I grew up in the Philippines with very little. At six, I was already finding ways to earn—selling paper dolls to my cousins, snacks to my classmates, and taking small opportunities wherever they appeared. When something was missing, I learned not to wait. I learned to create, solve, carry, and keep moving.
That instinct would later have a name: the Fixer.
At seven, I wrote my first fiction story. Then came the poems. By high school, I had written more than thirty. One won the top prize in my senior year—the first time I remember feeling genuinely proud of something I had made.
Looking back, those two parts of me grew up side by side.
Entrepreneurship taught me how to survive. Writing taught me how to stay human.
For much of my life, the rhythm was the same:
Dream. Build. Survive. Rebuild. Begin again.
After my first marriage ended, I rebuilt. Then I moved to the United States and began again. Years later, I built a business from the ground up and created a life I was deeply proud of.
Then life tilted again.
The business I had spent years building began to collapse while another part of my life was already taking on water. After a lifetime of finding a way through, I reached something I could not fix.
I went quiet for a while. Later, I recognized that way of staying as the Recluse.
Somewhere inside that quiet, I started writing again—not because I had answers, but because I needed language for what I had been living all along.
That writing became The Sinking Ship: a literary world shaped by the ways we adapt when life asks too much of us. I began to recognize the different postures we take on to keep functioning, carrying, and standing.
I recognized myself in them. You may recognize parts of yourself, too.
We rarely live in only one posture. One may appear at work, another with family, another when we are afraid, grieving, overwhelmed, or simply trying to make it through the day.
These ways of staying may have protected us when we needed them. We can keep carrying them long after the moment that shaped them, sometimes without realizing what they still cost.
I write as a fellow passenger, not from the shore.
Recognition doesn’t remove the water. But it can change the loneliness of standing in it.