Should you ever bother to ask of me now, I’ll swear by, as I have had on the many appointments borne out of bus rides to Ayala and Taguig and Boni, on purple ties and ebony-black slacks, on programming. I would confess squarely, without so much as a flinch, that coding is not only my passion. It was life, much like air I breathe.
Well, maybe not that much.
But maybe, once or twice, I’ll go as far as stretching the truths to say that all along, from the moment I sang Lea on my high school auditorium, leading up to crossing the arch, swiping my ID, day in and day out, on what was to be my home for the next five years, and ultimately to the grand staircases of PICC, that this was what I truly wanted.
Only that it wasn’t, and the choice, easy as it may seem to make believe that I had known all this time what I wanted for sure, was never easy to make. As ludicrous as it sounds, programming was, to put it harshly, just another accident.
Truth be told, the plump school boy that was me, backtracking half a decade and some years ago swore by entirely something else. Then, I confess, the breath of life that I speak of, unimaginable as it is, was writing.
As a high school kid, stories from the Greek mythologies gave me thrills. The sirens and muses captivated me, and poetry had me enthralled. I remember memorizing Frost and Henley by heart, and would undoubtedly jump at the chance to write anything, however much I deemed my work to be infinitely less noble than the works of the poets I idolized. At one point, I had planned, along with a friend, to write a novel entirely out of verses, much like, to an innocent mind as mine was in those days, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Those dreams were extinguished when my parents refused to have me take literature. They have never believed for a moment that the petty musings of a high school kid of arctic wolves that danced with humans and hidden gems could ever pay for the bills. It was a disheartening road block, but with all the enthusiasm on the world on my side, figured I could take up engineering as they had prodded me to do, but also keep a blog to, as I’ve always been keen to tell myself then, ‘keep the passion burning.’
And yet three years forward, and the fire has all but smouldered. I posted entries erratically, and on those occasions that I have, have struggled to produce something readable.
On the other hand, the very course that I had been force-fed to take as I had somewhat begrudgingly filled out the USTET application, I was, without so much as mock modesty, doing fairly well. I have had, undoubtedly, my fair share of bumps and dead-ends – the what-in-the-freaking-Atlantis’-name-am-I-doing-here, sweat-my-underpants, please-don’t-call-me-to-explain-what-a-Hartley’s-oscillator-is moments, but I had generally, to everyone’s belief, overcome.
An angst rooted from the notion that nothing mattered more to me than individualism would bitch-slap ‘this is what I want, and nobody can freaking take that away from me’ right on everyone’s faces. I have somehow convinced myself all these years that I had always gone after what I wanted, without so much as a brick wall fazing my focus. But who am I kidding? All I am really is the king of make-do’s.
And humbling, perhaps, as it all is, that is where, I believe, the danger lies.
That I have somehow succeeded and triumphed against my own heart and my own passion five years ago is what frightens me. Arming yourself with the knowledge that you can, as the cliché goes, “succeed in anything as long as you put your mind into it” inevitably giving you a false sense of invulnerability, and all the more reason to put off pursuing what you really want. That I had ultimately come out of it unscathed, for lack of a better term, frightens me to bits.
If I could be any more succinct than I already have, I still regret the five years I spent in a course I never wanted to pursue. Even now, a little over fifty months wasted pouring over one electronics book to the next, I would never imagine myself to explain the finer points of modulation in a heartbeat. I absolutely despise the idea.
In some ways, I shudder to think how my life today would have played out had I passed the board exams, and it is here where I ultimately shout forth praises to my God for the gift of failure.
And yet, growing and aging ever more cautiously to the brink of paranoia, I have come to the notion that I had only come out of the pan and into the fire. True, I have relished the idea of programming as a passion, even priding myself to be a mean programmer where it’s due. I have come to believe, as a result of a four-year love affair with programming, that this is finally what I want. And yet, being used to having options emphatically shoved down my throat, how sure can I be that all this is not a figment of yet another make-do attitude?
What if I was really born to write?
Or to manage and run my own restaurant as I had dreamed not so far back? Or become a radio jock? Things I had never been so much as exposed to in the academe, but have at point or another, been a source of daydreams and giddiness?
I was talking to Rona about her success on getting employed on her dream company the other day. On one of the few messages we happened to exchange after the congratulatory notes, I had jested on resigning from work and jumping ship once she was project head.
“Sayang, master, sana dun ka din. Para masaya,” she quipped, to which I admitted that, at one point, getting in to said company had also been one my top agendas for the year, only I had not been lucky with the interview.
So when the call was never returned, I decided to pursue something else. And yet to think that I had jumped entirely from what would have been a job with minimal programming, to one that extensively requires so – and then I realized, hoping and wishing beyond reason, that, throwing a prayer to the skies, this was not what I feared, and this time around, my God had only put me in my proper place.
