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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Saturday, March 28, 2026

entry arrow6:35 PM | Winging It [Long Version]

At one of my lowest depths in the days of the pandemic, when I was struggling mentally to just live through each day, I was tasked to teach a writing workshop for [bleep]. This was before I was diagnosed, by the way, and was properly medicated. [Or was this after I was diagnosed, but quit medication for more than a year because I thought I didn’t “really” need it? Who knows.]

But I accepted the challenge of a workshop, because the organizer is a very good friend, and I believed in the project. And the project paid. Anything that paid in the pandemic was a good thing. The thing was, the date of the event did not even sink into my consciousness, nor the brief. I forgot all about it.

Eve of the first day, I was reminded by my friend that the whole thing was starting the very next morning. Fine, I said. I can wing it. That next day, on the way to the venue, I realized it was to be a writing class with regional languages in mind. Fine, I can wing it, I thought. I’ve taught a workshop on writing in Binisaya before, anyway. But then when I was finally facing the participants, I realized that they came from all over the Philippines, and Bisaya would not be the primary language of most of them.

Dear God, I don’t know how I got through those three days just winging it—but I did. And actually did supremely well, and their final activity, which involved a performance of some sort, was a highlight of the closing program. We even made a zine of their outputs! How did I do that? I have no recollection whatsoever. I winged it.

But I will never recommend doing the same thing—winging it—to anyone. I think I was just lucky I had stock knowledge to impart, and a well-spring of bravado and guts. I can start talking, and talk for hours. I can make people do activities on the fly, and somehow string them all together in the end to create a kind of wonderful synthesis.

What I do remember most about those three days is not the teaching of that workshop but the strange elasticity of the self under pressure. Of how it stretches to meet the moment, and how it becomes a version of itself that seems, in retrospect, almost comically fictional. Because I look back at that person that I was—the one who stood in that room at the university library, which was humming with air-conditioning, fluorescent lighting, and low-grade anxiety—and I do not fully recognize him, to be honest. Here is the truth I rarely admit: I have always relied on winging it, even before the pandemic made that improvisational instinct feel like a survival mechanism. Teaching, writing, and living … these have often been acts of performance for me, of stepping onto a stage with only the barest outline of a script, and trusting that language, that old unreliable friend, will arrive … just … in time. Sometimes it does, which is great. But sometimes it leaves you stranded mid-sentence, grasping for coherence.

In that long ago workshop, though, something else happened. The participants, who were tentative at first, gradually bloomed into confidence, and began to take ownership of the space I provided even with my winging it. They spoke and wrote in their own regional languages, and in the cadences of their own homes, and what began as a logistical nightmare for me transformed into something almost magical. I understood that we did not need a single language to understand one another, not Tagalog, not English. We needed only attention, that rarest of currencies. We listened to poems in Hiligaynon. We responded to stories in Bicolano. We made do with what we can in works written in Waray. Somehow, we all understood what we were all trying to do, and appreciated the effort.

But I think now that what saved me from utterly failing that time was not bravado, not really, but the quiet discipline of having done the work before. Years of reading, of writing sentences that did not quite work until they did, of standing in front of classrooms and learning how to read a room … these had all sedimented into something like instinct for me. The truth is, when the mind falters, the body often remembers, at least for me. So when panic threatens to take over, I find that my habits can step in and say: “Just begin.”

There is, of course, a danger in romanticizing “winging it.” My story tempts you to conclude that crisis reveals hidden strengths, that we are at our best when cornered. Nah. This is only partly true. And dangerously so. For every story like mine, there are countless others where the strain breaks something essential, where winging it leads not to triumph but to quiet collapse.

I was really just lucky. Luck, I have come to understand, is both circumstance and timing. It comes at the moment when your accumulated fragments of knowledge align just enough to carry you through. But, mind you, luck should never be a strategy. It is not something you can depend on all the time. Not if you care about your own well-being.

But on the whole, I was winging it because I was mentally flailing. And one needs to understand that one needs to seek help if one feels like flailing, like a bad storm, in life. Especially if you have undiagnosed mental health issues. When I say this, I do not mean this statement as a moral injunction or a tidy lesson. I mean it as a practical acknowledgment of limits. There are just things we cannot improvise our way out of. There are battles that require more than instinct and accumulated skill. There are days when the self does not stretch. We can fray, trust me. We need help.

And yet, even now, I still do wing it actually. I actually think this is how Dumagueteños do things all the time, winging it. Last Sunday, for example, we gave outgoing Silliman University President Betty McCann a tribute and a farewell in a program filled with speeches and outstanding performances. True, the group that planned it met once or twice. And true, we did our utmost to get the best people to do the talking and to do the singing and the dancing and the instrument-playing. But we rehearsed just once at 1 PM that same Sunday, straight on until 3:15 PM. Then open house at the Luce at 3:30 PM, with the final program beginning at 4 PM. And it turned out to be a beautiful, beautiful show.

But we were winging it.

Perhaps winging it for me, and for Dumagueteños in general, will never change. But there is a difference, I think, between winging it alone and winging it with the knowledge that there are structures in place to catch you when you fall. There’s medication, there’s therapy, there’s friendship, and there’s the slow and deliberate work of understanding yourself.

That long-ago workshop remains as a kind of minor miracle for me. This is not because I performed well in the end, but because it showed me both the resilience and the fragility of the person I was becoming. It taught me that survival, like writing, is often a matter of revision: we return to the page, to the self, and trying again, this time with a little more care.

So, please, seek help if you feel like you’re flailing and cannot wing it anymore. I finally sought help a few years ago, and my life has been better because of it. [Although I still mostly wing it with life, to be honest.]



Warlito and I winging it for the tribute for Ma'am Betty the other Sunday.

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