Everyone’s story starts somewhere.

I grew up in a small suburb of Los Angeles, California called Silver Lake. It’s always had a very artistic vibe (even before the gentrification), and maybe a bit of it rubbed off on me.

Music played a big role in my early twenties. My friend Tevan and I would spend our weekends at Amoeba Records looking over all the used CDs. I was also a web design intern at the Buddyhead office in Hollywood, a popular music website that was notorious for a bunch of stuff, including getting sued by Courtney Love. One of my fondest memories was the Valentine's Day Massacre concert we organized at The Smell in Downtown, LA. Looking back, I can’t help but marvel how cool it all was.

I did my freshman year at Loyola Marymount University, but transferred to a community college while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. The classes that left the strongest impression on me were my art history classes and my creative writing workshops. I thought I might want to go into education, so I took a break from school to work as a teaching assistant for the Los Angeles Unified School District. During the summers, I worked for Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth program. Eventually though, I decided to finish my degree in art history at California State University, Northridge.

At some point, I had this idea about moving back to Manila—get to know where I was born (we left when I was six years old), travel Southeast Asia, maybe go to graduate school. And one day, I took a leap of faith and just did it.