I began writing seriously at thirteen, though in truth I think the words found me long before I ever found them.

What started as clumsy confessions—half formed poems, restless essays, margin notes on borrowed books, slowly became the language through which I learned to understand myself. Writing was the first place where I felt unbounded, where the world expanded each time I learned a new word, each time a sentence surprised me by saying more than I meant.

But writing never exists without reading, and reading was the inheritance my mother insisted on giving me. She told me again and again that education was the only inheritance I receive that could never be taken away from my grasp. Not land, not wealth, nothing material—only the enduring freedom of intellect and how to use it.

I grew up translating English to Tagalog at a young age for my parents, teased for an accent I didn’t know I had, admired for a diction I didn’t know I was cultivating.

English is not my first language, yet it is the one I write in—the one I wield to face the world, because it is where I am most clearly heard, where I am taken seriously, where I am allowed to stand on equal footing. But the truth is, I long to be just as fluent, just as powerful, in Filipino, the language of my beginnings.

Kailangan natin ng mga manunulat, mga makata, mga mananalaysay, sapagkat madaling mabaon sa limot ang kasaysayan. At ang pagkalimot ay bunga lamang sa kawalan ng pagsasanay.

Wittgenstein once wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I have carried that line with me for years.

My writing lives in the space between two languages—one that raised me, and one that shaped me. It is how I gather the fragments of who I’ve been and who I’m becoming.