Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The Lives of Others

For as long I can remember, I have always wanted someone else’s life because I thought that it was better than my own.

In grade school, growing up overseas, I wanted the life of the ‘other’ girls. This was back when being a dark, pug nosed and straight haired Filipina was nothing even remotely close to being exotic. I wished I could be lighter, my nose taller (well, myself taller, too) and my hair wavier. I wished I didn’t have all these weird traditions and didn’t not have to go mass all the time, which I thought was just “baduy”. Culturally, belonging to a conservative traditional Filipino household in a country like the US was like being time-warped. There were so many things that I couldn’t do that the other girls could.

Moving back to the Philippines didn’t help because it overthrew everything I learned in the US and it bred another kind of envy. I went to a private school that I thought pretty much resembled a country club. Girls compared out of the country holidays, weekends at family owned resorts and the latest brand names in fashion – names that I didn’t own and had only read about in magazines. After being in a middle class US suburb where Americans are not exactly concerned about being fashion-forward, this fascination with name brands was completely new to me. But nonetheless, I found myself feeling envious. I found myself wanting to have that life. To see that that life existed and actually belonged to someone I knew and was being lived by someone my age was absolutely surreal.

Then in college, I went to a university where I thought I could finally feel like I belonged. But admidst the bunch of highly intellectual students, some of whom were already quite radical, I felt apathetic and aimless. I found myself wishing I had their drive, their ambition and certainty about what they wanted to do with their life. They all seemed to be on this certain path where they were destined to be someone successful. I, on the other hand, was marked with uncertainty. I didn’t know what to do with such freedom – academic and self expression wise. I just tight-roped and waded along.

My only dream then was to launch a corporate career as fast as I could. I was obsessed with making money. I thought this was the answer to making up for the years I spent in perceived deprivation. But when I started working, I felt like a bumbling corporate junior executive who didn’t know where to put herself and ended up just being silent and wanting to disappear during client meetings, perfectly happy to go unnoticed. I had all the wrong clothes, said all the wrong things and was still poor. I got into credit card debt in my desire to speed up the process of living the life and amassing material things that would make it look like I had made something of myself.

And now….here I am. Juggling three jobs and trying to make organizational sense out of being a writer, make-up artist and yes, being the corporate executive that I had always dreamed of being. And that’s just my professional life.

On top of all this, I still have my life as a single mom, which is really just to say that I have a life as a singleton and as a mother. I am someone who has two sets of clothes for a night out or a day at the arcade and two sets of friends from these two lives.

I am often asked how I do it and why I do it. I find myself wondering the same thing,

On the outside, I know what it looks like – chaotic and outright crazy. Like I am a headless chicken of a woman desperately trying to fit everything into one day, one life, and one outfit.

I know that to many, it may not seem like it is any better than any of my past lives filled with wanting. And yes, there are days when I wish I could throw my hands up in the air and just let everything go. But I don’t because I don’t want to…and that’s probably the funny thing.

Ironically, now with my life at its most frentic pace and everything in a tailspin – now, is the first time that I feel like I would not trade my life for anybody else’s.

Because now, though I am tired and weary from my office job, and still need to work on churning out articles, conceptualizing looks for photo shoots, I go home to a place where Kiddo comes running to the door shouting, “Mommy! Mommy!” when she hears my key in the lock.

Because now Kiddo writes me small notes saying, “I love you, Mommy. Your [you’re] the best Mom in the world”.

Because now, when I dared not hoped anymore, I found love.

Because now, I get messages from both people I know and don’t know thanking me for a writing a story that moved them or simply made them happy.

Because now, I know the answer to the question, “What is all this for?”

And now that I have the answer to that question, I have never felt the most happy and the most content, with my life.

(Well…maybe I wish I could sleep a bit more. But I believe that you can never have everything anyway.)