My Story
Everybody loves a story.
Recently I’ve been asked to tell mine and, at the time, I struggled because I have been walking this earth now for 37 years and that’s quite a long story. I didn’t know what was relevant in the context of the conversation. So I said something generic, like…
I was born and raised in The Philippines in a family of five: My parents, and their three children. I am the middle boy child, with both my siblings being females… with huge age gaps in between us. In effect I was always out of the house and kept a small, close group of rowdy guy friends and, growing up, had a very active social life up to my college years. I feel I have learned a lot from those years and now I enjoy the quiet family life.
That’s it, and my audience nodded, as if they have now figured out everything about me.
But I’ve had some time to think about what “my story” is, and maybe it is better to do it this way…
Long before I was conceived, my parents met up in the mountains of The Philippines taking up arms to take down the dictator of their time. So you can imagine the kind of upbringing I had as a kid years later, tagging along around the streets of Metro Manila with angry activists shouting against the corruption of my time. In effect I think I am now a person who would never back away from speaking truth to power and would rather see myself destroyed than fall in line in well-established bad practices.
By the time I got to college I feel I’ve had enough activism from my younger years and, listening to the wise words of John Mayer, I’d rather “wait for the world to change”. The active social life I mentioned mostly revolved around making and playing music in many ways: I’ve written songs for and/or performed in weddings, coffee shops, underground battle of the bands, concerts, recitals, musical plays, various ceremonies of different kinds, local radio interviews, etc.
It was great and I’ve seen how universal of a language music really is. It transcends words. It transcends generations. It transcends cultures. To me, music became proof of an intelligent design that ties everything together.
I started questioning the facade of life. I called BS to anything that doesn’t align to the standard of Truth I found within me. There’s many names to it, but I think the most acceptable consensus now is Conscience.
The journey is not done and the exact path is still up in the air. But I pick up on age-old principles that guide my day-to-day. I now understand that a human is made up of many different parts seen and unseen, and that life is a pursuit of keeping those parts an integrated whole… a process of looking your shadow in the eyes and accepting he will always be following you until the end… a process of figuring out where the world ends and where you begin and protecting that border… a process of navigating a sea of lies to pick up small nuggets of truth…
I look back to the conversation when I was asked for my story. I wonder if they would still nod if I told it this way. :)