Who Am I?

The Name

June Canicosa Hebrew – that’s my full name.  It’s June because that’s my birth month; Canicosa being my mom’s maiden family name; and Hebrew because…  well, I’m not exactly sure.  One thing I knew – I grew up liking the reaction of the people who heard my surname.  They would often say that it was cool and unique.  Some would even ask where I was from or my family from originally.  When I was in grade one, my teacher, Mrs. Matulac asked me where I was from when she noticed my surname.  I didn’t know so I simply replied, “From my dad!”  She gave a sweet smile as if trying to tell herself “Of course, what question was that?”  I smiled back at her and she just led me to my seat.  Later that day, when I got home, I asked my mom why our surname is Hebrew.  She just told me that my dad was an Israeli and that my dad’s dad, my grandpa, was of a Bumbay (Arabian) descent.  When the first grading period PTA conference came, my mom went to school to get my report card.  My teacher asked the same thing to her and she replied the same.  From then on, whenever people asked me about my family name, I’d tell them exactly what I heard from my mom.  As I tell them my family name, I noticed that somehow I was more likeable.  My surname sounded foreign and I accepted delight when people would take interest in it.  I’d tell them my mom’s exact words, “My dad’s an Israeli.  My grandpa on my dad’s side is Arab.”  I had big round eyes; thick eyebrows and eyelashes then that resembled the facial features of a Middle-Eastern.  So people believed me.  I believed myself too.  I didn’t know the truth.  One weekend lunch, I went to my Uncle Carlos’ house with my brother Ace.  We would hang out there sometimes because my uncle was fond of digging camote and we helped him out.  We would bring the crops home and boil it and eat it with sugar.  One day we went there and I noticed his faded uniform patched with the word Ebreo on its chest.  I didn’t think it was important.  Time passed and each school year, and each opportunity I was asked regarding my surname, I told people the same thing – Israeli and Arab.  That was it – so etched in my mind.  I grew up telling the same thing to everyone – although, inside me, I had doubts.  I had doubts because I kept remembering Ebreo from my uncle’s fatigue uniform.  It couldn’t have been a coincidence that our family names sound similar from each other. And so, my family name dilemma started.  If my dad’s Israeli because he’s a Hebrew, does it mean that my relatives are the Filipino version of Israelis?  It didn’t make sense.   Does it mean that if your surname is the English translation of your relatives’ family name, it makes you foreign?  I kept asking these questions to myself.  One afternoon, after school, I was talking to my tito Carlos under the star apple tree in our yard and I asked him why his surname was in Filipino and ours, in English.  He brushed off the question and talked about how he’d give me a star apple from our tree instead.  I felt that he didn’t want to answer the question.  I never attempted to ask him again.  I still couldn’t connect the dots.  And during one of those lazy afternoon moments, my mom told me stories.  I found out from her story that Papang (that was how we called my grandfather on my dad’s side) was my dad’s step dad.  My mom still didn’t tell me why our surname is Hebrew.  What a great coincidence that my biological grandpa’s family name is similar to my step grandpa’s family name!   I thought to myself.  I knew that there was something else.

Earlier I wrote how hard it is to define your purpose without first knowing yourself, where you’re from, and where your home is.  Now, I’m on that journey to discover my roots more.  I’ve started with my name that has a rich history that goes along with.  I also think of my family more and more often and unfortunately, the first thing that pops in my mind is always how hard it has been for us surviving as one.  As I was forced to reexamine and reflect on my existence, I’ve looked in different directions for answer but there’s one thing that holds true – my family is my very root.  To answer the question “Who am I?” I need to carefully examine my family and the different factors of my past that could’ve contributed to my being me today. 

First, my family name – the very basic identifying factor of the smallest unit of the community – unfortunately, needs in itself a process of identifying.  Failure to identify this can make you question which part of your life is real and which part is a lie.  Name is a very basic human need.  It makes you find yourself and develop your identity in your home, school, work, and whenever you hear it, you respond.  Family name is the same, others identify your family’s geographical origin through it, not to mention your ethnicity.  Practically, you get your family name from your dad and your dad’s dad and the list of previous dads go on.  Your mom and dad tell you who your grandparents are and you just seem to feel naturally that you belong and that the cosmos automatically identifies your place in the universe as Juan, with de la Cruz as your family name.  You develop that sense of pride that you are Juan de la Cruz, a Filipino with the Spanish heritage of the Cruz’s.  It would be so easy to trace back your history with a name.   That hadn’t been the case for me.  I grew up having this confusion at the back of my head questioning what was real and what wasn’t.

And so I took the liberty of voicing out the whispers in my head.  Who am I?  What’s my name?  Where am I from?  The search for answers wasn’t easy.  This subject just seemed inherently a forbidden if not a merely awkward topic to talk about at home.  I didn’t hear anybody in our family who talked about it openly.  Until now, we just smile at the thought that other people think our surname is cool.  As I took the liberty of answering the voices in my head, I also realized that we could be put in a vulnerable position but I also thought that knowing is enough prize.  It would be like releasing a bird from the cage.  It would finally mean some sort of freedom.  I carefully traced back my steps from where I stand now.  In a conversation I had with my mom when I was around 6 years old, I found out that my dad grew up without knowing his biological father in person.  Whether he knew who his father was, I’m not sure about.  One thing I know though is that he too grew up without knowing what his surname is.  My dad and I have a similarity because we both don’t know what our real surname is.  If given a chance, I would look for his biological family and find out the truth.  I believe that they are around somewhere and I think that my dad would like to know them if they’re reachable.  I sure would like to know if they ever existed.  But right now, I don’t know where to start looking for them.  It has been more than sixty years since dad was born and I don’t know how to trace to that far back.  However, this is what I know now – obviously, I know that he chose Hebrew because it’s close to Ebreo (this one’s a given).    He didn’t want to carry Ebreo because it wasn’t his but he can own Hebrew.  He can make it his own.  It’s close enough to but not too far from the family that he knows.  He was somewhere in between.  So there, mystery solved.  Hebrew is simply the close translation of Ebreo.  I have known for quite some time but it’s always easier to shrug my shoulders and let people be led on to whatever they want to believe.  Most people encourage me to study my lineage because I might be able to trace it to the Jews that God so loved then.  That having been said and since I have this surname and I don’t have plans of changing it (although it crossed my mind), on a deeper perspective, this is what I want to believe in and hope for that my surname has in store for its bearer – that its bearer would gain benefits and privileges that God had extended His first people, the Hebrews.  I hope that despite all our weaknesses that we live with but one strength, my dad’s strength, his in Him – this very faith that he so well imparted in us when my brothers and I were growing as children; this very faith that we shall be eternally grateful for; the characteristics of the Hebrews that descended from Abraham, God’s servant.  And for this, I shall keep this surname and be God’s servant.  And each time I write, hear, read and see my name I’ll be reminded that my dad toiled to keep his family in faith just like how the old Hebrew patriarchs toiled to take care of God’s sheep.  This, I will hold on to.  This, I will live by with.  When people ask me about my surname, I need not tell them the whole story.  I just need to tell them that it’s my dad’s and he gave it to his growing family.  I know that there’ll be a lot of people who’ll ask me about my surname, I guess I’ll just tell them, “It is a long story.  And maybe if you sit down with me over a cup of coffee, I’ll tell you more about it.” 

 

 

 

What Am I Here For?

Purpose is what I am here for.  What that is, that’s the question.  I have grown to believe that I can do whatever I put my mind into but that hasn’t always been the case.  All I have were ideals but I lack the technical know-how.   I am a typical left-handed person who doesn’t use his left-brain to know how to work around deadlines.  My right brain is so dominant that I know how to create in my mind actions and imagine the outcome but it lacks a little push on the left side to make my hands work and actually concretize such creation and outcome.  I am filled with concepts, and abstractions.  I can easily infer good insights from almost anything but I have a hard time making them real.   “To learn and not to do is really not to learn. “  I have learned a lot.  In my head, I know myself that I can apply them.  My mind would wander entertaining tasks that I should be doing but my strength was mostly coming from my right brain and it’s hard to put my left-brain to work.  I’m trying now.  Despite my childhood, I have a pretty high self-esteem. 

I was a sucker for praises and approval as a young child but I mostly got them from other people.  That was why it would make me smile whenever my mom praised me and told me what a talented boy I was.  I knew how to sing at an early age.  At four years old, my mom put me onstage so she could win some gift pack during a socializing event and I was the last one dancing.  The crowd loved me and they cheered for me and so my mom wasn’t disappointed that she got her gift pack.  My teacher in nursery only taught me the alphabet once and I had memorized it.  She also taught me how to count one to ten but I was able to count one to one hundred out of my own initiative to learn.  She taught me how to sing a song once, and I got it right away.  I thought that I was her favorite.  She was my favorite too even if I didn’t know how to read then.  I only got to spend two-days in nursery then my mom sent me to Cabanatuan.  From nursery, they enrolled me straight to grade one.  I was the only one who didn’t know how to read.  But I was intelligent.  My aunt only spent one afternoon teaching me how to read and I got it right away.  I would then read all the komiks around the house that my lola bought for her to read in her spare time.  My teacher in grade one only taught me once how to syllabicate Filipino words and I got it right away, too.  I was never taught how to read English.  My Tatay (grandfather, my mom’s side) asked me to read the heading on the cover of a comic book that said “Holiday” and I read it in Filipino, I said, “HO-LI-DA-AY” and he laughed at me and told me “HA-LI-DEY”.  I realized that the English words were different from Filipino words and that they should be read differently as well.  I then knew that I should be on the watch-out for English and Filipino words and be careful not to misread them.  It was that simple.  I learned English and it was my second language but I mastered it better than most people my age that time.   My formative years were confusing for me though.  I went back and forth to my grandparents’, my aunt’s, back to my parents’ house and the cycle just went on and on.  Although I kept bouncing from one place to another, I knew that my parents’ house was where I should really be.  But whenever I would stay at my parents’, they would always manage to hurt me and disappoint me and so I would wish I was with my aunt or grandparents instead.  But when I was with my aunt or grandparents, I would miss my parents so I would want to go home and so again, the cycle goes on.  I drifted from one place to another, no direction.  No single place that I could call home but my imagination.  I would create in my head my own world.  This world changed from time to time whenever it helped alleviate the fear, the pain, I was experiencing each time.  And so my world was never fixed.  It was adapting to me instead of me adapting to it.  For me it was real up to the point that I couldn’t distinguish anymore which was fantasy and which was real.  My only distinguishing characteristic was if it felt bad, it was real and if it felt good and nice, it wasn’t real.  True enough that when I was growing up, yes, I wanted to win approval from a lot of people.  I was an approval-whore.  I wanted to be the best in all my subjects (although, this didn’t happen always).  Whenever I heard the other teachers told about how good other students were, I would want to fill that student’s shoe because I wanted the same approval.  Suffice to say, subconsciously, I carried it in me until today.  And I need to put it to stop.

Reconciling the pieces of myself was harder than I expected.  I thought I was strong.  I thought that I had no breaking point.  I thought that I could make myself invincible.  But I wasn’t any longer when suddenly my world stopped moving and I was forced to question the purpose of my existence - to question my place in this world.  I just had to stop doing and question my way of living.  At many points in my life, I thought that I had found what I wanted.  First, when I worked for ABS-CBN.  It was prestigious working there but not the payroll for sure.  I wanted more money and so I resigned and got a job at a new company.  I got more money but I was happier at ABS-CBN.  I went back to ABS-CBN.  Then I resigned again because I wanted more money.  But I was happier with what I was doing at ABS-CBN, still.  And so I resigned and went back to ABS.  Guess what?  I resigned again.  I didn’t know why.  I couldn’t remember why.  I resigned to be in the theatre.  So that was what I did for a while.  I also taught workshops in a talent agency.  Then I became a mad-scientist.  I did that too, for a while with my theatre projects.  I fell in-love with the theatre and I decided to take my MA in Theatre Arts at PNU but they required education units.  I lasted taking education units for a semester and then I stopped since I told myself that I should just take it in UP where there wasn’t any prerequisite and there I went – I took a semester of MA in Theatre Arts in UP but I didn’t finish it.  So far, the list of my life is just a long list of unfinished businesses.  Until finally, I got involved with events people and they liked my work on a consultancy basis.  So I pursued it.  I was doing theatre, I was a mad-scientist, I was doing events too until I finally decided to work full-time for a company but then things got complicated (that’s another story), so I resigned. I formed my own company to compete with them.  I was (still am too) a theatre actor, a mad-scientist, a workshop instructor and an entrepreneur.  I loved being a theatre actor but it made me question my future with that kind of profession particularly if I wanted to help my family and be financially stable.  I loved being a mad-scientist but I questioned the genuineness of the leadership in the organization.  I liked being an entrepreneur.  It might have given me headaches but I wanted to pursue it because of money but it wasn’t easy worrying about its capitalization.  Until finally, I realized that there was only one constant in all of them that I never stopped loving – teaching.  It led me to continuing my education units’ studies, which I just recently did and finished too.  As a theatre actor, I got to teach my co-actors and give them advices regarding their technique.  As a mad scientist, I got to teach students in different schools.  As a workshop instructor, obviously, I got to teach again but this time with a wider range of age group – literally from three years old to sixty years old.  As an entrepreneur, I got to teach my co-workers about how an event should be planned, organized, executed, and evaluated.  Teaching and sharing what I know to people gave me a deep sense of satisfaction.  The idea that people were listening to me made me feel that I somehow belonged.  I was never really listened to inside my family.  So I guess teaching was my one way of filling that void.  People listened to me and I mattered.

Motives and desires are important to identify what you really want to do and why you really want to do it.  Tracing back from my childhood to understand my psyche more helps me understand why I do things and why I make certain choices.  It wouldn’t matter to some people really.  Some people would just probably think that it’s psychobabble and that what would really matter is just to look and move forward.  For me though, how do you really move forward without really knowing where you come from?  Or what are you moving forward from?  Some would say to just accept what ever it is right now and go with the flow.  But then again, how would you accept something if you don’t know what it is?  How do you go with the flow if you don’t know what your vessel is?  Often times we are presented with gifts and we hope that when open that gift we’d like what’s inside it. But when we’ve opened it and found out that it wasn’t really what we expected, we get disappointed.  But in time, we grow fonder of that gift and then we learn to like it.  We learn to genuinely accept it despite its flaws.  I think as humans, we try to shake off whatever flaws we have or what flaws others may perceive we have.  We try to blend in and fit in to become that social image our society expects us to be.  So in the process of trimming ourselves, or accessorizing ourselves with the demands of the society, we whittle away, or we become so patched up, we’re near to becoming somebody else, or worse, we hardly become recognizable even to ourselves.

Now in my quest of examining my motives and desires, I have found out that some of them weren’t properly founded on proper motives.  I have desired all along the wrong things such as approval, and acceptance.  I didn’t even know that it was what was driving me all along.  I am just glad that it’s clearer to me now.  It is clear to me that I didn’t have a center, an inner compass that would guide me properly.  I found out that I jumped from one place to another without full awareness of why I jumped so.  I, too, was in a hurry to be successful.  As the youngest in the family and the foreseen breadwinner, there was a lot of pressure in my back and in my shoulders.  I hurried to get to sail to another part of the ocean but I didn’t understand the sailor, much less the sail and the boat and I was lost.  Not to mention, I forgot my compass and I just let the wind blew me in different directions. 

But now, I’m sailing back home.  And I know that in time, I’ll get there.  I just need to find pieces of myself along the way back to become whole when I get there hoping that when I sail back again, I’m whole and I have His compass.

A Long Time Ago

I have always wanted to blog and the last time I did my blogging was September 2008.  Geez, I'm hoping that as I try to turn my life around positively that I'd have more time or discipline to get to this.  I know that it'll help me sharpen my mind and clarify my thoughts and I can't wait to start the next blog after this.