The good part about any conversation with my friend Cedie Duller, is that it is often the perfect balance between chill and insightful. As a screenwriter and director, Cedie has experience and insight especially when it comes to mental health that I know can be of value especially to young adults. In this episode of Burning Questions, he and I sat for a quick drink and talked about life as an OFW, balancing career and passion, navigating situationships, choosing between love or career, and even our favorite movies.

So every year instead of coming up with new years resolutions I come up with a hashtag I use as a guide for the year. I do this because it’s easier to make decisions this way.

This year my hashtag was #Thrive2023. I wanted this year to be the year of rewarding myself after a really taxing 2022. Of course this year had its set of challenges, and #Thrive2023 really had to test my emotional and mental endurance. I wanted to share with all of you 4 lessons that #Thrive2023 has taught me.

I have wanted Shaila Rebortera to be on Wildlights ever since I concepted this podcast in my mind. We have been friends for over a decade and witnessing her journey from when we were young until the beauty queen she is now always leaves me inspired and I’m sure you will find it the same as well. With the challenges she has faced this year on top of her recent announcement of her daughter Amelia, her courage to have come on and talk about these experiences has been invaluable. Our conversation takes us way back to our high school years, her past relationships, her recent posts on abuse, the story of her daughter’s birth, and how motherhood has ultimately changed her worldview.

My conversation with Jam Buynay was surprisingly insightful. You see she grew up in the Philippines and Thailand and so I had so much fun asking her about growing up as a third culture kid, her family background, her work both in communications and as a social media content creator, and even her being an introvert. However perhaps what struck me most about our conversation is how values of family and respect for others collide in her experience as a Filipina in Thailand.

Snow Halud has been my friend since 2013 and one thing I love about her is that she is and has always been unafraid of taking risks and adventures. One of the most freespirited people I know, she has been working for Qatar Airways and has traveled parts of the world and has met tons of people but what strikes me most about Snow is that she is not afraid, but EAGER to experience and embrace the thing most of us fear the most: change.

One thing I love about talking about love, is that whatever age, gender, or race you identify as, you have an idea of what it is. Imagine as a child you had an idea of what it means to be in love, and today as an adult you probably have made the distinction of what real love and fake love looks like! This is the reason why I brought in my uni philosophy professor, Ma’am Duane Allyson Pancho, to join me in talking about the vastness of this concept of love, and to paint a picture of what it looks like, and what it’s not especially in the context of our personal relationships. Welcome to Wildlights!

I have known Ryan Banks for quite some time now, and I can say is that he’s probably the easiest person to get to know and to befriend. He also happens to be an architect and designer from Cebu now based here in Dubai since 2007, with features from Filipino magazines Ilustrado and Expat Media, noting his work for renowned brands such as Google, Microsoft, and most recently, Cartier. What fascinated me about our conversation? It’s that our friendships and relationships are perhaps the most important thing to take care of even when we try to grow our professional careers.

In this episode, I sit down with Gwyneth Vasquez who is the valedictorian of Ateneo de Davao University Batch of 2023. Last June, Gwen's commencement speech trended on Tiktok and Facebook, which allowed many to think and be aware of the privilege we share as she narrated her fieldwork and friendship with Weweng, who hails from the indigenous community of the Tagakolu in Malita, Southern Mindanao.

Our conversation also touched on her pre fieldwork and post fieldwork experiences, with the overarching question we tried to answer is how to choose which battles to pick, and how to ensure that we are able to fight these battles with enough sanity as the youth.