Graduation thoughts
If you remain true to yourself, someone will see it, and will choose you, because you are unhidden.
When I graduated grade school, in 1983, my hair was fully braided. I was in braces, too, and my dress was made by a seamstress in a small shop along Katipunan. Fittings were hard as the shop was also a carinderia. To try on anything, the seamstress would hold up a piece of cloth to keep me hidden. The shop was very small, and we needed to skirt around each other as she turned me this way and that, hem-ming and hawing. At the end of each fitting, I always thought I smelled like fried fish or inihaw na baboy. But who was I to complain? It was a new dress, all white, with rosettes on the bodice; and for once my cloth was not just the extra from my mother’s cloth but was entirely my own.
I am aware of my vanity, clued in by the fact that I remember so much physical detail from a moment that occurred 35 years ago. My shoes were from Marikina Shoe Expo, I wore white stockings, my hair was pulled tight by the braids and even then my hair was glorious. Like a shape-shifting canvas, my hair could do all sorts of tricks. For this day though, it was tamed in a braid, and kept my face at front and center. There was something difficult to contend with though: those damn braces. In 1983, it was a strange thing to have and a few months before the graduation, when we had to have our pictures taken, the photographer didn’t know what to make of the contraption. No smile I could give could be beautiful.
Call it a memoirist’s gift or curse, but I can still revisit my tiny self sitting in the auditorium waiting for my turn to do the practiced bow upon receiving the diploma from the president. Perhaps these memories are clear these days as I am able to re-walk my life as I watch over my own children struggle with young life.
When the children regale me with their stories of classroom antics, or lessons gone well or awry, my memory turns to my own years in the classroom. I tell the children these stories of my own, and they give me a perspective lost to me at the moment I lived the story. Once, talking about dissecting frogs, I shared how this was my favorite activity in science. I told them the story of how Mang Art, our family driver, and I would go to UP in the afternoons and buy frogs for me and my classmates and how we would transfer these frogs into jars or cookie containers, and I’d bring this large sack to school and distribute frogs to delicate classmates. I remember with a kind of surgical precision, the feel of that slime as we placed the frogs on the board and pinned their legs. I illustrated the ensuing chaos in the classroom as frogs eluded these pins and would jump off and scurry away. My voice turned quiet and solemn as I intoned the seriousness of slicing skin and watching a live, beating heart. All that poetry, erased, as my son replied: “Mom, no wonder you were an outcast in school.” Of course, I laughed then.
But back then there wasn’t much laughter for me as I navigated the vicissitudes of young life. My memories of that age are of isolation. I remember being bullied into letting go of my lunch money, at first, and then later with my actual lunch, to a girl who watched for me by the canteen, confident that I would give her all that I had. When I think about it now, what was it that propelled me to give it to the point that it had become habitual? Was it fear? Fear of what? Is it possible there was fear in her heart, too? But so much of the secrets of the universe were hidden to me. I only knew the inevitability of surrender and the consolation of knowing I could devour the Sky Flakes can at home.
In English class, when teachers would search for the right word, I would chime in from the back and proffer a possible word. It felt natural to give a possible word, not thinking it a display of superiority. But the resentment from classmates would come back to me, in a look, in a whisper, in a letter sometimes, told how arrogant to presume I had the word. What defense could I give? There were no words for that.
And eventually, memories of finding solace in the library, being asked by the head librarian to assist during lunch break, when there was so much time having no lunch to eat anyway, and no friends to sit with. I loved best the stamp of dates, and ensuring that the long date would fit into that tiny square under “date borrowed.” Walking among the shelves, the teacher talked about the Dewey Decimal system and the systems person in me soaked in the possibility of ordering what seemed such a fragmented world. You could lean on any shelf of books for company.
In a word, I was lonely. In the classroom, I contended with the different parts of myself that did well in certain things but was hopeless in others. I’d look at math and conjure philosophical queries. A + B = B + A seemed like an articulation of something deep about the world and the wonders and perils of equivocation. I’d settle on this and never leave while the teacher moved on to other properties. But in English every thing I ever wrote flowed like water and was often the sample of how to write things. In music class, Bach was a brother and no stranger to me. In Art class, I struggled with learning perspective. My teacher asked to see me and requested I submit extra work. Praised in some areas, hapless in others, what did it all mean? At home, no such dichotomy existed. All my father said was “be good” and I was good in all things.
But navigation outside the classroom seemed even stranger. There seemed to be rules about what to share and what not to share; rules that governed the spheres of public and private. In public, the popular girls made my life horrible. In private, they wrote me letters asking for advice on how to deal with a difficult family life or secrets of stealing or cheating. Who was I really, enemy or confidant? It made me wonder if it was a terrible thing for anyone to admit I was a friend, making me feel even lonelier. When I asked my mother what to do, I didn’t know what to expect. All she said was: enjoy your aloneness. It was a bone I did not mind gnawing.
What did I learn best through the difficult years of grade school and high school? I’ve paid for this isolation many times over very clearly by having very few friends from that time. I do not attend class reunions and that part of life is something I do not have. Former classmates cannot believe this of me; sometimes they send missives to let me know I got it all wrong. And this I say always in response: the bully never remembers.
There is a secret in the universe that is incontrovertible, proven to be true, time and again, no matter the century: you can only be yourself. And to be yourself, you will have to be false to yourself sometimes, but you must just as quickly go back to the truth. In a way, the real education I received was knowing what to do about not being liked. But it was precisely not being liked that gave me a freedom to be just myself. I pursued things then for the sheer pleasure of knowing something deeply for my own education. To sit at peace with one’s own self is a choice you can make as early as you know this. To shape shift for someone else is a waste of everyone’s time. And the truth is, if you remain true to yourself, someone will see it, and will choose you, because you are unhidden.
Sometimes, though, my bullied self comes to the fore. You’ll see it in the way I flinch when people approach me, like waiting for a hit to the core. Or I’ll feel it in the way I am surprised when people tell me they like me. It just hasn’t always been the case. But I feel it best, when I am second-guessed, when I am challenged, when I am tamped down, when I am frightened, and my true self rises to the surface and does its great roar. Too vague? It’s that line in the song from The Greatest Showman: I’m not scared to be seen. I make no apologies. This is me.
Congratulations to batch 2018. The greatest gift you can give to the world is your very best self. It is the only thing required for success. Take it from me.
