Not good enough for the 27 Club

详细摘要

'Greatness wasn’t my gift, but the potential for it. Now, I think that is somehow worse.'

I was never a Promil Kid. I was never on the cover of a newspaper or a magazine. All I knew was that my parents believed in me.

Growing up, I always felt like I was on the verge of greatness. I was not exactly the most outstanding student. I was never No. 1 (and to be honest, often not even No. 2), but I was usually somewhere up there.

So you could say greatness wasn’t my gift, but the potential for it. But now I think that is somehow worse.

In preschool, I think what made me stand out was my unusual worldliness for someone who was not even five. If iPad kids surprise you nowadays with their ability to name country capitals and their uncanny accents that sound too close to Peppa Pig, that was me before it was “trendy.”

I would talk to my parents’ peers about Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco thanks to 5 am reruns of Scooby-Doo — which I was already up for, since I had to travel from Cavite to Las Piñas to school daily.

In elementary school, they would ask me to recite Greek Gods, their Roman counterparts, and the words born from their names. When they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say “Paleontologist,” and they would react: PaLEONtoLogist? (Yes, it also elicited those reactions before it even became a thing). All things considered, from preschool onwards, people already called me a “human encyclopedia.”

My “first-born” energy showed in how I never shied away from the spotlight. Quiz bees and declamation contests, the odd VTR here and there, being a literal poster child, guest appearances on a chocolate drink-sponsored children’s show on national TV (I would tell you the name of the show if only ’90s Philippine TV archives weren’t a lost-media wasteland). Basically, I was unafraid of being “out there,” if one of those white vans from urban legend needed a child volunteer, I might’ve raised my hand.

I began to think that being impressive for my age meant being destined to impress everyone, and this continued until my pre-adolescence.

Again, I wasn’t…

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