Born in the city of Tagum, I've always had a longing. In this city where everyone knows each other, I sometimes get the urge to move far away where no one knows who I am. Away from my classmates, friends, neighbors, and my family. I wouldn't say I'm an antisocial person, in fact I'm quite the opposite, I've always had a lot of friends and was never lacking in any social interaction. I also have a good relationship with my mom and grandmother whom I cherish dearly. But every so often I get the thought in my head about what would my life would have been if I wasn't born here. Don't get me wrong, I love this place and all but we all have thought about what would have happen if we were, for example, born in a different country.
Growing up, I've never had someone I could call my father. My mom was struggling to make ends meet as she gave birth to me at a very young age, working various part-time jobs just to feed us. Fortunately, my grandmother was there to help her along the way and raised me to be the man I am now. Throughout my elementary years, I've always been an achiever. I consistently got good grades and always partook in many extra curricular activities such as Journalism and Basketball. But things took quite a turn when I got into high school, after I passed the exam to the prestigious Philippine Science High School, I packed my things and moved to Davao City to study in the Southern Mindanao Campus. I stayed in the dormitory there sharing a room with 3 other scholars from across the Davao Region. When classes finally started, I realized how out of place I was, lessons that my classmates could understand in a minute took me many hours just to grasp the concept. I couldn't keep up with the heavy workload and lost all motivation to study. Missed outputs and low scores were the result of my incompetence but I just didn't pay them any mind as I couldn't care less anymore. As expected, when grades were released, behold! Low grades all across the board, with two subjects that I failed. It broke my ego to pieces as I was consistently an honor student and seeing my failing grades just drove the nail in me. What surprised me the most however was my mom congratulating me for passing the quarter, I was ready for her to be disappointed but all she said was "As long as you pass, that's enough for me". Later that night, I silently cried, it turns out I was just the one pressuring myself with the high expectations I placed upon me, and when I couldn't meet those expectations it shattered me. After I heard my mom's words, it felt as if a heavy boulder was lifted atop my shoulders and when I woke up after that day, everyone was surprised as to why I was in high spirits even though my grades were very low. The only thing I could say to them was, "I'll do my best this quarter", and that's exactly what I did. In the next upcoming quarters, I truly did my best and put in effort, although I couldn't quite crack the dean's list, I was still very satisfied with my performance. I continued this streak up until my 8th grade and even got to the dean's list once, although I couldn't quite get it again I was still joyful. Everything was going smoothly until Covid-19 derailed my future plans and I had to transfer schools due to the pandemic halting everything and plagued the whole world by storm.
During the pandemic, I stayed coped up at home just like everyone else as every public facility back then was closed due to the alarming rates of people getting infected everyday. But although the disease terrorized everyone in the world, I had to find something to distract myself with and I turned to online games. I was just fiddling with my phone one day when a friend of mine messaged me to go play Counter Strike with him, as I didn't know what that was, I asked my uncle what it was and it turns out he also played the game and let me play on his computer for a bit. I got instantly hooked, I got addicted to it and kept begging my uncle to let me play on his computer, seeing this, my mom bought me my own so that I didn't have to bother him anymore and told me, "I don't care if you play all day, just do your school works", and that's when I got addicted to online games. Minecraft, DOTA 2, and Valorant are just some of the games I got addicted back then. And as expected of me, I never passed any school work on time and was always behind on my activities. Getting low grades were things that I couldn't care less about as I was busy playing video games. This continued until my 10th grade when the world was slowly recovering from the pandemic that I couldn't continue like this, so I vowed to myself that I would change in the 11th grade.
Although I'm now in the 11th grade and have actually changed things from before, I still deeply regret some things I did before, if I listened on my online classes before instead of just sleeping the whole day, things would have been much easier now and I wouldn't have to spend most of my time studying now. But nonetheless, I'm still grateful for everything that happened because if not for these things, I wouldn't be here writing this autobiography. Everyone has many regrets in life, regrets like; "I shouldn't have done that", "I should have listened", and I do to, but I think instead of dwelling on them all the time, we should take them as a lesson and use them as our guides for the future so that we don't get lost in our journey and become what we aspire to be.