On Ordinariness

A few months ago, my roommate L and I had a memorable conversation about someone she knew. This acquaintance apparently referred to herself as someone very ordinary, someone very normal, and L simply couldn’t understand how someone with potential enough to earn a spot in the country’s top university could ever be so unambitious. At the time, I agreed with my roommate fully. What was, after all, the point of working hard, studying hard, if our only goal was to be? There had been, back then, only obvious goal for me: becoming extraordinary, immortal.

As I was wrapping the new books I bought earlier though, I came to accept something I had always known, something I’d perhaps always considered for a very long time. All the books I had bought, all the books I had read as of late, were chick lit. The kind of reading the me of four years ago would scoff at for being so unabashedly cliché and mainstream. These were the books I was willing to go hungry for, the stories on which my sanity depended on. The semi-adult in me conceded: I was just an ordinary person. There was not much that singled me out from the average single young woman on the street – except maybe, I had messier hair.

The thought doesn’t even bother me that much anymore.


The age of 21, I think, holds a lot of realizations for most people. We come to realize we cannot all be poets and writers and lovers, and that more difficult that achieving our dreams would be envisioning our dreams, describing them. We come to realize we will probably be normal people for the next fifty, sixty years of our lives, and we gradually come to accept that. At times like this I feel older, somehow more sure of where I’m headed, if only because I know my future has narrowed itself – albeit not necessarily in a negative way.

In ten years, I will probably be married, middle-class, the proud owner of 200 romance novels that may or may not have satisfying plots and conclusions. In ten years, I will probably be like 90% of the other women in the Philippines. Or I may not be. Still, the realization that I may, after all, not be special is comforting.

Somehow I feel I have more to hold on to, that the future is becoming clearer, little by little, and slowly.