How my fight fizzled out (and how I’m trying to get it back)
September 1, 2016: High school me is naive, feisty, and afraid—yet hopeful. The world is too big but I am so adamant to face it head-on. I feel so small, but my anger is large; it swells inside me and burns.
My desire (and wishful thinking) to save humankind, combined with my youthful stubbornness, made it all too easy to be outspoken. I did everything a teenager could from the comfort of my home. I retweeted, storied, and posted whatever I thought I had to—most of them helped me express thoughts I didn’t know yet how to articulate. I just felt anger, plain and raw.
A lot of us couldn’t sit still after the news showed death after death and more victims left out on the streets. Speaking up was a privilege then because I could do it in relative safety. Online zines and think pieces in student publications were my outlets. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t enough. But I had my own restraints to blame, right? I thought, because I was still young and in high school, I was limited in what I could say and how I could say it. I wrote with the innocent belief that I would grow bigger someday.
November 18, 2016: People compared the former dictator’s surprise burial in Libingan ng mga Bayani to “a thief in the night,” which is ironic since he was a thief in broad daylight. I was in school when the news broke, and it was like a balloon being deflated and quickly filled up again. Everyone around me, students and teachers, felt the wind knocked out of them. Disbelief followed: This couldn’t be real, right? Surely this is fake?
We spent two subject periods just decompressing. My Social Studies teacher stood in front of us, eyes blinking rapidly as she discussed what today would mean. My English teacher made some of us speak about what we were feeling. I remember crying, feeling helpless and smaller than I ever did. We spent that time building up fury, desperately trying to draw something out of our exasperation.
That night, I joined the people flooding the streets. The anger pulsated throughout the crowd and it was overwhelming. It came in waves; I could feel us grieving for ourselves and our futures, and for our history that was being threatened. We were scared that history was being rewritten and revised and that we would end up on a dangerous path once we allowed former dictators to be hailed as heroes.
(Hindsight is a cruel thing, I have recently learned.)
November 25, 2016: I remember everyone rushing to turn their art into protest.
I remember having to tame the flame a little bit, keeping in mind the rules of the school. They didn’t want something too attention-grabbing or loud. So we wore black. We wrote and drew. Our student publication wrote about the war on drugs, extrajudicial killings, and the revision of history. It wasn’t much, but maybe this was practice for something bigger one day.
I was shouting in an echo chamber; I could do and say what I wanted with hardly any consequences, and it was okay because everyone around me was like me. There was no engaging with people with differing opinions or actually going out of my way to convince anyone of anything. This was a privilege and I knew that, but I promised to keep fighting the good fight once I finally could.
I could now see that being a small part of something bigger wasn’t actually a bad thing. I’m not meant to fight these large systematic battles on my own; I’m not some hero who can turn the tide with just one sentence or one action. Instead, there is power in the masses and in knowing that you’re all there fighting for the same thing. I can’t save the world but I can fix some parts of it—tiny pieces that I hope others are willing to mend, too.
June 3, 2020: When I’m finally thrown out into the big bad world, I find myself even smaller. I could scream all I want, but there were higher forces that would just shut me up. I saw what happened to the people who spoke out: schoolmates were red-tagged and organizations were targeted.
I was at the age when people started to take me seriously. What I did had weight, but it wasn’t enough to make a change. Tweet about how the government is mishandling the pandemic and get a few hundred likes, but see no changes in law or legislation. Bombard your Instagram Stories with links and infographics about the Anti-Terror Bill and get people to move, but activists still get targeted. The girl who wanted to save the world was now gone; she was getting too scared of living in it.
I learned of another privilege: numbness. I poured myself into other things like academics, family, and hobbies, and I filed away the larger picture. My excuse was my tiredness and my belief that I didn’t matter enough by myself. Fatigue, after all, came with constantly being angry at the state of the world. It was like being weathered down.
October 7, 2021: There’s a tiny spark that wants to rekindle into an old flame. When Leni Robredo announced her candidacy, it lit up not only in me but also in those around me. For the first time in years, hope became my reigning emotion.
I remember flooding the streets on more than one occasion, and I realize that my anger had transformed. My fight came back, this time more focused. Going to rallies and being an active follower of the campaign made me understand a few things.
I could now see that being a small part of something bigger wasn’t actually a bad thing. I’m not meant to fight these large systematic battles on my own; I’m not some hero who can turn the tide with just one sentence or one action. Instead, there is power in the masses and in knowing that you’re all there fighting for the same thing. I can’t save the world but I can fix some parts of it—tiny pieces that I hope others are willing to mend, too.
May 13, 2022: After all the hope came the disappointment. I usually avoid risks for this very reason: I hated the feeling of losing that hope. It was tempting to fall into the trap of despondency again to cope, but this time I’m trying to catch myself.
I'm trying to strike a healthy balance between keeping my peace and fighting for what's right. There’s still the angry part of me, but it’s my determination and hopes for a better future that keeps me going.