A self-assessment at nineteen. I hope to write this every year.
Some of these are merely blatant truisms, but I’m nineteen and have so much more to learn about and uncover and are a start to where I must ground myself.
Category: journal
personal drabbles, what would be my journal ?
What am I fueled by?
Reading Time: 9 minutes
In midway
Reading Time: 16 minutes
I’m no exception when it comes to feeling like I’ve aged decades in the past two weeks, when in reality I’m just nearing my second one. In my sophomore spring, I received and then lost an internship offer in America, was near-evicted from my college and then received dozens of messages of support in the form of housing and food from people all over the country, danced in the––for the first time ever––empty school courtyard that I have overlooked for the past eight months and will for the next two years, and broken down alone figuring out what of my life to throw away then keep, and so on.
(more…)March 2020
Reading Time: 2 minutes
[Content Warning]
Hello!
Around 12 hours ago, President Duterte announced a complete travel ban to and from Metro Manila, my home, to happen in 48 hours. 24 hours ago, I received an email saying that I should get out of campus by Sunday night. (My country is on lockdown, I wrote to them. Try to find a place to stay like family friends or an AirBNB. Nevermind that I am the only person in this building besides the facility superintendent.)
I have a fuckton of interviews that are postponed, delayed, or potentially cancelled. I’m not sure what I’m going to do this summer: I’m not sure if what I want to do in life is valid in the time of catastrophe anymore.
Feeling uncomfortable on some platforms since several people have been creating alternate accounts to follow me and act creepily even after I’ve blocked/distance them. Never expected that to happen to me but apparently it has. It’s discomforting and jarring.
One side of tech Twitter is talking about the implications of creation and entrepreneurship in this time. I am thinking about how I am going to afford groceries for the next months––and I am all fucking for creation.
My heart is bursting at how doomed the world is. As I’ve seen, the truly worst thing about this entire situation is how it upended our society–revealed how unprepared and polarizing it is. How healthcare is fucked. I want to believe this is a test of human resolve and that this will peak and then end and we can understand it: but the greatest conspirators are our own selves. This is not a new revelation.
I have not been eating a lot. One meal every two days since an awful midterm week last week. It’s strange walking into bookstores with an empty stomach, three product management books, and no certainty of whether I have a space to sleep in the next week in the midst of a university that asks its students upwards of 70,000 dollars a year. I actually self-harmed for the first time in years. The difference is that the validity of this seems more long-lasting (not that my previous ones weren’t). This one is of ire; much more than the Catholic heart compressed in the quiet home of Las Pinas. My self-destruction on my own terms seems more necessary than ever.
It’s not even the hurt of compressing my life into luggages. It’s how expendable it all is.
I think I deserved it all.
Take care,
Chia