The day I decided to be someone else started with a lunch box. I was maybe 11 or 12. My mom had packed me pancit the night before, still warm and fragrant in the morning. The kind that smelled like garlic and soy sauce and Sunday afternoons. The kind that, now as an adult, I would genuinely pay for at a restaurant and feel good about it. I left it on the kitchen counter and grabbed a ham and cheese sandwich instead. Nobody told me to do that. Nobody at school had made fun of my food. There was no incident, no traumatic cafeteria moment. It was just a quiet, preemptive little sacrifice I made on behalf of a version of myself I thought would be more accepted. More relatable. More... whatever the room needed me to be. That's the thing about colonial mentality. It doesn't announce itself. It creeps in quietly, wearing the costume of just trying to fit in. --- I came to Canada from Manila when I was 5. Only child. New country. New language (more or less). My parents gave me everything they had to give me a shot at something they believed would be better, and I repaid that by spending the better part of my adolescence quietly distancing myself from the very thing that made us us. It wasn't malicious. I want to be clear about that. I wasn't ashamed of being Filipino in some deliberate, conscious way. I was just scared. Scared that if my peers associated me with other Filipinos, the nannies, the caregivers, the nurses, the people who looked like my parents and filled every support role I could see around me, that I'd get sorted into the same box. That I wouldn't be seen as a leader. That I wouldn't be taken seriously. So I overcorrected. I traded culture for comfort. And the uncomfortable truth is that it kind of worked, for a while. I started to absorb the values of the environment around me: innovation, leadership, individualism. And because my parents had come from well-known schools and careers back in the Philippines, I had a foundation for those values at home too. It felt like a clean fit. Like I was evolving rather than erasing. It wasn't until much later that I realized I was doing both at the same time. --- The awakening didn't come with a speech or a revelation. It came after I left a job I'd given four or five years of my life to, and found myself completely alone in the aftermath. No real professional network to speak of. No close friendships outside of that world. Just the unfamiliar silence of having to figure out who I actually was when nobody was around to define me. I spiralled. Alone. For months. And somewhere in the middle of that spiral, I started to recognize what I'd done. I had spent so long being the version of myself I thought others needed that I had quietly rejected entire parts of who I was. The creative part. The thoughtful part. The part of me that would rather sit with a feeling than bulldoze through it. The part of me that came from a culture that places care and community above almost everything else. Being Filipino isn't just a cultural label. It's a lived experience, a rich one, and I had been filing it away like a document I didn't know what to do with. --- Here's what took me a long time to understand: the parts of me I was most ashamed of as a kid are the ones that have served me best as an adult. The care. The observation. The tendency to think about how other people are feeling before I speak. The ability to hold complexity without needing to immediately resolve it. These aren't weaknesses. They're not things that disqualify you from leadership or authority or entrepreneurship. They're the exact qualities that make someone worth following. I'm still figuring this out. That's the honest version. I'm still someone who occasionally defaults to blending in before asserting myself. Still someone who wonders whether the room would perceive me differently if I led with my background instead of around it. Still someone who left the pancit on the counter more times than I'd like to admit. But I'm also someone who has started asking better questions. Not "how do I fit in?" but "what do I bring that nobody else does?" Not "am I Filipino enough?" but "what does that part of me have to offer that I've been sitting on?" --- If millions of people from the Philippines have had a similar journey to mine, why did I always feel so alone? I used to think that question was about community, about not having enough people around me who looked like me or shared my experience. And that's part of it. But I think the deeper answer is that I was alone because I kept showing up as a partial version of myself, and a partial version of a person is always going to feel like a stranger in a room, including the room inside your own head. How do you know what you're supposed to be unless you see the potential of what you can become? I don't know exactly who said that first. But I think the answer starts with being honest about where you come from, even when it's inconvenient. Even when it's fragrant and unfamiliar and different from everyone else's lunch. The pancit was always the better choice. I just needed time to figure that out.
Identity
the pancit I left on the counter
10 March 2026