Growing up

Contrary to what many members of my extended maternal family think, when I say I love the Ateneo, it is not meant to gloat or to belittle other people's academic backgrounds. What I mean to say is simply that I am very grateful for the opportunity to have studied at the Ateneo, and to have spent some of the best years of my life there. I grew up, nay, raised myself, at the Ateneo, and I will be forever grateful for having been able to do so under the auspices of the university.

As I expounded in a previous entry, college was an escape for me. When I left Lipa to go to college, it was the beginning of a new chapter for me. I was sixteen, and about to embark on a new life in the (relatively) big city, alone, sans supervision. Only two others from my high school (Sands and Jenna) went to Ateneo, most having gone to DLSU. For all intents and purposes, I had been given a proverbial tabula rasa.

My college experience was not entirely smooth sailing. There were a lot of bumps along the way. My first semester in college, there was that enormous mess of an issue with an essay I wrote for English class which the substitute teacher had published in the Philippine Star without telling me. The short of it is it was intended to be a satire on dorm life which people took the wrong way. It was really bad, but my roommates and other friends from the dorm got me through it.

Towards the end of my freshman year, I decided to shift majors from Philosophy to Legal Management, as I was uneasy about job opportunities for a Philo major after college, and I was yet unsure of our family finances being able to see me through law school.

After my sophomore year, college was in full swing, and to say it was fun would be an understatement. My roommates, my Eliazo batchmates and my blockmates and I had become really good friends by then. I had a little mishmash of a family away from all the stress back home.

Then the summer of 2001 came along, and I met this guy who I'd eventually be "in a relationship" with for a little over two years. It's part of the whole college experience, I guess. I was young, and I thought I was in love. Looking back though, I'm not sure... Out of self-respect, I refuse to expound on the whole thing, but oh boy, if I could get my hands on my 17 to 18-year-old self, I think I'd give myself a good slap. =p The short version is it was a really long and drawn out and messy affair which, looking back, shouldn't have started in the first place, as we really had nothing in common. But hey, I was young and stupid and in college. I was entitled. =p Hey, at least Daddy and Tita Susan no longer lecture on the matter every time we talk. Well fine, they still do. And Chi and Punch still chide me about it too, come to think of it. Lord, pwede ierase? Okay, I think I'll go crawl under a rock now. Anyway, things fell apart two years later when I went to law school and we both moved on to other things, me to becoming a lawyer, and him to his officemate. =p Like I said, it was messy.

Nico, Sands and I have a term for ourselves: Self-raising Children. Just add hot water. I decline to speak for them, but in my case, that couldn't be more true. Save for financial support, I was fully detached and independent from my family. Unlike Chi's parents who called practically every night and sent her care packages every week, some members of my extended family, though they claim that we're a tight-knit group, apparently see keeping in touch as a one-way street, i.e. with me being the only mobile vehicle on the road. And so my friends have become my extended family. As I learned to see things in a new light, to think and discern, and to understand, the more I failed to comprehend. And I was okay with that.

I think a close friend of mine could not have put it more succinctly when she said, it's really sad that we can no longer relate to certain members of the family on the same level. I remember my freshman year English professor, Dr. Tony Ferrer, discussed this very same concept with us during one of our classes. We read this selection from the compilation of a poor boy from the province who was besotted with a girl from one of the influential families in their province. Her family didn't approve, and the girl also looked down on him as he was poor. The smart boy he was, he was able to pursue his studies as a scholar at a prestigious university. When he graduated, he went home to pursue the girl, but found that he could not relate to her intellectually.

It's not that we intend to belittle certain members of the family, but sometimes, they can be very touchy and overly and unecessarily sensitive about certain things, and just telling them about our day somehow gets interpreted as looking down on someone. Mob mentality adds insult to injury. All I can say is first of all, I am a long shot from being rich. I get by, that's all. I try to save and to be financially responsible, but that's it. I try to help out the best I can with what little I have, but I guess sometimes people take it the wrong way. Yes, I'm also entitled to get irritated, and to get mad. I don't think it's a character flaw on my part that I clam up and keep to myself when I'm irritable, irritated or annoyed. I try my best not to let my emotions get in the way so I don't say or do things fueled by fleeting anger. That's how my mom raised me, and that's how I am. I was trained not to shout, to throw a tantrum or even to cry in public. My mom underscored the importance of keeping one's emotions in check especially when in the presence of other people, and never to exhibit signs of anger or sadness in public just to attract attention to oneself. When I was a kid, if I wasn't in the best of moods, I was told to go to my room and resurface when I no longer felt like dealing with the world like an asshole, although of course not in those words. My mom said, for instance, that if I really wanted to cry, then I should do it in the privacy of my room, and when I was done, to wash my face and come out presentable. She lived what she preached too. In the short span of time I spent with my mom, I never once saw her lose her cool in public.


All that having been said, I am blessed to have mended my relationship with my dad, and to have reconnected with Tita Susan. While I have drifted apart from certain members of the family due to fundamental differences, I have also learned to understand and to see others in a new light. There are certain things that my sixteen-year-old self could not comprehend. What I saw as character flaws when I was younger, I now recognize to be simple personal quirks, which, if I may say so, are actually kind of cute.

And that, my dear friends, is the overly abbreviated version of the adventure, the pain, the excitement, the thrill, and the challenge of my experience of growing up. And the fact that I'm still sane and able to process and comprehend all these things in my own way in spite of everything is precisely why I am thankful to the Ateneo.