Derived from an original entry on Sunday, September 13 2026 11:52 pm
CW/ small mentions of suicidal ideation
I have officially made it through the six hour drive in the aux cord-less, AC-less U-Haul sitting next to my angry, loving father and Claire’s copy of Trick Mirror I’ve been failing to read all summer in the middle of a heatwave. I have officially moved across the state, and I, notorious for being emotionally unavailable with very slow processing speed, finally feel called to take inventory of my life. Perhaps just like every other young and annoying, old and wise, crazy and extraordinarily normal twenty-three year old ever, I can’t help it. I know it’s already been two years since graduating from University, but this move has proved to me even more that I have so much more agency over my life than I thought. So here’s to living a life I never prepared for and making a place for myself in this small and terrible, great and beautiful world.
Two weeks into my move, I reconnected with my dear friend Matty. Sitting in the patio of an arcade bar in Little Tokyo, buzzed as hell off of one cocktail, I mostly listened to Matty “take LA very seriously”, as in love and care for her city and its history and its elders and its families and its youth who will not know what this place was before the people who made it what it was were pushed out because of government neglect and corporate greed. To have grown up in one city and to know its streets and corners so intimately is such a special thing to have. I admire it on Matty. She holds it with real honesty and honor, and it makes me want to embrace this place.
Since moving here from the Philippines twelve years ago, I have not felt that way about anywhere else, really. Living with my parents in the suburbs of Southern California felt like I was plopped into a set, a place to play pretend for a long time– until they finally yell the last “Cut!”, and I can go and find my way back to my real home. This time in my life felt very much just like an open wound. I don’t want to discredit my preteen self, but in a lot of ways, I had only a small idea of why I was hurting so much. When almost every subject at your school is taught in English and you grow up wanting to be Sharpay from High School Musical and getting your U.S. Visa approval is celebrated like the biggest accomplishment of your life and the golden ticket to your family’s reunion but you end up the unhappiest you’ve ever been when you finally land there– you question yourself, not the American Dream. I felt like I was supposed to feel lucky, but mostly, I was just trying, and failing, to keep up with the Brandy Melville-wearing middle school girls and trying, and failing, to drown out the problems that were spilling out our small apartment next to the railroad tracks and trying, and failing, to kill myself. I didn’t realize I was already grieving something I didn’t understand yet: the forever unrealized dream of mine to stay, to grow up with my friends and grow old with our trees and hold my Lola before she passed and live an entire life actually feeling at home. I felt, without knowing why, that there was something deeply wrong with me. I never knew how to articulate it, and no one asked, so I never tried and kept walking around with the gushing wound. Just moving and moving and moving.
I will never forget my first day in Berkeley, California. After a quick and very characteristically nonchalant goodbye to my mom and dad, I took the elevator back up to my dorm room and bawled my eyes out for the rest of the day. I seriously couldn’t stop, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where that feeling was coming from. I knew I wasn’t homesick, but I remember running to the closest thing that felt like home to me in those suburbs: my best friends. Staring at Ashley, Irene, Jean, Keilia, Kim, and Lisa’s video call boxes through my tears, I realized I was goddamn elated, and I was terrified of it. I didn’t know anyone besides the three other students that were admitted from my high school. I could be anyone. I could do anything. This is the first time I have ever given myself freedom, the first time I felt like something considerable had changed in my life because I made those choices– because I wanted to move here and not there. I had never experienced that before. It felt like every bad thing before then had no place here, like all the anger and pain was worth it.
I find it hard to describe how special this time in my life is for me. It wasn’t really a set like the suburbs. It felt more like your best cousin’s house. It’s still not home, but dinner was always delicious and you got even better sleep there than on your own bed. I moved to Berkeley simply wanting to become a person who belonged, a happy person, but I am coming out of it with so much more, as corny as it sounds. It’s where I found happiness that I could truthfully call mine and pain that I could call ours with the people I now call kasamas. I got organized and celebrated many victories, made many mistakes and fell in love for the first time, got hurt a lot too and in the process, grew into a person I felt like I could be proud of (although far from perfect still). It’s where I would come to understand that the anger Matty feels about gentrification in LA is why I feel so angry about my family’s forcible migration too.
If my time in the Bay was a color, it’d be purple, like a wound finally healing itself into a bruise or a scar. After six long years in the Bay, I lost that feeling. I forgot what the place meant to me because without confronting it, I had slowly lost myself towards the end of my time there. Separation from home is separation from yourself and separation from yourself is separation from home. I knew I wanted to serve the people, and in some ways, I was, but I still felt unfulfilled and unlike the person I really wanted to be.
I knew it was time for me to make a choice again, and I knew I wanted to start over. As beautiful and dark and magical as it was, I don’t miss the Bay (maybe yet). I just know it’s a place I’ll come back to over and over again– in my art but irl too. I miss my kasamas and my friends and our favorite taco truck. Yes, I miss the tacos in the Bay (am I making an enemy of everyone right now?). I have not yet found my spots in Los Angeles, but when I wake up here, and I’m present enough to listen for our neighbors’ roosters, I am the happiest girl in the world because it’s as if I’m in my childhood home again, littered with my Lolo’s and my Tito’s chickens. For a split second, I remember how to be that little girl, and when I hold my door open and walk down to our bright yellow living room, my Lolo will be sitting at our table and it smells like his black coffee and in the background, I can hear my Lola washing plates in the kitchen sink behind me. Every time, it feels so vivid and so real and something I can never ever come back to.
Ultimately, I am lonely for the deepest, rawest part of me that wants to be seven thousand miles away in the Philippines where I know the land beneath me is the same one my Lola and my Lolo were born into and have been returned to. I will eternally yearn for my home to be my home and the unlived life of mine in my homeland will gnaw at me forever. But for now, I feel like me again. It feels like instead of carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders, I am hugging all the versions of myself that came before me: from the little kikay girl who used to dance on top of tables in Antipolo City to the terrifyingly sassy tween who wanted to kill herself in northwestern LA to the sweet bitchessa organizer in Berkeley to all of that still and entirely different me, here and now, back in LA. In some small, silly, earnest way, perhaps coming home is just coming back to yourself and to the people you love. This is where I’m placing myself for now. And it’s nice and warm. And yellow.