REIGNING STILL
Who is Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach without the crown? Digging past the decorations bestowed to a beauty queen, we dissect pageant ideals and figure out how and why she is the queen who matters MOVING ON
I LEARNED HOW TO BE REALLY HAPPY, I MEAN GENUINELY HAPPY
There are photographs that you flick through mindlessly through your saturated social media timeline. Another #OOTD? Pass. Another seamlessly created branded content? Skip. Another inspirational quote? Rolls eyes. Another destination you won’t see for some time? And then you give up completely and exit all the clutter and breathe deep. In this day and age where our senses are constantly violated with a barrage of visceral narratives meant to evoke and elicit a response; they all start to look and feel the same. Unless of course, at the midst of it all, there lies a genuine heart pulsing from within.
Sure, our collective memories have been indelibly seared by the image of the controversial crowning moment well over a year ago, one that has seen the steady inching of Pia Wurtzbach toward the spotlight she was meant to bask in as Miss Universe. Swathed in the iconic electric blue gown—eyes are in shock, her mouth rounded in disbelief covered by a free hand while the other cuddling a bouquet—the crown is placed on her head in the blur of controversy. The actual “crowning” moment would take place nondescriptly backstage, unceremoniously but nonetheless special.
Fast forward to 13 months after and Pia Wurtzbach, in all her beauty, quick wit and charming candor is the celebrated Miss Universe of the new generation. This time however, she is inching towards a different spotlight, one that will in a few seconds fade out and focus on the next winning hopeful. Still clad in an opulent royal blue gown (this time by Michael Cinco), her hair slicked back as if she emerged from the water that put together, she is flitting in between the shadows backstage. Standing straight and tall, trying to feign a smile, she slowly crumbles.
“I actually did not rehearse the final walk one day before pageant night,” she discloses just days after she passed on the crown to Iris Mittenaere. “When they asked me to rehearse, ang bagal kong maglakad palabas ng dressing room. I was dragging myself out because I didn’t want to go through this moment. I told them, ‘Ituro niyo na lang sa akin ang entrance and exit.’” And so there she was, seemingly walking off the plank of a life she had worked so hard for and was already accustomed to. “Just before I walked out, that’s when I started really breaking down.” Despite fighting to keep it in, the tears just started streaming. But she still had a job to do. She still had a few precious minutes as the reigning Miss Universe. “And then I walk, I wave, said goodbye. I even had that little moment with the crown before I passed it on,” she shares. This pocket of quiet onstage became a very powerful and moving photograph captured, one that still stands out from our Google search, giving us goosebumps to this very day. “Pagkaabot nila sa akin sabi ko, ‘Eto na yun. I slept beside you so many times and it’s now time to let go.’ It was hard,” Pia admits, followed by a silence that was so weighted and thick you could slice through it if you wanted to. “Nami-miss ko siya. Actually napanaginipan ko kagabi yung crown. I’m not going to lie, I still think about it up to this day and I am bummed that I don’t have a replica. And I can’t have a replica because it’s part of the contract: You cannot have a replica; you literally have to pass it on to the next one. And I’m fine with it. I just miss it.”
“There was really no reason to sulk or feel like I was about to expire,” she says of starting to live a life beyond the crown. “I always thought that I’d fight the expiration date but the thing is, it was a pretty long reign.” This was not only one of the more recognized and talked about reigns in the pageant’s history but it was one that mattered to a generation who probably didn’t quite see into the whole beauty pageant craze. “Some of the milestones I’ve achieved as Miss Universe, especially having to do with my advocacies are actually off camera. The thing with HIV/AIDs is that I deal with clients who are not comfortable with having their identities out in the open. So, I work with them maybe inside the kitchen as we were preparing food or in the testing centers. The best part about it is when someone leans over to me and whispers: ‘Pia, thank you for shedding light onto HIV and AIDS because I have it.’ To me, that’s best compliment, yung it’s just between me and the person. Para sa akin, kahit isang tao lang ang nakakaalam, kaming dalawa lang, but I feel like I did my job.”
Pia Wurtzbach made sure her reign was filled with purpose—even if no one was watching, even if no one cared and even if others were all but quick to judge her. “People who have questioned what I’ve done as Miss Universe, what have you guys done? Sorry. Kayo kaya sumali and let’s see. It wasn’t easy, it isn’t easy. I’ve never forgotten about it.” What she wanted more than anything was to enact change. “I can’t change the world in a year. I mean, I alone cannot do that, I need everybody to help me out with that idea,” she admits. “I still have so much to learn as I go along but at the same time, I don’t want to put it to waste. There’s still a lot to be done.”
NEWFOUND CONFIDENCE
It is hard to believe that for someone who has espoused being confidently beautiful with a heart, Pia still sometimes struggled with living it out as her truth. However, somewhere along the way, what with being exposed to her life as Miss Universe, she found new meaning to what was articulated a year back. “Now when I say I’m confidently beautiful with a heart, it isn’t just a winning line. It’s something that I’ve embodied as I went through my reign as Miss Universe,” she says. “And I believe that now, I don’t even have to tell myself to be confident anymore, whereas before I had to fake it ‘till I make it. Now I walk into a room and I know that I can do that and it was like a lifetime battle of finding that confidence.”
Loss, in whatever way, shape or form does things to strip a person bare of all preconceptions and stubborn ideals. It changes you, no matter how painful it may seem at the onset. As her reign as Miss Universe drew to a close, Pia Wurtzbach
hit a breakthrough—one that was perhaps a long time coming. “I learned how to be really happy, I mean genuinely happy,” she relates, her assured voice cracking at every delivery of a syllable. “Because in my case, I’m a workaholic and I’ve been working since I was a kid. I got so used to taking directions and asking for feedback after. If I got good feedback, I was happy. That was my mentality even as Miss Universe. And then one day the just asked me, ‘Pia, what do you want to do? What makes you happy? Stop thinking of what we want, what the people want, what people expect.’ And that caught me by surprised because no one ever asked me that. From what I know and what I’ve been used to, you make me happy. I realized I was being co-dependent with other people that if you put me alone in a room I’d probably lose my mind. That’s the one thing I learned as Miss Universe: You have your job, you have your responsibilities. You’re for the people but you’re also for yourself. Otherwise, you’d get burned out and lose your identity. I asked myself, ‘Who am I without the crown?’”
Pia Wurtzbach without the crown is a woman of many realizations. Without the crown, the sash, the selection of frothy and dreamlike confections of fashion, she is still that same woman with many more dreams to turn into reality. A beauty queen who broke the time-worn archetype of someone on a pedestal, she showed us that there’s beauty beyond the standards that people think they’ve set for us. And that speaking out, no matter how anyone else will take it, is something to be admired for. She spoke out and she will continue to do so because whether she realizes it or not, she has sculpted herself into the voice of her generation, one that isn’t afraid to go after what they want and to persist despite the many setbacks. Pia Wurtzbach is a woman who isn’t afraid of her past, no matter how far from the ideal it was because for her, the journey she went on made her who she is, someone most definitely to look up to and to emulate. “Pia without the crown is Pia. That’s who I am and that’s how I want people to remember me,” she says. “When I’m out, I want people to say, ‘Hi, Pia’ instead of ‘Hi, Miss Universe’ because there will always be another Miss Universe but just one me.”
A strong finish, as usual, Pia. But come on, did we ever expect anything less from the woman who was, still is and will forever be confidently beautiful with a heart that is all her?