When I was in grad school, everyone talked about how important it was to have good boundaries. At first I thought, boundaries? What are those? I guess that was a sign of how far I was from having any.
In my defense, Asian cultures have a different definition of boundaries than American culture. For example, it’s perfectly acceptable for any Filipino adult to tell you that you’ve gained weight and that look fat now, that you should have a baby, that maybe you look fat because you’re about to have a baby? OK then you’re just fat. This is one of the downsides of having all of those aunts and uncles that aren’t actually related to you.
The original post was written on October 14, 2013. If you would like to read it, you can do so here.
This post was originally written on October 11, 2013, back before arthritis in the hip wasn’t a thing. Ahh, the good ol’ days. Although, in all honesty, I’m way more chill about competition now.I have always been more of a love to win vs hate to lose player. But mostly I was a love to hang out with my friends and eat dinner afterwards kinda gal.
If you’d like to read the original post, you can do so here.
This post was originally written on October 4, 2013. It was inspired by Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly–one of the books that changed my life. I accepted her dear to be vulnerable since it was consistent with the theme of my blog. In the beginning, I was revealing so much about myself that I had masked that people kept commenting on how brave I was. Which really terrified me. But I kept doing it. And now I’m doing it in my new blog post, Neurospicy and Flying.
If you’d like to read the original post, you can access it here.
Since I spent several episodes interviewing Sadie, I thought it would be a nice touch to have her interview me to see what she was curious about, since she was very young while I was writing most of my posts.
As a bonus, I’m including the video we made last night of us singing For Good from Wicked. I’ve been practicing this song in voice lessons for a while and this is probably my best version. But the real reason I’m including it is because I’m helping Sadie to become the Broadway performer and singer/songwriter she is meant to be!
For the longest time, my identity revolved around feeling different. From my friends, my family, my community. It stayed with me probably until my 30’s, when I met my friends from Roanoke. They became the family that I chose. The people who loved me and could make fun of me for all my quirks but in a way that let me know that they accepted me exactly as I was.
One of the things that made me feel so different was growing up Filipino in a small rural town in Virginia. This post was originally written on October 3, 2013. Now I know that lots of Filipinos relish in all of the similarities we share as second generation Americans who share lots of inside jokes about how similar our childhoods were.
One of my missions in life is to help people let their inner rock start come out and sing, gosh darn it! Because I know they want to and I like to help people do what they want to do. Even when they don’t know they want to do it. I would have been a great drug dealer or salesperson. In fact, Amazon should be paying me commission for the number of red light therapy panels I’ve sold–even to physicians! Fortunately, I choose to use my powers of influence for good instead of evil.
This post was originally written on October 2, 2013. To read the full post, click here.
In Sadie the Artist, Part 2, I’ll talk about why I have included Sadie in my mission of promoting my podcast, feature a song that Sadie is working on, and talk about what this song means to her. Again, in listening to her talk so intelligently and with so much wisdom, I’m confident you will appreciate why I think she is a remarkable human being. Here are the lyrics to the song she debuts:
This interview took place a few days ago. The 2 prior podcasts were some of my fondest memories of writing my blog, and I hope you enjoyed them. In the next 3 episodes I ask Sadie to reflect on what her mindset was at that time and in what ways it has changed or remained the same. This podcast focuses on her political aspirations. Because they were interviews, there is no accompanying post. But as a bonus, I open and close the episode with a clip from one of her songs, which still needs to be recorded.
This podcast features an audio interview I did with Sadie on August 4, 2015 as she impressively describes her platform at 10 years of age, as well as why she became interested in politics.
The next podcast series will include interviews with my niece. This one was from a blog post written on November 27, 2014. You can read the blog post here.
