The Road to ‘Young Blood 6’
How ‘Homes’ found a place to call home
The Philippine Daily Inquirer launched the sixth installment to their Young Blood compilation series on Saturday, and it is an all-too-great honor to be a part of this collection, finally.
The essay ‘Homes’ was first published in the Inquirer on Nov. 27, 2014.
As YB6 book editor Ruel de Vera put it, being published in Young Blood, the Inquirer’s most coveted prime space for under-30 voices, is on many young people’s “Before 30” bucket list. It certainly was on mine. I remember being a young journalist in high school daydreaming about seeing my name on a national newspaper. Fast forward to a decade and a half plus plus later, here we are.
The year I turned thirty was a rollercoaster of sorts — I’d been with the paper for close to ten years, and there was a steady stream of projects here and there. In short, I was actually too busy to pay attention to getting to thirty, but it was just there, looming at the back of my head: I knew I was turning thirty, and I knew I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t even give it a shot, so I gave myself a couple of days to sit down and think about what I would like to write about, especially if this was something that esteemed editor Ma’am Chato Garcellano would read. (This was absolutely the scariest thing, to be honest.)
What a buzzer beater that was, and as Ruey told me, he’d always use me as an example from hereon to encourage those in their “very late twenties” to submit to Young Blood. (LOL)
Anyway, I decided to talk about home, moving, and moving out, because it’s something close to my heart, and something that, I think, is truly an experience shared by many in my generation. Right now, we are more mobile than we have ever been: We move out to live closer to our workplaces, move in whenever we find love, then move on to the next whatever it is — may it be a person, a place or purpose.
But amid all this restlessness, there’s this feeling of wanting to be anchored to something — to have a quiet place for our weary souls, so to speak, at the end of the long arduous day. Many times, we find this in our own families; for some, it is in the families they built for themselves.
Through this piece, I hoped to celebrate homes of all forms, and to thank the many homes that have taken me in through the years as well. This includes the Inquirer, which has given my words a ‘home’ once in its Opinion pages, and a second time, in its Young Blood collection.
Maybe someday I will have better words for how this makes me feel. For now, I have only this: Maraming salamat po.
