A few days after receiving the 2024 STI National Alumni Distinguished Award, I found myself sitting with a cup of coffee, still trying to understand what had happened.
It felt surreal.
The award carried a weight I did not expect. Part of it came from #OneChildOnePiece, a community initiative I co-founded from the belief that even a small act of giving can reach someone who needs it.
It helped me pass the screening, but it also made me pause.
Until then, I had never really considered myself successful.
I knew I was doing okay. I was working, growing, and finding my way through life. That same year, my work was beginning to move forward in ways I had hoped for. Still, success had always meant something more to me than having a good job or becoming rich.
Success, to me, was having the capacity to influence good.
It was being able to leave something behind that mattered. It was knowing that the life I was building could reach beyond my own needs and somehow become useful to someone else.
So I sat there with my coffee and looked back.
I thought about college.
I thought about the days when I had only one peso left in my pocket and still had to get to school. I walked three kilometers going there and three kilometers back because there was no other choice.
Six kilometers.
At that age, I did not have the words to make that sound admirable. I was simply trying to make it through the day. I remember seeing classmates enjoying their own college life—having the things I could not always have, moving through days that seemed lighter than mine.
Comparison could have hardened me.
Instead, it taught me to keep my eyes on my own path.
Someone else’s ease did not make my journey any less meaningful. Having less did not mean I had less to become. I learned to keep going, even when the distance felt longer for me.
That was the person I remembered while holding that coffee.
The one who walked because he had to.
The one who kept showing up.
The one who stayed optimistic, even before there was much proof that things would work out.
I wish I could sit across from him for a while.
I would not tell him that everything would become easy. Life did not promise that, and it still does not. There would be difficult seasons, more things to learn, and moments that would ask him to begin again.
But I would tell him to remain grounded.
I would tell him that the distance he was walking was leading somewhere. Every day he chose to continue was shaping his fortitude, his discipline, his patience, and the kind of perseverance that would carry him farther than he knew.
The award did not suddenly make me successful.
It gave me confidence. It gave me a little more merit to hold onto. It gave me proof that the things I cared about had value. More than anything, it allowed me to look at my life with greater reverence.
Perhaps success had been happening in small ways long before I knew how to call it by name.
In every kilometer I walked.
In every moment I chose not to compare.
In every chance I had to create good.
In every difficult day I still met with hope.
The coffee that day was bittersweet.
And I loved it.
Because it tasted like my life—complex, at times difficult, never perfectly steady, but entirely mine.
I am still walking. I still have more to build, more to give, and more to learn.
But I can finally say this to the part of me that kept going: I am here because I kept going.
And I will keep moving forward—with gratitude, with purpose, and with the same courage that refused to let the distance defeat me.