Friday, May 3: @ Pratt

In anticipation of the first Friday. 

That’s who I was the Thursday night before. I didn’t know what to expect, didn’t know what it would be like, participating in a program that never existed until I and seven other people showed up at the door. I’ve been in programs before where I was part of the pilot program or inaugural cohort, but so many of them were in service of something I did and not in service of something I am. Sure, of course, this is for people in the LIS field, but that felt secondary to being queer, being a person of color. 

True enough, our first session was spent around a conference table talking with each other, developing a community agreement amongst each other, and thinking explicitly, perhaps for the first time, about grounding ourselves in our identities.

What a foreign notion and a novel concept! 

Land acknowledgements have gone through a rollercoaster of discourse in the LIS field, yeah, but something about grounding myself in my ancestry, in the land I was occupying at that moment, and of the land I left actually impacted me more than I thought. So often with the diaspora, I only remember the flight to the United States. I forget about the soil I left behind, of the stability that I don’t stop being someone from somewhere just because I’m somewhere else. 

I’m Filipino. 

This is an identity I take for granted about myself, something that I don’t feel all that connected with to be perfectly honest. But thinking about my ancestry, my genealogy, even in such a snapshot reminded me that there are mangoes tattooed on my forearm in honor of my grandparents who have since passed. And about their mango tree still standing tall and fruitful in the province of Bulacan despite being thousands of miles away. 

So much of how I’d shaped my understanding of my identity comes from the departure, from the leaving and what I left behind, but never about what I still had inside of me. 

That grounding exercise did more than write down where I came from, it reintroduced me back to my bloodline, my ancestry—roots I hadn’t thought about in years.

So often, I saw my identities in equal parts as battered armor and as fragile glass! It is both knight and damsel.