Sometimes, I write not out of inspiration but unrest. In my quiet hours at ninangj@wordhouse, I find myself asking, “How do I turn my small, uneasy moments into meaning? How does writing itself become a prayer?”
I Write Because I Keep Indulging My Worries
Most days, I write not because something dramatic has happened, but because something indulgent won’t leave me alone. Worrying about finances. How to respond in love in a difficult relationship. Wishing for a house with a view. Are these my stories? If I am going to be “authentic,” these are the major concerns humming endlessly in my ears. I pray through all these voices of unrest.
I Go Through the Motions
Most days, I am simply going through the motions. Sometimes, I drag myself. Sometimes, I have to will the energy and force the writing, like this one. Most mornings this week, I did a prayer walk at the amenity garden of the condo, and today, I walked again from where I had breakfast up to this co-work space I occasionally use when I’m in the BGC area.
An eleven-minute walk, this is what the directional map Google search told me. Imagine me walking on 9th Street in my step-in, my laptop bag on my right shoulder, a shoulder bag on the left. Together, they’re quite heavy, my everyday load. This day’s start-up. The plan is simple: I wanted to go to BGC because this is a nice place to walk. Ambling along Bonifacio High Street, I stopped a bit, noticing for the first time a tree with white flowers. I wonder what it’s called. I wish the trees here were labelled. I also wanted to follow through with what the EENT said regarding my vertigo, that I should move more.
I Struggle to Stay Busy
But really, I have a problem getting busy these days. There’s just not enough to do. Even my classes have not been that demanding. With only six units this semester, checking papers has become even more demotivating. I finish the tasks too soon, then the hours simply stretch. Not having a scholar’s mindset or constitution, I’ve not focused on research as professors should. The books I’ve bought remain piled up, unread. I took a picture of the spines from the corner of my desk to remind myself that I should, I must read. There’s plenty of time to read now, but I lack the desire I had before when reading was still a joy. I hope I’m not falling into a mild depression here, but it seems this is what’s happening.
I Compete with the Machine
There are the occasional translation projects, medical reports and trade agreements sent by international clients. Occasional, however, is the curse here. The job orders come unpredictably, whereas before, I used to receive them every day. I was a machine then, translating almost nonstop. But now, AI seems to have taken more and more of what used to come to human hands.
I can’t even argue with it. The machine is faster, tireless, and can process far more than my usual 1,500-word limit per day as a full-time professor doing this part-time. (This is for manual translation or proofreading or editing. With linguistic validation, half is the word limit.) It doesn’t pause for a walk, for coffee, or for that occasional texting to friends or relatives, those small gestures that remind me I’m not that isolated. Still, I had been hoping I could get by again with these rushed jobs that once paid my bills on time.
I Stand on Shifting Ground
I’m in the red these days. Each workday feels unsteady and worrisome, as if the floor I’m standing on keeps shifting, like this vertigo I’m taking meds for, and the meds are so expensive. When I check my email, it’s with a small prayer that something will appear: a client, a project, an opportunity for writing. Even co-writing would be welcome. Anything. But so far, nothing.
So I tell myself to press on with my personal writing projects instead, but a new problem begins. What do I write about?
I Try to Pat my Ego
Writing, even not as work but as a lifelong interest, a passion, has been waning in my system. I can feel that it doesn’t fill my heart the way it used to. So I’m fighting the lack of inertia, I’m trying to prop myself up with some kind of ego boost or strength, anything to rekindle the spark.
But all I end up with is envy of those who have managed to make it even with just one book published. What do I have to show for all my wanting-to-write apologetics? For all my chanting and rhetoric about writing as “process,” or “discipline,” or “calling”?
I Live with My Scattered Pages
I believe I’ve written so much, but mostly about whining like this, scattered across files and drafts and half-formed essays. Book reviews that are really deep appreciations of my times of happy reading. Beginnings and brainstormed chapters for dreamt-of stories, plays, even young adult fiction. (This blog was supposed to be my young adult fiction space, a way to follow through that project about a fictional young girl’s diary. That’s why this blog is called The YA Bow.) Mostly Tagalog poems, still in draft form, waiting for revisions.
There were some published essays, mostly in the ’90s, and nothing much followed. And now, there’s this persistence, or stubbornness, to keep a blog alive in this hardly noticed digital space. I post anyway, despite the nagging feeling that maybe I’m only adding to the noise. Although, how can that be, when I’m hardly read? The site traffic is forgettable, a faint trickle of visits that barely register.
I check the analytics and assess my act. Is this also an expression of faith? To keep writing even when the audience is almost invisible?
I Question My Courage to Compete
There’s an upcoming writing contest, and I’ve been thinking, should I join? If I spend more time thinking about joining and not actually writing, what does that say about me? But this has been a pattern: thinking about the doing rather than doing the thing itself. I scrolled through the contest announcement again and thought, ok, let’s see….
Yet, I can’t find an experience for the theme: peace in war. It’s a heavy theme that I feel demands some kind of suffering that should turn out into revelation. What do I know of peace or of war? There is, of course, an ongoing war against corruption in this country. We have a war against the eroding institutions and consistent bad leadership in this archipelago. How to write about those within a framework of making peace?
I Wrestle with Frustration
Since me, I’m angry right now. I’m angry with how things keep breaking yet the Filipino is supposed to be resilient, patient, tolerant. Does this mean we’re a people with pacifist inclination? How does one not remain angry? In our situation outrage seems the most natural, even the most honest, response. Writing about peace, would that be writing about an ideal, romantic notion of the good and the beautiful? How do I write peace? How do I make space for calm without silencing this anger that feels truer? This could be the real challenge of writing.
I Remember a Story That Still Haunts Me
I’ve always been inclined toward fiction. I even began drafting a story once about a Sunday school teacher I met long ago, a brave woman who, out of faith and naïveté, walked into what was then called Smokey Mountain. She went there to teach Bible lessons to children, but she soon found herself teaching less and pleading more: for rice, for medicine, for some mercy from the city. Her Sunday lessons turned into social work, sourcing funds to feed the squatters, walking through municipal halls to help families get their birth certificates processed. Many of the locals weren’t even registered at birth, their existence unrecorded, as if poverty itself had erased them from the nation’s books.
I regret not recording her name in my memory. Back then, I was only following up on the funds Christian aid was sending them, too blind to see the real “war” she was fighting every day in that forsaken place. She was waging it quietly, against hunger, neglect, and the apathy of those who had the power to help. I’ve been thinking how I could turn that story into fiction, something forceful enough to carry my anger, because the conditions haven’t changed. Even with Smokey Mountain now flattened and erased, people are still drowning in floods, in landslides, in the corruption that lets both happen again and again.
I Wait for my Words to Write what is True
How do I write peace here? How do I let hope breathe in the same paragraph as despair?
Perhaps I could lean on style, knowing enough from contemporary writers how to manipulate language to embody this kind of material. But how do I write so the words breathe honestly? I’ve started, and the story still isn’t going anywhere. It’s hard when I keep bleeding into the language. The contest deadline looms. Nothing is happening yet, and I’m growing impatient.
