This day, exactly ten years ago, was the day when my life changed. No, actually it was the day when the whole dynamics of my family changed. But since I’m writing this entry, I’ll put my own point-of-view of the story and I can’t really write this on behalf of everyone in my family.

June 10, 2005 was the day when I migrated to the United States, not with my family, but with my sister and Dad, along with my stepmom, stepbrothers, and half-brother. From that day on until now, there must’ve been a lot of things that went on all around the world. There was the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the election of the first African-American president, and many on. There were millions of narratives in motion from that time until on, all evolving for its own good over time. Out of those millions of narratives, however, let me share you one that, perhaps, wasn’t totally acknowledged by all of those millions, but one that I found inspiring as I look back, one that I find intriguing just reading the first couple of lines of the first page.

Mine.

I’m a big-picture oriented guy, so that quality puts me in a disposition to think that no one really knows me that well until I share the “big picture” of my personal identity, narrative, however you want to call it. I’ve been thinking of writing and sharing my narrative to shed light on who I really am, if ever anyone is intrigued enough with it. It is a narrative that started deep in the dug hole, a dug hole filled with questions, insecurities, loneliness, anxiety from which the main character tried to escape from by climbing back up on the way home. He was able to climb back up, and when he did he found himself exactly in that same dug hold and he wondered why, puzzled and disappointed. He went through an intense self-examination why, and the process of it turned out to be much more edifying than what he expected. Eventually, at this point, he now knows that there was never something to escape away from.

He eventually realized that everything is a dug hole, and he found it beautiful.

That process of realization is a narrative worth many blog entries, for it is long and shortening will do it injustice. It is a narrative that is philosophically richer than the common Filipino diasporac narrative. Not to say that the rest of the stories of Filipino migrants in the US are not philosophically rich enough, but I’d like to write it through the lens of a thinker as I am.