### **Morning Pages** Aaaaaaaaaand I guess I didn’t win the Palanca. One person who won the children’s story posted. Sad, but not too sad to hope I win Romeo Forbes. I really wasn’t expecting Palanca to come sooner. I can’t fathom how I was able to serendipitously come up with “prangkahan” as a method and connected it to confrontation. You just might be a genius but the catch is that you can’t predict when or how. I can feel myself burning out now. I just can’t sustain heavy work for a long time. Maybe not winning the Palanca is a blessing in disguise. I’m being redirected to better avenues. I don’t remember particularly liking any of the winning entries they had on the website. Maybe they just have a preference and I don’t fulfill it because I’m incompatible with what they consider literary. What is causing me to feel like this? Maybe it’s the dopamine dysregulation. I am constantly seeking stimulation, or a response, or a notification, or an update. I’m so impatient. I feel like I’m going nowhere. Some part of me is raring to volunteer as a reader again for Uncharted. Just so they can give me a recommendation letter. Oh, and I have to start work on my CW 200 Mirrored project. I just can’t wait around for my absentee adviser. Maybe she’s going to show up too late and I’ll be shocked by how much work I have to do. Why do some people seem fully-formed? Like they have a method, a way of being, a personality. Meanwhile, I’m here second-guessing everything I do and am, because I genuinely do not know what I’m doing. I’m the most self-aware zombie I know. I’m disorganized in thought, and my creativity comes in waves and it’s mostly unpredictable, and I don’t unconsciously anticipate what’s expected of me. It’s like my brain turns off when I’m interacting with people. It must be so confusing to some people reading me because why would I be trying to earn money when my family has money? Like, my relatives have properties, some are in my name, but I am out of the loop how it works. Yeah, I am “privileged” but my family is too stingy. As in, they don’t even have hobbies or take vacations. I’m trying to fathom the relative misfortune of being born into money, as in, hearing about it, hearing how my relatives are trying to earn 1M per month, and how unfortunate me and my cousins are for not having privilege anyway. I just wish they were the type to prioritize education by sending us to good schools. Well, they did eventually send me to OCGS, but I wish they would invest in it like how Sydney convinced her parents to send her to the UK to study. Maybe if I try really hard I could convince them to spend the amount of three cars on an online degree. What are they planning to do with all that money? We barely even do anything. My grandfather built my dad and his sisters a house in the city so he could study. Now that he’s dead, I have no one to convince. We’re not the type of family to fight over property but I just wish somebody talked sense into them because two of them agreed to invest in a fucking MLM. Which is why we have a “Hub” in my house. I just got the faint feeling that I’m being watched again, but my impulse is to explain. As in, I put the scholarship foundation as one of my 2026 goals because I can personally relate to domestic workers who have no access to education. We have no maids now, because the one who molested me is dead, and the other one got fired because she made some action to slap or hurt my grandmother and my dad saw her. But I feel really bad for her, the latter, because while I was exploring the old part of my house, I came across a notebook of hers where she was trying to self-teach vocabulary from a dictionary. And while I was growing up, she was always in the kitchen while I played piano with a teacher and she eventually taught herself how to play using my piano books. It just speaks through to me how tragic it is, knowing what I know. It is such a tender and wrong thing for her to hope that by her methods she could simulate and attain what I didn’t have to earn myself, because I was born into the right circumstances and started early, knowing that she is locked out of my world and the possibility that was once offered to me even if she tried hard. It reminds me of my own hope, trying to buy La Roche Posay moisturizer, just one bottle, in a Singapore Watson’s, trying to fix my lackluster and acne-prone skin, never mind that one expensive topical moisturizer is just a drop in the ocean, never mind that I was just fooled to think I could become like a celebrity too and attain that privilege if I slathered expensive lotion on my face. Come to think of it, education will not earn her generational wealth, but it may help her build something. This background anxiety and memory intruding on my ability to recover. I faintly remember going to Singapore in 2023, and this person bungled a Bisaya accent so bad but it was enough to overhear, “Luoy kaayo siya” as I walked by. And that Ralph lookalike at the airport bookstore making these weird sex/mastubration noise and action. Two things that have me questioning my perception. I often forget what I’m in denial about. Maybe, just maybe, I am capable of being schizophrenic. I tried telling my parents about the Bisaya phrase uttered by a foreign tongue, but they heavily implied I imagined it. I remain convinced it was real. Like it’s not so far-fetched then, to logically assume they either read A Steady Altitude (which I assume nobody knows about) or they read Mirrored. I’d prefer it if they, wait, no I don’t prefer anything. It’s either my profs spread my draft, or that I really was hacked. Otherwise, how could a random tourist or Singaporean know I was there, track my movement around that place, and walk by me while saying that phrase? Then it’s not so farfetched that my mind got opened and exposed to these delusions where I assumed a sikad driver was blasting “Like a Virgin” specifically because they wanted to terrorize me, and I broke a window trying to shut out the noise. My only consolation is that I have nothing to be ashamed about. If they read my Seat14C story, they know I predicted so eerily this future with AI everywhere, in 2017. That means I must have earned some kind of audience otherwise why would they try to remind me of that story? What I don’t understand though, is that it seems to have ended. I don’t get regularly assaulted in public anymore. It happened in 2023. What did I do that was so bad in 2023? Why did that guy masturbate or make noise like that in a fucking bookstore, just so fucking odd. These weird experiences will never stop being weird. I just forget about it for a while. Maybe it was my Mirrored story. The other reason why I think it’s Gabriela Lee, or at least I had this suspicion. She went to NUS, she was my prof where I wrote Mirrored. Maybe she really thought it was me. I’m so horny these days. It’s a sign my body is healing from PSSD. I really thought I wouldn’t get my sex drive back. Too bad being unattractive is dampening my fantasies. Like, deep down I know I’m a horny person, but my looks don’t justify it. You know what, I’m leaning into my delusional self. I’ll just assume they haven’t emailed some winners yet. I’ll even assume they forgot. That they misspelled my email. Not to toot my own horn, but my children’s story was particularly unique and unconventional, and I’ve never seen it done before. It’s taking them forever, but if I don’t hear back before November 2, I’ll truly accept defeat. I’m quietly going insane over my own paralysis. I just know I have a mountain of responsibilities. I used to be so conscientious. Normally I should have always been expected to finish things, but I fell out of that loop because of mental illness and neurosis. I just find it very odd that they haven’t posted anything at all for short story and poetry. Like at least one person could have picked it up and posted on their behalf like some others I’ve seen, their family or an organization they’re connected to congratulating them. Arguably, poetry and short story in English might be the “high-ticket” categories, no offense. Maybe it’s taking them so long because they needed to finalize it or something. Maybe I won twice? Maybe, maybe. Please. Nobody has also posted about the play. There are nine people who are good at keeping good news to themselves? Why is Jeffrey posting redheads? Ireland? GOOD GOD I AM NOT DELUSIONAL AND MY REALITY IS SO FUCKING STRANGE NOW. IT’S LIKE I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT BEING HACKED OR SURVEILLED. Not one soul can accurately tell me or even corroborate something. I just remembered being followed on Twitter by this famous crime author that I recognized from Audrey’s followers I think, back when I was a nobody and had literally nothing published that could have connected me to the speculative fiction community. WTF IS HAPPENING??? It’s not exactly happiness, lol. It’s incredulity. But on the other hand I just hate how I have to monitor everything I say now. On the one hand, it seems farfetched, but farfetched things have happened to me already and my radar is kind of broken already. Like, if that were really true, I would notice some spike in my website visits, or my Instagram views. But it’s like my delusion which I’m logically fighting is also fighting to be real. 2019 really broke my radar ever since. These people who have no connection to me suddenly got motivated to monitor me for some reason. I must have done something terrible or great, not necessarily good. I mean, I know it was bad, but it’s like they were trying to do an experiment, as in I felt I was punished at times, and I also felt “rewarded,” and I can’t accurately remember the link between what I did and what happened to me. How is it possible that anything is happening like how my own life is playing out? I feel like I’m entering derealization. Speaking of famous people, I found out Alix’s mom is Salve Ibanez, a famous journalist or media person. Maybe that’s how I’m connected to this web. I know someone who likes someone whose mother is famous. Maybe that’s why he likes her. She’s well-connected and possibly neurodivergent since she shared something from a neurodivergent page. And she only has like 34 connections on Linkedin, which is sort of the same to me. It’s like she’s literally the better version of me, and that’s why Jeffrey likes her. In the way that Jeffrey is the better version of Ralph, at least in how compatible we are and our background. What am I talking about? I should be finding some other dream guy now. Someone who prefers my neurodivergence instead of watered down versions of me. She is too neurotypical-passing that I’m offended she identifies as neurodivergent. Because Jeffrey likes me, I have got to assume that he is also drawn to my difference because he also has aphantasia. But I’m just too much, so he wants someone who reminds him of me. But not me though, I’m too much. I just hope I’m not too much to some imaginary guy.