I started not long after I turned 15, I learned about Sikolohiyang Pilipino (SP), a field of study that addresses the limits of Western psychology in explaining the Filipino psyche. According to SP, Filipinos are collectivist and relational. We value pakikibagay and pakikipagkapwa; we move with hiya and utang na loob. Our existence is shaped through and with others, and even our pursuit of selfhood is nary an individualist endeavor.

So, somehow, it feels as if my journaling practice is at odds with the supposed nature of the culture I grew up in. Journaling moves inward; being Filipino, outward. Journaling cultivates an inner life; being Filipino celebrates oneness with others.

Then again, maybe there’s no contradiction at all.

Filipinos also value a sacred inner space, our loob or kalooban, and this is still tied to our sense of relationality. Tending to my interior life is therefore not a rejection of my Filipino-ness; it is my way of tuning out the noise and achieving mental clarity, which consequently (hopefully) helps me become a better neighbour, a better person.

So, maybe the discomfort that I feel when going through years of my own personal confessional writing has little to do with my fraught relationship with being a Filipino in the diaspora, and more to do with my just-as-fraught relationship with politics and activism.

Central to my coming-of-age in the Philippines was my involvement in the student movement. I still remember how we made fun of the petty bourgeoisie, the very class we belonged to, for its indulgences and excesses. One time, not long after I moved to Canada and when I was still in touch with college friends, I told them about my first time doing yoga. A friend of a friend unironically called it burgis, noting that only the petty-b would have the time and energy for something so frivolous. Woops.

Clearly I am no longer an active agent of the movement, but the principles and expectations from that phase of my life still echo in me. I still police my own indulgences, wondering if journaling, too, is a kind of frivolity that I shouldn’t enjoy, let alone celebrate.

When I read Elizabeth Austin’s “Girls Who Journal Have Always Been Radical”, a small part of me thought, ooh I feel seen, but a bigger part just had to wonder: weh?

Being radical can mean many things. It can mean going against the grain, solving a problem from its roots, or being point-blank militant. But at its most basic form, being radical necessitates risk.

To be radical is to willingly place something you deem important — your reputation, your credibility, your life — under a guillotine, ready to take the drop at any time. Nurturing an inner life within the private margins of a notebook sure subverts the current dominant culture of performance and publicity, but unless we spill the contents of our diary out into the public, what exactly do we risk losing by keeping a journal?

This isn’t to say that we should stop journaling because it isn’t radical, or that we should not be proud of doing it at all (that’s a “me” problem). This isn’t to say anything, period, and maybe that’s where the real shame — my real shame — lies.

At 15, I truly believed that the world was my oyster. I wanted to do so much, not just for myself but for other people too, for my country, for the world. I can always still write about matters bigger than myself, yet here I am choosing to muse about the white noise of my privileged burgis life — it’s not necessarily bad, but I feel bad about it. Guilt tugs at my chest; an unnamable weight falls on my shoulders. I want to apologize, I do, but I have no idea whose feet I should be humbly bowing down to.