First Yap Session: Why I Started This Whole Thing

I know.. I know.. there’s already an ABOUT section on this blog, but I wanted to yap more about how this whole thing came to be! So let’s start from when I was a kid..

As a Filipino, of course, music has always been deeply integrated into my life. I grew up in a family that loves music–my titos and titas on my mom’s side, and especially my dad (who, by the way, literally took voice lessons for karaoke.. that’s how serious it is for us).

My family always dreamed that I’d become a famous singer someday. They encouraged me to sing on events and join singing contests–basically wherever there was a microphone and a stage, I will be pushed to be there. And since kids are usually enrolled in something during summer break, while other kids took taekwondo or instrument lessons.. I, on the other hand, was enrolled in swimming lessons and.. voice lessons.

During my voice lessons, while waiting for my teacher, I’d always hang around the drums and play with it. As a rebellious kid, I wanted to learn drums because I thought it was the complete opposite of singing. Well, sucks for litol me, my parents didn’t let me study them.

Then, fast forward to Grade 2: I accidentally auditioned for a dance competition. I got in, and I genuinely thought this was my big rebel success story–finally escaping voice lessons and choosing dance instead. But plot twist: my parents were incredibly supportive of it too! My Tita Gladys even paid for my dance costume that time, and my mom said I could take dance lessons on top of my voice lessons. So.. my plan to steer away from singing to be different from my family who are all musikeros failed.

Then in grade school, we had a choice between taking a regular music class or something called PMC (Practical Music Course), where you could take instrument or voice lessons. At the end of every semester, everyone would perform in front of an audience, so it’s basically like a forced band situation with your PMC classmates.

And guess what my mom chose for me? Of course.. voice lessons!

2016 I PMC Class

So I stayed in voice lessons my whole childhood until Grade 8. At the same time, I was juggling my growing love for dance, which meant I never really took singing seriously back then–something I massively regret now. I took it for granted, to the point that I’d deliberately eat a ridiculous amount of chocolate the night before lessons just to give myself a sore throat and avoid singing (didn’t work, they’d still make me sing anyway). Looking back, that was incredibly selfish of me because my band/classmates had to keep practicing with me over and over again with our instructors. 

Side story: one of the reasons I hated voice lessons so much was because of the warm-ups. I was so shy! At the start of each PMC sessions, everyone else would either be tuning instruments or making chika with each other while my voice teacher immediately made me do vocal warm-ups with the piano accompanying me. So there I was.. warming up in a somehwat quiet room full of people.. what a nightmare!

And the love for music in our family didn’t stop with me either. My sister took piano lessons in PMC too, and at one point, my mom even wanted her to take violin lessons on top of piano after watching a violin ensemble performance and getting inspired.

2017 I PMC Recital

But aside from music, I also had another dream growing up: becoming an author.

I loved reading so much growing up, and writing was always one of the few things I genuinely felt confident in. English was easily my strongest subject–not so much Filipino or Araling Panlipunan though.. sorry!

2017 I Our section winning Best in English for the nth time

I practically grew up in our school library. Once I got over my fear of actually going inside (because I thought the library was only for adults), I basically lived there. Our librarian even became my Facebook friend, so that says a lot my time spent there. Litol me was constantly borrowing books like Dork Diaries, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, etc., and wasting my baon on late fees haha.

So naturally, when Wattpad became huge, I became a Wattpad kid too!

I remember thinking: “Okay, I love reading and writing.. maybe I should publish my own stories.” But then I was like, “No one will read it because who am I?!”

So I came up with a plan.

Kpop was huge at the time, and since I was also deep into kpop stan culture, I decided I’d write a fanfic first and ride on its popularity, then slowly advertise my own stories later on. Strategic? Maybe. Slightly embarrassing? Definitely. 

At the time, I was a huge fan of BTS and SEVENTEEN (along with many other groups, are we surprised? I was a multi stan!). But BTS fanfics were already everywhere on Wattpad (I know because I read them all during that period of my life lol), so instead, I wrote a fanfic about Woozi–my bias from SVT.

This was during the Love&Letter era too, before SVT became as huge in the Philippines as they are now.

2017 I Published a fanfic under a pen name

And somehow.. it blew up!

I genuinely don’t know how because looking back, it was so cringe! But then again, younger me would also devour literally any fanfic about my Kpop biases, so maybe I shouldn’t judge too hard. Please be kind.. I was just a fresh high school student that time!

Recently, I revisited that Wattpad account, and while it still makes me cringe a little, I’m honestly proud of younger me for having decent grammar and sentence flow without ChatGPT or any AI!

But somewhere along the way, for some reason.. I stopped pursuing the dream of becoming an author and publishing my own book.

Still, I guess life has a funny way of bringing you back to the things you love.

Because now, I have this blog! A space where I can combine my love for music, writing, and feeling things way too deeply. This girly longs and yearns for essays, analysis, and research papers.

And yes, I unironically love writing essays, academic papers, and research projects. I’m naturally curious, so researching and overanalyzing things weirdly excites me!

But I also just really love to yap.. as you can probably tell by now.

This first blog post is already way longer than I intended it to be, so I’ll stop here before this turns into an accidental autobiography.. lol!

Yay! I just wanted a space to yap, reminisce, and purge emotions into catharsis through music!

So yeah, that’s a little more lore about me.

I hope you’ll enjoy this blog as much as I’ll enjoy writing it.

D.