THE REAL MOND GUTIERREZ

If there’s one good thing to come out of the pandemic, it’s that we’ve all been able to quietly look at our lives to see what is real, what is true and what essentials remain removed from all that we’ve built to protect us. For many of us, we felt what it’s like to be truly vulnerable for the first time and it’s this vulnerability that has jolted us to finally be very open about ourselves, enough to share what we find out about ourselves to others that might be in a similar journey. Because if there’s something that we’ve learned from this global crisis, it’s that we are all ultimately connected to each other and that life is about shared experiences.

This much is true for Mond Gutierrez, a highly celebrated personality and purveyor of good taste. He has always been ahead of the curve in terms of trends on anything and everything social—from the social scene to all social media platforms. But even he could not have predicted how his life would change in a matter of moments.

“I think the first wake-up call—because, in January and February, I was starting to hear about COVID already through the news and through friends, but I was kind of one of those people that dismissed it early on as the flu. But when it really kind of hit me that this is a real thing was when Manila started going into lockdown, and my brother’s wedding was canceled. And I flew to Manila a week before the wedding for the wedding and then it got canceled. So, that was when I was like, ‘Totoo na ‘to.’ Like, this is really happening. And in the beginning, it’s so easy for us to be like, ‘Ah, wala ‘yan. Like, it’s not gonna come to the Philippines.’ ‘Di ba gan’on tayo nu’ng umpisa? Like until they labeled it a ‘pandemic,’ they told us what to do, then it started becoming more of a reality. And then that’s when I really just like, ‘Okay, this is really happening. We’re in it for the long run,’” Mond recalls.

And for someone who’s constantly surrounded by