Passion vs. passivity

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

 MANILA, Philippines - Giselle Jose graduated from Colegio San Agustin, Makati in 2009 with honors. Awarded as one of the Ten Outstanding Students of Makati in 2009, she currently majors in economics at UP-Diliman. She loves reading and writing, having a soft spot for coming-of-age novels and drawing her inspiration from her travels around the world every summer with her family.

There is a certain way a book breathes when you hold it in your hands. It’s as if, resting right there on each page, is a soul waiting to expose itself to whoever’s fortunate enough to pick up that book. And if you’re really lucky and I mean really lucky you will find a book maybe twice or thrice in your life whose breathing is right in sync with yours.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky is one such book. And this tender breathing that inhaled and exhaled in time with mine held true only for me, back when I first read it, around five years ago, when I was a high school freshman. At the time, I was at a crossroads, and it felt like the street signs, if any, were written in gibberish. It felt like I was being forced to wear shoes 10 sizes too big and walk along a path I wasn’t ready to take. I guess growing up felt that way, especially for a girl like me who thought that all she knew was how to be young.

I can’t remember reading a book as honest as this. It is as though Stephen Chbosky’s pen spilled out only ink splatters of emotions and they calmly assembled themselves into words. And it was like I was not reading words, but bearing the pain, empathizing with the sadness and sharing the happiness they were written with. The words were rife with such pure sincerity and such blinding honesty that only someone real could have produced it. There is so much raw pain behind these letters, which are written in such simple words. And yet, I did not see the characters, the plot and the dialogue as springing from Chbosky’s mind, but from and of themselves.

Written back in 1999 as a series of letters to a stranger, Perks of Being a Wallflower offered me a kindred spirit in its protagonist, Charlie, who has also just begun his first year of high school and is looking for someone to just listen. He relishes the quiet and basks in being unnoticed, while he watches people make mistakes and act impulsively. Not only is he afraid to draw attention to himself, but he is also content with it; he is comfortable with being nothing more than a wallflower. Charlie writes with a sense of detachment mixed with passive desperation as he traverses the scary road of growing up, and he hangs on to the hope that his anonymous friend is out there, reading each letter with sympathy, which in turn might bring him the clarity that he needs. The idea of a person like Charlie both fascinated and frightened me. Until I realized that I was in danger of becoming that person.

“Do you always think this much, Charlie?” “Is that bad?” “Not necessarily. It’s just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.” “Is that bad?” “Yes.”

However, Charlie has one defining quality, which may, from a certain angle, be seen as a deadly flaw: he is completely absent of apathy. He cares too much. He loves too hard. And this comes in conflict with his being a wallflower. How can he act on his raging feelings if he does not feel it is his place to act? But like any teenage boy, he falls in love. Being the wallflower that he is, however, he does nothing for his own happiness, and he lets the girl of his dreams go, as she tells him, “It’s great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn’t need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things.”

At this point, one has to ask, what are the perks of being a wallflower? I saw so much of myself in Charlie. It wasn’t about the romance, but it was about the passion. Charlie had so much of it, and I had so much of it, but there was nowhere for all of it to go; not if I closed myself off and stayed passive. My soul was bursting as I hungrily devoured the book. And then I knew what I had to do.

At the crossroads, I had to wear those shoes, even if they were 10 sizes too big, and I would have to forge my own path. And so I did, and eventually I grew to fit those shoes. From being a timid little girl who was scared to act for fear of rejection or failure, I became a young woman scandalized with the very idea of inaction, of not helping myself realize my potential. The path I took in high school was this: I became more active in organizations, taking on several leadership roles throughout those four years, I joined competitions (sometimes winning them), and I made friends. And I grew up, just as Charlie did by the end of his story, when he decided that it was time to stop sending letters to that anonymous stranger. Perks of Being a Wallflower helped define me throughout my high school years, and even now that I’m a college sophomore. And when I feel a little lost, I like to take out my battered copy and feel the book breathe with me, until I calm down and find my way again.