Mood: Meh 
Vaping: Vozol 12000 Puffs Cool Mint
Weather: 26°C, Clear
Location: Mont Fleuri, Mahe, Seychelles
I’ve caught some kind of cold. I’ve had 3 days of throat discomfort and 2 days of runny nose. I was trying to figure out where in the world did I catch this, and then my older sister sent us a message yesterday to let us know that she wouldn’t be able to hangout because she and her son are “still sick with cough”. I actually started feeling a mild throat irritation that morning after we hung out at their place. I thought it was probably because I was vaping a lot that evening. On Tuesday 29th my employee wasn’t able to make it to work (2 days sick leave) so my sister and I went to work for the day. I started feeling even worse the following day. So I could have caught something from the customers as well. Whenever I work at the store, I do the cashiering. We already know how dirty it is to handle money!
I had 2 Tagalog classes this week. I’m quite happy with it. I think my teacher is great! I’m trying to immerse myself with Tagalog songs and I started watching this Philippines telenovela on Youtube. The words are slowly coming back. It’s so unfortunate that I’ve lived my life with such identity issues. I feel as though I’ve lost a huge part of who I am when we left Philippines. I remember when I broke up with my first ex, he started telling everyone that Seychelles has done so much for me; that I’ve had opportunities in life thanks to Seychelles. I never responded to him because he’s an idiot – I even as a young adult, I was wise enough to believe that he didn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand that I am as Seychellois as he is from a legal standpoint; that all the opportunities that was available to me were my right as a citizen. But what a lot of people don’t understand is that these are opportunities I would have had too, even if I had grown up in Philippines instead of Seychelles – that not all Filipinos are poor; that not all Filipinos need to leave Philippines to seek better opportunities abroad. Back in Philippines, I was in private school, we had 2 cars (my mother’s car and my father’s car), we had air conditioning in our house, our house was owned, we had a garden, we had a gate, we had our own orange tree, we had dogs, we had cats, we had a backyard, we had an attic, we had maids. Who in Seychelles had all of these back in the 80s? We didn’t come to Seychelles to seek a better life, we came to Seychelles because my parents separated and my mother decided to go back home to her parents. Had I stayed in Philippines, I probably would have gone to university anyway, we (my siblings and I) all would have. So what opportunity did Seychelles give me that I would have had no access to in the Philippines?
Had I stayed in Philippines, I probably wouldn’t have endured the bullying I was subjected to here in Seychelles; being exposed to a society that made me feel I was inferior in some way. It was only when I went to China that I started to appreciate being myself again. Now with the Tagalog classes and reclaiming some level of identity, I feel saddened by how much my life would have been different if I had just lived in an Asian environment my whole life. I do find it absolutely ridiculous that I’m an Asian person, living in Africa, speaking a “Western” language. I still believe I need some kind of therapy to unblock a lot of the things I’ve swept under the rug all these decades.
I completely support what my mother did. She left an unhappy, abusive marriage. But it shouldn’t have ever been treated as a simple thing to just uproot your children and move them to a whole other country with a culture that to this day, none of us relates to.