"It's a trip, you know? When you're a kid, you—you see the life you want, and it never crosses your mind that it's not gonna turn out that way." — Monica, Love & Basketball
I was thinking about that movie, "Love & Basketball," the other day. It came out in 2000, and at the time, I was dating a woman who complicated my life in ways I didn’t fully understand back then. She’d break up with me at least once a month, only to get back together like clockwork. It was a toxic cycle. We were both dragging around our childhood trauma, both immigrants, her from Poland, me from the Philippines. That combination sounds like the start of a joke, but it wasn’t funny. It was survival.
I thought I was deeply in love with her. I put up with emotional and mental abuse because, honestly, I didn’t know any different. I grew up believing love was conditional, so when it hurt, it felt familiar. I’d done some therapy before we met, after a suicide attempt, actually, so I was starting to heal. But she wasn’t there yet. There was so much jealousy, insecurity, and unhealed pain on her end, and I just absorbed it. I thought love meant staying, no matter how much it hurt.
It wasn’t love. Not really. It was intensity. A trauma bond. It grew into something, sure, but it wasn’t healthy. What taught me the most wasn’t the relationship; it was the way my friends showed up after the final, messy, drawn-out breakup. One that deserves its own story. But let me just say this: I never understood how someone who doesn’t want you can still act like they don’t want anyone else to have you. That part was always bizarre to me. When she found out I was seeing someone else, someone I worked with, she threatened to get me fired. So yeah, that was the level of toxicity we’re talking about.
That relationship broke my trust in other people. Worse, it broke my trust in myself, in my ability to recognize what love should actually look like. But I learned. Love shouldn’t come with threats. Or conditions. Not like that.
My friends, especially Kimi, were the lifeline. She literally shook me one night, desperate to make me see what I was putting myself through. That was the beginning of me waking up. Healing took time. It took unlearning. But it started because someone loved me enough to pull me back from the edge.
That movie reminded me how our childhood wounds show up in love, complicate it, and distort it. In Love & Basketball, the characters choose between love and basketball. But basketball was also their first love, the thing that steadied them when people failed them.
If you’d asked 25-year-old me what life would look like now, this wouldn’t have been the picture. Honestly, I’m not sure what I imagined. I thought I’d be a doctor. But that relationship threw me so far off track that I changed my major to political science. Somewhere along the way, I started dreaming about law school, but didn’t know if I’d ever actually get here. And yet, here I am. The path was anything but straight. It was broken, winding, bumpy, and entirely mine.
And here’s where golf comes in.
My high school didn’t offer golf, so I played basketball. I wasn’t great. I was decent at tennis. But if we’d had golf? I probably would’ve played. Now, I love it. And I think golf is a lot like falling in love.
You never really master it. Some people give up because it’s hard and takes forever to get good. You have to understand the fundamentals to even be decent. It requires time, patience, and humility. There are days you want to walk off the course. Shank a shot into the trees, top the ball into the pond, or take five to get out of a bunker. But then, there’s that one shot. The one that lands soft and close to the pin. The tap-in birdie. That’s what keeps you coming back.
Same with love. Those moments when it all clicks, when it feels easy and right, that’s what makes the struggle worth it.
I’m really good at getting out of the sand now. Mostly because I get a lot of practice. That’s true for golf, and for love. You don’t get better if you stop showing up. You have to learn from your bad shots, work on your mechanics, fix your flaws. That’s the hope, anyway.
I still remember the first time I broke 100. It took years. And when I’m rusty? I shoot over 100 again. But once the season gets going, once I’ve worked out the kinks, I’ll regularly shoot in the 80s. Every year, I set new goals: hit my driver more consistently, learn my woods, shave strokes. I don’t stop learning. I don’t stop improving. I just want to be more consistent. Lose fewer balls because it gets expensive, in golf and in love.
There’s no perfection. But if you’re lucky, you get better. You get more open. More grounded. More intentional. You start to trust yourself. Your instincts. Your course management.
Because ultimately, that’s what it comes down to, knowing the lay of the land and making smart choices. Especially when you’re in trouble.
Like Monica chose to fight for both basketball and love, I’ve learned I don’t have to give one up for the other. I just have to keep showing up on the course, in love, and in life, willing to play through the rough and trust that the next shot might be the one that changes everything.
"Every immigrant is a lover of possibility. Every journey to a new land is an act of faith in the unseen, the unknown, and the hope that love will be enough." — Unknown
Today is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 87 years old. He passed away from lung cancer over 15 years ago.
In February of 2020, I was in the Philippines with my family because my mom was dying. After long days spent taking care of all the heavy things you have to handle when a parent is nearing the end, my oldest sister and I would sit and talk. One night, we dug deep into our family history. And I realized how different my version of our story was from hers.
She’s ten years older than me—she remembers more. She remembers our life in the Philippines before we immigrated to the U.S., and things about our family that I was simply too young to know.
I always thought my parents' love story was romantic. Turns out, the truth was a lot messier. But isn’t that the harsh reality of most things?
My sister once joked that my dad tricked my mom into marrying him. According to her, my mom had come to visit my dad from a neighboring city. He told her there were no more buses running, so she had to spend the night. Back then, if you stayed overnight with a man—even if nothing happened—you were considered "soiled" and not fit to marry anyone else.
The thing is... there was another bus. He lied. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Basically, if you’ve ever listened to "Baby, It’s Cold Outside," my dad pulled that move—with intent.
I don’t even know if my mom truly wanted to marry him. What I remember being told as a child was that my dad heard about my mom, came to see her, fell instantly in love, and did whatever he could to marry her.
Well, long story short: they married. And here I am.
I was 45 years old when I found out that part of my family legacy. Jesus H. Christ on a bike. You can imagine how that scrambled my brain.
Here’s the thing: you can love and hate someone equally. And that was my relationship with my dad. Parent-child relationships are complicated.
I both idealized and resented him growing up. He was a narcissist. He was physically and mentally abusive. And yet... he was still my father. He worked hard to provide for us. He gave us opportunities he never had. He made sure I always had a home to come back to if I needed it.
Your first toxic relationships are almost always with your parents. And when he was dying, I didn’t hesitate. I got on a plane, flew 5,000 miles, and sat by his side. Because no matter how prepared you think you are, you’re never really ready to say goodbye.
I honor my father for the sacrifices he made for our family. I forgave him for the harm he caused. At the end of the day, he raised a family that chooses, again and again, to serve others. And that comes from him. He was a public servant.
As I get older, I think about where my parents were at the age I am now. When my dad was my age, he had only been in America for a few years. He’d crossed the globe to start over, landing in frigid Minnesota—talk about culture and weather shock—and then packed up a station wagon and moved his whole family cross-country to California for a new beginning.
I can only imagine the level of sheer delusion he had to have to believe we were going to be okay. Maybe he thought, "It’ll be good in sunny California... if we can make it there, we can make it anywhere..." Wait—that's New York. Anyway.
As I start new chapters of my own life, I take some comfort knowing I'm only making decisions for myself. My dad was carrying all of us. No wonder he was stressed out. I don’t blame him.
The immigrant story is different for everyone. But at its heart, it’s about survival. About hope. About trying to create a better life.
Immigrants are not the enemy.
We don’t come here to take from anyone.
This land is rich, abundant, and vast.
We come to add to it. To bring our own cultures, our own flavors, our own dreams.
I hope, in my father’s story, you can see the struggle that so many immigrants face.
Seeking safety.
Seeking stability.
Seeking a place to belong.
You don’t have to walk a thousand miles in my father’s shoes to show kindness and dignity to people who don't look like you.
Mahal Kita.
Happy Birthday, Dad. (Vid Vidal R. Castro, April 28, 1938 – October 23, 2009)
“Golf is the loneliest sport. You’re completely alone with every conceivable opportunity to defeat yourself. Golf brings out your assets and liabilities as a person. The longer you play, the more certain you are that a man’s performance is the outward manifestation of who, in his heart, he really thinks he is.” – Hale Irwin
In the novel She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb, the main character, Dolores Price, loses weight by imagining all food is covered in mold. So she basically starves herself to lose 100 pounds. The reason she gained the weight in the first place is because she was sexually assaulted as a child by a neighbor and found comfort in food. After a failed suicide attempt, she’s institutionalized for seven years, and that’s where she sheds the weight.
The book came out in 1992. I was in high school, and for some reason, that part of the story always stuck with me. I was thinking about it again today—could we do that with people? If we don't want to think about someone, can we just mentally cover them in fuzzy mold? Repulse ourselves enough to stop remembering them?
In a way, I think we already do that. After a falling out, we latch onto all the bad memories to justify the distance. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” right? But memory is rarely accurate. It shifts. It softens. It distorts. Sometimes we rewrite entire stories just so we can sleep better at night.
I’ve kept a journal since middle school. I started because I was beginning to understand I was gay and needed a place to pour all my secrets. Journals became that quiet vault for my inner life—everything that couldn't be spoken out loud. When I was in relationships, sometimes I wrote about women I had crushes on, ones I’d never act on. I’ve filled pages with unspoken moments, private thoughts, and contradictions. Some of it’s messy. Most of it’s honest. All of it is mine.
My friend Kimi thinks I have a great memory. I used to. Now, it’s like trying to pull data from an old hard drive that’s overloaded and out of date. What I can’t remember, I’ve written down. I’ve chronicled every meaningful moment—and plenty of meaningless ones. Most of it’s from my vantage point, which means it’s probably biased as hell. But whose story isn’t?
Now that it’s been five years since that forced time of isolation during COVID—and we’ve been out here living our lives like a global pandemic didn’t kill millions of people—I’ve realized something. Life feels way more complicated when we have to keep functioning inside this capitalistic mess. That feeling of contentment I found during the quiet? It’s constantly challenged now. Just participating—in other people’s drama, in our country’s chaos—takes energy. It takes real effort to hold onto that peace.
And at the end of She’s Come Undone, Dolores doesn’t get all her answers wrapped up neatly. She just finally accepts her brokenness. That life isn’t about having all the answers—it’s about learning how to live with the questions.
How do I live my best life without measuring myself against everyone else? Because that’s all we’re taught: to measure ourselves. But isn’t that just chasing something that’ll never satisfy?
We’ll always feel like we’re lacking if the bar is set by someone else's highlight reel. And honestly? I hate that. I don’t have time for it. I don’t have the energy for it.
There’s so much judgment out there. It’s exhausting.
The second half of my life isn’t about proving anything to anybody. It’s about growing. About shaking the fuzzy mold off myself and learning new things. Staying curious. Staying alive inside.
What else am I supposed to do? Pretend I’ve already lived all there is to live? Push myself out to sea on an ice float?
Nah. I’ll keep living my best life. Because eventually, death comes for all of us.
Might as well like who you are until then.
And I think—finally—I do.
Thanks for being part of the story. ❤️
