Iolo Keon Villegas Is Incriminating Himself
By Mikael Rizada Borres
Quotes and dialogue have been edited and/or shortened for clarity and length.
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Prologue: The Brand Called “Iolo Keon”
“Iolo Keon” means – or at least is in relation to – the Hawaiian phrase for “God’s Grace.”
“I’m actually an accident child,” Keon told me. “So my mom was in Manila at the time, [...] she was not at the best point in her life. So when she had me, she felt like her life turned around and it was like God’s grace helping her get back.”
“So how’d you get a Hawaiian name?” I asked. “She could have just called you ‘God’s Grace.’”
“Oh, pfff! So what, my friends are gonna call me ‘God’?” he quipped.
“What if ‘Grace’?” I asked Keon.
“‘Grace’! ‘Gracey’!” Keon replied.
The range of shorthands for “Iolo Keon” is broad. For most of his life, he was called “Iko,” a combination of “Iolo” and “Keon.” Nowadays, most people call him “Keon,” but close friends could opt to use “Iolo” to annoy him. According to Keon, he doesn’t “vibe” with the name “Iolo.”
“I like how people have different nicknames for me based on how they met me,” said Keon.
I raised another question: “What’s a nickname you don’t like now?”
“Oh, if you add a ‘y’ or an ‘i’ after Keon? No.”
“Keon-y?”
“No, no, no way!”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just too…”
“Cute?” I asked.
Keon laughed, then replied: “It’s too cute for my liking. Nothing wrong with cute, but–”
“It doesn’t go with your brand?”
Keon laughed again. “You’re kind of getting it.”
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What is the ‘Keon Villegas’ brand? Yes, several people link him to the leadership roles he has taken in recent years. A former councilor of the University of San Carlos Supreme Student Council (USC SSC) and a presidential candidate during the 2023 USC SSC elections, he now assumes the role of president of the USC Architecture Society (USCARS). But most people don’t know him aside from him being in those offices, and Keon is more than just at peace with that fact.
“The less people know, the better,” Keon opined.
“Hold it,” I interjected as I pushed back. “But you’re in SSC, USCARS–”
“And surprisingly,” Keon interjected as well, “you still don’t know much about me.”
“Why is that?” I asked Keon, letting myself pass on the job of analyzing why I don’t know much about a friend to the friend in question.
“I don’t know… maybe it’s because… I like to keep it that way. Not in a bad way; I like talking about my life. For example, this is probably my third or fourth time sitting down with you and talking about life. I can talk about my life. If you ask me, I’ll talk. If there’s a prompt, I’ll talk.”
But many people don’t have Keon talking. It’s not because they don’t want to hear him talk, but people talking about themselves is so pronounced and intrinsic to the human psyche and behaviour that they may not bother asking questions. In Keon’s case, he satisfies the other people’s desires to talk about themselves by being the one who asks the questions.
When I asked him whether he wished people asked him more questions, I heard a firm “No” from him.
“I like that it’s rare [to get asked questions] because I don’t have to talk about my life that much, so the fact that it’s rare, it makes me excited.”
Runaway Baby
Once, Keon ran away from a resort he and his family stayed in for a getaway to escape his parents. Before he ran away, his parents discovered his secret girlfriend.
Keon’s parents didn’t uncover his secret through some accidental stumble. His parents used to check through his phone to look out for any suspicious activity. In most of the instances when they inspected the phone, they couldn’t find anything dubious on his Instagram and Facebook accounts; it was all clean. But they didn’t know about Snapchat, where Keon kept his dalliances under wraps, and they never suspected looking through that app.
But by some twist of fate, however – perhaps they got tipped off by a notification or learned about Snapchat just before they checked his phone at the resort – they saw the messages between him and his then-girlfriend.
For Keon’s parents, who have put in years of establishing to Keon that having girlfriends at a young age (and even having crushes) would be a “taboo” idea, the revelation came as an unpleasant surprise for them.
When Keon’s parents confronted him about his secret, he did what he thought was the best way to deal with such a problem: deception. He was so good at lying that his mother feared his ability to make up untrue tales with a straight face. “At that time, I didn’t really know how to get out of situations like that, ‘cause the first thing I do is to lie and deny and deny and deny, no matter what proof you had,” said Keon. “And I was good at it. I was really good at it.”
His parents took his phone, locked it away in the hotel room safe, and had everyone in the family eat breakfast together at the hotel buffet. Unbeknownst to Keon’s parents, when they got in line at the buffet, Keon first sneaked out of line and took the hotel room key card his mother put in her bag. Then, he sprinted out of the restaurant and to their room, cracked the safe open by guessing which numbers his father would use, and booked a ride to the resort where his friends and his then-girlfriend were staying.
Whilst in the other resort, he turned his phone on airplane mode to stop his parents from tracking him down. “I tried to worry them as much as I could,” Keon admitted.
For three days, Keon stayed with his friends and then-girlfriend. His then-girlfriend’s mother allowed him to stay on the sole condition that he would go home to his parents when he was ready and tell them everything.
Keon decided to come home after putting his phone on airplane mode and seeing text messages from his youth pastor, asking about his whereabouts. “My dad asked him [the youth pastor] to message me,” Keon recalled. “And, I mean, I can ghost my family, but this youth pastor was like a mentor to me. I could not ghost him. So I replied to him and said, ‘Hi, Tito. Yes, I’ll be home.’
“Then I went home, and [my parents] were not screaming,” said Keon, who remembered them being calmer than he expected and telling him to stay in his room for a few days. He perceived his parents’ relative composure as their form of recognizing their understanding. They may have realized why Keon felt he had to run away even if they disapproved of his escape. Nevertheless, as a consequence, Keon had to break up with his girlfriend.
That consequence could have been something Keon took as a form of capital punishment, but it wasn’t. “Obviously, I hated it, but I felt like I had no other choice,” said Keon. “It was also because, at that time, we were like one year into the relationship already. So that’s one year of hiding, and I hate that. My ex [the then-girlfriend] also hated that ‘cause it’s just hard.”
“Even if I wanted to be with her, I think I ran out of energy to keep it up. Even if I said that I’ll break up with her but then I don’t, it’s even harder to keep up with a secret relationship if they [Keon’s parents] think he broke up with her.”
That all happened in the 9th grade.
Rebel, Rebel
To be the firstborn, according to Keon, is to be the “test subject” of his parents. “It's either the firstborn turns into the most responsible out of all children or they turn out to be the most rebellious,” he said. By scrutinizing his own adolescence and hearing the experiences of other eldest children with strict parents, he sees a clear pattern wherein the lack of flexibility and freedom their parents give to their eldest children directs the latter to rebellion.
Keon did have that phase of rebellion in the 9th grade, a retaliation for all the years of his parents expecting so much of him in what he does. “The years leading up to Day 1 of the rebellious phase, you know, [the parents] are very proud of you [...], and they know you can make your own decisions, so it kind of gets in your head, personally speaking.”
Signs of his rebelliousness began to show themselves early on. Around 7th grade, he started acting upon his feelings for girls. The following year, he started drinking at house parties. By the time 9th grade came along, the extent of his rebelliousness expanded, going out and partying harder.
9th grade Keon thought he was at the peak of his life, just when his “ego was at its highest.” In fact, his big ego served as the greatest sign of his rebellion. “[My ego] was crazy. I thought I was the shit ‘cause it was peak ‘party boy,’” said Keon. “Oh, I’d easily beef with anyone for the… fun of it. I found entertainment in chaos. Sometimes, I intentionally made two other parties beef with each other, and I just like to watch it unfold.”
When asked about a time when he instigated drama, he described a fortnight of intrigue and pettiness that began when he “sparked something that shouldn’t be sparked.”
In the 9th grade, a girl from Turkey became one of Keon’s classmates. A particular group in Keon’s class felt ambivalent, if not jealous of the new girl for her beauty. “So then this one person made a tweet about her. And if you just look at the tweet – I won’t say what it says – but if you look at the tweet, you can easily overlook it, it won’t really matter. You can just be like ‘Oh, okay.’ But then, I knew that this person was referring to our new classmate. So I sparked it.”
Keon initiated his shit-stirring by telling the girl from Turkey about the tweet, then tweeted about the guy who made the tweet. Afterwards, he told the tweeter how the girl from Turkey reacted. The whole ordeal captured the whole class’s attention and imagination for two whole weeks.
In retrospect, if such a time was the actual peak of his life, then his life would not be worth living. Keon would agree, saying, “I wouldn’t be happy about that if it’s just 9th grade ‘cause I had a lot more as I was graduating. Even if it was during the pandemic, I was happy with myself during 11th-12th grade. I wouldn’t want 9th grade to be it.”
On The Run
Nowadays, Keon thinks he should have refrained from being that kind of junior high school provocateur or the egotistical menace. And when looking back on his months in the 9th grade, Keon holds a convoluted combination of emotions. Hints of embarrassment (if not contrition) for his ego and his recklessness can be spotted in that combination of emotions. He seems comfortable saying that his feelings towards his time in the 9th grade can be dubbed “the worst of times” of his life so far.
But in fairness, his far-from-virtuous actions and mindset in the past only show a portion of how Keon has had to deal with the ramifications of parental pressure. “Even if I thought I was peaking in 9th grade, it was still the worst of times because… yeah, my self-esteem was high, my confidence was high, but I had really bad anxiety, I was still a little bit depressed,” said Keon.
“Most of the anxiety was because of my parents because I was hiding a lot of things from them. So I hated being at home, and I was always paranoid. I hate the feeling of being paranoid, but I was always paranoid of them finding something out or me getting in trouble for shit. It was a constant run. I felt like I was always running. And, you know, you can’t keep doing that forever. While what I got from running might have felt nice, felt good, felt like I was on top, it still doesn’t dispute the fact that I was still running.”
Until now, the pressure, now living as the inner worry of letting his parents down, continues to chase him around. However, Keon hesitates to say the present pressure comes from his parents. He would rather say he concocted it all by himself, explaining how his willingness to be the best in what he does stems from the self-imposed standards he tries to follow.
Nevertheless, even with his hesitation, the correlation between his worries and his parents remains. He believes his big failure is not his drinking or partying or swinging around with the biggest, but it’s him “making them proud. I know that they’re proud, they’re really happy because I always tell them about my accomplishments [...], and my mom is always so eager to post them, tell her friends, which I’m glad, but I feel like my biggest failure is really making them proud because they have this ideal son, the concept of a son.”
“This is what they wanted from me: that I just grow up, achieve in school, be active in church, not have a girlfriend. The only time I get somebody is when I get married.”
“I wish I had different standards for myself because if I did, I would be playing basketball every day, hanging out with my friends every day,” he said, “but I always have this constant pressure that I put on myself, that I need to get things done.”
On The Move
Keon may wince at the regrettable actions and ideas he thought of back in the 9th grade, but he cannot say he laments doing and thinking about most things he did during that school year. He sheds light on that 9th-grade year, from the drinking to the partying to the hiding to the running, as a period of “exploration.”
“People ask, ‘Do you regret?’ ‘cause I was in trouble, I was rebellious. I do not regret it because I’m glad that I went through it at that young age ‘cause eventually I was able to realize later on in 10th grade, 11th grade, that I’m done and I don’t really need to do those things.”
Does Keon still party and go out? Yes, and he tells his parents about his plans. Is drinking still something he does? Sure, but he says he only does so socially (for the most part). Does he date around? He did mention during a Today’s Carolinian interview about him having a girlfriend during the summer of 2022; his current relationship status is not my story to tell. But whatever he does in that context now, he does so at a sensible pace. There is no need or urgency to go living with a juvenile, somewhat hedonist lifestyle.
Keon flipped over to a later chapter whilst getting grounded for hiding the truth about his then-girlfriend. By the 10th grade, when he was “under probation” for his runaway scheme – which meant he could not go home late or be seen with a girl – he started joining different student organizations and taking leadership opportunities, prompting a new era defined by responsibility, success, and personal fulfillment. With positions like the presidency of USCARS and a councilorship in the USC SSC, this more recent chapter could make his parents devoured with pride for their son when reading.
Knowing what he knows now, Keon utilizes those past realizations to guide his parents away from the strictness they got accustomed to, trying to save his younger sister from obstacles he had to overcome. “I told them how I felt. I was like, ‘This is how I felt and this is why I started hiding,’” Keon described. “I don’t want the same things to happen to my sister, so I told them, ‘I’m speaking out of care and not out of rebellion right now about how I felt before. You can say whatever you want – that you tried to do this, you tried to do that. I understand everything, [...] you did your best as parents. I understand that, but I’m just going to tell you how I felt and how you can avoid that.”
Keon’s father seemed more receptive to what Keon had to say, while his mother stood firm in defending her decisions and ideas when raising Keon. “She was like, ‘No, you did this! No, we really gave you freedom and all that, but you were the one who broke the trust first!’ I was like, ‘I broke the trust first because I knew for a fact that if I would have come out with something or I told you about something, automatically, you would have me cut them off or whatever.’” Convincement can truly be a process.
These words for his parents are part of the many realizations he had during 9th grade. Without what he would consider “the worst of times,” there would be no Keon who exists with the valuable wisdom and experiences he gained from the previous chapter of his life.
If he had the chance, what would he say to 9th-grade Keon?
“I think I’d tell myself, ‘Just keep going,’” Keon said. “Because I feel like, being in that household, it was bound to happen at some point. If I didn’t go through that ‘hoe’ phase in the 9th grade, I would’ve gone through it in 10th grade, 11th grade, or college. And I’m glad – while there are decisions that I made that are not my proudest moments, I’m glad I got it over with, all said and done at 16, 17 years old. I’d just tell myself, ‘It’ll get better.’”
April 2023 Today’s Carolinian interview with TINGOG! Carolinian Party standard bearers.
(Left to right: Vice Presidential Candidate John Arvert Cadiz, Presidential Candidate Keon Villegas, Mikael Borres)
Keon and Mikael conducted the in-person interview on Friday, January 13, 2023.
Recommended Song: The Body Rock - Treacherous Three
Pictures of Today’s Carolinian interview taken by Kiezo Se Kong (@kiezo_sekong).
