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I never planned to become a writer.
I spent most of yesterday writing about my mom across all the sites… Mother’s Day pieces, one after another.
The 30-minute study rule she had.
The OPM songs that remind me of her.
Even the animal kingdom moms piece had me thinking about her in weird, sideways ways I didn’t expect.
And after all of that, after the emotional exercise of putting her into words again and again, I kept circling back to this one quiet thought that wouldn’t leave me alone.
Writing saved me after she died.
I was 18 when I lost her.
Completely unprepared, which is probably the only way anyone loses a parent at that age.
I had no framework for grief, no language for it.
So instead of processing it like a functional human being, I wrote. Badly, at first.
Embarisingly badly, if I’m honest.
Run-on sentences that went nowhere, dramatic metaphors that made zero sense, journal entries that were basically just feelings with punctuation slapped on top.
But something was quietly happening underneath all that bad writing.
I was learning to pay attention differently.
To notice things I would’ve walked right past before.
The way silence sounds in a house after someone’s gone.
The small, almost invisible things people do to hold themselves together when they’re falling apart.
Grief cracked something open in me… and what came through that crack, slowly and messily, was a writer.
I’m 47 now. Twenty-nine years later and I’m still writing about her, clearly.
On a different note, also over on filipinowriters.com this week, I published a piece about Google’s March 2026 Core Update and what it means for Filipino writers and content creators running their own sites.
The short version: nearly 80% of top-three search results shifted positions, and almost one in four pages that were ranking in the top 10 fell completely out of the top 100. That is not a minor adjustment. That is Google flipping the entire table.
The hopeful part, though… the update appears to favor sites that genuinely own their lane. Specialist publishers, niche sites with real depth, established voices with consistent output all seem to have held their ground or gained.
Which, when you think about it, sounds exactly like what good writing has always required.
Know your subject.
Write it honestly.
Show up consistently.
My mom had no idea what SEO was. But she believed deeply that if you were going to do something, you did it properly or you didn’t bother at all. Turns out Google agrees with her.
