Of fighting and fighting the good fight.

For as long as I could remember, I have always loved stories. I loved reading and writing. In high school, this passion inspired me to join and eventually become the Editor-in- Chief of the school newspaper. In college, I was a writer for the sports website of the College Athletics Office, where I covered the University Athletics Association of the Philippines (UAAP) games of the different varsity teams. Despite the fact that I was writing about something that I enjoyed very much – sports, it was not long before I realized that there were bigger stories out there – stories of the marginalized, stories that are forgotten, and stories that must be heard. This led me to join and spearhead the only accredited political party in the Ateneo de Manila University – the Union of Students for the Advancement of Democracy (USAD AdMU).

In marching and working with communities and the basic sectors – farmers, fisherfolk, workers, indigenous peoples, women, and the youth, I rediscovered my love for stories and in hearing stories and being confronted with the realities of unfreedom, of inequality, and of injustice, I found myself wanting to do more and be more. I came to realize that the young girl that once dreamed of becoming a lawyer in order to amply the voices of those who have no voice in society was all-grown up and this was what she – what I am was passionate about: working [and fighting] with those who are oppressed. It was a conscious choice on my part to commit to the cause of advancing democracy because in staking against a future dictated in favor of the unjust, in it, I learned to fight, learning in the process that the fight that needed to be fought was bigger than myself. This led me to a continuous commitment to stand and fight with the marginalized.

This persistence and resilience through struggle comes from the having gone through the many difficult situations and challenges growing up.

I was six-years-old when my mother was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I remember vividly the day when she first experienced the paralysis that would handicap her to a wheelchair for the next thirteen years (which would also be the last thirteen years of her life). It was three in the morning and I had woken her up from sleep because I was too afraid to go to the washroom alone. I remember how despite being exhausted from work, she got up from bed to accompany me. The next thing that I remember was that she was on the ground. She could not stand up anymore. From then on, it was endless hospital visits, ambulance rides, and wishing that she would get better when the reality of MS, being a degenerative disease, was the opposite – that she would get worse. My mom’s sickness took a toll on my father, who lost job after job and turned to alcohol and cigarettes, blaming himself for what happened to our family.

In 2010, my father became withdrawn. He started having violence episodes and became so paranoid that he began to hear voices and believe that everyone was out to get him. In that same year, my father tried to commit suicide for the first time through poisoning himself with muriatic acid. I was the one that found him, vomiting his guts out and his organs shutting down. This would not be the first time that he would attempt to end his life. The years that followed that were some of the darkest days of my life with my father diagnosed with clinical depression and a bipolar disorder due to a chemical imbalance in his brain (which would later regress to schizophrenia) and being in and out mental facilities. For a while, he was getting better and then, worse, and better again, and then, worse again. Eventually, he refused to drink his medicines and see his psychiatrist and soon enough, we could not manage his mental illness.

In 2014, my father broke and in a rage, went after my younger brother, who he shoved around and hit relentlessly. Thereafter, he left. We kept in touch for a couple of months before he got worse and broke all contact.

In 2015, my siblings and I found out through an email that my paternal grandfather passed away in November. He had been battling prostate cancer for around two years before his body gave up. Not having been told of his end and spared the details of the wake, I called my paternal aunt (my father’s sister). I broke down after being told that it was my father’s decision not to let us know of own grandfather’s demise because he did not want us there nor did he want anything to do with us. Being robbed of the chance to grieve and say our goodbyes to our Lolo, my siblings and I decided that if our own father did not want us, we too wanted nothing to do with him. We have not seen or heard from him or his family since.

Over the years, my mother – who had been fighting MS for more than a decade – got worse. Soon, she was bedridden and suffered many complications as a result of her immune system being shut down. In 2016, she had a seizure attack. She recovered, but in April of the same year, her heart rested and she passed away due to complications after being infected with pneumonia. It all happened so fast. I remember sitting in the car on my way to the beach with my siblings and cousins when we got the phone call that she was not breathing. The next thing that I remember was sitting in the waiting area of the Intensive Care Unit, meeting families of patients that were suffering from pneumonia who all assured me that, “people do recover from pneumonia.” And just like that, she was gone. In the same year, I left the house that I grew up in to live with my maternal grandparents, who took us in and have been taking care of us ever since.

In the past five years, I experienced what it was like for the world that I grew up in to turn upside down. Just like that, the world that I was familiar with–and felt safe in–crumbled before my very eyes. While this does not make me and others that have undergone challenges in their personal lives different, in a place like Ateneo, it does more often than not, bring out a feeling that I am around people that had and lived better lives, privileged lives. I do not mean this only in terms of families or finances, but of the comfort of knowing that they do not have to take care of their families or themselves as they are already cared for as well. As a friend of mine eloquently put into words, “[t]here will always be this sense of friction between wanting to take care of our loved ones, to give them a comfortable life (and we are especially posited to provide simply that), and to eschew the opportunity to serve a higher purpose: to deepen our fellow human being’s understanding of democracy, which offers little to no financial recompense nor sense of immediate accomplishment and reward.”

But this is precisely the reason why I have fought and why we fight. We do not have the privilege to fight for what we believe in knowing that we will come home to comfortable lives, but we nonetheless fight. This is why I have chosen to study and pursue law, knowing that I must fight for and with others–that I must fight the good fight and work to put the law into the perspective of the marginalized.