Hi, I'm Lala.

Honestly, I still ask the same question. I am not glamorous. I do not have a fancy office. I did not come from a famous family. For a long time the voice in my head said, "Who are you to even speak here?" Then I learned something simple. Information is free. Anyone can Google a tutorial. What people are actually starving for is someone real. Someone who tells the truth and answers messages like there is a tired human on the other side of the screen. That is the whole thing. Genuine content and kindness. No secret recipe.

I am not clever enough to have built this on my own, and I stopped pretending I was. The words, the story, the small audience, the strength to show up on sick days, all of it was given to me by God. I just try to take care of it honestly instead of performing it.

We were a family of eight. Two girls and five boys. We were very poor back then. My mama was a street vendor. She sold cooked food so we could eat. My papa was a security guard. He guarded a school so we could go to school. By 2010, no one in our family had graduated yet. I was a government scholar studying Computer Engineering. I tutored Korean students for five thousand pesos a month. I was a student assistant for three thousand more. The government paid my tuition. I worked for everything else.

Not every family on our street made it out. I still think about the ones just as poor as us whose children never got to finish. I do not know why mine did and theirs did not, and I have stopped trying to sound like I do. What I know is what happened in my house. I graduated in 2011. Then my brother. Then my sister. Now we are helping the youngest finish. For years I was sure God had forgotten us. He had not.

It is scary to say out loud, but yes. I was born with a blood condition called hereditary spherocytosis. My skin was yellow for years. I no longer have a spleen or a gall bladder. My spine is weak. My brain is prone to bleed. I get sick easily. This is not a story about getting better. I am not fixed. The brain still bleeds. I still get sick. I am not writing this from the safe side of it. I am writing from inside it.

There are days the fear is loud. "You will always be the sick one. Your body will fail you again." I will not pretend the pain is small. But the sickness does not get to say who I am. A long time ago a man named Jesus let Himself be broken on purpose, for people who could not save themselves. I am one of those people. That is why I can say I am held even on the days my body is not holding. There is a kind of joy in me that the pain cannot reach. I did not manufacture it, so I cannot lose it.

No. Not even close. For the first twenty years of my life I was bitter and angry with God. The voice in my head asked, "Did God make a mistake when He created me? Am I just a mistake?" I grew up poor, yellow, and weak, and I blamed Him for all of it. People assume a faith like mine is just what desperate people reach for. And I was desperate, I will give them that. But desperation did not invent the God who met me in it. I did not climb my way back up to God. I was too angry and too tired to climb. He came down into the dark and found me there. My grip on Him kept slipping for twenty years. His grip on me never once did.

AJ is my husband. He loved me when I was sick and yellow. He was already with me before the surgery, when my skin was yellow, when my eyes were yellow, when my body was the thing I was most ashamed of. For years I kept a private list of reasons no one would ever stay. He never asked to see it. He just stayed. A man chose me when I had nothing to offer and every reason to walk away. I had heard my whole life about a love you do not have to earn, and I always thought it was a nice idea meant for other people. AJ is the one who made me believe it was real. He stayed, and somewhere in his staying I finally started to see that Someone had been staying with me all along.

What I do now is content marketing. I help a US-based team tell their story online. The writing, the social media, and the behind-the-scenes work that keeps it all organized. I did not start there. My first real job was in a call center doing technical support, including for Google. In March 2015 my health made me give it up. So I started over from nothing and began freelancing, and my first gig online was email support. My body could not keep up with heavier work, so I taught myself digital marketing, because it was something I could still do sitting down on a bad day. I got certified as a Facebook Blueprint Creative Strategist and a Google Educator. One skill, one client, one certificate at a time.

These days my hours are flexible, which is its own kind of mercy, because my body does not always let me work on a fixed schedule. I have done this for years and I still wake up afraid. Will today be too much? Will my body hold up? So before I start, before I open my emails, I give the day away. "Lord, you take care of today." That is the whole prayer. Then peace I cannot explain shows up. I am not telling you to hustle harder. I am telling you to put it down. I do my work well because I care about the person on the other end, not because I am still trying to prove I am enough.

I am the founder of a community of thousands of Filipino freelancers. It started in one of the hardest seasons of my own life. I could not see myself clearly yet, but I could see other tired people who needed someone one step ahead of them. So the pattern became simple. Follow someone ahead of you, and help someone behind you. I teach people how to start working from home, and I walk with them as they grow. I learned something I did not expect along the way. Joy you keep to yourself quietly dies. Joy you give away grows. I am not a guru on a stage. I am just a little further down the same road, turning around to say, keep coming.

People ask me this with suspicion, like there has to be a catch. I understand it. The online world is full of people trying to sell you something. So here is the plain answer. It was given to me for free first. The strength, the second chance, the people who taught me when I had nothing and could not pay them back. I did not earn the seeds, so I am not going to hoard the harvest. The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit, and somebody watered mine long before I could ever return the favor. This is just me passing the bucket down the line.

Slowly. And not on my own strength. There was a season I was broke, broken, and lost. No money, no work, a tumor in my brain, a spine that felt sixty years old. The voice said, "Everyone is moving forward. You are behind. You will never catch up." I did not get up all at once. I got up one small thing at a time. Open the laptop. Send the message. Drink the water. Say the prayer, even if it is only one sentence long. I am not late. I am being formed. The same hands that hold me now were holding me when I had nothing to show for a day except getting through it. Patience is not weakness. It is trusting there will still be a hand there tomorrow.

Because my time here is not guaranteed, and I have made my peace with that. I live in a body that keeps reminding me how fragile life is. After one hard hospital season, I spent a whole day with my siblings and my nieces, and something quiet settled in me. I do not want to waste the life I was given. I want to leave true words for the people I love while I still have the time to write them. Not just the good parts. The real thing. The bitterness that healed. The fear that got smaller. The One who stayed when everyone, including me, had reasons to leave. If these words outlast me, I do not want them pointing back at me. That is the whole reason this page exists.

I mean I gave up trying to be flawless a long time ago. I will never be the perfect freelancer, the perfect wife, or the perfect Christian. My faith itself rises and falls. Some mornings I believe easily. Some mornings I do not. But where I stand with God does not swing with my mood, because it was never built on my performance in the first place. So I stopped measuring myself by perfection and started measuring by direction. Am I still facing the right way? Am I taking the next honest step? That is enough for me now. Not perfection. Direction.

Not me, honestly. If you walk away remembering Lala, I have missed the whole point. Here is the truth I would actually want you to keep. I was poor. I was sick. I was bitter. I was lost. And somehow I was carried the whole way, by a love I did not earn and could not lose. I am not anyone special. I am just a person who was held when she had nothing left to hold on to. We are each a small dot in a vast universe, and I have learned that is not a thing to fear. It means I was never the one holding it all together. So if you take one thing from this page, take this. You are not too broken, too far behind, or too ordinary to be held. I know, because I was all three.