The might of stories

It took exactly 3.5 minutes to sprint from my fourth-grade classroom to the school bus, 2.5 when I was sporting my yellow Nikes. I wasn’t much of a runner. In fact, I ran like a tiny penguin. But running is a skill you acquire if you’re a kid who is perennially in a hurry to go home and escape the popular kids that huddle after class, waiting to pick on you and others like you.

“Being different is good,” said the lady in bifocals. In her little pink office, she would always come up with reassuring statements. “Being different means being unique and special, like a unicorn.”

For our guidance counselor, being different meant being extraordinary. I, on the other hand, had an entirely different definition of it when I was growing up. It meant mastering the art of putting on a straight face during physical education class, to save yourself from humiliation for always being picked last during dodge ball. It meant doubling your breakfast consumption at home so you can skip lunch and not have to eat alone in the cafeteria. It meant having worn-out leather shoes, for always scurrying toward the school bus every day in 3.5 minutes, 2.5 if you own a pair of Nikes.

Being different, from my understanding, meant being rendered powerless against kids deemed by society as better than you were.

I was that kid—that swishy, plump, unusually short nerd whom the new kids would pick on to secure admission to the coveted popular kids’ table. It wasn’t their fault. I acted differently; I didn’t fit into any stereotypical roles taught in school, or in church. People didn’t know where to place me and therefore didn’t know how to deal with me. For them, I didn’t belong to any conventional and acceptable social category, and was consequently led to believe that I was inferior to my peers.

Going to school felt like being forced into an unsolvable labyrinth that demanded to be conquered. The anxiety and fear would creep in the moment I opened my eyes in the morning, and would ebb only when I had finally reached home, which signified that I had come out unscathed from the day’s maze. That is, without anybody shaming me or calling me names.

As luck would have it, in the fifth grade I found a secret door in this dreadful labyrinth. Sometimes this magical door opened to the world of Narnia. Other times it opened to The Shire. Most days it was Hogwarts.

At an early age, I discovered how to use my affinity for

literature as a tool to evade the monster that lived inside me—a monster so generously fed by my peers who made it more formidable by making me feel not only different but also like a powerless pest that required immediate extermination.

My resolution to optimize this new “escape tool” grew stronger and stronger by the day. I immersed myself in stories in whatever way I could. I read them, told them, lived vicariously through them, and eventually wrote them myself.

I used to write stories primarily for fun; it was a hobby to take my mind off matters that give me stress hives. But things started to take a significant turn when I was introduced to student journalism, when I was called to the principal’s office for publishing “inappropriate content” in our school paper, questioning an ineffective and backward student-punishment system that inflicted unnecessary damage on a child’s self-esteem.

At 18, I was doing my rounds in a regional newspaper, writing about sociopolitical issues concerning the youth.

At 20, when, as a school project, I and others were assigned to make a short film, I wrote and shot an allegorical film that underlines the oppressive tendencies of some religious leaders of the Catholic Church. Understand that, at the time, I studied at Ateneo de Davao University, an institution run by Jesuits and therefore strongly affiliated with the Church.

Was my short provocative? Probably, to a certain few. But its being so didn’t preclude it from winning “best film” in the little ceremony that my professor had put together. Its being so didn’t preclude it from winning “Best Student Film” in the 6th Mindanao Film Festival, a year later.

“Your short film made me think. We need more of that in the film industry,” one of the judges in the Mindanao Film Festival told me after the ceremony.

I paused for a minute to wrap my head around what I had just been told.

My work, my words provoked thought. It’s no Kubrick, but it was a personal feat nonetheless, because my imagination, my story, sparked something. The voice of the little boy who sprinted from his classroom to the school bus in 3.5 minutes to avoid bullies, provoked thought.

In that moment, I discovered that stories—the written word—really do make for weapons powerful enough to battle even the most daunting villains. This was me, slaying my metaphorical monster; me, fighting back.

I have long outgrown my childhood bullies; I no longer think about kids shooting spitballs at me or pulling down my gym shorts in public. Instead, I think about the bullies I face now: the people who take my taxes and shove it into their own pockets; the people who murder journalists among whom I once aspired to be; the bullies who won’t let me marry; the bullies who tell me that if I continue to listen to my heart, I will burn in hell.

What I had once used to evade my enemies is the exact same thing I am using now to stand up to them. I am old enough now to realize that stories have power, stories have might. People like me tell stories in the hope of not only causing a spark but also fanning a wildfire so fierce it will burn those who need burning.

I think about another boy who also liked writing stories, one who wrote two beautiful, literary masterpieces, two stories from which one of the most defining revolutions in my great country stemmed; two stories that sparked a chain of events leading to a scene where the boy’s mangled body falls to the ground and a nation finally gains victorious independence years later because of it. Two stories that pulled the triggers of eight rifles, causing the storyteller’s life.

His name was Jose Rizal.

I think about him a lot, the storyteller who taught me that the weapon you need most to slay your demons sits quietly on your writing desk, collecting dust, begging to be picked up.

Kristian Somera, 25, holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communication from Ateneo de Davao University. He travels the world for a living, and moonlights as a storyteller.