Which Battles Will Monica Tawide Choose?
She felt like she was an old cardigan.
Let’s start off with the fact that Monica has never had a boyfriend.
If you didn’t know about it, then Monica will let you know within the first minute of your first interaction. If you’ll never get a chance to talk to her in person or through Zoom (I did the latter method), then feel free to watch her YouTube videos — Monica will be there to tell you to say that she’s single.
But before you watch her YouTube videos, just bear in mind that she prolongs her rants about being single for at least two minutes.
Monica’s eyes and mouth went wide open when I told her that she kept on mentioning her single status; in the midst of me explaining my observations of her videos, she could only cover her mouth with bond hands and rolled her eyes when I quoted the things she said on YouTube. Her over-the-top reaction signified some levels of embarrassment and shame. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed, “I didn’t realize that I joked about it a lot to the point that people can actually...Oh my God!”
The reason why she doesn’t have a boyfriend becomes clear when you watch past her sometimes unintelligible displays of dismay over her lacklustre love life. “I’ve got high standards,” she says in one of her videos. She then expanded her criteria of love during our interview, “I’ll give you four words: Chris Evans, Henry Cavill.” She continued to gush over them, “Oh my gosh! It’s the fact that they’re guys who you can bring to a party and they could be goofy as hell, but also guys who you can bring to an elite, fancy gathering and they’d be proper. They could have a dumbass groove but also be intellectual.” She then got so excited describing her ideal man that she could only make the chef’s kiss gesture to end off her explanation.
Monica exhibiting one of everthingshop’s necklaces: Daisy.
“Sadly,” she confessed, “no IRLs (In real life) have ever come close” to her Everest-esque standards. Then again, I don’t blame the men who can’t even meet half of them. After all, they’re trying to compete with Henry Cavill and Chris Evans. These are lofty demands for those interested in her — and there will be little to no room for negotiation. “It's like I would completely rewire my entire brain to ever lower my standards. Not to say I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m better than you. I have high standards.’ It’s not like that, but I just have these standards. It would be nice to have someone who’s goofy and funny, as well as someone with whom I can have stimulating conversations. I don’t want one or the other; I wanna have the best of both worlds.”
Even when she keeps on complaining about not having a boyfriend, she’s willing to accept the single life forevermore to maintain the calibre of excellence she’ll expect from her suitors. “If I’m going to stay single, that’s gonna be okay because I can be my own best of both worlds. I can be the dumbass that I want, but I can also be the intellectual that I want.”
Having these high standards for love is a part of a larger narrative that encapsulates the essence of Monica Tawide, and that essence tells us that she’s a visionary. She explained to me that “visionaries are the people who see the big picture. They’re the ‘This is what I wanna do. This is where it’s gonna go’” kind of people. They’re the guys and girls who’ll think about the end zone, but they’re never sure of the process that’ll get them there. She can’t see “the small picture”, she said. “This is kind of frustrating on my part because I want to do a lot of things, but I don’t know where to start.”
Monica’s remedy to counterbalance the lacklustre planning mindset that comes with the visions she makes by surrounding herself with “integrators”. They’re the people who’ll ground her, warning her to not fly too high into her space of daydreams.
Similar to the instance with her high love standard, the cords inside her made her into a visionary. “I’m wired as a visionary and I like that I’m wired as a visionary because I’m very ambitious.” She has tried to be an integrator, but “it’s just in the wiring” of her brain, so she finds no use in forcing herself to be someone she’s not.
She’s a visionary through and through. One aspect of her life that exemplifies this imagination is HeartCry Philippines, an organization she and her mother founded. To borrow the organization’s own words,
““HeartCry...exists to demonstrate love and compassion through acts of service. It is the cry of our hearts to help the helpless, feed the hungry, lift up the neglected, bring healing to the sick and ultimately, love the hopeless. This isn’t just another charity organization, it is a movement.””
The organization brands itself as a service focused on “improving access & quality of mental health services to the homeless.” Through photos and 24-hour stories, HeartCry shares content that strives to brief netizens about several mental illnesses overlooked by the majority of the public; beneath are attempts to spread hope and encouragement, telling those who stumble upon the posts to get in touch with their raw feelings and unresolved issues.
Monica after getting the hair blowout of her life.
But truth be told, all of HeartCry’s online presence is pure fluff. There’s nothing particularly unique about what they share on Instagram. The organization seems to be more inclined to repeat new-age sermons that have already been preached by millions of influences on the internet. The sugar-coated posts with designs reminiscent of every white-girl board on Pinterest shroud the vague, surface-level messages that will probably have little impact on the trajectory of mental health awareness and self-love. I wouldn’t be confident if I were to say that HeartCry is useful in most of its objectives.
What is perhaps one of the few ways that HeartCry can be effective is to be a vanity project for Monica; no one gets satisfaction out of running the organization more than her. In fact, I don’t think it’s meant for anyone else — it’s for her. In a way, she’s posting through HeartCry to make herself feel good about the possibility that she’s helping someone out here.
This seeming desire to gratify herself in such a method could be the reason why she used to have (and might still have) this strong saviour complex. Saviour complex, as explained by People Skills Decoded, is “a psychological construct which makes a person feel the need to save other people. This person has a strong tendency to seek people who desperately need help and to assist them, often sacrificing their own needs for these people.” Monica can certainly identify with this phenomenon. “When I was growing up, I really thought it was really noble to go completely above and beyond [to] be the one controlling the person ‘cause you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I’m doing this out of love. It’s out of care.’”
Aside from holding this inner inclination and urgency to aid someone else, she might also be experiencing some sense of elation. The Swaddle’s Devrupa Rakshit writes that “saviour complex occurs when individuals feel good about themselves only when helping someone, believe their job or purpose is to help those around them, and sacrifice their own interests and well-being in the effort to aid another.”
Sounds like Monica to me.
But only painting her exterior benevolence as mostly self-serving can overshadow the downcast side of the saviour complex experience. “Back when I was in university, I came across this person and then we became best friends,” Monica said. “And then, it turns out that she’s incredibly toxic...she would make fun of me in front of people, in front of the class. She would say things like, ‘You look like a dog’ or ‘You look pregnant.’ The whole class would laugh, and I was shaking. I was like, ‘Man, this is some crazy shit.’”
Monica and the tower behind her are clearly twinning in this photo.
The off-putting insults, she said, were just “little tastes” of how awful Monica’s friend was to her. “Being with her really felt like a chore,” she said. But despite the great discomfort she felt, she stayed anyway. “I was like, ‘She's just very angry. She just has suppressed anger problems, and I know that I’ll be the one to help her. I can save her from herself.’”
But at some point, something’s got to give. She realized, later on, that her real emotions were more related to sorrow than empathy. “I just really felt sorry for her. I did not love her at all. I just pitied her, and I thought that I’d be the one to make her soft and vulnerable and human, but that was just really bad.” She acknowledged how the mix of the friend’s toxicity and her saviour complex is not only sustainable - it was hurting both parties. “This year, I learned that if your friendship feels like a chore, do yourself and that [toxic] person a favour and end it.”
“I had to run,” Monica told me.
She did run in the end; she opted to shut the saviour complex down. “I just ghosted her, honestly...I kind of stopped talking to her.” Monica’s exit, however, only brewed reservations within her. “We never really had closure, and to this day, I still think of her.” She admitted that there were glimpses of fondness towards the former friend, saying that there were “good times” even with all the distress she felt. “I ask myself, ‘Was I really right to ghost her?’” She then identified a flaw in the mantra she often spouts to others and through HeartCry. “[I’ve been going] around, saying, ‘Open communication, open up to people, share your resentment and patch things up.’ But then I also tell myself, ‘Pick your battles. If you feel like this battle is not worth it, then don’t do it. Open communication is worth it when the person you’re talking to is worth it.”
To Monica, trying to salvage that friendship wasn’t worth it. “She messaged me once, but I never responded to her because I know whatever I’ll say, she’s gonna turn the table and say, ‘But you’re like this! But you’re like that! You did that to me!’” This kind of argument tactic is one Monica knows all too well, given that the friend is a frequent user of it. “She’s gonna gaslight me and I’m gonna go crazy.”
She continued, “If you feel like that person is not gonna understand, it’s not gonna be worth it because they’re not gonna be bothered to change anything anyway.”
With this friendship buried into the ground without a proper funeral, I asked Monica whether she wanted any closure between her and the former friend. Does she want to officially bury the body? “I don’t know. Sometimes, I think to myself, ‘Yeah, maybe I could message her.’ But after, I say, ‘Nah, it’s not worth it.’ I already have enough friends. I’d rather just not talk to her anymore because I’m really happy with the friends that I have.”
Even if she wanted to bury the body, Monica doesn’t have much space on her schedule for it. She’s got other battles to fight. For instance, as much as I’d want to criticize the genericness of HeartCry, there is a saving grace that compels me from demolishing the entire operation; its origin story is the saving grace.
After moving from Iran back in 2009, Monica was introduced to the class inequities that were never particularly around in her early childhood. “Of course I was young, but I didn’t have this awareness of the different privileges,” she said, “and that there were people poorer than me. I never knew.” She could remember the first instances she saw the homeless, who, she remarked, “were almost on every street”.
Is it just me or does Monica’s mom look like Tina Turner?
Maybe it’s just the Insomnia talking.
On the (many) occasions when her family witnessed the poverty surrounding there, Monica’s mom would stress out. “[My mom’s] like, ‘Who is helping these people? We should help these people, but how can we help these people?’ She always tells me, ‘Anak, can you meet these people? Can you do this? Can you do that?’” Monica responded to the pleas with enthusiasm. “Yes. Okay. Yes, I will. Of course...Who wouldn’t want to?”
“I really want to do this. I see myself as someone who would be able to help these people...I want to have a charity organization.” Starting off with this mindset and the accompanying concept, she then constructed the end goal in her mind, which is also influenced by her mother. “My mom always said, ‘Anak, Oh my gosh, I really wish that we’ll be rich so we can buy a really big [plot of] land and we can build a house where we can bring all the people there. They can farm there and they can make a living.” The end goal for HeartCry, Monica said, is to own a shelter where the most vulnerable Filipinos can reside. “It’ll be homey and it won’t look ‘corporate’ and ‘hospital-y’. It’ll actually be a home and we would bring homeless people who are mentally ill. We’ll bring them to the [centre] and we’ll have medical professionals, mental health professionals.”
This dream of aiding the homeless through such a large-scale project is rooted in their disappointment towards the status quo. “What I’m envisioning [for the centre] is not like what [the government] have; they’re not well-maintained and they’re dirty.” She also noticed that when people run away from the government centres, those who are responsible for their welfare seem nonchalant about the escape, failing to evaluate the possible reasons why people left. “Why did they run away,” Monica asked, “What could be improved? What can’t you provide? Why were they satisfied?”
Monica’s pissed in this picture. It’s because they ran out of Tanduay, I think.
Her battles aren’t limited to the Philippines homelessness crisis. Through her YouTube channel, Monica Tawide, Monica channels her frustration about the prevalent social issues of our times. They’re quite long-winded (and rather repetitive), so be sure to schedule your viewing and be aware of the constant rewind of some argument points. Nevertheless, despite the rambling that sometimes occupies portions of her videos, it’s clear that she’s passionate, honest and sincere about what she’s espousing or rejecting.
A few of her videos put forward sharp disapproval of aspects of Filipino culture; she paints bleak pictures of the society she is part of, denouncing the “glorification” of Filipino resiliency and suggesting remedies that may “cure” the “ignorance” of her fellow countrymen. “A lot of things don’t make sense,” Monica told me. “I’d like to believe that God gave us a brain, and the function of the brain is to analyze things and to think critically. If we’re just blindly following something that some dead person a hundred years ago said, then I don’t wanna do it.”
Knowing that she has high levels of passion, honesty and sincerity within her, she has established a rule for herself to utilize those feelings effectively. There’s no question that she’ll pick a topic that “really agitates” her, but she’s mindful of which one to air online; she doesn’t want to post videos for the sake of adding to a crowded discussion.
It’s apparent that Monica has chosen a lot of battles, but sometimes, the battles choose her. Sometimes, for Monica, those battles are within her. Throughout our interview, she kept apologizing for going on several long tangents when answering questions. “It’s so embarrassing! I talk, and then in my head, it’s like, ‘Yeah, this thing is related to the thing I’m talking about right now, so I’m going to talk about that.’ That’s something that happens to me a lot.” I then asked if this was a point of insecurity for her. “Yeah. I’m diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and of the symptoms is the ‘flight of ideas’. So you’re here, and then you’re there. It’s A Beautiful Mind kind of thing where your mind is everywhere.”
She didn’t know she had to fight this battle. “Initially, I thought I was just depressed. I grew up with really bad depression. I didn’t want to self-diagnose, but I knew something was wrong with me. I knew I wasn’t normal, and I had bad anger issues.” Listening to Taylor Swift and Eminem were her quick remedies, she said, but that wasn’t enough to alleviate the despondency. “I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna take up psychology in college.’”
Her time in college certainly dissipated her uncertainty about her mental health. “That toxic friend that I was talking about, she was actually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Everything she was talking about, I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s me!’ But I didn’t want to admit it because she might [have thought] that I was trying to copy her, that I was trying to be like her.” After many months of this deep despondency lingering on within her, she decided to get professional help. “ I went to therapy, and then I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and I was like, ‘Yes! That’s it! Yeah!’”
“I was undiagnosed for my entire life until I was 20. After that, I was finally at peace.”
Recommended Song: Choose Your Battles - Katy Perry