A Life in Reflection: My Journey as a Blogger, Civil Servant, and Witness to Change
When I launched my blog in 2009, I didn’t set out to build a legacy. Truthfully, I just wanted a place to think out loud, to put order to the flood of information coming at me each day. I remember my very first post: it was short, almost tentative, like dipping a toe into unfamiliar waters. I wrote about a news item that had caught my attention, more commentary than confession. But when I hit “publish,” something shifted. My thoughts weren’t just mine anymore. They were part of a larger conversation. That’s how it began—quietly, modestly.
Before that, my life had followed a very different rhythm. I spent my career at the Food and Drug Administration, a place most people don’t think about unless they’re worried about their food, their medicine, or a national emergency. At FDA, I learned how decisions made in cubicles and conference rooms ripple outward into the lives of millions. It was steady, serious work, and while it wasn’t glamorous, it mattered.
September 11, 2001, was a day when all of that came into sharper focus. I was working when the news broke, watching with disbelief as the towers fell. In the days that followed, there was no time to process the shock—we were too busy adapting. There were concerns about bioterrorism, about the safety of the drug supply, about whether the systems we relied on could hold under such strain. I remember one meeting where we reviewed protocols for handling potential anthrax contamination. The weight of responsibility was overwhelming. I walked out into the crisp September air that evening, carrying the silence of colleagues who knew that the world had changed forever. That moment marked me, and it stayed with me long after I left government service.
Blogging, when I began it years later, became the outlet I didn’t know I needed. It gave me a way to return to questions that haunted me—about resilience, about fear, about how societies respond to crisis. But it also opened up space for wonder. One of my most memorable posts was about a scientific breakthrough: researchers had managed to restore vitality in aging monkeys. Not mice, not lab cells—monkeys, our closest cousins. I remember typing the words, pausing as I thought: if science can truly make the old young again, what does that mean for us, for me, for the way we measure life? Writing about it was my way of wrestling with the awe.
I didn’t only write about science and politics. Culture found its way in too. When Paolo Pasco, a Filipino-American Jeopardy! champion, burst into headlines, I felt a rush of pride that I had to capture on the page. Growing up Filipino-American, I knew how rare it was to see someone who looked like me celebrated on such a stage. That blog post wasn’t analysis—it was joy, plain and simple, and readers responded to it with their own stories of pride.
The blog also gave me permission to explore darker corners. I once wrote about the origins of ethnic slurs, not to sensationalize them but to strip them bare, to show how language can wound, exclude, or diminish. That post drew heated comments, some supportive, others angry, but I welcomed it. Blogging taught me that writing isn’t about agreement—it’s about engagement.
In recent years, the writing has grown more personal. I live with stage 4 kidney disease, and I made the deliberate choice not to pursue dialysis. I remember the conversation with my doctor when the options were laid out on the table. Dialysis might buy me more time, but at what cost? To be tethered to a machine, to spend what energy I had left in clinics and waiting rooms—it felt less like living and more like surviving. I chose otherwise.
That choice has given me a new perspective on time. Every post now feels both urgent and calm. Urgent, because I know my days are numbered; calm, because I no longer pretend otherwise. I’ve even prepared a final blog post to go live when I am gone. In it, I want readers to see not just my illness, but my life: the FDA years, the aftermath of 9/11, the reflections that carried me since 2009, and the community of readers who walked alongside me.
Looking back, what strikes me most is how connection threads through all of this. Blogging has introduced me to readers I’ve never met, people scattered across the globe who take the time to read, to comment, to argue, to share. There’s a quiet miracle in that. One man sitting at his desk, typing out reflections, and somehow those words find a home in the minds of strangers.
I don’t pretend my blog will change the world. But it has changed mine. It has given me a voice outside of bureaucracy, outside of illness, outside of silence. It has given me a place to be fully present in history as it unfolds—and to leave something behind when I no longer can.
If there is one thing I hope readers take from my words, it’s this: keep bearing witness. Pay attention, whether in writing, in conversation, or simply in how you live. Because life is both fragile and vast, and none of us gets to keep it forever. But we do get to leave a trace.
This blog is mine.
And until that final post arrives, I’ll keep writing. Because the world, for all its chaos, is still full of things worth noticing.
Meanwhile, here's my photo Sculpture of the Day- Bacchus and Ampelus
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