I was thirteen, bored with online classes and with the internet at my fingertips. One day, during English class, I found myself scrolling through YouTube when I clicked on a video titled “Def Poetry – Taylor Mali – What Teachers Make.” I was captivated by Mali’s powerful performance and the way his words seemed to leap beyond the screen. Delving deeper, I discovered spoken-word artists like Rudy Francisco, Sarah Kay, and my personal favorite, Celia Martinez. Their work inspired me to tell my stories through verse.

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And so I did. During my freshman and sophomore years, I wrote constantly, filling pages with poetry and prose, most of it fictional. It wasn’t until my junior year that I began turning my pen toward myself. I started writing about my own experiences, not expecting anyone else to care about the stories I had to tell. But people did.

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In writing, I found a way to make sense of an identity that had always felt difficult to put into words. Being Filipino Chinese, living between cultures and places, rarely fit neatly into a single sentence. Poetry and prose gave me the space to explore those contradictions, memories, and questions in ways that a simple explanation never could. Writing became one of the ways I came to understand who I was.