Renato Gandia

Between erasure and indifference, I write as a queer, immigrant, second-language speaker—because I must.

Some mornings the cursor blinks like a small, impatient metronome—daring me to start, to speak, to be worth reading. A tiny pulse on a blank screen, steady and patient, asking the same question over and over: Who are you writing this for?

There are days I don’t have a good answer.

Not when the submission goes unread.

Not when the editor doesn’t reply.

Not when the story I bled for vanishes into a digital void without even a whisper of acknowledgment.

But I write anyway.

There’s a specific kind of silence that comes with writing in a second language.

I write because the voices in my head don’t leave until I let them speak. I write because sometimes I don’t know what I think or feel until I see it on the page. I write because it’s the only way I know how to gather the fragments of myself and shape them into something that might, one day, mean something to someone else.

There’s a specific kind of silence that comes with writing in a second language. English is not where I was born, but it’s the room I now live in. I decorate it with care. I dust its corners. I rearrange the furniture often. But still, it’s not the house where my first memories were made.

And yet I choose it—over and over. Not because it’s easier, but because it reaches. Because it lets me say this is me to people who will never know the streets of Calauag or the quiet neighborhoods in Cavite where I first learned to imagine a life beyond what I saw.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the rising tide of book bans across North America—how entire identities are being legislated out of libraries, classrooms, and conversation. It’s not a gentle erasure. It’s deliberate, loud, and politically sanctioned.

Here in Alberta, the volume is rising too. There’s a co-ordinated, aggressive push to silence queer and trans youth, to undermine the legitimacy of inclusive education, to treat visibility itself as a threat. These are not abstract policies—they are real restrictions shaping real lives. When the government debates whether queer existence is appropriate for schools, what they’re really saying is that people like me, like us, should be hidden—erased before we can even speak.

So writing, especially as a queer immigrant, becomes more than an act of self-expression. It becomes survival. It becomes testimony. It becomes a way of insisting: I was here. I am here. You do not get to write me out.

When I was a boy, I wrote prayers on the back of my notebooks. Little pleas I didn’t have the courage to say aloud: Make me normal. Make me disappear. Make me someone who doesn’t feel this way. But in writing, I made room for the parts of me that didn’t fit anywhere else.

Now, I write love stories between men who are afraid to speak. I write mothers who forgive too slowly, fathers who disappear and return bearing silence. I write immigrants who smell of garlic and grief, who carry entire countries in their pockets. I write characters like me—and not like me—because I want to understand them, and through them, understand myself.

When I was a boy, I wrote prayers on the back of my notebooks. Little pleas I didn’t have the courage to say aloud: Make me normal. Make me disappear.

There are days it feels like shouting into a canyon. Days when my own voice echoes back at me and I wonder if it’s all for nothing.

But then someone messages me—I saw myself in this.

Or they tell me they cried.

Or they say they never thought a Filipino story could feel so familiar.

And I remember: it only takes one reader. One listener.

And sometimes, that listener is me.

I don’t write for applause. I don’t write for virality or validation—though I won’t lie, those things feel good when they come. I write because not writing would be worse. Because silence, for someone like me, has never been neutral—it’s been a punishment, a consequence, a shield, a scar.

So, I write. Even when it feels like no one’s listening.

Because writing is how I learned to stay alive—and maybe, just maybe, someone out there is waiting for the exact words I haven’t written yet.

And until they arrive—I’ll keep showing up.