Last year rocked my world.

My dad had a medical emergency while living in the Philippines and had ongoing health issues throughout the year…as in had-a-medical-emergency-and-ongoing-health-issues-and-then-moved-back-to-Canada-and-lived-with-me-and-my-partner-for-6-months kind of a situation.

A few months later, my mom almost died…as in, had-a-medical-emergency-abroad-and-couldn’t-breathe-on-the-plane-home-and-had-to-be-rushed-to-the-hospital-upon-landing-and-had-to-stay-there-for-weeks kind of almost died.

So yeah, last year rocked my world.

Why am I sharing this with you all?

I spent most of this past November in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Sto:lo, Sts’ailes, Semá:th, Mathxwí, Kwantlen, Sq’éwlets, Katzie, and Leq’á:mel peoples. I was there because Living Hyphen was asked to facilitate a series of writing circles in the federal prison system. We wrote and shared stories with 60 incarcerated men from Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities exploring our heritage, our ideas of home(s), and what it means to live in between cultures.

On my second day, one of the men – we’ll call him Mark – came in and right as he sat down, he told me quite gruffly that he struggles with reading and writing and that he has "some kind of disability".

"Is that going to be a problem?" he asked me sharply.

In these times of fierce division and never-ending destruction, the work of building intentional spaces of care and belonging isn’t just important, it is vitally urgent. And I remind myself that the work that we do at Living Hyphen – of cultivating and fostering a culture of courageous and tender storytelling amongst racialized communities – is revolutionary work.

At Living Hyphen, we approach storytelling as a connection both to ourselves and to others. We approach storytelling as a pathway to healing. We approach storytelling as a key to unlocking just and equitable futures.

That’s why over the last few years, we have been partnering with school boards across Ontario, with settlement agencies across the country, and with cultural institutions across North America to train educators, settlement workers, and frontline staff to centre storytelling in their work in ways that are decolonial, intersectional, anti-oppressive, and most importantly, rooted in care.

I am struggling to find the words to capture the profound grief and the seething rage I feel about the tragedy that occurred at the Lapu Lapu Festival, while also trying to hold the immense complexity that I know underlies this act of violence. I weep with my Filipino/a/x community in K'emk'emeláy̓/Vancouver and all across the diaspora and homeland whose families have been broken and whose sense of safety has been seriously shattered. I weep for the loss of precious life, the loss of dreams, the loss of futures, the loss of possibilities.