Feeling The Sun (2019)

When I entered university, I carried over this idea that grades were always the end goal. Looking back on this idea, I can see I was stupid―only 50 IQ.

Freshman year was mostly just me studying and going out very rarely like for birthdays. Friends? Who needs ‘em?

Life was gonna pass me by before I knew it.

“Durr college hard hurr durr.”

People would always tell me that.

It only made sense to focus.

I’ve lost count of the number of parties, dinners, lunches, and brunches I would be invited to but not attended. It’s sad thinking about it now, but at least my parents were proud of me right?

On a rare occasion that I would go out, I would still be that fresh-from-highschool boy that was still awkward around girls. It was tough but I managed (at least I think).

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There was an exception to my isolation however, and that was my college block. I had to be friends with them anyway since 4 years was a long time with the same people. It’s like they were my assigned family. Being a naive freshman, I saw my block as my people. MY WORLD (2.0) I would always make an effort to hang out with them and managed to make some fast friends early on. I was still wary of people outside of my course though, like some course-bigot.

This kind of mindset had its obvious drawbacks. I didn’t have a lotta friends outside of my block and that was a real bummer when I would find that my friends were all busy (I had 4 at the time).

If there was an award for tunnel vision, I’d surely be nominated during my freshman year. I would still talk to some of my friends from high school, but college friends was “what was in”.

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I also learned to be a shady bitch because of my attitude to people outside of my block.

This was especially true for some classmates I would get.

I was condescending, mean, and just an all-around jackass.

Of course I wouldn’t show it in public, but I would confide it with some people, if not just letting the thoughts sit with me. The main reason I would be like this is because I thought that only my block and coursemates were the very definition of competent.

I honestly felt like I was some course-fascist and I see now that freshman Juancho was to be jammed in a meat grinder.

My irrational contempt was at its peak when I took zoology.

I was obsessing over this one classmate, lets call him Chief, because of how he looked like a stereotypical meathead.

I thought to myself, how did this guy get into college? He didn’t look like the smartest, and was kind of a douche in lab sessions.

Chief was a summary of what I didn’t like in outsiders. Chief was loud, annoying, and didn’t care for grades. That last one would irk me for the longest time since grades became my biggest target (if that wasn’t obvious enough).

I see now that I was imposing my personal standards to the people around me, without seeing that everyone has a different context.

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My Four Friends!

JOSEPH

MILDRED

A girl named Joseph, she liked to dance and was one of my first friends in college. Buddha bless you Joseph.

Her name has “dred” in it and it sounds like “dread”.

She’s nice though. Buddha bless you Mildred.

CRASH

T’SOL BEDULF

One of the nicest people I’ve met so far. Very reliable but has some time issues. Buddha bless you Crash.

I met T’sol in high school but turns out, T’sol would be staying for a longer time. I don’t know what to feel about T’sol most of the time.

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I started to feel the effects of my bad mindset pretty early on. Nobody told me about how the breaks between classes in college could be longer than an hour. I found myself without companions during the breaks, and this made going to school bad for an extrovert like me. FOMO or fear of missing out was something I always had early in college, and I couldn’t see a way past it.

An experience I’ll never forget is this one party I was invited to. I got to the party knowing only about three people, and talking to around 3 more. I was out of my element. I spent nearly an hour in the bathroom of the party just playing a golf game on my phone. It was sad, and I would have even won the award for Biggest Loser Asia.

Because of that party, I realized that I was closing myself off too much for everybody. I didn’t care about a lot of people either because of my “blockfirst” mindset. I realized that way too late, and by that I meant halfway through freshman year. Everyone seemed to making lots of friends and having the time of their lives in college. Meanwhile, I was a sad pile of hate. I didn’t know what to do about it.

For a while I thought about making changes to how I would relate to people. I never made any concrete progress since grades just had to get in the way.

Grades were my priority after all, so I wasn’t able to get much change in. I knew everything from here on out wouldn’t be pleasant. There was a storm brewing.

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I COULD FEEL A DESCENT. Academic requirements paired with a fear of not making any meaningful connections in the “prime” of your youth was something to be feared. I think I didn’t fear it enough. I went through the rest of my days as a freshman with much frustration and worry about what this meant for my future.

I needed a way to cope with the stress from the two fronts. Some of the main outlets I found were porn and food. I was gonna gain weight in college no doubt, so might as well right? Both of these options were unhealthy and it really made my first year in college a rough one.

Would I never have anyone to call my best friend?

Will I ever feel love? What was it like to have a set of friends you could count on anytime? Would I just continue to let my life pass me by?

Not only was I gaining weight, but I also had a very distorted view of what it was like to feel love.

I thought that if I got a girlfriend, my issues would at least be partially gone. Boy, was I wrong.

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ROME Like the old city she was named after, Rome was beautiful. She was also my first college crush.

At first, I wasn’t familiar with the concept of infatuation. I wasn’t in love with Rome, but good ol’ naive me didn’t know that yet.

I became obsessed with her. I saw getting a partner was a way out of the descent I was feeling, but I tried and was obviously rejected.

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Getting rejected by Rome was the most pain I’ve felt in a while, but my obsessions didn’t stop there. I started to become infatuated with my friend Mildred after a while, and I could tell it wasn’t gonna end nicely either. I spent a good half of my second semester of freshman year being unsure of whether I would try and go for Mildred because I still had no idea what the difference was between love and infatuation. I was too horny to know the differences, and I’m not proud of it.

MILDRED (again!)

My second college crush turned out to be one of the first friends I made. I sure am a degenerate.

One day, I was walking down some stairs after class with Mildred and I got the dumb idea of telling her then and there that I liked her. She was hot yeah, but I hesitated. I was about to say those three words but then I just decided to shut up and keep walking. It was at that moment I realized how much I actually didn’t like her. I just wanted her body and I’m thankful I saved myself the embarrassment. Currently, I’m still friends with Rome and Mildred, and I’m glad it’s that way.

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LIFE WAS TERRIBLE Slowly I felt myself get worse and worse. My two attempts at “love” turned out nothing to be more than self-motivated and fueled by lust. I was essentially back to square one. All this time, I never once thought of reaching out to the friends I currently had. I was my own saboteur, my own enemy. Freshman year went by and I was only able to make a handful of connections I could say had my confidence.

Past me didn’t know that things would get better. Past me only knew that times were bad, and that all he had left were his grades.

Unfortunately, that too became a disappointment. I was expecting to get honors in at least one of the semesters but I managed to miss by a huge margin. That was officially the bottom of the barrel for me. Despair managed to set in, but at least I got to see T’sol more often.

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With nothing left, I went into my sophomore year with low expectations. Little did I know, next year was going to be much wilder. Life was only divided into two parts for me, pre-freshman year and post-freshman year.

If I could go back in time and tell past me anything, I would say that things do get better.

-END OF STORY ONE-

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ORGS. Student organizations or better known as orgs were the main channel people could meet outside of academics and work together for a common advocacy.

I joined six of them.

I thought to myself that I could learn how to better relate to people through six orgs filled with people. I joined one for animals, one for the student body, and so on. I also found a word that I felt I needed to act on.

Sympathy.

I wasn’t relating to people enough and became a shady bitch because I wasn’t thinking about them. I didn’t care about them to begin with, and that’s where I felt like I could start.

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Freshman year seemed so far away from me now, but I still felt its effects psychologically. I would now be really conscious of my word choice with people I just met for example. I made sure to look somewhat presentable with my hair and outfit.

I never got smiling right though. It was always a problem for me since I was a kid. Much like my smiles, a lot of the org interactions I found myself in were forced. I was the one forcing myself to do so, because no matter how awkward a conversation could be, it was still better than no conversation.

“At least people would acknowledge my presence right?”

That’s what I would tell myself. I was stepping into a new world, the world of orgs; it was both exciting and terribly horrifying all at once.

I met a lot of people in my org interactions, and it started to feel like I was learning how to make meaningful connections. I would sympathize with a lot of them since we were united under the same org advocacy. It still felt surface-level, but I was starting to slowly undo my freshman isolation.

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One of the most unexpected twists of my sophomore year was that I would actually find myself a partner. She was named Blub-blob-blub. She was also a fish. Blubblob-blub was nice and I do have to admit I found her cute, even though she was a fish, a sunfish at that.

It was going well for a while, but early warning signs like the fact that she’s a fish and has to be brought around in a mobile aquarium for class was a bit alarming. Despite these, we still went forward with some semblance of a relationship, albeit a wary one.

I remember visiting her at her home/aquarium and not being able to have any form of physical affection of any sort. That was especially tough for a horny scorpio like me.

She was a sunfish for crying out loud!

BLUB-BLOB-BLUB A beautiful aquatic creature!

Blub-blob-blub and I had some degree of affection for each other. My main love language was physical touch, but I had to fall back on quality time and gifts. There wasn’t much I could do, I wasn’t a fish either.

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We would see each other almost everyday in school, which made it easy for us to meet and spend time together.

However, it wasn’t long before I felt doubts as to whether or not this inter-species relationship was gonna last.

Seeing Blub-Blob-Blub was hard, but I made an effort to. It kinda stung knowing there was never going to be some higher intimacy than feeding her some Tetramin Tropical Flakes.

I even spent 5 digits on some top diving gear in order to swim in her aquarium. It was a bandaid solution and I felt myself drifting further and further away from any future prospects. Before the first semester of sophomore year, I made peace with ending the relationship.

The relationship didn’t end until February of 2018. I put on that diving suit one last time and told her I wanted to break up. She replied with three words I’ll never forget: “Glub glub glub”.

And that did it. That was the sound of a fish breaking up with you.

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Even though we both wanted to break up, Blub-blob-blub still left a huge impact on me for the following months. I wasn’t exactly sad, but I did feel like I lost direction once again.

So I brought up Google maps and found myself going back to T’sol. I’ve known T’sol the longest but he gave pretty bad advice. I don’t know exactly what even T’sol is. Is T’sol a demon? Either way, T’sol stuck around long enough.

T’sol told me to go find another girl, a rebound. I wasn’t too keen on taking advice from a demon but I kept T’sol’s advice at the back of my mind.

Grades didn’t really matter much at this point, and I just wanted to find myself some post-breakup peace. Little did I know, I’d be in for another one of T’sol’s Wild Rides.

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MILDRED! She’s back again. If T’sol were a Thanos line, he’d be the one about failure and coming back to him. I don’t recall exactly what lead me to get myself infatuated with Mildred again. I guess I just always had her in the back of my mind.

This time however, Mildred and I were working on a big project. Like, time travel big. We wanted to go back in time to kill Duterte. It was in working with Mildred did I see her from a sober point of view that wasn’t in any way touched by lust. She was messy, and somehow very unsure of herself. I started to become disenchanted with her, but still was somehow infatuated. Libido goes a long way. For a while I would hang around Mildred, but our time travel project went south and I decided to give myself some time. We did like a lot of the same things and were in the same org, but it wasn’t worth pursuing her. Right before the second semester of second year ended, I realized that I needed to keep my libido in check.

Blub-Blob-Blub was an exception since I barely had any sexual thoughts about her. Armed with this new knowledge on love and experience with a sunfish, past me was ready for the next year.

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After Mildred part 2, I realized I was still motivated to make friends for reasons outside of genuine love.

Empathy was the word I was looking for. I wasn’t empathizing with people, rather I was just trying to understand them well enough for them to be “friends”.

I realized that I wanted to get something out of my connections.

It was all surface level. I was still able to find a bunch of new and good friends in my sophomore year, but I was still going in blind. My methods lacked the genuinity of actual friends, and it felt like I was blessed by the Lord with tongues of fire.

I wanted to open Messenger and see my whole screen filled up with new messages.

I wanted those vanity posts on social media with all my friends.

It was the biggest epiphany I’ve had in my short 20 years on this dying planet. I was able to identify the problem, and according to the scientific method, that’s always the first step (pls do correct me if I’m wrong).

I wanted others to feel FOMO. I wanted more time for friends so I wouldn’t have to deal with my own personal demons (aka T’sol)

I was prepared for junior year, or at least I thought so.

I was selfish. Only a twisted jackass like me could have turned as something as wholesome as making friends into something for personal gain. I felt ashamed of myself, but at the same time, thought of ways to remedy this as soon as possible.

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MAYBE, LIFE ISN’T AS TERRIBLE AS I THOUGHT?

-END OF STORY TWO-

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“Hi, how are you?”

Those four words that have probably been said over a million times in Walmarts were a hidden weapon. At first I was iffy about asking how someone was because it might be too prying. However, I did see that I did like it when someone would ask me that.

With a newfound confidence, I started asking how people were more often. The effects were outstanding. Junior year saw me making the most meaningful connections in a short amount of time. Strangely enough, I also cut my orgs down to three instead of six, and still managed to make lots of new friends.

I realized that asking someone how they were was a good way of showing empathy. It was a way of viewing someone’s world from their point of view.

It was an absolute revolution.

It wasn’t perfect though. I still fumbled with some of my relationships with people at times and I was still pretty awkward. It was a new year, and more academic requirements began to sit in. I was worried but not as much as I was in freshman year.

I would now go out more often with friends, talk to them more, and even love them more because I was doing it for the sake of being friends, and not for personal gain.

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In philosophy class, we were taught about Zhuangzi. He was a dead Chinese philosopher yada yada yada. I learned one thing from that slightly boring class and that was that each person has their own contexts.

Zhuangzi emphasized that empathy wasn’t necessarily giving what you think someone needs. Empathy was hard since people are worlds apart in context sometimes. From that, I learned that even just listening was good enough.

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When I learned this, I didn’t hesitate to try it out. So with that, I decided to grow larger ears. Larger than anyone else’s! I would be the human freak equivalent of Dumbo.

Listening was something I was good at, but only for class.

I saw listening as utilitarian. Something to do so you don’t fail a class or miss your number being called at the bank.

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I learned to not just hear what people have to say, but to also listen hard. Listening to people’s words were just as important as listening to the way they say them. This revelation made T’sol angry, and he grew crab claws from his bony hands. T’sol didn’t want me growing into a better person, but T’sol was evil―and evil never won.

However, there were also times when life would get hard and I felt T’sol’s power taking over again. This was especially true academically since junior year really burns out a lot of people.

For the times I felt alone and sad, listening wasn’t enough.

I couldn’t listen to myself since I still had a very selfdemeaning attitude.

I couldn’t empathize my way out of my isolationist tendencies that were rooted in my freshman experiences.

Countless nights and very early mornings were spent in front of my laptop, with Xvideos, Youtube, and Facebook open. I would always distract myself from thinking about what made me sad.

This was of course unhealthy. I tend to shun people away under the guise of “needing time”, when in fact, I just didn’t want people to see me at my lowest.

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Freshman me would never have believed it, but more than once in my junior year did at least one person try reaching out to me. It was always moving at times since this is still very new to me.

I was so unused to people showing genuine care for me. It was shocking to say the least.

I remember this one night in my second semester where I just felt so hopeless about not being able to get myself the latest Jordan 1 collab with Nike SB. One of my friends knew about this and told me that it was going to be okay.

“Some Ls are there to prepare you for the Ws my dude” “Damn bro, that was deep fr. Much love”. I said in a deep, California-surfer-dude voice. From that point on, I was more conscious about empathizing with people.

You never know what someone’s going through.

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I’VE FINALLY UNDERSTOOD WHAT IT MEANS TO GENUINELY CARE FOR SOMEONE. LOVE WAS THE ROOT―AND WHAT I WAS MISSING THIS WHOLE TIME. 30

And just like that, I went through the rest of my junior year thinking about what it would have been like without all the twists and turns. T’sol might look like the bad guy, but without T’sol I would never have found my way through university so far.

Even though T’sol is a demon, I was able to learn from it. T’sol taught me to see the rain clouds, but to also appreciate the sunshine afterwards.

-END OF STORY THREE-

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Thank you!

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To Vigi, thanks for having us do this project. It means a lot.

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Written and Illustrated by Juancho Luna

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