THE HIDDEN STRUGGLES OF MY CHILDHOOD

My childhood was strange.

I remember we started with boxes laid out on the cold concrete.

We used to sleep on them in unfurnished and unfinished spaces.

The roof leaked when it rained, this never really changed.

My brother would say, "If god really exists, then why can’t he just give us food?”

A question that never left my subconscious since.

We had a sturdy roof over our heads.

Walls that protected us from the outside world.

But our childhood home wasn't ours.

It was an empty house from Papa's family.

We didn't own it until years and years after.

See, my parents didn't have a steady income flow.

My dad quit his job around the time I was in Kindergarten.

Nothing happened after that. It was the last time I saw him put that much effort into providing for his family.

My mom did all the legwork from that point on.

She used to have a flourishing career in Manila until she agreed to move her whole life where my dad was comfortable.

That meant losing the stability of everything she had built for herself. She went from privileged to running around the neighborhood to put food on the table.

Utang.

We survived on utang from the store.

Basically, it's the Philippine equivalent of the credit card system where you go to the store and tell them to put the bill under your name—old-school debt.

Having a long list of utang means you're barely surviving the everyday.

That was our reality.

Some months my mom would land consultancy projects, other months we'd be back to not having enough.

Thinking about the sacrifices she made all those years triggers memories of a life that breathed discomfort.

Four kids and a husband—she had to carry all of us on her tiny, tired shoulders.

Look, I love my dad. I just wish he did more for us. Something. Anything at all.

If only to ease the burden from his wife. But that story is for another day.

As life would have it, his sister made up for all of his shortcomings. She offered financial support and put us through school.

We wouldn't have had the rare chance of experiencing a bit of fun from time to time if not for her.

That's why from the outside looking in, we were living a normal life.

But nobody knew my mom's struggles of making that shit work every single day. Because a family of six is hard to sustain.

I watched her trying to portion that amount so that it stretched to cover a whole month of expenses. Most of the time, the money wasn't enough.

She would still resort to utang towards the end of the month. Food on the table meant one thing: she found a way.

We didn't have an extra dime to spend on nice things. No gadgets. No toys. No whatever.

At a young age, we knew that if you're not gonna perish without a certain material thing, you probably don't need it. It can wait.

The concept of needs and wants never confused me in school. It's default and ingrained.

I was never a fancy kid. We were never rich. We barely had enough to eat some days. Yet somehow, I made it here to Japan, writing this newsletter.

The thing is, poverty is the norm in developing countries.

So our situation wasn't that bad in this sense.

People still have it worse.

The poorest of the poor live through days without clean water to drink.

Growing up this way cultivated the values of contentment, resilience, and hard work in me.

But the extremity of it keeps me from openly talking about it.

Because it doesn't sound like a "valid" story of poverty.

Who am I to complain about having less when others literally have nothing?

This is a day late, I've been busy with another 7-day workweek.

Happy Tuesday, wallflowers. Sending all the feels straight to your inboxes.

Talk soon,

Jopaz