so it’s the fourth of july. everybody’s grilling, the sky’s gonna get loud later, and i’m sitting here thinking about a calendar.
here’s the thing that’s been rattling around my skull all day: the philippines got “given” its independence by the US on this exact date, july 4, 1946. the same day america throws its own birthday party. our freedom, scheduled for the colonizer’s convenience, on the colonizer’s holiday. and then in 1962 president macapagal looked at that and went nah. moved our independence day to june 12 — the day back in 1898 we declared ourselves free from spain. not the day freedom got handed to us. the day we said it out loud ourselves.
the handed-down day versus the declared day. that’s the whole thing. and i can’t stop turning it over because i’ve been living that exact split on a personal level this whole fucking year.
i found out this week i’m a natural-born filipino citizen. both my parents born there. which means the door home was never actually locked — i just spent my whole life not knowing i was already holding the key. so now it’s a real plan, not a someday-daydream i mumble to myself. bring my mom home. me, the reseller’s leftover kid, reaping his own lineage back out of an estate sale.
but the calendar thing goes deeper than paperwork for me. because most of my life ran on someone else’s schedule. told what i was, what i wasn’t, what a light brown neurodivergent kid with a stutter and blurry vision and a brain that files everything sideways was and wasn’t allowed to become. dysfunctional student, not participating enough in school even though my grades were always way above par, even so much so that i got to leave high school a year earlier. so i wasn’t a bad student on paper, but attendance would say otherwise.
and somewhere this year — and i’ve written around the edges of this before, i won’t do the whole thing again tonight — i pulled a macapagal on my own life. i moved my independence day. stopped accepting the one i was handed and picked the one i declared.
that’s what this whole return-to-web-dev is, and i fucking said at the beginning of this year even, soon after having that technology epiphany/awakening that “i’m on a one-man crusade to high-five all my ancestors by breaking chain after chain of generation trauma bonds keeping a light brown man down!!” 😤 and if i’m being honest with myself, which is the only reason to write anything down, it’s not really about html and css and eventually python, though it is about all of those too.
and today it doesn’t even feel that one-man. that’s the part that snuck up on me. every tita and lolo who survived colonization and migration and poverty and being told to shrink — they’re not behind me watching. they’re reaching through me. i’m just the current link doing the part only i can do from where i happen to be standing. the high-five goes both directions at once.
sooo yeah, happy fourth, i suppose?
maligayang araw ng kalayaan for real on june 12.
but today, on the handed-down day, that’s kind of the perfect day to sit with all this. to celebrate the freedom you declared instead of the one you were given.
years and years and centuries of being told what to do, and we chose our own. i choose my own.
i am still choosing. every. damn. day. even the low ones. especially the low ones. 🌺 🇵🇭
current mood:
• Guerz 😌 feels pleased
currently listening to: