Why I Am Not A Normal Writer

I was on a plane bound for Edinburgh, Scotland that encountered turbulence, and I thought I was going to die with P!nk. Still, I felt I was fortunate to be there—all there, spilling peanuts, clutching madly at my seat. Before The STAR, I was in a business rag tasked with charting the rise and fall of copra. At UST, I learned from the best (Ophelia Dimalanta, Ferdinand Limos) and hoped to earn a living as a writer. “Journalism is literature in a hurry,” Ma’am Ophie once said in class. But I never dreamed of writing about Life Insurance Consciousness Week or National Rice Awareness Month. One call from Millet Mananquil changed the trajectory of my life. I was in Purgatory, and she found me. Then came the string of unforgettable assignments for Lifestyle: interviewing David Medalla, Arturo Luz, Malang; taking a literal trip to Jerusalem; getting high in the Himalayas; listening to Salman Rushdie talk about beauty in a time of strife; and sitting down with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino one afternoon in New York City. If not for Ma’am Millet and my kind bosses in STAR, I’d probably be an e-sabong agent right now, graying and in limbo, still waiting to get the party started.

This essay was part of a compilation by The Philippine STAR Lifestyle editor Millet Mananquil. D’Bayan joins a merry band of STAR writers past and present.