The etymology of change - my changes, at least.

Stumbled across this entry that I wrote in my journal the past year. It seemed fitting for what I'm trying to make sense of for the last few days.

“Change is inevitable. The good news and the bad news is, nothing in this world is permanent”. When I came across this quote while neutrally surfing the internet, wedged between an advertisement of a marriage predictor date and a link to a budget hotel somewhere in Hong Kong, I was startled out of my reverie. There I was thinking how my life has changed so much in the last 10 years and griping incessantly about how adult life sucks when God pityingly consoled my sad self sans the need to stuff my face with fattening chocolate and ice cream. I mulled over the words, much like a surgeon probes the brain of a dying patient, for the next few days. I can never make sense of what I really wanted in life. Was it to stay in the past or sashay into the bright albeit vague future? Looking back, I never became the person I envisioned myself to be. Growing up wasn’t all rainbows and flowers like what I thought it would be when I was in grade school. I wished I stayed a chinky-eyed 8-year old girl forever, whose biggest curiosity was how the windshield wipers kept the rainwater at bay when it was raining really hard. Or that 15-year old girl who was running full steam inside the Haunted House, grabbing someone’s shirt in random and nearly reducing it to shreds due to the fact that she was so scared and didn’t want to be left alone in a house full of her worst nightmares. Was it really 13 years ago when I was lying in bed, keeping my eyes shut tight while pretending to sleep from 1 pm-4 pm? I used to hate siesta time and have given up on asking why my parents made us kids sleep in the middle of the day when our older playmates were free to play patintero until dinnertime. Was it really 9 years ago when I wanted to become a Chemical Engineer because it sounded cool and all the other kids wanted to do it too? I used to think that Chemical Engineers spend their time doing experiments and making things go BOOM! I never really gave any thought to the things that they are actually hoping to achieve with those life-threatening experiments like finding a cure for the latest deadly disease. Minus of course the making things go BOOM! part. When I was about 5 or 6, I used to watch all these American and Japanese shows all day long. When the opening theme of Pokemon would play before that day’s episode, I’d sing along with gusto, throwing a round-shaped object and saying “I choose youuuu!”. It was the time of no labels and I was one of the boys.

Grade school was a safe haven, a place for making new friends. Being in elementary brought about new experiences and routine afresh. Curiosity was never low in supply, and it was the time of unrestrained exploration (case in point: I was so curious how the stapler worked that I accidentally stapled my index finger). Break times were spent huddled under the trees in the school quadrangle eating our packed lunch and sharing funny stories about our teachers. In between classes, we used to play Blue’s Clues and imitate the way Steve would sing and dance when he gets mail or when he solves the clues Blue left for him. Memories that stand out during my elementary days were a combination of the funny, the weird and the unforgettable. I remember a time when I was washing my hand in the sink outside of the girl’s bathroom and accidentally cranked the water faucet to its maximum level, hosing down one of the terror teachers of our school in the process. I was scared but amidst the fear, I felt exhilaration since I’ve never done something like it before.

High school was an alien world to us when we were in elementary. On the first day of high school, we were positively petrified with fear since the feeling of familiarity was gone. There were a lot of new faces, new names to remember. Everybody was more sophisticated. My boyish state of mind noted that the girls were starting to use make-up, the stuff that I found neatly arranged in my mom’s dresser table. The prettiest girls in class reeked of expensive perfume that irritated my nose. I felt different and out of place in this whole new world. Nothing was familiar except the institution and my friends. It was nice though that we were given something to hold on to. We were the first batch to retain the short sleeved blouses that we wore during grade school. Nothing’s changed much except for the more difficult lessons. My antidote to stress was to head to the library after dismissal time and borrow the numerous Sweet Valley books that crammed the shelves of our mini-library. My love of books started during grade school, when I first stumbled upon the “Goosebumps” series by R.L. Stein. I loved that I was a part of the story and I have a say on how the story will end. For the fun of it, I would reread the book over and over again until I read all the possible endings. Seeing that I was a budding bookworm, my parents gave me the complete set of Harry Potter books (of course back then, only the first four books constituted the “complete” set). I stayed up for about a week reading about Harry’s adventures sneakily avoiding the lights-out policy in our house at 10 PM sharp. I distinctly remembered the time when the 5^th book of the Potter series was released and I scoured five bookstores in total just to get my hands on the latest installment. I love to smell books. The musty, old smell of the brown pages and the crisp, clean smell of the marble white pages were like rugby to a bookworm like me. The four years flew by and another round of firsts happened – my first time to not be included in the star section, my first time to be included in the honor roll, my first time to say goodbye – to a bunch of people I knew since I was a little kid. I was vulnerable once I entered college. I didn’t know anybody, was culture-shocked to say the least. I wasn’t prepared for the freedom, the uncertainty that college brought to the point that I came home from the first day of orientation blubbering and crying like an idiot telling anybody who would listen that I wanted to go back. But as with the body’s ability to adapt, I managed to carve my own little niche at college. I met friends whom I considered very dear and experienced almost every ritual of passage a college girl should experience. I experienced no uniforms, a different set of faces, a whole slew of activities to choose from. I was immersed in a totally new environment where fast food and street food became a daily part of my life, where cutting classes was optional but sometimes necessary, where giving up something you love was inevitable after it broke you down bad, and where rivalry was almost synonymous with pride. College was fresh, liberating, and downright FUN. As with high school, I never wanted to leave. But again, fast forward to 3 and 1/2 years, I bade goodbye to my daily routine and readied myself to be devoured by the big mean world. The real world brought about a fresh supply of surprises. Rejection and being told that you aren’t good enough were knife slices, they weren’t meant to cut you open. Rather they were meant to be healed and a lesson to avoid the knife in the future. But alas, we’re only human beings. Changes will still come and maybe, just maybe, someday it will bring about something warm and familiar. I’m still keeping my hopes up."