the fluctuation of two barbies

My Barbie dolls from childhood were pampered like real human beings who were somehow always in our house to hang out with me or blankly heed whatever I command them to do: tend to the kitchen set they have, give their poodle a bath on the pink bathtub (which is partnered with a mini shower that squirts out water when you press a button from the little water dispenser, or play dress up and change their clothes with the other Barbies at bay. I forgot how many dolls I had back then, I lost count. Like girls my age before, I also loved performing ritualistic changes on them, verging on “surgery” because I wanted to play doctor, or “salon” trips that would eventually need some washing for their fragile China-strand hairs. 

I didn’t grow up hating my dolls, nor Barbie herself. Not even the brand. In fact I owe most of my childhood years to it, and without which would have been bleaker considering how my family life panned out for me. I didn’t have the semblance of desire to become like her, or the dream of having her blue eyes and straight hair. Maybe I could say that I wanted to have my own Dreamhouse, or the Cher Horowitz-esque wardrobe choices.

When the Barbie Career Dolls came out, I was ecstatic. I had one ultimate dream back then as a child, and that was to be a doctor. If I remember clearly, the Doctor Barbie looked stunning. Donning her white robe and a tiny stethoscope around her neck, the look embodied a medical professional complete with her clipboard (physician’s clinic sold separately). I didn’t get to have that one, though; I never asked my parents to buy me one, not even the other “Careers.” I just didn’t find the need to have one. Instead, I still gunned for the other Barbies, the one I considered more me or those from the normal series. I still didn’t know then what “self-concept” meant or what knowing yourself is but in picking which Barbie dolls I should own somehow dictated that already. I wanted the ones wearing summer dresses, those that look like they’re going to the mall, or just the casual ones that do not play any “role.” In present day lingo, this Barbie is normal. Local, even.

If Barbie manifested a certain type of life that the thousand versions she portrayed in the many iterations Mattel introduced in the market all these years, then conversely, it also launched a thousand archetypes of girlhood–and womanhood, eventually–that many young people subscribed to, that I subscribed to. Suddenly it became less about acquiring a profession that she was marketed as, but more about the growing want to become better than her and the plasticine ephemera that came with the boxes she was sold in, to kill whatever stereotype her birth in the toy sphere brought. If she can become a lawyer, then I, too, can lead a life that I have authority over. Barbie’s made by businessmen; I’m raised by the internet. 

Photo by Carlijn Jacobs

There’s a double-edged sword somewhere here, the way Barbie is both role model and competition to me. Growing up, I didn’t have a sense of self-image, or what I should do to feel satisfied enough to have confidence as a young girl. But I was insecure, and that’s that. I didn’t have the desire to have the same body as hers (which is, a millionth time we’re reminded now, is unrealistic and physically threatening to try to achieve). But what grew in me was the desire to be just like the other girls who embodied a Barbie-like everything. Svelte bodies, a variety of clothes to choose from on the daily, a nice Malibu pink apartment that has all the pretty things a girl like daydream of: quality furniture, cute pets, delicious food. 

Buy, get tired, buy another

In my adult years from age 21 to present, I built a certain relationship with the objects I’ve acquired over the years. The feeling of impulsively buying something I don’t need vehemently elicited a feeling of superiority over my complaints and other personal woes. Going out for coffee or eating out at restaurants with friends also evoked a similar feeling of authority, something Barbie couldn’t do because, obviously, she is a doll. But there was some resentment that came with it, me vicariously living through socializing and buying shit. I felt like I'd made it when I bought my first fridge, my first couch, my first bed frame and mattress, my first cabinet, my first bookshelves, my first work desk, my first MacBook Pro. The bond I shared with these material things I’ve acquired borders on intimacy sometimes, but there was also a resentful version of me hiding somewhere deep, someone who has had moments of regret for investing so much money on furniture that she didn’t feel anything when she had to let go of some before moving. It’s not like I was forced to let them go, though. The circumstance just required a bit of “sacrifice”; it, however, felt like a breath of fresh air when I no longer saw them within my periphery for the past five months. 

I didn’t so much model myself as a Barbie or as someone who had her life together, someone who embodied feminine prowess. There were girl power moments when I felt more free than I normally do, sure, but it felt stunted, like something big is barring me from feeling a hundred percent content with whatever I have now. Somehow the intimacy I felt towards the objects I acquired when I started living alone felt like movie set props, like the past two years had been a farce with the fake fridge, fake couch, fake bed, fake cabinet. I lived in peace away from the people who tormented me daily but the oasis I built for myself over the years now seems to be a reminder of how trivial it all was. I cannot grasp the feeling now but looking back on it, all I feel is being imprisoned. I was coaxed by my own desires of being independent so much that the bliss I felt was manufactured and scripted. I can’t explain why I felt so, and why it’s been a recurring feeling for so long now. 

Seeing TikTok flourish with influencers who vlog about how their day went or what they eat in a day didn’t help either. There was a moment when I began aspiring to be like those girls who seemed to have their lives together just because their mornings were as productive as I dreamed of: a morning self-care routine with skincare brands that seemed to always work for them, a clip of their Nespresso machine spurting out luxurious liquid gold, and finally, eating an avocado with egg toast on a white ceramic plate speckled with black ink blots. It crushed me, having thought of many ways to belong in the “That Girl” trend on TikTok, totally disregarding the fact that it’s not fucking serious. I would’ve droned on about how the internet fed my social insecurities but that’s a conversation for another day. Point being, Billie Eilish really struck a chord when she liltingly asks everyone what she was made for, because I, too, am a teenager in her late-20s who wants to do something but couldn’t even name one thing to start with. My pseudo-corporate girlie vlogs on TikTok are neatly edited, but deep down all I feel is dread because I feel I’m still not doing enough, and that I should always be this and more. The sense of self I am carefully gathering through every video I post of me recording my outfit is like a cry for help, for self-validation just so I could always remind myself that everyone’s on a different path and that me having my own is already enough in itself. But it’s always easier said than done. 

Maintaining Barbie and her reputation

Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie'' carved it out perfectly when Margot Robbie’s character started questioning everything she came to know in the Barbie world. Her own Dreamhouse didn’t feel like home a day after she thought about dying. She can’t walk properly on her shoes, and her shower’s temperature tends to irritate her. The movie began with the focus on the ultra-glam and bright world of Barbieland, the pink-everything world where Barbies of all kinds, sizes, and color are engaged in what their ‘versions' require them to do. There’s a lawyer Barbie, a doctor Barbie, a mermaid Barbie, even a pregnant Barbie–everything. Indeed anyone can be anything. It’s when the Barbieland continuum gets disrupted when Barbie starts dealing with reality–in this case Los Angeles. 

She then started doubting her own body, the perpetually glorified image in media as having the perfect dimensions. There was a part when Helen Mirren ascertained that Robbie might not have been the best choice to portray insecurity in a woman. She definitely wasn’t, but the movie articulated her “struggles” later on, which was met with a warm realization that she’s just like us. Suddenly even her house and the community she shared with the other Barbies had this coarseness to it. It looked like it was still hers, but marred by edges that used to be soft corners. And like clockwork, her insecurities morphed into fear, fear turned to despair. The Barbie who used to bleed confidence, who was so sure of herself and the environment she lived in, is now forced to confront her reality and what, or who, lies on that plane. 

Cinched between the realities of an ongoing bout for who deserves more rights than who are Weird Barbie and Barbie. Weird Barbie acted as sage to Barbie’s growing concerns within her sphere: cold showers, burnt waffles, feet flattening, cellulite. Weird Barbie has gone through the same thing before too, only that she seemed to be unable to transform herself back to “normalcy”–she stayed weird, deformed, and defamed. Her whole get-up says it all, compared to Barbie’s bubblegum pop wardrobe frothing with attractive colors that never go out of season. Weird Barbie wears the same colors too, only in patchworked manner with colors in less-than aberrant placement. It’s as if Weird Barbie struggled through so much, so in return she’s like the god of decisiveness. For the price of wisdom and personality, you must deal with the cruel cards of fate, while the sheltered Barbie must stay prim and femme so those who struggle must have someone to look up to and aspire to be. This only tells me that women are perpetually separated in two archetypes, if not oscillating between being insane and being stable. There can only be one, always. 

Photo by Carlijn Jacobs

But Weird Barbie, no matter how many times we eye her choice of appearance compared to the intentional Chanel-clad Barbie, is all  of us without the glare of the public eye, most importantly our own eyes. We sell ourselves in palatable chunks of Instagram stories and posts so the Weird Barbie barely shows on the surface, lest we are perceived as struggling pill poppers–and I’m guilty of partaking in this criminal vocation that is self-effacing. All the pent-up frustration I had growing up due to being bullied for my looks can now be erased, in exchange for my sanity and my healthy relationship with food. What used to be an arm’s length rule for material things turned into an obsession that ruefully blinded me of what really constitutes contentment and what made me feel full. How do you pull yourself back up from that kind of self-destruction, something so complex, something that almost all people can relate to because they had a rough childhood? Can a movie heal that part of us that stopped functioning after a certain event forced us to conclude that buying something or weighing less and less by the week can make us forget about the horrors? 

When Barbie was told she can be anything she wants to be, I wanted to scream. I didn’t have that choice like she did, but the movie still felt all the more like a quiet hug after three months of ruminating on it since it came out. I still find myself going back to that part where Barbie sees an old woman and spends a minute looking at her, telling her how beautiful she was. Of all the parts that had a pull on me, that one, next to the montage of women doing things that made them happy, could be one of my favorites. Women having choices and being happy with the cards they’re dealt with is such an alien concept that being shown the bare minimum enjoyment on screen is already so momentous in itself.

The face of ‘this or that’

There were a lot of moments of reckoning for Barbie in the movie, most particularly her jump from being the Barbieland muse to being just her, Barbara, a woman who chose to have a life of making ends meet to find herself. But the unintentional exclusion of Weird Barbie as an end-all and be-all for most, if not all, Barbies appeared as a preclusive framing of women as the perpetual good egg and bad egg. I say unintentional because her arc ended in her den, acting as an ornament of the pseudo-feminist revolution hatched by the other Barbies trying to straighten out the wrinkle that is patriarchy and horses in the fabric of Barbieland. Whatever happened to her, we cannot decide. Does she remain a learned yet struggling being in her world? It’s as if the Weird Barbie was vilified via banishment from Barbieland–and it’s not even consequential; her “owner” did too much ruinous experimenting with her, garnering her too rusty for the bubblegum world of Barbieland. 

If the Barbie movie represented a caveat while in the throes of womanhood, it’s how much Barbie’s tears enshrined itself as a currency in her world. Her first encounter with crises began at her own home, which she felt warranted a cryfest in front of the other Barbies. This isn’t to say that her outburst was her throwing a fit, nor was it bad even if it fell on that classification. But much of her “suffering” in the movie was framed as a vulnerability vis-a-vis her birthright as the “main” Barbie, rather than bodying the culpability of her disruptive thought process that highly involved her whole community. We are forced then to reconcile with a band-aid-solution monologue about womanhood which in itself also felt skewed towards a critique that feels regurgitated.

Photo by Carlijn Jacobs

All of us, who aspire to be like Barbie who realized and accepted full humanity, are not wrong to have done so, though. But if we look at it closer, if we allow ourselves to squint just a bit for the bigger picture to make more sense, a lesser, smaller portion of the threshold of success for Barbie’s ultimate humanity lies on the sacrifices Weird Barbie had to endure. In the real world, there will always be women who act as a catch basin of all the “Make sure you study hard so you don’t end up like her,” threats, and the overbearing “Chanel versus Walmart” comparisons between a corporate woman and someone who works a full nine-to-five shift at a McDonald’s. 

I enjoyed the privilege of having access to basic needs like food, shelter, and education. I was able to have a choice, somehow, despite having to struggle for the things I am reaping right now. But there will always be Barbies who are going to be more comfortable with their lives, whose tears can solve every crisis they have thanks to the less-than glamorous Barbies surrounding them, teaching them a thing or two about numerous realities. I’ve thought about this hard enough but the movie, though having all intents and purposes to bring forward a story about female triumph, felt like a navelgazing project, if not God-complex. I loved the movie. I would want to watch it again for comfort. But it’s now less personal in a way that it milks the woman as a fragile media darling, not as a confidante or model of the selfsame bravery translated by Weird Barbie’s experienced panache. Are women doomed to be compared in all art forms for all eternity? Am I meant to always view someone as a lesser woman than I am because I used their story as a motivation for me to be better at my career, finances, and relationships? Is that justice?

The Barbies of my life while growing up were all women I wanted to be, in the many stages of my life. But I’m not so sure if I ever fit the mold of these women who made it look so easy, getting and living the lives they lived. Somehow, there will always be something missing. I want this Filipina businesswoman’s condo unit with boutique mid-century furniture. I want this influencer’s wardrobe teeming with timeless pieces that I know would also look good on me. I wish to have this TikToker’s makeup collection that could be likened to a shop building up in her BGC condo unit’s living room. This lowkey vlogger’s book collection, plus her niche set of Bottega bags, plus her random travels to Europe with her friends and boyfriend, plus this Instagram model’s body and her bikini collection, everything. And it all makes me feel bad, the way I’m desiring for everything to be mine. And it’s not wrong. It’s just tiring, when your life closely resembles a mortgage you’re required to keep under your name through your purchasing power as a woman because if not, then who am I?

Maybe what constitutes being a woman sprawled with the blanket of capitalism over her is the endless search for contentment and validation through the many lenses she’s viewed with by the varying sets of people she meets in her lifetime. Because no matter what we do there will always be comparisons not just with our male counterparts, but also with the women who are doing more, and those who are doing less. And it’s a weakening thought, to realize that while we are bound with these circumstances until we reach our deathbeds, we are also completely tethered with the throes of capitalism’s affective touch on our fantasies, never mind if it includes spending money or not. I’m not really sure now if “Barbie” really disrupted something; to me it’s more like a feminism skewed towards an exclusionary ideology that only caters to the educated, to those who have access to the ever-changing models of popular culture, a.k.a. those who have WiFi and smartphones. 

While “Barbie” was a tremendously entertaining watch, packed with social commentary disguised as comedy and the whatnot, its social critique begs to be more sincere and original. Gerwig wished for the film to push back on the presently hazy state of Hollywood for women, yes, but we cannot disregard the fact that “Barbie” is from the same vehicle that runs over women from minorities–a self-explanatory fork in the road. 

I’ve gone on a tangent here, really. I was only ever meant to write a wistful piece about the years I spent with my Barbie dolls, but it turned into an unsolicited rant about the two Barbies I’m trying to nurse inside me. 

mumbling "i'm just a girl" for the remainder of 2023

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. 

I’ll always end up looking back on my younger years, and be emotional over it. Never in a Fuck-Time-Passing Vibe, (although it would’ve felt as such if this were in 2018) but in a Life-Is-Funny Vibe. I’ll never be that kid again, and I’ll never be that woman again–all pertaining to particular stages of my life. Transitioning is not as scary as it did before, awful parts and all. Somehow knowing that everything in life has a temporal aura is a comforting thing. Yes, I’d always be pining for certain parts of my life to happen again, or to have some semblance of what it felt like before when the world wasn’t as crazy as it is now, but it is what it is. I can be cold and bitter over the fact that time is not slowing down for me, not for anyone, but it’s up to me if I want to roll with it with my 14-year-old mind, or be present for my nearing-her-30s self, while still carrying my 14-year-old heart with me in the shape of a book I received not over a week ago. 

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. 

Several years ago, I used to always check prices of every Rookie Yearbook that came out, even months after its first press came out just to imagine if I could afford them. As expected, my parents didn’t agree because it cost a fortune. Understandably so, because as a working class family, buying a P3,000-worth book couldn't be justified. I wish I knew back then that I’d only have to wait around 12 to 13 years to physically own and hold one in my hands (and a signed copy at that!). And that the time it took was an ultra necessity for me; the in-between years served as a prologue.

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.