minimum posting cadence

It’s more than halfway through the month and I haven’t made any blog posts yet. I feel the urge to publish something. I’m sitting on several drafts right now, none quite ready. And yet, here I am, starting another draft, for what seems like a sense of obligation. Where does that obligation come from?

In high school we had the subject Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao, what amounted to values education. My guess for the derivation of pagpapakatao is pag-pa-RED-ka-tao:

• tao means “human”.

  Blust and Wolff agree on the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *tau “person” as its etymology, though they differ in its Proto-Austronesian reconstruction, with Blust taking *Cau and Wolff preferring *tau. In either case, it’s cognate to the word for “human” across many of the Austronesian languages.

• ka- makes it stative, so *katao is “humanness”.

  This isn’t a word on its own, but we derive pagkatao “personality” and katauhan “personhood” from it. From the latter we also get sangkatauhan “humanity”.

• pa- makes it causative, so *pakatao is “to cause humanness”.

  While *pakatao isn’t used on its own, it conjugates like the root of a mag- verb. A proverb says, madali maging tao, mahirap magpakatao, or “it’s easy to be human, it’s hard to choose humanness.”

• pag- makes it a volitional act, so *pagpakatao is “the act of causing intentional humanness”.

• The RED is reduplication, which makes it habitual, so pagpapakatao is literally “the ongoing act of causing intentional humanness”.

While the usual usage of pagpapakatao is something like “acting with dignity”, I’m drawn to its literal meaning more. I’m surprised that pagpapakatao doesn’t mean something like “identity”. (The usual Tagalog word for “identity” is pagkakakilanlan.) After all, identity isn’t a static thing; it’s a composite of our actions, something that arises from practice, not being.

Or, well, is it? There’s some parts of identity that we view as unchanging. I’m Filipino, and male(-ish), and gay; surely these are much harder to change than being a programmer or a New Yorker. In On identity, I even write:

They’re not what make me Filipino, and they’re not what make me gay, but they’re certainly related. While identity is fundamentally our perception of ourselves, it’s inseparable from what we do. Self-verification theory holds that we seek experiences from others that validate our self-views, a process called self-verification. If pagpapakatao didn’t already mean something else, I think it’d be a good fit as a translation.

Yesterday, while visiting Reading Terminal Market with some friends, we ate lunch at a Filipino place called Tambayan. After the meal, I walked up to the founder, Kathy, and said salamat, ninang.

She stepped back and her eyes widened. “Ah, you’re a Tagalog speaker! Where are you from?”

Tiga-Valenzuela po ako, I replied.

Ah, Valenzuela. Ako’y Batangueño, lumaki ako sa Taal, she said. Halika, kumuha tayo ng selfie para sa Instagram!

We talked about New York and Philadelphia for a bit, and then we took a picture, with me, her, and my other friends.

Why did I walk up to her afterward? The surface-level thought that prompted me was that I haven’t spoken Tagalog in a while. Which was true. Something about the thought of losing a language terrifies me.

Conversely, speaking Tagalog with others, talking about my birthplace, and recalling the food I miss the most from the Philippines—these are all things that reinforce the feeling of being Filipino. None of these are actions are a necessary part of being Filipino, but something about doing these things gives me a sense of ease.

When who we think we are desyncs with what we think other people think we are, we feel an identity threat. In the framework provided by George, Strauss, Mell, and Vough (2023), such a threat can be to identity value (“to be worth less in the eyes of others”), identity meaning (“questioning what it means to be”), or identity enactment (“cannot show people that I am”). For example, I’ve felt each kind of threat in the context of being gay:

• Toward the end of high school, I wrote a spoken word poem called “being gay in four parts”. The opening line is “being gay is easy, as long as you’re not.” It’s about the fear of coming out, of being seen less by others if they find out that I’m gay.

• Earlier, I mentioned my blog post On identity, which tackles the question of what identity means. Part of this was asking: what does it mean to be gay, outside of being gay in contrast to people around me?

• These days I worry about not being seen as gay. I’m a chubby Asian guy, and I don’t even have a boyfriend. To borrow a phrase from Bodies, I Have In Mind: how can I be gay when I’m not an Immensely Powerful Gay Husband? (A content warning for the linked post: there’s discussion of sexual content, but nothing obscene.)

Now I’m feeling the threat in my self-image as a blogger. Because I am a blogger, right? I post things regularly on the internet, right? When I was in MIT, I posted once a week on MIT Admissions, easy. Sure, I was paid for it, but I did it on top of all the other things I was doing.

I’ve heard alumni say that life after MIT is less busy. You get more free time, time you need to fill yourself. Somehow that’s only made it harder to write regularly. I’ve already given myself an easier goal: post twice a month. Maybe even that is too hard.

In an objective sense, I blog more regularly than the vast majority of people with a blog. I am, in the eyes of many, a writer. I call myself that. I’ve posted hundreds of thousands of words on the internet, after all. Yet I still feel this threat to my identity, that even with all this, I’m still not writing enough.

I don’t know who I’m afraid of. I don’t know someone who’d look at my writing and say I’m not a writer.

Except, maybe, myself.