To Myself, 

Stay curious, stay compassionate, stay true.

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Immigrants are perhaps one of the most resilient individuals I know and I’m proud to call myself one. No matter the journey, immigrants have many more similarities than differences and that is something we don’t talk about enough. Our journey requires us to find the strength to leave behind everything we know. Everything from our families, language, cultural norms, and food - can be lost when we leave our homes in search of the unknown which still does not guarantee us a better life. The act of starting over demands immense grit in the face of inevitable hurdles such as through language barriers, financial instability and being at risk of becoming a social outcast. 

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Vargas, in his book Dear America: Notes Of An Undocumented Citizen, he writes,  “When people think of borders and walls, they usually think of land. I think of water. It’s painful to think that the same water that connects us all also divides us, dividing Mama and me.  I left the Philippines on August 1, 1993. I was twelve years old.”

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It’s funny because although our stories are different in every way possible, there are so many parallels between us. For one, we both left the Philippines at a young age, him at 12 and me at 13, to a country where we could barely speak the language. We both had to learn how to be independent and navigate the social, emotional, and generational borders between ourselves and society as well as our families. We’ve learned that the country we once called home, is no longer a place we can truly be ourselves in. Going abroad changes you in ways you will never expect. Maybe home was never a place you had to return to. Maybe it has been growing inside you with every language you learn, every person you meet, and every story you choose to tell.

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The Philippines is an archipelago of over 7000 islands. The water that divides these islands is exactly what connects the Filipino people together as they learned how to navigate the seas to get from one point to another - allowing us to form a deeper connection with the waters. Rather than it being a barrier, the waters represent prosperous trade and migration which has brought riches to our country. However, there has been this increasing trend of OFW or Overseas Filipino Workers leaving the country to pursue jobs, especially in the United States to send remittances back home. The water that was once used to connect us, now divides us as Vargas puts it. 

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But perhaps water has always done both. It separates, yet it also carries us. It asks us to let go of one shore before we can reach another. I cannot change the fact that the sea now exists between me and the place where I was born, but I can choose what I carry across it. My language. My memories. My family. My stories. If home can exist on both sides of the water, then maybe it was never something I had to search for. My home, my tahanan, was something I have been building all along - no matter where I am.

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