I don’t have a word for it yet. But I know what it feels like, standing in a kitchen in Cebu, folding something that didn’t grow up where I did.
I live in Cebu, Philippines, where the heat arrives early and the smell of the ocean finds you even when you’re nowhere near it. Most of my days right now go into what I call making new menu, Japanese food, Korean food, dishes that belong to someone else’s grandmother and someone else’s memory. I am learning them slowly, getting them wrong and then less wrong, paying the kind of attention that doesn’t feel like work.
What pulls me most isn’t the cooking itself. It’s something I call my shot in abroad, a phrase I keep close and don’t over-explain. It isn’t just a trip. It’s a version of myself I haven’t met yet, the one who figures things out when nothing around him is familiar, when I have to build my footing from scratch. I think about it more than I say out loud. It lives in the back of my days, quiet and steady, like something I’ve been preparing for without fully knowing it.
I skipped most of the harder questions. The ones about doubt, about pushing this part of myself aside, about what brought me back. And maybe that silence says something too. Maybe I am still in the part of the story that hasn’t been tested yet, still assembling, still waiting. That kind of waiting is its own weight. The dream is real but it’s blurry, and nobody talks much about how that feels.
What I know for certain is the sea. Not as a metaphor, but as a fact about my own body. When I am at the water, something in me stops performing. I don’t feel behind. I don’t feel like I’m waiting for my life to begin. I just feel like myself, which is rarer than it sounds, and worth chasing.
I don’t know yet who my story might help. That part might still be coming. But I have one word for anyone still looking for their thing, still circling it, still unsure. Padayun. Just that. Keep going.
“I feel most alive when I’m at the sea, like something in me finally stops pretending.”
Every life has a story worth telling. Thank you for reading this one.
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