10-year-old me would throw tantrums while answering Filipino homework.

She never struggled to speak in English, but absolutely detested whenever she had to speak in Filipino.

I would only ever learn new words — words that become more complex as I did. My family praised me for being an Englishera because it placed me on this pedestal that could supposedly foresee a successful future.

I was the kid whose favorite subject was Englis— the kid who could repeat what the people with different-colored hair and lighter skin tones on my old tablet said.

Ironically, I never had to feel restricted in the confines of a language that isn’t mine.

But when it came to speaking in my native language — I would choke.

I carried that hesitation with me as I grew older. I avoided speaking in Filipino in fear of mispronouncing a simple word—butchering the grammar.

And that fear always felt wrong, Filipino words would crawl toward the back of my throat, desperate to be spoken, only to retreat before they ever reached my tongue. It was as if the host of this body had turned foreign to the language that could have belonged to her, unfamiliar with the beauty it held, because she figured that she didn’t need to learn it.

She thought being an Englishera was impressive.

She thought getting mistaken as a half Filipino was a compliment — because it was apparently better to sound furthest away from the country you came from.

One night, I was deep in thought, wasting away inside the pages of my journal, my choice of words being awfully more creative than usual. Then I had to describe a very specific feeling: a feeling I have yet to describe myself because I had only heard it once before from a makata.

That situation had never happened before: where I longed for the words in my native language.

And what frustrated me the most is it was impossible for me to think of it…because when it came to it, I was clueless.

And I realize: how many feelings do I actually know?

I say I'm happy, or I'm sad, or I'm angry because that’s what those words mean, but the word “ligaya” feels like a smile trying to reach both my ears.

I say I’m heartbroken, or that I am longing yet I have never had the chance to describe that feeling like those poets that say: “kamahal-mahal ka man palagi, may umalis man o manatili.”

Each consonant and vowel that works its way together to make the most heartfelt of pieces, I realize, is something that I never appreciated.

I cherished making essays and speaking in my Englishera ways. I never had to ask someone: “Ano English ng…”

Yet with that blessing, came a curse, where I could never know what my emotions are capable of; what they are truly feeling; what words it misses.

Because I never truly found importance in those words, those phrases, in that language.

Now, I find myself wondering how many parts of me I had unknowingly left untranslated.

How many pieces of myself had been waiting for a language I spent years refusing to speak?

And as I grow out of that box that I put myself in, maybe I’ll get the courage to mispronounce, to butcher, to make mistakes in speaking in Filipino — just to see how far my emotions can go, and to finally see the blossoming flower it has been dying to reveal to me all this time.

The Frontman