On reading again and reading ABI NAKO, OR SO I THOUGHT by Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz

Abi Nako is the first non-poetry book I completed reading, start to finish, this year and the past years. The book before this was La India by Chari Lucero in 2016 for a class report, which I pulled an all-nighter for, but it was such a great book, it didn't feel like cramming at all. I did cry from how amazing it was, though. With Abi Nako, I took my time.

I was diagnosed with ADHD a week before 2021 and began treatment on January 5th. I sought to be diagnosed because my current bipolar medication, replacing the ineffective SSRI that I've taken since 2013, worked for me finally, and yet, for whatever reason I still couldn't read with the ease as I had in my late teens and early twenties. I managed to finish Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer in November 2020, but it involved a lot of energy to make myself sit and focus, because I wanted to prove that I was well enough to read again. I reached the last page with the realization that there might still be something else.

I am now five months into my ADHD treatment, the first few spent on behavioral changes with the help of medication. I attempted to read again with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I dropped it a week later. I wasn't ready. 

In early April, after my book orders from UP and Ateneo Press arrived, I picked up Abi Nako. It was a Saturday, and my sister called me out, "Why are you working on a weekend?" To which I shot back, "I can't read for fun now?" In one sitting, I went through a third of the pages without needing to take a tablet of Ritalin for extra focus.

I affectionately referred to Abi Nako as a twitter call-out thread in the form of memoir to my friends, how I encouraged them to put it in their reading list. As a chismosa, I loved being included in the juicy kwento in each essay. But Abi Nako is not all spectacle, because it tackles heavier topics of death, violence, motherhood, the complications of family in love and hurt, the internalization of your environment's homophobia, misogyny, and many others. The beauty of this memoir is that it succeeds in tackling terrible, emotional, or traumatizing events without burdening the reader. It helps that the prose has a certain lightness, the right mix of self-assuredness and humor, very much evident when I read the sentence, "But what I really am is a star." You experience the rollercoaster of emotions with Cruz without getting traumatized by it. It's a bare-all mess that you can participate in because she lets you. She bares her scars, but not wounds. 

The structure of the essays is mostly organic, subtle in the way it carries you through her paragraphs to the insight, eschewing the usual formula of anecdote > fact or trivia > anecdote reframed > insight common in other works I've read. In some ways the essays do employ this formula, but not following it exactly; it doesn't come off as jarring or formulaic, instead favoring a more streamlined flow to the end. 

When I read "Days Like This, Mommy Said", I wanted to cry but I was in a room with my sisters at that time. I saw my childhood reflected, but more so, my mother's life. My mother was practically a single mother, despite having my father around until I've had enough and kicked him out of our life for good in 2016. I knew the difficulty in raising children by yourself, through how my mother raised me and my four siblings, and as I read this essay, I choked up, because I saw my mother. I remembered Cruz promoting the book in a Tiktok with her kids. I remembered with a smile, because I'm happy for her family to have survived everything.

And when Cruz recounted how her ex-boyfriend, X, barely made effort to support her when she needed it, I thought, there is something amiss with feminism when the independence of a woman is used to further burden her. It reminded me of when my mother started earning for the first time at almost fifty years old, after two decades of being a housewife, and my father took it as an opportunity to keep his salary for himself. Not that he was in any sort a father and husband figure prior.

Life got in the way for me to read through the rest of Abi Nako by late April up to May. I didn't want to let go of my progress in reading again, but I couldn't set time aside to pick back up. Last week, I pledged to read before I sleep. I set up a table lamp at the corner of my bed, between my pillows and bookshelf. After taking my bipolar medication at night, I'd have around thirty minutes of reading time before it takes effect and knocks me out. The other day, I quietly sobbed during "Do Not Resuscitate" to the point that my eyes throbbed as I tried to sleep. 

Last night, or rather, this morning, I accidentally read until the end, despite my eyelids begging to close, and finished at three in the morning. I know my hyperfocus, a feature of ADHD, made me do it; I couldn't stop because it was an amazing memoir. I'm glad it's the first book I finished in my journey to get back to reading.

(There are other things I loved that I don't want to mention, more so because it will incriminate me. Haha!)