Yamanni Pabillore Wants To Know What “Love” Is

By Ridwan Anam

Trigger Warning: Self-Harm, Suicide

The definition of “love” is subjective. You can attach the corniest and cheesiest definition to it or the most gut-wrenching or awesome idea of it. So when Yamanni Pabillore says that she does not “understand” love, the concept of love becomes an intriguing topic for Yamanni, who thinks she does not understand this common yet mysterious emotion.

 Are You Feeling Lonely, Yamanni? 

Yamanni shared that her lack of understanding of love “manifested at a very early age because my siblings and I were neglected by our parents.”

The neglect Yamanni and her siblings experienced is not what you think it is. It is not like they were not provided by their parents with their needs and wants. Rather, it was because her workaholic parents – an agriculturist mother working around the Philippines and a seafaring father working abroad – had to provide for them. “I can’t really blame both my parents because we need to live.” 

The workaholic lives her parents lead is what resulted in their neglect. As far as she can recall, the only time she and her siblings were given attention was when they achieved something or did something wrong. “We were neglected emotionally,” she said. No parent figure helped them in processing or understanding emotions. They did have a yaya (nanny) attending to them, but it was the type of presence their parents could only supply. “We were left to our own vices, which led to us being emotionally unavailable people.” 

Yamanni shared more of her splintered relationship with her mother, who was somewhat present in her life due to her relatively close vicinity – being in the same country, that is. “At least in a family with an OFW (overseas Filipino worker) parent, the other parent would be stay-at-home,” she said, “but I guess my mom believed in the ‘grind.’”

The relationship with her mother became more splintered and distant because of the latter’s religiosity. “If she’s not at work, she’s most likely in the church,” she said when describing her Catholic mother’s devotion. 

She then recalled a time when she was plagued by a fever. Whilst in agony, she became delirious, calling for her grandmother, who had already passed away by that time. The fever got worse to the point that she needed to be admitted to the hospital.

Yamanni remembers waking up with a shocking view. She was sitting down with one rosary in each of her hands. Adding to the absurdity of the situation was her mother reciting prayers right beside Yamanni. For her mother, this was a last resort to save Yamanni from the sickness that plagued her.  

“The next thing I know, I was lying down, and there was smoke everywhere,” she described. “I was being exorcised. I swear it was an exorcism.” What made her mother believe that her daughter was possessed was how Yamanni called out to her grandmother. “I was calling out dead people,” she said when recalling the severity of her condition. 

The turbulence of their relationship and her trauma with religion truly began when Yamanni wanted to find solace. Yamanni recalled a time when she harmed herself. (She never disclosed to me why she did so). Young Yamanni looked to the person whom she could trust the most at the time, her mother. 

Yamanni then showed her mother the slashes on her wrists. At that moment, a daughter called out to her mother for help. 

“‘Do you know what you lack? You lack God in your life.’” That was the response Yamanni received from her mother. 

At that moment, all Yamanni could recall was shutting down. She felt like falling apart into pieces.

It was the last time Yamanni shared anything personal with her mother.

The mighty words of the eternal being are the most common responses that Yamanni’s mother had to some of the struggles her daughter faced. This made communication between mother and daughter more difficult and painful than it should have been. 

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The difficult communication also extends to her siblings – three girls and one boy, with Yamanni being the third child and the second youngest girl in the family. “We don’t usually talk about emotions or feelings.” With a word, she then described their interactions when emotions are brought up: “avoidant.” “We talk about anything and everything except our emotions.”

Yamanni avoids communicating with them because of their responses. “Most of the time, I know what types of words they would throw at me.” 

She recalled how one of her siblings replied when she shared about her break up with her partner. “I said to them, ‘I broke up with my ex,’ and they replied to me, ‘Why? Maybe it’s your fault. you’re very maldita (rude)?’”

There are times when Yamanni can talk to them, though only as casual conversations and nothing too deep. Still, Yamanni refuses to share her feelings with them. “I still don’t have the guts to talk to them about that [heavy] stuff.” 

Yamanni ended with a vague answer. “I think they are not ready for it.”

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The lack of personal communication between Yamanni and her siblings became prominent during the pandemic. Because of how isolated Yamanni felt, and the lack of connection with her close friends, expressing herself as an extrovert and her emotions made it difficult for her. Yamanni’s siblings, as established, were not the best people to talk to. They were also the last people that Yamanni wanted to talk to. “I was non-verbal for the majority of the time outside of class.” 

Her sisters also had different year levels and studied in different schools. “Who am I going to talk to? My mom also had work.”

Yamanni’s radio silence throughout the pandemic raised some concern from her older sister. “She got scared of me because anytime it feels like [I was] going to kill myself,” she shared. “I think it was true.”

Yamanni, who “thrives around people,” was not ready for the sudden change of pace in her environment. “I [didn’t] know where to put out my energy and I was deteriorating.” She considers herself to be a very vocal person, so she was shocked when she went silent. 

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Religion and Yamanni would have another fateful encounter during her time at the University of San Carlos (USC), where she currently attends as a political science university student. As Yamanni talked about her refusal to communicate her feelings, she recalled a short conversation with an unnamed priest. “He told me, ‘I want to refer you to a licensed professional [therapist].’”

Being reminded of that encounter with that priest was enough for Yamanni to exclaim during the interview, “‘What the fuck?! What did I say for you to prompt that suggestion?!’” 

From that point on, several referrals to different licensed professional therapists and school counsellors started pouring in. But even with the suggestions, she still had no idea what to do with them. “But bitch… I don’t know how to communicate,” she said. “Your mhiema (slang for mother) is avoidant, and if not, the idiot [Yammani] would overshare.”

Yamanni declared she would do “anything” if it meant she wouldn’t have to communicate her feelings. “Not only do I share, I’m very annoying when I share.” Her avoidant attitude towards communication boils down to the fact that she does not know how to approach her own emotions. “Either I dump it on a person or I go non-verbal.”

Yamanni then recalled how even her sister thought of the same suggestion as the priest. “She wanted to put me through therapy, and I was like, ‘I can manage,’ but I did not manage,” she replied with a chuckle.

Forcing Yamanni to share her feelings would lead her to “retaliate out of anger.” Yamanni would feel fed up and would show her anger if she was pushed. “I will fucking shout, no matter where we are or the people that we are with.” 

Who Do You Even Want To Be, Yamanni?

How Yamanni acts toward her family is a sharp contrast to how she acts toward her friends. 

A self-described people-pleaser, Yamanni allowed other people, good or bad or whoever they may be, to dictate what to do with her life just to satisfy them. Yamanni just goes with the flow of her ‘life,’ even if it means she has depended on other people to move it. “It’s exhausting to carve another path that’s for my own.” 

Because of the number of people Yamanni has befriended, she ended up creating a facade that would satisfy them. “A version that caters to everyone… What else are you going to do? People know you because of this and that.” 

She created a facade in fear of disappointment and being abandoned by people she deemed closest to her. Yamanni gets frightened when she hears them point out just how much she has changed. “It makes me think, ‘What do you mean change? I’m still me,’” she said slowly.

She ended up having to attach her own meaning to other people into something bigger. “What people think of me is literally my lifeline,” Yamanni said. 

It’s almost as if Yamanni, starved of meaning, has depended on others to define who she is. She admits to even valuing people who merely tolerate her. “I would put them in the same category as people who I should please to the point that they would care for me.”

However,  conflict resides within Yamanni on whether or not her life does have meaning without the definitions coined by others. “It’s hard to think that my life has meaning when all these years I always thought that my life has only meaning when people put meaning to it.” 

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Our discussion about Yamanni’s meaninglessness opens up a conversation about a tragic memory back in her 4th grade. “Someone told me that I talk a lot, and it’s annoying for them,” she said. All she could remember at that moment was her state of shock and that familiar feeling of shutting down and falling apart. 

At that point in her elementary school, Yamanni wanted to keep a facade up. “You want to keep that image of being likeable.” She knows that some people, during that time, wanted her to just be quiet/ “They’d take it as something annoying and they’d shut me up.” 

“I should do what they want because I’m good at letting people walk all over me.” This was the impression that Yamanni was left with after that encounter.

Beyond that, she regards this memory as the moment she started to become more non-verbal and scarce, with the latter meaning that she distances herself from people to avoid a difficult situation. When she feels that people are mad or annoyed at her, she makes herself scarce. She thinks that if she did not make herself scarce, this would result in people walking out on her.

Along with this tragic revelation is also the beginning of Yamanni’s suicidal thoughts, justifying them by believing that she is an inconvenience. That experience in 4th grade gave her an idea of her supposed purpose. She thought to herself, “I was put in this world to be annoying. Maybe I am a nuisance to other people. So I might as well die or something.”

The same mindset also goes into her past romantic relationship. “Before I got into my long-term [romantic] relationship, the cut-off [was] always 7 months.” She blames it all on the same attitude as before, that is not wanting to be the person that ended the relationship, as she recalled, “I wait for the other person to cut all things… [I’m] scared of the perception of other people that ‘she’s the one who ended it’. I don’t want that.” 

Yamanni was conscious about what people thought of her when it came to that relationship. Even when she was aware that their relationship was not going anywhere, “I will wait for you to end it. I will wait for you to end things before I say some shit.”

But Yamanni finally decided to end her longest romantic relationship. “It came to the point that I don’t see anything coming out of this relationship.” The longer her relationship went on, she started to see the physical toll it had on her, describing it all as “a very stressful time. It was a very devastating time.” She then finally decided: “I’ll end things for the both of us.”

Yamanni, Do You Think You Deserve Love?

Yamanni said, “I can take the thought of people leaving me rather than if I were to leave people.” It was truly interesting to hear from Yamanni, who has admitted to fear being left alone, that she can handle being abandoned. “I am aware of this issue. So that means I know how to handle it if I ever experience it,” she explained. 

Yamanni, being well aware of the pain of being left, does not want other people to experience the tragedy of feeling abandoned. Even though she can handle it, “[t]hat still does not mean that it does not affect me as much,” Yamanni said. “Every time it happens to me, it destroys something in me.”

Before going off into a rant about her abandonment, Yamanni suddenly paused and said, “Maybe the fact that I don’t understand love means I don’t deserve it as well.” Her statement came out of the blue. There was silence between us for over thirty seconds.

But then she expounded more on why she does not deserve to be loved. “The fact that I don’t love myself, the fact that I don’t understand certain types of love, and how it would manifest, maybe it means that I don’t deserve it at all.”

“'Do I really deserve something I don't really understand?’ It’s like, a certain type of acceptance means you understand it. It means that you understand, ‘This is how things work.’ So, you know sometimes it just does not work, but you’re in denial regardless – you still want it to work,” Yamanni shared.

“I personally know that I am too unloveable for things to work,” She told me, that her bold and straightforward personality may be too much for people.  “I can’t be in a relationship because I’m too afraid that I would make them unstable.” 

Her call for love has manifested in what she calls her yearning hours – that’s when would sometimes unironically post about wanting to feel a romantic type of love on her social media. But even during those times, reality hits her as she realizes, “I can’t do things normally because I am not normal.” She believes that relationships could only work as “it takes a certain type of person to deal with a certain type of person.”

“‘What are the odds that you can find a person that can handle you? What are the odds that you, who does not understand love, who thinks they don't have meaning in life, who thinks they’re just a tool for people? What are the odds for you to have that fairytale ending?’” 

Yamanni has concluded: based on what she knows about love, she does not deserve love, and has told herself not to expect much from any type of love that she may experience.

Yamanni, Do You Know What Love Is?

Yamanni was able to find solace in the vibrant atmosphere of USC, a stark departure from the isolating experience that she endured during the pandemic. The school campus and its people allowed the extroverted Yamanni to truly thrive. “At least I’m not alone… I am around people, that means that I get to learn certain stuff about them.”

While in USC, Yamanni met a couple she considers to be the most important people in her great journey of understanding. She dubs them her “father figure”; she names one of them “Dad,” while the other gets called “Father.”

“My father figures’ manifestation of their feelings [for each other] made me believe that love is real,” Yamanni described as she witnessed most of their relationship. 

She stared into the air – with a big smile – and shared what she thinks of her father figures’ relationship. “I would want that for me one day or soon, maybe,” she emphasized, with the “maybe” sounding like they were meant to be typed in capital letters. 

“For example, my ‘father’ would say, ‘Where’s your dad?’, or ‘I miss your dad,’ or my dad would say, ‘Girl, your father is getting hungry.’” For Yamanni, it’s those little moments between her father figures that make her appreciate love. “They treat each other as husbands already.” 

There was a moment between Yamanni and her ‘Father’ that made her tear up, “Father said, ‘I can’t wait to marry your dad.’” Yamanni could not help but squeal as she shared that moment. “That’s the first time I heard someone say that.” 

“Even if it is just how they’d interact with each other,” it was enough for her to see just how in love they both are. “Dad, from what I know of them from before [he met Father], was not like that.” 

Yamanni recalled how her Dad was before meeting her Father. “They were very lowkey and maldita (snobbish) core. You don't know how to interact with them and you would just be intimidated by them.” This led her to share a very specific quote, “to be loved is to be changed.”

“They [father figures] made me realize, maybe I still want to feel love,” Yamanni shared. “The way they treat each other, the way they put themselves out there, they find comfort in each other,” 

She contrasted the type of love that she was seeing with her father figures to the type of love she had with her old romantic partners. There were moments in her relationships when one of her partners engaged in behaviour or actions that went against her wishes or capabilities. Though she refrained from sharing the complete extent of those moments, she explained her feelings in full detail. “I panic, and I just shut down, and I let them do their own thing.” 

“If it makes them happy, then why not? At the end of the day, I’m the one who will break down. I’m fine. As long as it’s me.”

The relationship she saw with her father figures has made her realize just how “wrong” her past relationships were, or at least how wrong her thoughts of love were.

Yamanni then made her big decision. “To yearn. Yearning for love, or finally realizing that even though I may not understand love, I do want to feel loved.”

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In the long conversation we had, Yamanni rehashed the question that has been going on within herself: Why does she not understand love?  “Maybe one thing that’s holding me back is the lack of understanding of love.” 

“All my life, when I went into a relationship and told people ‘I love you,’ if that wasn’t love, then what was it?” Yamanni asked. “Was it me just pleasing or just wanting to know that I ‘love’ them?”

Even when she says “I love you,” in a platonic or romantic way, she starts to feel guilty. “Apparently, I do not understand love.” All she knows from love is that it has a profound meaning and impact on people, even something really simple. “People smile when you say that to them.”

“Love is an all-encompassing concept that does not need to have a certain definition,” she said when explaining what she knows about love. “As long as you feel it, that’s love.”

When asked whether or not her idea of love is evolving, Yamanni answered, “I think so. The only constant thing in this world is change,” she said with a loud “HUY!” in the end, feeling proud of how far she has come. 

Though she is not actively seeking the meaning of love, Yamanni is going with the flow of life, and taking important advice from one of her seniors to heart. “Not overthinking things that I have no control over. I’m trying that.”  

The last question asked to Yamanni was whether or not she would ever love herself, and she answered with a confident, “Yes! I think there’s no person who intentionally would not want to accept themselves,” she exclaimed. 

“I would want to accept myself. It gets tiring to realize that I don't like myself and I don't like looking at myself. That’s one of the reasons why I want to shut down. It’s something that I can’t do alone because I need other people to make me realize that I have certain factors that are worth saving or salvaging.”

Yamanni and Ridwan conducted online interviews through Google Meet on December 29, 2023 and January 4, 2024.

Recommended Song: I Want To Know What Love Is - Mariah Carey