Walking Kapwa: Questions Are More Transformative Than Answers

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Editor's Note: I met Tala over a decade ago through The Mix, the Teen Center at the San Francisco Public Library. We've remained close over this whole time, and I have been witness to an Tala's incredible winding path that has led Tala to UC Berkeley.

Tala asked me if Queerly Complex would be able to host them Fellow this summer in collaboration with Filipino Mental Health Initiative. Tala was applying to the Peter E. Haas Public Service Leaders Program, and Tala need a workplace site that intersects mental health, arts, and community. I said, "Yes, and I have a project that I'd love for you to support: Chambers of the Heart."

Tala and I worked together over the course of three months on a project called Walking Kapwa, which was a storytelling walking tour through memory, the Mission, and SOMA inspired by the themes in Chambers of the Heart and that ended at Filipino Mental Health Initiative. It required a lot of introspection, walking, writing, and rewriting. And it resulted in a deeply transformative experience, one where We All more deeply witnessed ourselves, one another, and the Cosmic Mysteries. It was, in other words, Queerly Complex.

What follows is Tala Justo's writing from our work together. Three are the stories shared on Walking Kapwa. One is written in response to reflection on the experience. And the opening and closing bring it all together.

Tala will continue with Queerly Complex and Filipino Mental Health Initiative in the Fall 2026 and Spring 2027. Tala will be supporting Storytelling Circles between Filipino Mental Health Initiative interns and Artist-in-Residence Jethro Patalinghug (October 2026) and Beth Trifilo (February 2027). Tala will be writing about these experiences too with posts going up in December 2026, and April 2027.

Introduction: Walking Kapwa

I thought I knew the stories that made the people I loved who they were. I was wrong.

My name is Tala Justo. I am a Fellow in the Peter E. Haas Public Service Leaders Program and a former College Corps Fellow at UC Berkeley. This summer, I partnered with Queerly Complex and the Filipino Mental Health Initiative, where my capstone project was Walking Kapwa, a walking meditation on home, choice, belonging, and connection.

For more than two months, Jason Wyman guided me through a process of writing and reflection. I created a map, identified places that carried personal meaning, explored the Chambers of the Heart catalog, gathered quotations that resonated with the questions I was asking, and wrote my way through stories I had never fully examined before.

I began the summer believing that reflection would help me find answers. Instead, it changed the kinds of questions I knew to ask. The stories that follow began as responses to prompts such as: How do we witness one another fully? How do we honor the sacrifices of those who came before us while still becoming our own person? Who teaches us how to dream? By the end of the summer, I realized these were no longer questions to answer, but questions I would continue living.

Question: How do we witness each other fully?

I have come to believe that witnessing another person fully requires seeing more than who they are now. It asks us to imagine the unseen worlds that shaped them long before we ever knew their name. The songs that filled their childhood. The histories they inherited without consent. The places they dreamed of before they ever saw them. The losses that rearranged them. 

How often do we mistake the present for the whole story? How often do we believe we know someone because we know where they work, what they study, or how they introduce themselves?

I wonder if the opposite is true. Perhaps every person is mostly invisible. 

When people meet me today, they see a UC Berkeley student, a community leader, someone interested in mental health and social welfare. They do not see the generations of history standing behind me. They do not see American colonialism teaching my grandparents and parents to imagine America as possibility. They do not see a Filipino child learning English before fully understanding their own country’s relationship to the language. They do not see the immigrant family crossing an ocean because somewhere else had become synonymous with hope.

Nor can they see the versions of myself that no longer exist. The teenager who believed prestige would save them. The dancer who thought movement could solve loneliness. The twenty-two year old psychiatric patient convinced that life had already ended. The community college student who spent years trying to prove that they deserved to occupy spaces they had admired from afar.

None of those people disappeared. They accumulated.

Isn’t that true of all of us? How many invisible lives does each person carry into a room? How many childhood dreams, inherited fears, family expectations, migrations, heartbreaks, illnesses, recoveries and acts of survival remain hidden beneath an ordinary introduction? 

We often speak of identity as if it were something stable, something we possess. But perhaps identity is sedimentary. Every place we have loved, every language we have spoken, every person who believed in us, every injustice we survived, every community that welcomed us leaves another layer behind.

To witness another person fully, then, is simply to look carefully. It is to imagine generously. It is to resist reducing people to the chapter in which we happen to meet them. It is to ask not only, “Who are you?” but “what histories made you possible?”

Perhaps that is what kapwa asks of us. Not simply to recognize ourselves in another person, but to approach them with the humility of knowing that we have encountered only the smallest visible portion of a life whose deepest truths remain unseen.

Question: How do you honor the sacrifices your family made for you while still becoming your own person?

How do you know whether the life you’re living is your own? Can gratitude become another form of obligation? My parents immigrated from the Philippines believing that America would offer their children opportunities they never had. Like many immigrant families, sacrifice became so ordinary in our household that I almost stopped seeing it. Long workdays, financial insecurity, and the decision to put your children’s future ahead of your own become part of daily life. I grew up believing that the only appropriate response to that sacrifice was success. Has anyone ever felt that pressure? The feeling that your achievements are no longer yours, but something you owe to the people who came before you?

For years, I chased that idea of success. I became an honors student at community college, presented research at Stanford, and dreamed of prestigious universities because I thought that was the best way to repay my parents. But, at twenty-two, I experienced psychosis and was hospitalized several times. Suddenly the future I had been building disappeared. I wasn’t wondering whether I would attend graduate school anymore. I was wondering whether I would finish college at all. What happens when your life no longer follows the script your family sacrificed for? Recovery forced me to ask a different question: what if honoring my family was never about prestige? What if it was about carrying forward the resilience that allowed them to leave everything they knew for another country?

Today, I think about my parents whenever I facilitate a mental health discussion or help create spaces where queer Filipinxs can belong. The life I am building looks different from the one I imagined as a child, but it is still rooted in their sacrifices. They crossed an ocean so that I could have choices. One of those choices was the freedom to become someone they could have never predicted. Perhaps honoring our families does not mean living the exact life they envisioned for us. Perhaps it means taking the courage they modeled for us and using it to imagine a future of our own. I’m curious what all of you think. Have you ever realized that becoming your own person might actually be the greatest way to honor the people who have made your life possible?

Question: Who teaches you how to dream?

What kind of dreaming becomes possible when we stop imagining ourselves as separate? 

I once believed dreams belonged entirely to the individual. They felt as natural as breathing, arising somewhere inside my own imagination. If I studied hard enough and wanted something badly enough, I believed I could build the future I envisioned. Success seemed like a matter of determination. The future was something individuals earned for themselves.

Growing up in the Philippines, America already lived in my imagination long before I ever arrived there. What kinds of stories begin shaping our imaginations long before we realize they are doing so? I knew it through balikbayan boxes, movies, relatives’ stories, and the internet. Success meant immigration. It meant attending prestigious universities, speaking English without an accent, and becoming independent. Those dreams felt deeply personal, yet they were older than I was. American colonization, globalization, and the colonial mentality they produced had already shaped what possibility looked like for generations of Filipinos. The “good life” always seemed to exist somewhere else. Looking back, I realize I was not simply choosing my dreams. Many of them had already been chosen for me.

As I grew older, however, I began paying attention to the dreams my parents were living everyday. My mother spent what often felt like sixteen-hour days running our family business while carrying the invisible work of caring for our household. Back then, I understood those long days as sacrifice. What if dreaming sometimes looks like responsibility? Now I recognize them as acts of imagination. Every exhausting day was an act of faith in a future that did not yet exist but was still worth working toward. My father, navigating life as an English language learner after immigrating to the United States, once asked for a bilingual therapist. At the time, I did not fully understand why that mattered. Now I see it as another kind of dream. He refused the assumption that healing required abandoning his language or a part of himself. He imagined that dignity could exist alongside immigration rather than only through assimilation. Neither of my parents ever described these choices as dreams. They called them responsibilities. But perhaps responsibilities are simply dreams carried for so long that they begin to look ordinary. Which dreams do we overlook because they have become ordinary?

Learning about kapwa gave me another way of understanding what my parents had been teaching me all along. What changes when we understand dreams as something we inherit and share? If our lives are constituted through one another, then our dreams cannot belong to individuals alone. My education, my opportunities, and even the questions I ask about the future are extensions of my family’s imagination before they are products of my own. Instead of asking what I want to accomplish, I find myself asking: whose dreams make our own futures imaginable? What kinds of futures become imaginable when we dream together instead of apart? My parents’ sacrifices do not end with them. They continue through me, just as my dreams will one day become part of someone else’s inheritance. I used to ask who teaches me how to dream. Now I ask, what kind of dreaming becomes possible when we stop imagining ourselves as separate?

Question: What is “choice” and who has the power to choose? 

On Saturday, July 18, 2026, during the 465 Collective's open gallery hours for Chambers of the Heart, Zack and Johnny came to browse the exhibit. Instead, they found us gathered in the lounge. Crystal Mason, Alan Tello, Sonia Esteva, Jason Wyman, and I had been sitting together for a while, talking over pizza and letting one conversation drift naturally into the next. I commented that the pizza was phenomenal, and Jason shared that it was from their favorite place for thin-crust pizza.

Zack and Johnny didn't make it into the gallery. Instead, they joined us in circle. At first, we talked about the Academy and our relationships with school, university, and education. I remembered my Sociology of Hope course at UC Berkeley, where my professor consistently referred to the class as "men and women" and misgendered me throughout the semester. At first, I corrected him. As the semester went on, I stopped trying. It delivered the message that I didn't exist.

As we shared stories, I realized that many of us carried similarly complicated relationships with institutions that claimed to produce knowledge while sometimes failing to recognize our own lives. Our queerness and transness shaped not only how we moved through the Academy but also whether we felt seen, believed, or understood within it. That conversation naturally led us to another question: who gets to define who we are?

From there, our conversation shifted to the idea of "casual choice." Both Zack and Johnny expressed frustration at people reacting with anger toward queer folks for "casually choosing" who to be: to identify as asexual and later identify differently, to experiment with femme clothing before returning to masculinity, or to be trans and dare to choose. As I listened, I realized the conversation wasn't really about whether queer people make choices. It was about the word casual. That word erased the reflection, uncertainty, and lived experience behind those decisions. It reduced a person's life to something simple when it wasn't.

Before that afternoon, I usually thought about choice as something to evaluate. Was someone's choice right or wrong? Was it responsible? Was it authentic? I assumed the important question was whether someone had made the correct decision.

But in the 465 Collective lounge, I wasn't listening for "right" or "wrong"; I was listening for what choice meant to Zack and Johnny. I realized they weren't asking for permission to make different choices. They were questioning why other people believed they had the authority to decide which parts of another person's life counted as legitimate choices in the first place. The conversation shifted the question for me. Instead of asking, What is the right choice? I found myself asking, Who has the power to define what counts as a choice?

I now find myself listening differently whenever the word choice comes up.

Question: What happens when curiosity reveals that the stories we've been living by are incomplete?

"I already had a life there," said Papa.  

I pause, curious to hear more. I don't look at Papa because I don't want him to feel self-conscious. I wipe the sweat off my forehead and glance at my watch, reminding myself that we must be at FMHI by 3:40pm to be welcomed by Ate Jennifer. Papa repeats himself, "immigrating wasn't my choice." I look up to the sun and squint at it. 

Papa is carrying my backpack. He walks behind me and then taps me on the shoulder and asks if I was okay. Jason and the rest of my family were engaging in a discussion about concepts like pakikipagkapwa - the Filipino practice of meeting another person with the understanding that their life is deeply connected to your own, and I remained quiet. I couldn't tell him that I was reflecting on what he meant when he said he didn't choose America. Only a few days earlier, I had been listening for what the word "choice" meant to other people. Now, I found myself wondering what it meant to my father. For the first time, I wasn't trying to understand his decision. I was trying to understand what the word “choice” meant in his life.

I had made the assumption that he desired the same America I desired. The America where I could ride a bike on the road, go to the public library, take public transportation, be queer, learn languages, be free to imagine a different life. I thought I knew why my family came to America. I believed I already knew my family's immigration story. Because I believed I already knew it, I never asked.

Papa's words stayed with me for the rest of the walk. Instead of giving me an answer, they gave me a question. What kind of life had he left behind? What dreams had he carried before America became part of our family's story? I realized that curiosity was not the absence of knowledge. It was the willingness to admit that the people I loved still carried histories I had never asked them to share.

Walking Kapwa created the conditions for me to ask questions I had never thought to ask. Before this summer, I believed learning happened when someone with expertise explained an idea I didn't yet understand. Walking Kapwa taught me something different. Learning happened while walking beside my family. It happened while listening to Zack and Johnny describe "casual choice." It happened while folding zines together before the walk, our hands busy as our conversation continued. No one stood at the front of the room with the right answers. Instead, we learned by asking one another questions, sharing stories, and allowing our assumptions to be interrupted.

I didn't know learning could happen like this. I thought education belonged to classrooms, lectures, and books. Walking Kapwa taught me that knowledge can also emerge through movement, conversation, making, and community. I left the summer with fewer certainties than I began with, but with a deeper curiosity about the people around me and the histories they carry.

What's Next?

This fall, I'll continue this journey by supporting artist-in-residence Jethro Patalinghug. I don't yet know the conversations we'll have or the stories we'll hear. That's part of what excites me. If Walking Kapwa taught me to become more curious about the stories people carry, I hope this collaboration gives me another opportunity to keep practicing that curiosity.

One question I'm bringing with me is who gets the opportunity to become an artist in the first place. I used to think pursuing art was simply a matter of talent or passion. Now I find myself wondering how capitalism shapes that possibility. Not everyone has the same freedom to decide how to spend their time. Many people spend their lives working to survive, caring for family, or carrying responsibilities that leave little room to create. The opportunity to imagine yourself as an artist is not distributed equally.

Supporting Jethro's work makes me more aware that creative practice is never only about individual expression. It is also shaped by the conditions that make imagination possible. I'm looking forward to learning how storytelling can make those conditions more visible while creating space for people to share experiences that might otherwise go unheard.

I don't expect to leave the fall with all the answers. If Walking Kapwa taught me anything, it's that every meaningful conversation reveals another question worth asking. I'm curious to see what stories emerge in the fall, and how they'll continue to reshape the questions I carry with me.