Chasing Roanne | A blog by Roanne Manio

I'm Roanne and I'm nineteen. I'm a small town girl with big city dreams. I like books, beaches, pastels, good food, and intellectually stimulating conversations. Read More.

[chasingroanne]

A Reboot

Every now and then I hit a slump.

With my blog, I promised I wouldn’t try too hard. I would only write when I felt like it. I would only put out content if it was something worth sharing and something people would learn from.

While some of my posts have been useful, there’s still that little itch at the back of my mind.  I am not who I am two years ago. I wrote letters to future boyfriends and future heartbreaks. I wrote wishlists and what i’m up to’s. I read it all again and felt like a big phony. Holden Caulfield would not be proud.

True, everything I wrote the past two years are a part of me. (I have not deleted them--- just set them to private.) But if there’s anything I want to share the world, it’s who I am now: someone more thoughtful, more brave, more honest, and someone constantly seeking to outdo herself. 

Thank you for staying despite the indecisiveness and being a work-in-progress. 

Love, Roanne

[chasingroanne]

I lied and I am not a writer.

I had always called myself a writer. It is a passion I had since childhood. I remember writing short stories and dialogues on those red and blue lined papers. I remember writing in blue ink. I still have the papers somewhere, stored in a pink High School Musical envelope. 

The stories were simple, definitely something a child would write. There was one, though, that was unique in the fact that it was written in English and that it was in a tone unfit for a kid. Eight year old me wrote, “The last poem is when I die.” How depressing. But how utterly, incredibly honest. To this day, I do not know how I came up with it or what was going on through my brain when I scribbled the words. I guess mortality was something I wanted to confront, or something I vividly want to understand.

Since then, I was writing, writing, writing. In sixth grade, I was writing essays on an old computer, saving them for who knows what. In high school I was writing for the school publication. I was blogging my thoughts-- a more intimate look to who I was a writer. It was public, but it had a sense of privacy which I craved.

In 2014, my essay was published on a national newspaper. It happened again in 2015. I was “the resident writer”. In a way, that was the label that set me apart. But apart from a now defunct blog full of teen angst encoded to appear somewhat literary, two mediocre essays on The Philippine Daily Inquirer, what am I?

I am not a writer. I am not eloquent. Turning my thoughts into comprehensible sentences can be difficult. I do not write on the daily. If I am a writer, then I am a big fat failure. 

Hello. I am Roanne Manio, I’m nineteen, and I am not a writer.

I see the power of words, I hear them sing on dog-eared pages of forgotten books. Alive, alive, alive. But they seem to die in the place where the tip of my fingers meet the body of the pen or the grooves of the keyboard. Maybe I had lost the magic. Maybe it was never mine in the first place.