I got my own copy of Rookie Yearbook 3 yesterday from the mail and I couldn’t explain what I felt while leafing through its worn pages. Wistfulness, if not nostalgia, dominated–there’s still this rager inside with whatever’s left of what was extinguished when reality compelled me to be practical. I had a good eye scrolling the other week; If it weren’t for a friend's post saying that she bought one, I wouldn’t have arrived at this Conclusionary Emotion (It’s from a warehouse sale I ordered from and I only got it for P99, a total of only P137 including the shipping fee. If you told 16-year-old me that I’d get it for more than quadruple of its original price nine years on, I would have laughed; one copy used to cost almost P3,000, excluding the shipping fee.)
The year was 2008 and I’ve just been given my own PC set at home, complete with an internet connection. It was the peak of Windows Vista and I always had the best time coming home to it from school; weekday afternoons meant scrolling thoroughly across varying gaming platforms, poring over Disney edits on YouTube (my favorite was High School Musical edits of Troy and Gabriella while a cloyingly sweet pop music plays in the background), and of course the endless pages of blogs I’ve read. I read opinion pieces, pages upon pages of fanfiction, learned how to copy-paste articles from international websites in lightning-speed mode before the paywall activated the scroll-canceling screen of grey on my face. All these efforts, all the hours owed to being online, fortunately–if sometimes regrettably–built my long-standing claim that I want to write, I should write for a living, I will die a writer. It's flooded with cliche, that thought process, considering how my career trajectory over the years spouted from me resenting everything I did to save face and be perpetually known as a writer. I actually believed that being “raised by the internet” garnered me the right to document whatever there is to document. I'm literally the most embarrassing person I know.
I have Tumblr to thank for that part of my pre-adolescent years, my cliche grrrl-power arc–I saw people my age get too in-depth with how they felt toward something so trivial, like their lunch food, wax poetry over an episode of a sitcom, or express this kind of glow they feel for a song, a poem, or a book. It influenced me to be an introspective 12-year-old who would yap about her crises: are mismatched Chucks cool? Is cutting my own bangs rebellious enough to send my Dad into a frenzy of remorse for not allowing me to go to a Mayday Parade show? Am I tweaking my Greying by Gabrielle Wee Tumblr theme enough for people to find me laid-back but still cool and a bit rough on the edges because I listen to The Strokes and The Psychedelic Furs? There was always something inside that needed to punch its way out to be seen, to be heard, to be read. What started as a penchant in asking my mom to buy me the newest Total Girl or Candy Mag issues ended up being a stepping stone to a girlhood owing its shelf life to dreaming of a life à la-Andy Sachs.
Then came Rookie Mag, a virtual dream that I treated like a best friend, a sister I come home to every afternoon after school with a few simple clicks. It was a refuge of all sorts, an educational trip to survive girlhood and how to actually live it in the style of kitschy, dreamy zine. It became my first online friend, my own garden of plans as a teenager who wished to be like Tavi Gevinson: a self-serious online savant, a genuinely cool word fairy, always knew what to say and how to translate it as doodles and collages. Much of what I know now about pop culture–Greta Gerwig, Broad City, film photography, Sonic Youth, and the Fanning sisters–and life’s in and outs, I learned from Rookie during my formative years.
My wild guess on its personal pull on me is that it somehow serves as a reminder that my 26-year-old anxieties could still be weathered by parsing through material that serves as guides for 12- to 15-year-olds. That version of me, an older cohort-slash-reader of this record of eternal youth, could be likened to finding a puzzle piece that completes the navigation process of Growing Up and Making Decisions.
Every time something from my childhood (or teenhood) resurfaces, I sort of ruminate, limning on the identities I'd had over the years, hence the moments (days) I pored over this thick book that bridges me to a life I used to have, which I lived through a bit too fast for my liking. And that’s all there is to having this book with me: seeing glimpses of my past quirks like mixtapes and artists from my young adult years: deciding that it has been too fast, too quick for me to see the ending of. So owning a piece of my past can be a bit of a special montage-viewing experience.
Being in a corporate job is not always gratifying. Sometimes it’s thankless, sometimes you’re just thankful to end the day because you know it’s gonna reflect in your next paycheck. What I treat as a highlight may not be the same for those who do it by heart, with purpose. For me it’s not an office day without doing my makeup, arriving at the office in style (mostly, if not everyday), drinking my coffee in my favorite insulated mug, and admiring my desk setup with my three Sonny Angels. I do my tasks diligently and never miss a deadline, but I may be the shallowest, most useless fixture in this setting. Nobody has to remind me that I was handed this job because of my privilege; I remind myself of the fact everyday so I try to be good at it and not appear like an ingrate. It felt like implanting my own agency when I started entering free Google courses on mastering Microsoft Excel, planning corporate strategies and branding. I wanted to be relevant, I wanted to be useful, I wanted to stop believing that everything I do should be glamorous and cutesy, Lisa Frank-esque. The only time it should be will be how I decorate my desk, hence the Sonny Angels on my right to “watch” over me.
There’s no contextual meaning behind why I added this anecdote. Maybe I wanted it to sound like a situation-versus-desire scenario; it’s not. I’d like to think that this is me heralding my girlhood with respect to how my late-twenties panned out. Not totally what I envisioned, but somehow just floating with lots of looking back on the island of teenhood and how it feels fast-forwarded with circumstances that I couldn’t help.
Revisiting my past like this, even writing extensively about it, feels like a taxonomy of sorts filled with feelings that will once become previously-felt emotions too in the long run. Teenhood lasted me a full lifetime, but was still so fleeting, so limited and short-lived. There have been numerous moments I remember from those years, and like most adults my age, I would give anything in exchange for me to be young again and be free from the limitations set by myself and the environment I grew up in.
Coveting youth, taking ownership of my past, and establishing my self-will on all things ‘me’ didn’t always have to be sad. I thought otherwise when I first laid my hands on this particular Rookie book. It felt like I was gonna mourn what once was, the first time I held it, and grieve the lost time I used to spend on reading old material or collecting magazines. But it didn’t feel like grief at all–it was still the same, still a bit rusty on some parts but wiser nonetheless, with the age that came with it.
So the reflection and recording, the writing of a whole ass essay on finding a piece of myself and how I felt about it, is me finally paying back what I owe myself all these years: a space for acknowledging every stage of my life, both the good and the bad, the dumb and the wise (mostly clueless). In the different stages of life I’ll arrive at, there will always be little Forevers that will accumulate, which I will, most probably, come back to and rewatch like comfort episodes from a comfort TV show.
Allison from The Breakfast Club said that your heart dies when you grow up. I used to always carry that with me, through high school and college. But I wish some time machine could take me back to that moment of pure belief and whisper to my young ear that no, it’s not fully true. Maybe sometimes it brings some truth to it, but most of the time it’s just me being upset that the world is too real for me to receive what I want, or for me to experience some tenderness when everything feels cold and concrete-hard. I was a cynic growing up. I thought being that way cushioned whatever heartbreak I’d experienced and saved me the pain and hassle of being human, excluding myself from the time it exhausted for complaining. I bemoaned the fact that the Vans Warped Tour never reached my country, but I’ll never cry over a boy, I thought. I was dead wrong. Heartbreak shaped me and taught me so much about myself, partially thanks to Chiquitita by ABBA.
There may still be moments where I wish I understood what my teenhood was about, and most especially why it happened the way that it did. But I no longer wish to stay there, as it kind of lessens its impact in my (present) life, all the while losing the sincerity I feel towards it. There is nothing for me to forgive from those past selves I came to know and sit with, for there was nothing wrong with how I let it happen; not even the lack could cancel out the full and good ones. More importantly, I don't need to understand all of it. These books, archived websites, glossy magazines replete with tutorials on how to make beaded bracelets or homemade hair dyes, and the monthly updates of Batrisha Comics, old journals and keychains, are minutiae that serve as a reminder of an era whose lifespan lasted as soon as I started Googling about sanitary pads and what diets should I practice to be thinner. My world suddenly became scary wide then, a bit too loose in some parts that I found hard keeping close and tight around me–and it was supposed to be that way. I can’t always chase after an outcome that best fits the scene in my head. This is what my whims, quirks, and hobbies are for, to pad whatever disappointment I choose to moan about and to retreat to. If it weren’t for my (rather shallow) crises, I wouldn’t be so committed to any of these.
I was wrong to assume that being a writer is a glamorous choice, or to decide that anything I partake in would come easier, notwithstanding my degree or the university I graduated from. In college I thought it was gonna be a breeze, because I spent two years in the school organ having my own desk, having free rein over the choicest coverages for the arts and culture beat. It gave me no chance to thwart my expectations in the coming years as a journalist by practice. The movies I watched and the TV shows I spent my time absorbing were all wrong, and admittedly I lacked the contextual knowledge about the real world. And it’s thankfully so, as I can confidently pronounce now as a 26-year-old that it's okay, I turned out okay. Not everything is as it seems, and I continue to be grateful for that.
Remembering should suffice, always. I owe that to myself (I think), if I can’t remotely fulfill any dream or plan I had for myself. Every recalled song, movie, or pop-culture event that I closely followed then, is an act of pouring what I can for my younger self in the form of chronicling a single feeling and expanding it into vast meanings, as wide as the ever evolving world (and life) I used to be scared of. Re-telling is a form of self-love, I believe. It can’t change the world, no. I don’t certainly contribute anything useful for society by writing this down; I’d be delusional if I believed so. But maybe this is me doing myself a favor by recognizing that I can never be anyone else, and that this little piece of writing belongs to me, along with the time and emotions and other pieces of media I claim to love.
It’s all in good faith, and timing, this little, minor moment in my adult life. A mere blip in the radar, but consequential nonetheless. And because this is the first time in years that I wrote something for myself.
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