Diaspora Diaries: A Portrait of Pandemic

MagazineIssue 02

Aug 9

kali diwa. Photo courtesy of the author.

Exploring the idea of innerworld vs performance of normalcy through a series of reflections and intimate discoveries

Text & Photos kali diwa

From Hella Pinay Issue 02: Interconnected - Fall/Winter 2021.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the print edition of Hella Pinay Magazine and was designed with a Tumblr-inspired layout that can't be fully replicated on the web. For readability, this digital version has been reformatted while preserving the original text and editorial content. If you'd like to experience the story as it originally appeared in print, click here to purchase the digital edition.

Posted just now

kali diwa writes a letter to their younger self five years prior, taking themself on a journey that bridges the time between who they once were and who they have become.

[Originally written on April 10, 2020]

Hey Kirsten,

You actually did change your name finally. You found it so beautifully too, like it was made for you. You’ve emerged into this new world you’ve built for yourself as kali diwa, and it fits in every possible way. It was right after a POC Yoga class at the East Bay Meditation Center (yes, you still do yoga, yes, you only do it with other brown folks around, and yes, seriously fuck yes, you live in Oakland. And bitch, you fucking love it.) where your teacher chose to honor Kali Ma, imploring her to burn all things that no longer serve you. It struck a chord, a strong vibration of both nostalgia and enlightenment, then you went home to watch Bourdain go to the Philippines again and that fool showed you exactly what you wanted to see: Kali – the ancient Filipino martial art that is intrinsically tied to the resistance of your homeland and your blood. How could you say no when it revealed itself so perfectly. And the best part? It’s yours, fully.

You’re in Europe now, you as in 2015 you, and I know you feel so many things right now, but it’s okay. These are lessons you need to learn. You’re always exactly where you need to be at all times. This trip will be unpacked over and over and over again. So keep those eyes wide and that heart open – it will show you truth.

After Europe, you come home with nowhere to go, but back to LA. You live in a hostel again, which you didn’t want to do after living at that atrocious AirBnB situation, you know the one where the host used a completely different name than what was given to you on the website, where you were told to tell people that you were “just a friend staying,” where there was no doorknob when you moved in, where the upstairs roommate had to walk through your room to get to theirs, where you only had a broken hot plate and lived off of sardines, and the windows had a privacy film on them that was made entirely of scotch tape, and that weird landlord who smelled like a sun-baked, urine-soaked downtown street wouldn’t stop asking you if you were sure you weren’t a lesbian (FYI, you’re definitely queer as fuck now so that fool did kinda clock the shit out of you – also stop doing shit like that). But after that, you lived with a slew of equally, if not more, horrible roommates that made you really question what the fuck you’re doing in LA, being unemployed, doing comedy, and generally just end up feeling like a loser.

It’s okay. People find you and it’s very kind.

After 5 years of will they/won’t they-ing, you finally stop talking to that punk boy from college, but then you tie yourself to some weird men. It’s gonna suck, but you do this a lot. You needed to, they were important to your growth and how you relate to your self-worth. You’re also just horny as shit so, fuck it the fuck up. You really lean into being sexually liberated in a different way. It’s still really hard and confusing.

In a year, you’re gonna spend Valentine’s day realizing that you’re falling in love with yourself. Amidst the chaos of your love life, you find you.

You find good homes that teach you so much care and kindness that it makes you want to scream.

You spend a year listening which doesn’t make sense now, but it will. It saves you, creates a new world for you that actually feels good and real. People hold you here, hold you how you needed it then. It’s as full as you can muster and it feels good until it doesn’t. So you do what you do best: you move.

I know, right? This is the part where you go back home. It’s the best decision you’ve made so far.

You come home to go back to school. City College of all places. Wild, I know. But you know education has always been a pillar in your life. One of your favorite feelings of all time is actively feeling your brain take in new information. Learning is like magic and you want to experience it constantly. Also it’s free, which makes it socialist as fuck. You dive deep into social justice, a place you never thought you’d be, but honestly after Europe, after that last year in LA, it all makes so much sense. You are supposed to be here. The classroom is a fucking stage and you live for it. Nothing makes you hornier than a good debate and the sound of your own voice. Everything just feels better when you do it with your mouth. You join the sexual health educator program and end up being a healthy relationship counselor (I know – healthy relationships – this is where you do that learning thing) working in sexual violence. It’s like Law and Order SVU, only not at all. It’s healing, it feels like good work as a survivor. You realize that comedy was never your girl, sex was. (Honestly, it’s both; you’re very complex) You dive deeper into gender stuff, racial stuff, all the good things. You start to become full.

You feel yourself becoming a whole human being and then a sweet boo shows up. It’s gay af and you’re into it. It’s kind, the healthiest relationship you could muster in puppy love. You feel how young it is, how it’s mostly about sex and suddenly, it doesn’t feel as good. It didn’t have the longevity to match you. You break it off kindly, and you’re thankful for it. A gentle experience for your first relationship ever, at 25. But then you spiral a little. The queer scene in Oakland is good but also a complete mess, but so are you. You go back to Spain, it feels like torture. You run into that pub crawl dude – you know the one, the Filipino hapa with the British accent that you fell in love with (read: made a fool of yourself in front of by getting ostentatiously drunk and throwing yourself onto him in the back of a cab only to be rejected. Remember? It would have happened like… two weeks ago) and it is sufficiently awkward. And you cry. You cry literally everywhere.

26 is the year that you definitely just lean into tears… and it won’t stop.

You get a therapist, you lose a best friend, and you find yourself again and again and again. You only take what serves you.

You realize that sex, your favorite girl, has deceived you for years. She has told you that this feeling is the one you crave, but it’s empty, housed in the desires of men and nothing for you. You have had enough. You have had a taste of what healthy sex can look like and nothing else is as sweet. It’s unfair. After pretty much a decade of having sex, it’s only at 26 where you know that this is true. It’s so fucked up. So you stop.

Really.

It’s the most rewarding and devastating journey you’ve ever taken and it’s still. so. fucking. hard.

You create bonds with people who live close to your soul in a way that has never felt as real as it does now. You find connection everywhere and it’s electrifying. You feel powerful all the time.

Once, you had a full moon ceremony in your backyard in Oakland (this is what you do now because you’re so annoyingly and unbelievably queer) and your friend Tiara, who you instantaneously knew you needed in your life, looked you in the eye and said “You’ve spent your entire life being fire, it’s time to become ocean.” It changed you. You listened.

You have your dream job, working in the gayest place on earth, besides Disneyland, cause you already did that one. You work in a queer sexual health clinic, fully tied into the makeup of what makes San Francisco home, but also so fucking complicated. You drive a huge RV bus, swabbing buttholes all over town while people tell you about their sex lives. It’s brilliant. You’re on the precipice of change. You feel more alive than you ever have in your entire life. You feel in control.

Everything has felt so special and complete, growing every day. And you’re just so goddamn thankful. You feel lucky, which I bet is super weird to hear considering you drunkenly just considered having sex in the bathroom with that short German guy in a suit who wants to be Barney Stintson. (Do you regret that? Yes. Yes, you do.)

And in the face of all this gratitude, the world is still so unbelievably hard.

We are in a bizarre time where you’re currently stuck in a pandemic quarantine with the funniest roommate and some kid who walked on to your bus one day to get his asshole swabbed. You just spent your 28th birthday in lock down. It was weird, and beautiful, and kind. You cried like you always do on your birthday, but it might be one of your favorites.

It was complex, just like you.

You’re reckoning right now. You’re doing a lot of reckoning with things you thought were done, things you thought you laid to rest years ago. Things that felt fine, but they resurfaced in spaces you didn’t expect. It’s unkind, but you don’t have to be. You are full like the moon. Just because she changes her shape, does not mean that she isn’t always full. You are always full.

Authenticity is the key to being taken seriously. Remember that one, you’re gonna need it.

to my pandemic depression:

first of all, you’re annoying.

second of all, i hate you.

third of all… actually, no, that’s pretty much it.

The Return of Saturn

It’s an odd feeling rereading that letter now, in this eclipse season. It was written so early into the COVID pandemic era and seeing who I was then, thinking about who I was in 2015 is such a fucking trip. The person who wrote it feels so wholly far away from me now. I am in awe of their resiliency, their ability to find joy, feel powerful, and love deeply, especially in the face of fear. A few months after writing this letter, I sent a copy of it to my brilliant, badass pinay therapist with this intro:

every time i’m low, i get to read this letter and it feels like a gift – a gift i gave to myself. it always gives me such a visceral mood boost and honestly it’s just so fucking cool that i just love myself enough to create this resource for me. i actually love myself more than enough, and sometimes it really just pours. i’ve reached that point and it’s sick.

i also think i love it so much because it’s honest – it’s my life story written by me and it’s never incorrect. i gotta say that again. it’s my life story written by me and it’s never incorrect. self-affirmation and self-validation are not only possible but impressively powerful. it feels like alignment. it feels like a path.

I feel so different now.

Not saying that any of that was dishonest or disingenuous, all those things are true.

Everything is just... different.

That was the person I was throughout 2020, barely entering my Saturn Return, taking everything in stride. Anytime I felt the knowing sting of deep shadow work or needed to reground myself, I read this letter. I kept saying, “My magick is strong,” and I refused to shy away from any healing work necessary to become the person I am meant to be.

Here we are, nearing the end of 2021, and I am very much deep in the thick of my Saturn Return. It's truly very hard not to think of the moment I wrote the letter as a moment of blissful naivete because damn, this Saturn Return has been no joke. If age 26 was the year I leaned into tears, ages 28 to 29 were the years I lived in them – full gush, unstoppable water works with no end in sight. I am soaking wet, but not in the same way I tried to manifest for the 2020 calendar year.

This time has proven to be thoroughly punishing and exhausting, overwhelmingly challenging and exceedingly painful, and in small moments, just as incredibly rewarding as she has been utterly devastating. But those incredible moments are still few and far between, with deep emotional suffering coursing throughout. And it seems as if the universe relishes in cruel jokes by presenting me this extreme transition during a full blown global crisis (Honestly, makes sense, my ancestors stay testing me).

And once again I have reached the point where I must be reminded to accept and understand that healing is never a linear process and it never will be.

Our ancestors work in so many ways that drag us through the ringer, asking us, “Who are you trying to become and how will you change to get there?” proving that their tough love mentality is still alive and well beyond the grave, just with more mysticism.

Near the end of my letter, I wrote, “I am on the precipice of change,” and each time I’ve read that, a new reaction has filled my body as I reflected on how poignant that sentence has been for me. I remember writing it and feeling wholly empowered. Despite being in a time of looming crisis, I felt elated with joy, love, happiness and sorrow for the world all at the same time.

Reading that sentence now, I feel at odds with myself, as I sit fully reflecting on the last few years filled with deep loss, painstaking grief, aggressive violence, and the constant, unyielding disconnect that pandemic has showered on us all, slowly severing us from ourselves.

As someone who swims with depression, I wrote this in a moment when I felt satisfied with the world I had built for myself. For the first time in my life I could honestly say that, despite being faced with unprecedented challenges and adversity. I was truly happy to be alive. And I knew that came from constantly changing and making choices that further aligned myself with the values I worked so hard to trust and develop. I did the damn thing. And also: this work is never done.

That life is gone now because of pandemic, and I am constantly grieving that loss.

Grief is a bitter emotion to hold; it asks us to fully hold our pain. At times, this sorrow feels like it swallows me whole with nothing else in sight.

As complex humans, we hold multiple emotions within ourselves all the time. To grieve means that joy has been lost somehow, which means that to have one, you must experience the other. They are constantly working in tandem; they are never apart. And I know I must work with this grief if I want to access my own joy again.

The work is just slow.

This has been the time where I am learning the edges of my capacity and growing to be able to hold more, a process that proves to be painful time and time again. The world keeps giving me more shit to hold and lately it feels suffocating.

In these times, my therapist has said, “Of course it hurts, it is painful to stretch,” and believe me, I am stretching. I am being stretched thin by this world. I am sure we all are. You cannot be a human living right now and not see how we are being collectively pushed.

Fear has created its newest currency; fascism has gained another face.

It came hard, and it came fast. This is definitely change – just not the one I had imagined.

I am in a deep well of mourning, mourning the collective losses in our world, in our local communities, in my closest of circles, and in myself. Parts of me keep breaking off into ether never to return.

As if it exists in a fast-paced maniacal game, pandemic has stripped away everything that breathed life into the very being of my identity, one by one. My core now lies empty and hollow. And I know I am not the only one.

I’ve died over and over and over again in this pandemic.
And it is so hard to trust that this is exactly where I need to be.

I have no doubt that my magick is still strong, it’s just so hard to feel into at this time, to believe it is still working beyond my eye. The erosion is also strong.
My belief in divine timing is being tested like it’s never been before.

But I know that this is all part of it, that if I’m this deep in it, it means that overwhelmingly beautiful alignment is waiting for me on the other side because I’ve been here before. I’m in Europe trying to fuck a German guy in a suit all over again.

Being reborn is a tricky business.

I am clearing space to make something new.
I am becoming something new.

I’m on another precipice of change.
And it’s exactly where I need to be.

all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. (j.m. barrie, peter pan)

all that you touch, you change. all that you change, changes you. the only lasting truth is change. god is change. (octavia butler, parable of the sower)