This Must Be The Place
Words / Jess Molina
I am 12 years old and living in Manila, Philippines. I have a Friendster account, my first ever foray into the world of social media. I write random statuses, post ‘testimonials’ – the original post on wall -on my friends’ walls (in hindsight, it was a bit weird that those were called ‘testi’ back in the day, eh?). I connect only with school friends and people I know personally. I first learn about “blogs” and pronounce them as b-logs. No one corrects me because at this point, no one knows what the fuck these are yet. I sign up to Xanga, add music to my site, and those ‘cool’ flashing graphics in my scrolling header. Our friend group have our own Xanga site. I browse through other people’s Xanga accounts and I enjoy getting a glimpse of their lives. I sign up to Livejournal. I completely fall in love with finding a little corner on the internet to call my own, a space dedicated to my thoughts and creative expression. I decide to treat this as an online journal. Raw, emotional, angsty tween thoughts and all. I play Simple Plan’s ‘Perfect’ on repeat and quote it on my status bar. I had absolutely no idea that blogging was going to change my life and expand my world in unthinkable ways.
I am 14 years old and still living in Manila. I beg my parents to drive me to a ‘meet-up’ with my internet friends in a mall 30 minutes from where we live. Candy Magazine, the Philippines’ answer to Teen Vogue, is my bible. I want to be a magazine editor when I grow up. The highlight of my month is getting my hands on the latest issue and I fill the spaces in between that by being super active on their moderated online forum on their website. It’s the first time I’ve found a community in a forum online. I use all my computer time browsing this website, talking to these friends who shared the same interest. I am most active in the fashion, beauty, and music forums. Our computer is bulky, the dial-up internet tone is comforting, I get pissed when my parents tell me they have to use the phone so I need to disconnect from the internet. My online community grows and so does my love for oversharing on the internet. I’ve ‘left’ Friendster to be more active on Multiply. Multiply has a dedicated blog section, I can add categories and customize my site the way I want to. My username is disneyprincessjess. It is fairytale themed. Multiply asks for the type of relationship you have with the person you add and I add my bestfriends as ‘life partners’ and contemplate adding that guy I ‘married’ at the school fair as my ‘husband’. I am addicted to writing down my thoughts and sharing it and commenting on my friends post and the lengthy comment threads on my posts is where I spend most of my time in instead of studying maths. God, I hate maths. I try and pay attention to geometry but in my notebook I write short stories and daydream about the little worlds that exist in my head only.
I am 15 years old, and one of my bestest friends in the whole entire world just died. What the actual fuck. It’s the first time I deal with losing someone my age, someone this close to me, someone I was supposed to grow up and share more memories with. The day is Feb 8, 2007. I stay home from school because I was feeling lazy and it’s my dad’s birthday and I want to cook ribs for the family for dinner. My phone rings at midday during lunch break. My friends don’t know how to break it to me. They tell me she’s dead. I stay on the line and wait for the ‘just kidding’ to drop. I am in complete shock when that doesn’t come. She can’t be dead. I saw her less than 24 hours ago, she had a slight headache after school, I helped carry her books to the school bus so she didn’t have to. I cry to my mum. I cry for most of the day. I struggled to cook dinner that night, still in shock, wondering how a healthy, beautiful 15-year-old girl can die from an aneurism just like that. I think about death, I think about her, I think about the unfairness of it all. I go online and write on my blog, I read my friend’s post and tributes, I see pictures of her everywhere. It finally sinks in that one of the constant people in my life is no longer there. That there will forever be an empty seat in the classroom. That we will not all be together at prom, at graduation, and all those milestones you’re supposed to go through with your school friends. I write some more, I process grief, I keep in touch with her parents through Multiply. I know I am not alone in my grief. Everything else feels so minor, so irrelevant compared to the loss I am feeling. I write some more and just publish all of this on my account. I realise writing is my favourite way of trying to make sense of the world. Especially when it doesn’t make sense.
A year later I am 16 years old and oh my god everything is so dramatic. I have boy issues. I’m involved in some sort of love triangle between me, my prom date, and one of my closest friends. There is tension in our group as we convene for lunch. I write down my feelings on my blog. I share some passive aggressive quote on love and betrayal. This happens again a year later. Same friend, different guy. This guy friend comes over, we watch The Butterfly Effect on my laptop while having dinner and then go for a stroll around the neighbourhood after. I hug him goodbye. He is off to Boston University and it feels like the end of something that was nothing but felt like everything. I write about matters of the heart on my blog, decide I’m gonna be one of those careerwomen instead of hoping for love and devote myself to my new dream of being a fashion designer. I enter the school fashion show with two pieces that I sloppily sew. I decide I might not be cut out for this. I write about it on my blog. My working in a magazine dream, my fashion designer dreams. The future feels so uncertain and scary. I design the uniform for the school’s cheerleading squad. I am an outsider, I find those girls intimidating. We keep ignoring each other in the hallway. They are nicer to me after they find out I designed their uniforms. I want to cry when I see them wear it to an assembly for the first time. I decide there and then I want to live a creative life, whatever it takes. Even if I was an outsider. Even if I was a fat girl who loved clothes. Even if I didn’t fit in to these spaces. Even if I wasn’t beautiful like the people I saw on TV and films and magazines and my skin colour is too brown to be considered beautiful. Maybe I could be the interesting one. Maybe I could be the funny one. Maybe I could be all these other things to be accepted. I knew I wasn’t beautiful so I had to be something else to be accepted. I write and write and write but I don’t publish them for everyone to see anymore.
I am nearly 18 years old and packing my life away. I’ve graduated High School, in a few, short months my mum, brothers, and I are moving to New Zealand where my dad has been for the past year and a bit, preparing for our arrival. University starts for most of my friends and it’s weird that I’m not going to one yet. I have a lot of free time in between sorting out belongings. I still write on my blog – my new one on blogspot.com. I am addicted to blogs now, I am addicted to social media, I am addicted to a website called Lookbook.nu. It was a members only site by then and you had to be invited to join. This exclusivity made me feel like I was part of such an elite group of fashionistas around the world. I had a low-res digital camera, my photosavy friend and I ‘collaborated’ on posts, I came up with looks, I shared them on the community there. The rest of the world was catching on with the whole blogging thing. The Lookbook friends I’ve made were starting to ‘make it’ in the fashion world. Chiara is known as the blonde salad. We comment on each others blogs. Rumi Neely is my ultimate inspo. I write ‘fashion’ articles on my blog, look at the latest streetstyle on Perez Hilton. I move to New Zealand and I am introduced to a whole new fashion season – now my favourite of them all – Autumn and Winter.
I am 19 years old, finally able to start University after waiting for months to be given permanent residency. New Zealand is home now. I’ve spent these idle months writing. I’ve started working on my fiction novel more, I go to the gym, I get my first proper job at a tourist café at the Hamilton Gardens and learn how to make a cup of tea. I go to Uni and decide to study comms because I don’t know what else to do. My bestfriend Steph and I start a joint blog. With The Cool Kids covers everything around the Hamilton culture/lifestyle. We review cafes, we post our outfit of the days, we are party animals and quickly become a familiar face in the clubbing circuit. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights were spent out and about. I didn’t really drink but I danced a lot. It was the ritual of planning outfits for those nights that I looked forward to the most. My disposable income from my retail job is spent on clothes and food. I buy an expensive knitted cape from Witchery after eyeing it up everyday I was at the mall working. I calculate and budget and then decide I can live on migoreng and this cape was worth it. I try it on for the first time. I tell the sales person I will have this cape forever and I will probably be wearing it when I hold my firstborn child for the first time. It’s that special. I feel like I’m finally free to be who I’ve always wanted to be, dressing how I want. Most of all, the version of me I had in my head of who I was – creative, fun, confident, and so damn well-dressed – was now the person I saw in the mirror. I go through a grunge Tumblr phase. I wore black lipstick and flower crowns with my Dr Martens and creepers. My favourite dress was a micromini black lace dress that I wore with those strappy (??) tights. I knew all the bouncers in town, we’d bring them cupcakes sometimes, we never had to queue to get in anywhere. I saw the same faces every week, I started memorizing the song rotations of the DJ setlists. I go up the stage and dance with my mates as our other mates DJ, Tiki Taane was the MC, and in front of me was a hundreds of people dancing along. I felt electric. I write about these gigs for the student mag, I interview Netsky for an hour when I was supposed to only be talking to him for 10 minutes, I do a six60 cover story and learn about NZ music. I get really high marks in class despite my night owl life. I host a primetime radio show Monday – Friday, my favourite song to dance to is Skrillex’ Bangarang. The DJ knows this is my song and jokingly plays it as soon as I enter the club on a Saturday night. I keep writing, Steph keeps working her visual magic on the blog. I think about maybe studying journalism. I want to keep writing. Gosh, there’s so much to write about. I’m interested in so many things. Everyone I know is interesting and I love hearing their stories.
I’m 21 and I’ve just gone viral for the first time. Oh god. So this is how it feels like to be completely exposed, for strangers to have an opinion on you and post it anonymously on the comment section. My friend Mandy was campaigning for marriage equality ahead of parliament’s decision. She asked if I could please make a submission to the MPs before it closes the next day. I click on the website and find the submission section – a tiny box below the name and contact details section. I don’t know what to write. I’ve never done this before. But I feel this fire in me, this feeling of wanting to be heard, of wanting to fight for what I believe in. This feeling of injustice and unfairness washes over me and I think about how all my life I’ve been a hopeless romantic despite never having a boyfriend, never experiencing that love myself. But I see it all the time and it’s wonderful and why shouldn’t everyone be able to have the same rights as I do. I turn the submissions section into an online therapy session and unleash ALL OF THE FEELS. I write to all MPs that I’ve never been in love but how lucky are the people that are in love. I don’t know what that’s like but it’s all I ever wanted. I tell them love, and equality is something we are all worth of. I don’t even know what came over me but I wrote and wrote until it was 3 am and I should really go to bed. I copy the text and paste it on my blog because I was worried that the website would crash and I would lose all that writing. I hit submit and go to bed.
I wake up to my inbox blowing up. I am told by several people my submission is the talk of parliament this morning. I am getting personal replies from MPs, I am not expecting this kind of feedback. I just wrote how I felt about the issue. I wanted to do my part, however small that was. My blog was being shared. Someone from Stuff called. They heard about the submission, they read my blog and can they please run my piece on Stuff?
24 hours later I am the leading story on the website. I get an email from an old journalism tutor saying congratulations. No one except for my family knew this was getting published.
I was raised Catholic, my grandma is very active in the Church. I felt so scared to be so public with my stance because it’s controversial. My whole family tells me they are proud of me. My writing, my image, my byline goes up on the news site. I go to the gym and try and burn off the sweet and sour pork I treated myself to.
I check my phone afterwards and it is indeed blowing up. ‘Don’t read the comments’ my friend texts me. I read the comments. 200. And then 400. And the number just grew. I read them all. It’s a mixed bag. Some anon finds my original blog and tries to start a debate with me around people being able to marry their pets. I ignore that shit. I reply to some of the comments. I cry when I read someone say it’s because of people like me that people like them can have a shot at this and not feel like they don’t matter. I cry some more as I read the comments, amazed at how much strangers are willing to open themselves up and share their own stories in that comment section of something I wrote. A mum tries to set me up with one of her ‘lovely sons’. I cry when someone tells me to never give up on finding love. I realise for the first time that maybe I do have a voice – small but strong – and that voice matters. I write some more, discover my voice, feel exposed and vulnerable and empowered at the same time. Shit. Am I a real writer?
It’s 2013 and I turned 22. It’s been a whirlwind couple of months since the Stuff article came out. So much has happened. I keep writing. I met a girl a few months back who said she wanted to start a magazine and it’s something she’s always dreamed of doing. I said, ‘then why aren’t you doing it yet?’ We talk some more. I suggest Blacklisted as a cool name for it and fell in love with ‘You’ve been Blacklisted’ as a slogan. I am having a shit day so I go to my fave magazine store to get a little treat. I see copies of Blacklisted being sold there right beside Vogue, Frankie, and all the titles I grew up. I want to cry right then and there. Wow. Seeing it there reminded me of what it was like to have a dream and to make that happen. I played a very small part in that. Think of the possibility. I officially become a magazine editor before the year ends. It is a dream come true. I feel completely unprepared to be an editor but I edit the first article from one of our writers, the one we weren’t sure of hiring but my gut told me yes and I fight for a place for her in the editorial team. I realise the gravity of an editor’s job – to help bring out the worlds inside other people’s heads, especially when they don’t know it yet. When they don’t believe in themselves yet. This writer thrives and we give them the big stories. The magazine is doing well. We have a great team of writers and PR teams. I see a stranger reading the magazine while I’m sitting inside a café on a lazy Saturday afternoon. I want to give them a hug or say thank you but I don’t.
I’m 24 and the magazine is folding. We had a great run. I write scripts for a multimedia Fringe festival show while working on the final issue of Blacklisted. I act in this show, both the stage and the web series version. We launch the last issue and announce it’s our last. My show finishes and I feel like rediscovering acting again is bringing me back to life. It’s all over by the time March rolled around. For the first time in my life I had no creative project, nothing in the pipeline. But I still had my blog. But I didn’t feel like writing, didn’t feel like sharing. So much of my identity and my focus has been on those projects, I don’t know who I am without that. I miss my team. I miss collaborating. I miss planning the next issue, being at photoshoots, reading a piece by one of our writers that was not perfect but absolutely has the potential to. I miss helping people find their voice, helping them bring out the worlds inside their heads. I write sporadically, but not on my blog but on my journal. I find comfort in pen and paper. I let my feelings out. I don’t make sense. Sometimes I write so much, so fast that my thoughts are ineligible in my scribble.
I start getting the feeling like it’s time to dream new dreams and I know in my gut what I want to do with my life but I’m too afraid to say it out loud. This dream is mammoth. The kind that might take a lifetime to achieve. There will be naysayers. The odds feel stacked against me. I don’t say it out loud because I’m scared it’s ridiculous. But then again, if anyone could do it, it would be me, I tell myself. So I give myself permission to admit that I telling stories is what I am meant to be doing with my life. I’ve known it since I was young and starring in school productions. I want to act in film and TV, I want to write fiction, I want to keep blogging, I want to help other people write, I want to publish other people, I want to do something with my voice. I get a call sometime in October about hosting the Hamilton piece on TV One’s Neighbourhood. I go on a screentest/interview. They say they’ll be in touch. I do background work for Shortland St and film for the special episode coming out in a few months. I get the Neighbourhood gig too. I am involved in the process of creating the episode, I fill out really long questionaires and they base the script off my words. I film the show, the call time for hair and makeup is early, Mitchell makes me an outfit to wear. I have a camera crew follow me around. It’s both the longest and shortest day of my life. We are down to our last scene. All day I didn’t have a script because the director wanted it to be as natural, as close to my own words as possible. It is now pouring down in Hamilton. I am sitting down for this scene doing the extro. I talk about finding a voice online and knowing how powerful that is and not being afraid to speak up and be open and vulnerable. This turns out to be a huge foreshadowing. I’m about to go through one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through. This is a story I’ve never shared publicly online. Until now.
25. Big birthday. Big year. I’m going through the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. I am feeling bullied at work. It’s gotten so bad that I had to bring a legal team in. I’m a mess, a ball of stress. My friend Mitchell comes with me to doctors appointments. My doctor and I talk about anxiety and maybe going on medication. I’ve never had depression or anxiety before and she says this is situational because of what I was going through. I have never in my life felt my legs wobble so much. After a particular meeting, I was shaking all day long I couldn’t hold a slice of pizza and my brother spoonfed me dinner. I started going to the movies a lot. I picked films that I normally wouldn’t go for. Action films especially. I wanted something I could completely lose myself in, at least for a couple of hours. More than that, I wanted to clearly see a bad guy and a good guy like how clearly defined those roles in action films usually are. People are a lot more complicated in real life – no one is completely evil. Things aren’t black and white. I wanted to see good trump evil. I watch more action films and then I stay in the cinema lobby for hours in a corner with my notebook. I write about that time in my life and think maybe one day I will share all of what I went through. I still haven’t to this day. My episode of Neighbourhood is being shown on a Sunday and the next day my Shortland Street episode airs. It feels serendipitous that both TV appearances air at the same time. I took it as a sign to leave the past behind and start fresh.
It’s 2017 and I start craving for the big city life again like what I was used to in Manila. I move to Auckland to be with my family, start a new job, make new friends, started to blog more than I ever have. I write for other outlets now, I have an incredible community on social media, and I feel more courageous in terms of owning who I am. I start doing more speaking gigs. I watch The Greatest Showman and completely fall in love. I am reminded of why I want to tell stories, why I wanted to act, why I wanted to write. I find out one of the lead actors is from New Zealand. I reach out and we do an interview, I call him in his LA homebase. I realise I wanted to do more of these in my website because I love having a yarn with people I find interesting. I get the opportunity of a lifetime to speak at a Miss Universe fundraiser for NZ’s first Muslim hijabi contestant. Nurul had seen me speak at another event and messaged me about what she was hoping to do. I get the message on May 12, my mother’s birthday. We are sitting in the doctors lounge in Manila. It’s the first time we’ve been back since moving here and we are here because my uncle had his leg amputated and there is a lot going on. I read and reread the message because I couldn’t believe that once again my voice, my words, had led to this. I say yes even though I was terrified. My uncle is a brilliant writer and one of the last convos we had before I left was that I was going to start a blog for him about his recovery journey. He loved it. He was always the first to comment on my Facebook posts and social media. Two months later I speak at the event and in a beauty competition event where the theme was beyond beauty, I titled my talk “I never thought I was beautiful so I became me instead”. It was a Sunday, I jumped on a bus back to Auckland and not even halfway home I got a text that my uncle had died. I thought about the strangeness of the universe as I looked out the bus window and saw the pitch black Waikato highway. That I first knew about this opportunity while I was with him and I literally just finished my talk and he had gone. I write a eulogy and my cousin reads it out loud as we watch the funeral via Skype.
2019 rolls around and I am shaken to my core when the terrorism attack in Christchurch. I am at work when the news hit. I worry for my friends and team in Christchurch. I tell my boss what had happened. We gather to watch the Press Con and we cry together in the office. My boss tells us to go home and I frantically call my brother so we could commute home together. There was a lot of anxiety and fear in the air. People were worried that Auckland was next and there was a suspicious package in Britomart. We get home safely but I can’t look away from my phone and my laptop, refreshing the news and Twitter feeds every few minutes, wanting to find out more. I read about all the victims. I read all the reports coming out. My heart hurts. I feel helpless. What can I do? What can I realistically do in Auckland where I am safe and far away? I want to be on the ground helping. I want to go to a Mosque and be around people. Instead I am at home posting on the NZ Community Managers group and asking all the social media teams behind big companies like Spark to turn off all their advertising on social media. I did the same for all work accounts before that. Total blackout online. I talk to people who are scared, told my friends if they were in the city and nervous about going on public transportation that I’ll get them an Uber.
But still, I feel helpless. What else can I do? There’s got to be something. I try to calm myself down and start writing. Mostly just for me, like I always have done in the past. To process the world around me. I rack my brain for tangible actions. Surely other people are feeling the same helplessness and the same urge to do something about it. I publish the list here and take to Instagram. I decide to stop posting about anything else except this, except resources, except ways to help. I give my platform to the community and share messages. Others are organising a group to go stand outside Mosques around the country and guard the community while they are in. My DMs are filled with the most vulnerable, intense messages I have ever received. People are scared. They tell me about their fears, about their experiences with racism and ‘othering’. I hear stories about microaggressions by emboldened racists in their community after the attack happened. I cry with them. I try my best to make sure that my Instagram and whatever platform/voice/influence I have is devoted to this.
It’s April and I’m still reeling. It’s on my mind. I think about the martyrs a lot. I read about their life, their passions, their hopes and dreams. My heart still aches for the community and I watch in utter awe as they start picking up the pieces. I start thinking about the whole situation, and how people are radicalised online because they fear what they don’t know. They fear ‘others’. Those who practice a different religion, a different lifestyle. I can’t shake the thought that we are so caught up in our own beliefs and lived experiences that we fail to consider other perspectives in so many issues. I wanted to do something about it but I didn’t know what.
April 28, 2019, Saturday, around 11 am. I am on the train to see my best friend Simon for brunch. It is a nice day. Crisp enough to feel the Autumn breeze, but sunny enough to sit outside. The train empty and I am left alone with my thoughts. I am still thinking about sharing stories and allyship and how we can be more tolerating and understanding of each other. I think about how the most effective way I can maybe do this is through my voice. Lately people have been listening. At the same time, I’ve felt like I was missing a part of me creatively. I missed collaborating with people, editing stories, drawing out a world inside someone’s head into written word. I’ve also been thinking about my blog and what it could evolve into.
I was listening to This Must Be The Place by Talking Heads on repeat:
OUT OF ALL THOSE KINDS OF PEOPLE
YOU’VE GOT A FACE WITH A VIEW
I’M JUST AN ANIMAL LOOKING FOR A HOME
SHARE THE SAME SPACE FOR A MINUTE OR TWO
Woah that line makes me want to cry everytime. I realise that this is what I want. To share the same space with people, to share stories and experiences about anything under the sun. I also realised I wanted to use my voice more for the issues I am passionate about. And as the train approached Britomart, I had a phrase that was stuck in my head. LOUDLYQUIETLY. Because in order for any change to happen in this world, we need that balance of knowing when to be loud and when to be quiet. When to shout about the things that matter. When to shut up and listen to other perspective. Loudly, quietly. Yin Yang. Both truths must exist at the same time. In fact, I’d even argue that one cannot exist without the other.
I am excited as I make my way to meet Simon. There’s a spring in my step. I feel a bit like myself again. Like I had a purpose, an idea that I wanted to pursue. It might not be life changing, it might not work. But at that moment, on that day, everything was possible. I talk about it all afternoon with Simon. I say loudlyquietly out loud for the first time as we sat there eating. Loudlyquietly.com had a great ring to it. So I brought my phone out and bought the domain/email address/reserved the social handles right there and then. If you’ve ever tried to buy a website or online account in this day and age, you’d know how hard it is to find a name or handle that hasn’t been taken yet. I couldn’t believe my luck. It felt like it was meant to be.
And then I waited a whole bloody year to really get to this point. So much has happened since. I’ve dreamt about this place for a very long time and when the pandemic and lockdown hit, I realised that there is no more time to waste. I was scared of creating something that quite frankly did not add value. My biggest fear is contributing to the noise. For this to just be another self-indulgent blog or website.
But I think about all these stories I’ve just told you and realise every single one of us has a story to tell. We are shaped by these experiences, by the things that happen to us. By the people we have lost, by the challenges we have overcome. And wow just that very thought is overwhelming. We see life through different perspectives but we also have the same universal experience. Hope, joy, loss, pain, love.
My blog and social media accounts have always been a safe place for me to chronicle these themes and experiences, to share parts of me, my thoughts, and everything else. I never anticipated that in this home that I built purely for my own because I cannot imagine a life where I’m not writing about the world I experience had somehow turned into a home for other people too. That I was never alone in feeling all of these. When I write, share, create, blog and it somehow makes someone feel less alone, or validates their experience and thinking. The DMs I get are incredible. Challenge thinking, share perspective, from skincare to violence against women. I want Loudly Quietly to be not just an extension of my blog, my DMs, my words, but a place for other peoples expression too.
And now here we are. 6:30 pm on launch day. I deliberately left this essay to be finished when everything is online and ready for launch. I wanted to see it in its entirety before I finish writing this. Because it’s here! Finally. After all this time, this website now exists in real life. The links are clickable, the stories are in. I actually ‘quietly’ launched this last week to my family and the team who contributed to this launch. I wanted a week of this website just being mine before it becomes everybody else’s.
Welcome to loudlyquietly.com. I hope this feels like home for you too.
