It as a Function of Girl

In 2010, it felt like anything was possible if you were a Girl on the internet – which I was. I had a very public Tumblr which contained outfit photos, musings on what happened to me that day, and yes, attempts at experimental poetry.

The 2010 local poetry scene was heavily polarised. Unlike today, where despite (or perhaps because of) the existence of different scenes, there are various avenues for writers to publish and engage in discourse, back then, there were really only two main options for young writers who wanted to get their work out there.

You could be part of the more traditional literary crowd, meaning you’d be submitting to Anvil anthologies, the Likhaan journal, and avidly attending Lira or Happy Mondays events at Conspiracy Bar along Visayas Ave. At these events, you’d most likely be listening to poets like Michael Coroza, Rio Alma, Marne Kilates or Joel Toledo perform their work. You would be on the look-out for the Call for Submissions announcements of the Philippine Graphic and the Philippines Free Press. You’d be gunning for a seat at one of the National Writing Workshops and entering your manuscripts to the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards every year. You and your friends would visit the La Solidaridad bookstore every Friday and go on writerly walks in Intramuros if you had the afternoon off. One of your big dreams would be to attend the famous Iowa workshop one day. Your poetry would follow a certain type of lyrical form and cadence, likely preoccupying itself with sparrows and rain and ephemeral light as metaphors for meaningfulness or history or heritage.

Or else you were part of the indie crowd, submitting to then-new online literary magazines like Stache. You’d be hoarding High Chair poetry books by Conchitina Cruz, Alan Popa, Mark Cayanan and Mabi David at events along Katipunan. You would be making your own zines to be sold at Better Living Through Xeroxography: A Small Press Expo at Ilyong’s in Cubao.

You were most likely friends or friendly in some capacity with Adam David. You were uninterested in the traditional milestones of Filipino writerly life¹ and more invested in replicating the McSweeney’s small press model spearheaded by Dave Eggers in San Francisco. You read The Believer Mag and worshiped Zadie Smith and Sheila Heti. You owned an industrial stapler and had a regular relationship with the photocopy guy at Alva. Your poetry was preoccupied with desire vis-à-vis your Catholic upbringing and you most likely had a fondness for footnotes.

My baptism into the local literary scene was via the latter aka the zine scene (the zcene?). I was a pre-med student who had fallen in love with literature after joining Malate Literary Folio, De La Salle University’s official literary publication. The zine scene gave me an avenue to engage with fellow writers when I felt I didn’t have the credentials or the background to do so. I wasn’t a Lit Major. I wasn’t formally trained as a writer. All I had was what I’d published in Malate and on my blog. My main preoccupation at the time was to find a way to articulate my love-hate relationship with attention via prose poems or poetic prose that I called ‘tiny fiction’. I resisted the label of poetry because I felt there was a lot of pressure to be ‘correct’ or ‘to know’ if you claimed you were writing poetry.

My attempts to merge concepts I was forced to think about and learn because of my undergraduate track (e.g. trigonometric functions, biochemistry, hemoglobin) and concepts I studied out of my own volition resulted in work like ‘Word Problems’, published in Plural Prose Journal’s second issue, which utilised the form of mathematical word problems to convey the circular nature of problems within romantic relationships. The appealing thing about co-opting mathematical forms for literary purposes was that I could finally pretend to be good at something I hated by injecting it with something I loved.

It was a year of mixed forms. I found myself getting featured in publications like the now-defunct StyleBiblePH and landing a gig as a Zalora brand ambassador, a pretty big deal pre-Instagram influencer boom. I was doing on-the-job training at the Philippine General Hospital’s infamous Ward 7 for psychiatric care. I spent daily six-hour shifts in a set of blue scrubs doing patient interviews and assisting with occupational therapy. At the same time, I was running for Prose Editor at the university folio and spending nights with other aspiring editors at the publication office, reviewing and studying for the Editorial Board evaluation. I had a strange email correspondence with my thesis mentor who was convinced I had written a story with the love interest patterned after him. My dad was undergoing hospital procedures for his pacemaker, and I spent a lot of time in and out of Makati Medical Center. I had broken up with my black leather jacket-wearing, fiction-writing boyfriend of three years, only to get with a graphic shirt-wearing poetry-writing boyfriend. I was also secretly in love with a brooding jock who played bass guitar and had clinical depression.

By the end of the year, most of these things had fallen apart.

I didn’t have enough time and energy to keep the fashion blog going, let alone attend Zalora events and launches. I’d ended my on-the-job training with less than spectacular remarks. I’d been described by the evaluator as ‘distracted’ (which was accurate). I’d gotten the prose editorship and had come to the bitter realisation that being an editor meant most of your time was spent, well, editing. My thesis mentor had failed me after an emotional rollercoaster of confrontations and apologies, but not before asking for my confidential information from a guidance counsellor I was having counselling sessions with, stalking me whenever I went for a smoke, and writing me an email to let me know I was one of the best students he’d ever had the pleasure of teaching. My dad was recommended for regular dialysis; his heart was better, but his kidneys were failing. I broke up with the poetry-writing boyfriend for the brooding jock but the brooding jock decided I was insensitive for making him sit and wait through two relationships and didn’t want to be with me after all (exact words: ‘leave me the fuck alone and just shoot our friendship in the head’). Most interestingly, I began getting anonymous hate mail from poetry-writing now-ex-boyfriend’s fans: how fucking dare I break his heart, did I think I had the right just because I had a stupid blog, he was drinking himself to death and it was all my fault, it’s not like I was famous so what the fuck did he see in me, didn’t I know that everyone thought he was too good for me, didn’t I know that I was an ugly, dumb bitch?

One of my friends told me this was happening because I was an ‘It Girl’. And while it was meant as a compliment along the lines of Beyoncé calling herself ‘That Bitch’, I found myself wondering about why we use the pronoun It to describe It Girls. My hypothesis is similar albeit less eloquent than Patrick Flores’s: being at the centre of attention and therefore, drama, also makes women subject to criticism and acts of incivility because they’re no longer seen as people.

As an It Girl, you are a capital-P Protagonist or capital-P Persona, to be read as a text and scrutinised, broken down into the different components of vice, virtue, and transformation arcs before being evaluated as either effective or ineffective, based on [A,B,C]. At the time, the solution seemed easy: don’t make yourself visible. Do well, but never shine so much as to actually be seen.

Twelve years later, while working on Functions:Poems, I found myself circling back to this period in time with a more compassionate view of my nineteen-year-old self. Why was I expected to suddenly know how to monetise my hobbies? Why was I expected to be the primary carer for my dad? (To be clear: I love my dad and would have taken care of him even if it hadn’t been expected of me, but I’m the youngest in four siblings with large age gaps, and so I really just do wonder why it was expected of me, in particular.) Why was I, a teenager, being held at academic gunpoint for my adult professor’s assumptions about a work of fiction? Why was I expected to have to be ‘good enough’ for a poetry-writing ex-boyfriend? What did that even mean? Why wasn’t he expected to have to be good enough for me? Why was I expected to fulfill brooding jock’s expectations of when and how I would choose to do something about what I felt for him?

The honest answer is I don’t know – but I think it’s telling that there’s not really such a thing as an It Boy. (Not that there should be.)