Someday this will pass.

That was something that I heard since I was a child and something that took root in mind. So I learned to wait. Wait for hours to get home. Wait for pain to pass. Wait for dreams to happen. I waited until there was nothing to wait for, but I'm still waiting..

I'm tired of waiting.

I used to be a pretty child. I don't know what happened since then. Hahaha!

Okay so pretty is very subjective but I'm sure I was cute. (I was chubby to boot 🤷‍♀️) So cute that when I was a child some people would pinch my cheeks so hard that it hurt. We would get on jeepneys and, since I was very young then, my mom would carry me over the steps and I would walk inside ahead of my mom. Some passengers would pinch me as I walked past and and some would do it so hard that I thought they were angry. Well, I was angry right back.

When I got to grade school I had enough and I actually stepped back when another adult tried to pinch my cheeks in the grocery store. He looked embarrassed and I felt bad. So I had the wonderful idea to just let people keep pinching me and hurting me.


It didn't take long before it stopped though. I was getting older, chubbyness turned to weight problems, and I was no longer the cute kid. Life happened I guess.


It's so absurd to look back on these memories. The sense of self that you lost, the pain that you took. Can I take it back?

Would've, Could've, Should've

This song from Taylor Swift dropped about a month ago and got so many people talking about who this song was about considering how jaw-dropping the lyrics were. While many people like myself thought 'girlhood' referenced a particular definition, some people thought that 'girlhood' meant innocence in the general sense.

For context, people think the song Would've Could've Should've is related to the song Dear John, although they're about written ten years apart. I went to read discussions for this song and one comment struck me- how time gives you clarity, how it gives a person a different perspective especially now that Taylor's older and in the same age as that person she was singing about was. 

And I could really relate to that idea. For everything. Now that I've spent time this last couple of years to really look back at my life, I'm amazed at how different the past looks to me now. 

All this time I thought I was navel-gazing, but for the good part of it, I was only filtering the surface and could barely scratch where it actually hurts. I still can't, but it's damning to see.

I put up with a lot of bullshit lol.

When things happened, I thought I could take it, but I couldn't see where it broke me. Did I have rose-colored glasses on? Did I ignore things out of respect? Where do I draw the lines of personal responsibility and finding accountability? Did I gaslight myself? I could see the mess it made out of me, but for a long time I struggled to get out. Maybe it was because I couldn't make sense of the hows and the whys. I still can't, but now I'm beginning to see.