Voice Note #13 - Free Falling
It's my party and I'll cry if I want to
Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” has a special place in my heart—I know its cadences like the back of my hand. It was my “emergency song” at gigs—like if I blanked out and forgot my setlist onstage, or was asked to do an encore, this was my go-to. I used to watch the music video, enthralled, wishing I could be whisked away into the cotton candy Los Angeles of the early ‘90s. I wanted to be in a crop top rollerblading down Venice beach and soaking in the West coast sun. When I first heard the song, I was in high school, and obsessed with anything filmed or set within that aesthetic sensibility—the sparkling Beverly Hills food court universe of Clueless. Every Aerosmith music video with Liv Tyler in it. Saved by The Bell. Twin Peaks. The Virgin Suicides. Fictional worlds that felt like a sickly-sweet caricature of overripe innocence, like sticky fruit in a sweltering summer. Like a cut that broke skin, but just barely.
I recorded a cover just shortly after that time, a million years ago now. It was 2013 and I was a college freshman (it freaks me out that it’s been almost 8 years, wow). Tonight, I listened to the track for the first time in years and was struck with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia, like I’d run into a past self in an elevator. So much time has passed, and all so quickly. I think about how much I’ve changed, yet how the same I still feel. Sometimes I wonder if we all just feel the way we do forever, if it doesn’t change in spite of our bodies aging and our minds maturing. I remember having a conversation with my dad about this once. “The way I feel now, it’s the same as how I felt when I was your age. When I was nineteen. When I was six.” He’s fifty-three. I asked him if he thought he’d still feel this way in his seventies, and he said yes, probably.
I think I would, too. Our perspectives change as we grow, of course, and I don’t subscribe to the belief that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I think we are malleable, and always capable of learning and progressing no matter how old we are. But there’s something inexplicable at the core of my being that feels like it’s been that way for as long as I can remember.
Tomorrow, the 21st, I turn twenty-six. It also marks exactly three months since Voice Note #1. (It’s just past 1am here, so it’s technically the 21st already—this in-between time of night always feels so strange to me.) As much as I love birthdays and anniversaries and really any excuse to celebrate, I’ve always struggled to wrap my head around the idea of suddenly being a whole year older all in one day—it just seems like a lot to process in such a short amount of time. Kind of like when you go on a road trip and cross a state line or a provincial border and for a split second, the front of your car is in one city (or town, or province, or country) and the back of your car is in another. When I was a kid, I used to stretch myself out across the backseat of our family van so that I could say I was in two places at once.
I’ve never been very good with absorbing change, so I make a concerted effort to take stock whenever I need to. I often feel like things move faster than I can keep up with — myself included. Recently, I wrote this in my Notes app:
I suppose it’s borne out of a fear of getting left behind, like I’m always chasing the bus and hopping on at the last minute before it turns the corner to leave my block. This week in particular, I haven’t had much time to absorb anything—I’ve been running around like a headless chicken trying to get things done, juggling the moving parts of my life. Having nervous breakdowns in the middle of the day, taking warm showers late at night, bone-tired, feeling my heart thud heavily inside my chest as I curl up under my sheets, the lights out and the room silent for the first time all day. No light, no noise, and all the space in the world for my thoughts to roar, in a whirling cacophony that feels like a tropical storm.
This sounds darker than it feels — I’ll admit that this past week has been a hectic one, but I’m ultimately grateful that things are happening. I’ve accepted that my anxiety is a part of my life. Though it can be cumbersome, I find comfort in knowing that this just happens to be how I’m built. There’s a funny exchange of dialogue in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library that sums it all up:
‘You’re overthinking this.’
'I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.'
This week, I started reading through all my morning pages since I started The Artist’s Way last November. I’ve barely made a dent, but was touched to find some early scribbles about this little weekly newsletter when it was just what my friend D calls “a wee seedling”.
“It could be like a diary,” I wrote. “Like a space to play.”
It made me emotional to revisit the time I set up Voice Notes—really not long ago at all, but so much has happened since that it feels like a lifetime away. My world looked and felt so vastly different — a planet in another galaxy. A lot has changed in my life, and for the better. The way I move in the world has shifted. My landscape is rapidly expanding. I feel like the same person, but I also know I’m not.
On the topic of change, and time, and getting older — I’ve been reading Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company. It’s a gorgeous, irreverent book about a young woman who laughs at the face of time, who knows she will never grow up no matter how old she gets.
“When I was twenty-eight, I decided to make serious stabs at adulthood, and I plunged into fatal misadventures which nearly killed the poor men because all I did was spend their money, vamp the landscape, cry, and say, “I hate San Francisco.” (Both of these serious stabs had a lot to do with San Francisco. All my adult-type bouts with reality take place there and always will.) After my second K.O., I packed everything I owned back in my car and drove south, back to LA, knowing that I was never going to grow up like you’re supposed to… Driving home, with my back against the giant orange bat of a sunset, east on Olympic Blvd. in the rush hour, I decided enough was enough, I would be satisfied with just the sunsets in Los Angeles and forget finding the someone I didn’t mind.”
I’m burning through it, despite all my efforts to savor it slowly. Yesterday, I was reading the essay/story “Heroine,” which introduces a character who is twenty-six when she and the novel’s narrator meet. (I’m a sucker and I take everything as a sign, so I took this to be one as well—a whimsical wink from the universe). Her entrance comes right underneath my favorite paragraph in the book so far: an incisive, heart-wrenching take on fame and success.
Jia Tolentino’s review on The Week first sold me on this slim, exquisite novel (it’s marketed as fiction, but I have a strong suspicion it’s heavily autobiographical):
At some level I'll spend my whole life wishing that I'd ever really lived, if just for a little while, the way Babitz did in Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s. No one writes about pleasure, recklessness, and evanescence better. This book is like a night with perfect velocity; a lavender sunrise; a pharmacological whisper that you can do this forever and never die.
This book may be my new favorite. I want to live in this world the way I wanted to live in the Free Falling music video, all those years ago. Although I suppose, if you think about it, they’re sort of the same thing. Maybe I’ll always want to glide down over Mulholland after all.
The life-changing habit of keeping a journal
I recently did a video collaboration with Globe Self-Space about my daily morning pages habit. I’m hesitant to call it journaling, just because this practice feels messy and low-pressure and not particularly thought-out at all — which is exactly what I love about it. Doing something imperfectly on a consistent basis has led to some pretty big changes (like this newsletter, for example!). I tend to be impatient by nature, but this has taught me that baby steps can really get you places. One foot in front of the other, one day at a time, and before you know it you’ve traveled miles. My morning pages are the one space where I feel I can truly let go of my perfectionistic tendencies, and it feels like a sanctuary in all its chaos. (Also, I had a lot of fun making this video, and I hope you like it!)
Make a Wish
I wrote this essay exactly a year ago, for the now-defunct Man Repeller Writers Club. The prompt was, “What’s your favorite commitment?” This is mine.
Chalk it up to my Pisces nature—I’m a sucker for promises. I could fill a novel with the ones I’ve made in the past six months alone. There was the time I told myself I’d draw every day—even stick figures counted, which means my notebook is filled with pages upon pages of stick figures. I’ve also resolved to go on a first date every week, though I put that on hold sometime after date #6 (I missed my friends). I do my skincare regimen without fail, even after I come staggering home at 3 AM from an evening of raucous festivities. Before bed, I have to read—if an exhausting day renders my brain half-useless, I swap out my current novel for a children’s storybook. And I’ve been doing my best to follow Heather Havrilesky’s advice to move until I sweat every single day, because, as she writes, “this alone will save you.”
This alone will save you. Making a commitment feels like washing away all your sins. Like you’re making everything right. Like you’re doing something real towards becoming the better, kinder, funnier, hotter, smarter person you’ve always wanted to be.
The one commitment I’ve truly stuck to is something I do only once a year. For as long as I can remember, I’ve written in my journal on the eve of my birthday (which is incidentally on the 21st, the day this essay is due). I’m writing this now in lieu of that journal entry. It’s the evening of the 20th, and I turn twenty-five in half an hour.
In the Philippines, we have something called “salubong.” It means, literally, to welcome, or to meet. It’s also a kind of ritual for important events. We’re big on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, the-night-before-birthdays—we like waiting up until midnight, to greet the next day exactly when it begins. Writing is the way I welcome the next year of my life, and say thank you to the last.
It doesn’t matter if it was a good one or a bad one. Regardless of what time I get home, or how tired I may be, I hunch over my journal and scrawl out my reflections for the past year (as well as my hopes for the next). The day before I turned seventeen (my worst birthday to date), I managed to muster enough hope to write, “While I’m turning SEVENTEEN—which is ugh too old for my life!—I still believe in magic.”
My annual birthday journal entry helps me take stock of what’s happened. I am able to be still—something I rarely am—and recall moments I would not have otherwise. I can feel, almost tangibly, my own growth and change. I think about the year to come, and either excitedly anticipate what’s in store, or sit in the uncertainty of not knowing. Journaling helps me see the magic of my own life clearly.
I enjoy what it leaves behind, too: when I read old entries, I can identify exactly where I was at certain points, track my own trajectory. My seventeen-year-old self, and all the other versions of me at the cusp of a beginning and an end, are immortalized on paper, like flies frozen in amber.
So, as midnight approaches, here’s to another year, another promise. To every vow I’ve made, and the hundreds I’ve broken. To believing in magic—perhaps that’s the real reason why we make commitments at all.
Next week, I’ll be performing for Cosmos, a virtual music festival. It’ll be happening on February 27th, 8pm Manila time (9am EST and …4am PST, heh). The whole thing is airing for free, live on their Facebook page. I spent today recording my set. It feels surreal to be performing this way—my first show in two years, to an audience I’m not able to see or physically share space with, but who are sharing their own spaces so intimately by participating from their bedrooms and living rooms, their inner lives just on the other side of the door. It feels trippy and I’m excited about it! If you’d like to attend, it’s free, but the festival is also a fundraiser for For The Farmers PH, a nonprofit that supports farmers in the Philippines amidst Covid-19—donations are open!
Happy birthday, Niki! I’m so happy for all the things unfolding for you. ❤️
happy birthday angel!!! 🥰