Tag Archives: writing

365 Things to Look Forward to — Number 33: A New Post

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33. A New Post

I started writing this collection of 365 things to look forward to for several reasons.

1. I wanted to force myself to write something everyday. The original plan was to write something everyday, until a whole year was up. Then I would have 365 blog entries that I could turn into a book, or sift through and turn into a book, or pick through for topics that I could develop further and eventually turn those into a book. Unfortunately, I hit a few snags early on, and a month passed and I still didn’t have 30-31 things to look forward to. Now, I have 33! One month and a couple of days of things to look forward to and counting. I know it’s a daunting task, but I always wanted to be a serious writer. Which means, I wanted to make writing a life-time career. I’d always dreamed of becoming a writer, and I know I was getting there, but bills got in the way, and other jobs provided a more steady income. Now, before it’s too late, I just want to get on my way, so I’m always setting aside some time for writing. And as long as I can do it, I will do it every single day for the rest of my life.

2. I needed to start counting my blessings. The past two years have taken a lot out of me. I’m still recovering, but I know I need to face life head on and go on with it. Many times, I’d just take things for granted. Most things, I’d take with a grain of salt. Everything was just ordinary. Nothing special ever really happened in my life. At least, that’s how I looked at it. I was just living. I know I started becoming cynical when I was in elementary school, and I was a full-blown cynic in high school. I also developed an armor of protection. Nothing would faze me–at least on the outside. I’d taken on a serious visage and a sharp tongue. Everything I said was tongue-in-cheek, in the sense of an earlier meaning that connoted contemptuous humor. I was satirical, cynical, sardonic, critical, and took everything with a grain of salt. I remained quiet whenever I could, rarely speaking and when I did, it would be some pointed comment. Beneath all that, I wanted to be liked and like others around me. I wanted to be normal. I wanted to understand what my classmates’ lives were like, because my life certainly didn’t seem like anything anyone else I knew had. So I struggled to be that way in my senior year, and I brought that into university, where I adopted a very casual, very carefree aura. I became the belle of the ball, so to speak, and I always tried to look my best, by dressing in very feminine couture, as opposed to my boyish outfits before senior high. I enjoyed the attention and I never showed how I really felt about things. I was a natural flirt and enjoyed the attention I felt I would never get when I was younger, because I was the nerdy geeky girl with eyeglasses at whom men never made passes. I traded my eyeglasses for contact lenses, which did wonders to boost my ego, which had been brutally and constantly bruised growing up. I was extremely active in various organizations and found that I could influence people and I could make myself heard. I was experiencing independence, freedom, and responsibility like never before. And I learned that I could be in control of it all. Through all that, nobody every knew when I had problems or difficulties or issues with anything in life. I was always smiling, always friendly, but still avoided speaking when I could. I preferred to sit at the edge of things, except when I was pushed up front and center to assume leadership roles or to perform tasks, which I always strove to do my best at. I preferred to listen to others as long as I could and not volunteer anything until people looked to me, or I felt obliged to speak up and do something because no one else would, or they couldn’t figure out how to approach a problem, and so on. I preferred to watch people, because I could learn so much about them just by watching them, listening to them speak, observe how they interacted with others and reacted to people or situations or ideas. This was something I had enjoyed doing since childhood—just watching, observing–and I still enjoy doing it now. I can sit for hours, imagining what people’s lives are like from watching them, making up stories about them. After so many years of wearing this persona, I have finally realized that I do have talents that other people don’t have. I always thought I was just another ordinary, insecure girl, who had grown up to be an ordinary, insecure woman. I never thought my life was so different, or so special, or so unusual, or even so extraordinary. I never thought that some of what I do and have been doing all my life are things a lot of other people can’t do at all. I have learned to face the fact that I have been showered with so many blessings, which more than make up for the pains of growing up the way I did. It’s not the first time I tried to start counting my blessings, but every time I tried to in the past, I’d get foiled. I have learned in a very hard way that I can’t let things or people foil me. I’m in control of my life. While I can’t control everything, like my job, the environment, politics, and other people, I can always control the way I feel or react to things. I can always control the way I think. Of course, once in a while, I might indulge in a pityfest. But that’s human. What most people fail to do is learn to stop pitying themselves and learn to love themselves and see everything as some sort of blessing, twisted and disguised as they may be. Being able to even begin to see that is, in itself, a blessing.

3. I need to be more positive. For the longest time, I’d seen things with a jaded eye. There were people and things, of course, that were exempt from this point of view. Those people were mainly my friends who I considered close to me, or those who had taken our relationship from “colleagues” and “associates” to “friends.” I’m not going to name any now, but I do keep in touch with several of them, and even those I haven’t been in touch with are still special to me. Those are people who, no matter what, I will consider good and dear friends. Others are just passing through my life. But that’s not the way it is. In reality, everyone and everything that is in contact with me in whatever shape or form they come, touches my life, becomes a part of me. Some will affect me in a huge way. Some in tiny ways. But I know I am learning things from them, every single day, every moment of my life. I just need to acknowledge that more often. I need to accept that. And I need to do it in a positive way. Some things or people might pass through with little effect and hardly any affect, but that’s because I will have learned that these are insignificant to me, or potentially harmful, hence the need to avoid them or discard them. That’s actually a life lesson. I need to count my blessings and see things in a more positive way. Which brings me back to item 2 in this entry. Blessings and positivity. You can’t separate those two.

4. I need to focus. Too many things interest me. I want to do too many things. I want to learn too many things. I want to be too many things. But I have only one life at the moment. And one self. One body. One me. I knew, back in high school, that I needed to focus on something to determine what course to pursue in university, and eventually, what path my career would take. I was overjoyed when we were offered an aptitude test, that would help use determine what areas we were good at, so that we could plan our future along those lines. That way, we wouldn’t be wasting time developing an area that we had absolutely no aptitude for. I was completely dismayed and disappointed when my results came back. I was hoping the test would decide for me what direction I could and should take. The results I got back showed that I scored at the top of the chart in three career areas (out of five), and scored in the second bracket in the remaining two areas. Before the results were out, I was told that I could pursue a career in the areas where my aptitude lay in the the top two brackets. All I found out was that I could be good at any of all the 5 areas, and that I would be good in any career. I couldn’t even ignore the lowest-scoring area because there wasn’t one. And I couldn’t focus on the top-scoring area because there were three of them! So once again, I was thrown into a quandary where I could be anything I wanted be. And so my life continued, picking up skills in disparate areas of interest. I have finally decided that my earliest desire, to be a writer, is what is really best for me, because it allows me to use the knowledge I have acquired over all the different aspects of my life into a singular task, albeit with a myriad outputs. I have also decided that the second thing I do want to specialize in is my art. That will be totally new discussion, of course, as this entry is getting quite lengthy.

So, there you have it. This is why I chose to start writing 365 things to look forward to. It doesn’t mean I won’t write about other things, because if I do, that means I’m doing just dandy, because finally, my writing is coming handy!

 

365 Things to Look Forward to–Number 29: Writing

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29. Writing

I started actively writing at a very young age.

In an effort to make us children “widen our horizons” and “broaden our knowledge” my mother made us read. We had several books in our “library” at home–the Grolier’s Encyclopedia set, the Book of Knowledge series, Through Golden Windows series, the Book of Science series, the Bookshelf for Boys and Girls, and more. As a voracious little bookworm, I gobbled up everything I could get my hands on, and when I was done with all the stories in the Bookshelf for Boys and Girls and Through Golden Windows, I dug into my mothers collection of novels–The Ugly American,  Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Somerset Maugham’s The Book Bag—and my dad’s novels, starting with El Filibusterismo and Noli me Tangere. Not exactly reading for an 8 to 10 year old girl, but I took them all in. In between different books by Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys, and Good Wives) I entertained myself with more of my dad’s collections from the Classics Club: Montaigne, Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare’s Complete Works, Milton, Wordsworth, Desiderium Erasmus, Bacon, and other scholarly and philosophical literature. Most unusual fare for a young girl, but I thrived on it.

By the time I discovered the school library, I was bringing home book after book after book, most of the time, up to the maximum of 5 books per day, all of which I’d have returned in the course of a week, so that by the weekend, I’d have another 5 books to bring home. It was there that I discovered Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Dana Girls, the Bobbsey Twins, and all manner of novels. Because I had befriended the librarians and helped out as a member of the library club during breaks and after school, I could take home more books than other students. My school bag would be full of 10 books I’d check out every Friday and return sometime during the following week, as I finished them.

So you can see that I had a lot to write about. Why did I need to write about these, you ask? First, reading all those books was helpful in writing book reports. I had no trouble writing book reports at all. Second, to make sure my brothers were reading books, my mother provided the added incentive of money for every synopsis of everything we read. I was the happy camper, as I benefited most from this, since I could dash off summaries in a jiffy. And because I was a fast reader as well, I could have at least one summary a day, which earned me a pretty penny until my mother figured out that it wasn’t working on my two brothers. Shortly after that, she stopped giving the monetary incentives, as she had bigger problems to deal with besides my brothers’ lack of interest in reading and writing.

I never stopped writing.

At 10, I started writing poetry. I had kept a diary since I was 7 years old, and as the diary entries became less, the poetry I wrote increased until I had a full notebook. I could fill up a notebook of poetry every year, but the lure of other extra-curricular and co-curricular activities drew me away from just writing. Still, I joined the school paper every year from 5th grade until I graduated from senior high school; and I joined the school paper in undergraduate school, earning a significant stipend for every article I wrote, and eventually, a substantial amount in various editorial positions until I was the editor-in-chief. I was responsible for contributing to several newsletters for the program I was enrolled in for my undergraduate degree; I was a major writer for summer workshop newsletters; I was on the staff for a grad school newsletter; and I was on the staff for newsletters in various jobs I have held. I continued writing poetry, though I had expanded my repertoire to feature writing, column writing, reporting, and other journalistic efforts.

Once I was working, I participated in research projects; I edited literary publications of works by students; I wrote manuals and seminar materials for teachers; I even wrote a manual for teachers that was released nationwide–and I never saw a copy of that work, but have received feedback from teachers who had seen or had copies of that work! I continued to write poetry, though much reduced in volume and somewhat sporadic now. Most of my writing was scholarly rather than creative and literary. In several jobs, I wrote press articles, interviews, media releases, programme material, copy for programs, ads, posters, flyers, and brochures; speeches, reports, memos, and business letters. I also wrote technical manuals for operational procedures and learning programs; designed programs, curriculum, and books.

Finally, I had reached book writing. I wrote copy for a grammar book; a Communication Arts work text; a series of pre-school work texts; a manual of activities, projects, lessons, and games for English teachers.

I still hadn’t written what I had always wanted to write: a novel.

I wrote a play, instead–well, several plays–but completed one that I liked so much, and that several friends thought highly of, that I was persuaded to submit it to a national literary competition. I was extremely pleased and completely elated when I was informed that it had won the 3rd prize for a full-length play in English. In the most prestigious national literary competition in the Philippines!

Now, I am back to writing essays, mostly informal, as most blogs are.

I have plans to create more blogs to share more of my writing.

I am writing poetry again, although not as regularly as I want, but certainly more than I had written in the last 20 years.

I am trying very hard to establish myself in freelance writing, so that I can eventually spend more time earning from doing something I really enjoy doing and that comes very easily to me.

I am a creative person. I live by creating through words and pictures. I create pictures with words, but I find that sometimes, words cannot express what I want to show–and now I have opened myself to my inner artist–something I had denied because of sibling comparison and a sad lack of encouragement from the people who should have encouraged me from the start. Still, I also am part of the cause–I hated being compared to anyone else, especially my siblings, I hated having to compete for anything, and I hated any form of confrontation, which included having to explain myself. So if my siblings had chosen a certain path and showed themselves good at something, I avoided it. If that were not the case, I probably would have established myself in performing arts early on, as a playwright, an actress and a director–all of which I had a passion for. But my older brother was THE actor and singer. So I did lights, design, and directing. And I hid my voice. I was always afraid it would be criticized, even if I attended voice lessons and joined a couple of choirs, I never did make it to the glee club in school. There were always better singers, and I could never belt it out singing. But I could belt out directing. I was afraid to complete most of the sketches I made or attempt to develop them into anything more than light sketches. I felt that if I continued working on them, the images that initially appeared under my pencil would be ruined and not look real anymore. Besides, my younger brother was THE artist, who later specialized in Fine Arts, and was the Michaelangelo of my mother’s eye. I didn’t even want to delve into the sciences or math because my youngest brother, who had nothing in the creative and artistic department, was THE math wiz. Ironically, I also passed the same national scholarship exam that he did, but because I was in the 2nd 50 rather than in the top 50, I had to take either Math or Science AND Education–which peeved my brother, because, while he could take any science-related course he wanted to, the terms of his scholarship were subject to family income. I, on the other hand, had only two choices, and the government had decided that, because of that, I would get a full scholarship with the maximum benefits–book and clothing allowance and a full monthly stipend to boot! And that didn’t stop me from finding venues for writing. No matter what I did or where I went, writing would eventually find me. And that made me happy.

Now, I have this blog, which gives me the chance to write all I want and share as much of it as I want with anyone around the world who’s interested in reading what I have to say.

I know I will never run out of things to write because the world will never run out of topics.

And one day, I will see my work in print and in bookstores–my ultimate dream come true–and that will only make me want to write some more!