Chapter 1 — Before Everything Changed

Before the hospitals, the diagnoses, and the scars, there was a child who didn’t yet truly know that she had the right to choose her own dreams.

I was born in the Philippines, one of three children spaced almost perfectly apart.

Two years between each of us.

An older brother, two years older than me.

Me, in the middle.

And a younger brother, two years younger.

We were raised mainly by our grandparents, with a fairly traditional upbringing.

Old-fashioned.

We were expected to respect adults.

To listen.

To be grateful for what we had.

Above all, never to become ungrateful children.

And then, we were expected to succeed.

There was this idea that a child should grow into someone their family could be proud of.

Someone who studied.

Who worked.

Who made the right choices.

And for me, a future already seemed to have been chosen.

I was going to be a doctor.

At that age, I didn’t really ask myself whether that was what I wanted.

When you are a child, the dreams adults have for you can easily become your own. You repeat them whenever someone asks what you want to be when you grow up, until sometimes you forget that you never really chose them in the first place.

So I said it too.

I wanted to become a doctor.

That was the plan.

Then, at eleven years old, in October 2008, I left the Philippines with my two brothers to join our mother in Switzerland.

She was already living there with her partner, the man who would come to occupy the role of a stepfather in our everyday lives, even though it was never really made official.

For the journey, a flight attendant was assigned to accompany us from beginning to end.

For once, I wasn’t really the one holding the reins.

An adult knew where we needed to go, when we had to board, where we were supposed to sit, and what was going to happen next.

I followed.

While still keeping an eye on my brothers.

Had they been served?

Did they have a blanket?

Was everything okay?

Then we landed.

We had arrived in Switzerland.

And with this new country came many firsts.

A new school.

A new language.

A new way of life.

And, gradually, something I perhaps had never really done before:

I began asking myself what I wanted.

That was where my dream of becoming a pastry chef was born.

I wanted to make pastries.

I loved cakes, desserts, sweets—probably just as much imagining myself making them as I enjoyed eating them.

There was something about creating things with my hands that appealed to me.

Taking a few ordinary ingredients and turning them into something beautiful.

And, if I’m being fair, being surrounded by desserts all day seemed like a perfectly reasonable career argument.

For the first time, there was something different about this dream.

It didn’t come from what other people imagined for me.

It came from me.

But having a dream of your own doesn’t mean you immediately have the freedom to follow it.

The path that had been planned for me remained the same.

Primary school.

Cycle d’orientation.

Then collège.

Because collège was supposed to lead to higher education.

And higher education was supposed to lead to medicine.

So I went to collège.

And I tried to stay on that road.

I persisted.

Even when I began to understand that maybe it wasn’t mine.

Because leaving collège didn’t feel like simply changing direction.

It felt like disappointing people.

Like failing.

Perhaps even, somewhere deep inside me, like being ungrateful.

So I kept going.

Until the stress stopped existing only in my mind.

My body began to speak, too.

I developed an ulcer and had to be treated for it.

Eventually, I had to choose.

Keep trying to become the person I was expected to be,

or accept that perhaps that life was never going to be mine.

I left collège.

And I returned to the first dream that had truly belonged to me.

Pastry.

I looked for a place where I could complete a CFC apprenticeship.

I tried to find a company that would allow me to enter the world I had chosen for myself.

But it didn’t work out.

There were no places available.

And sometimes, that is part of growing up too.

Realizing that finding what you want is not enough to make life give it to you.

So once again, I had to choose.

To keep searching.

I enrolled at the École de culture générale.

And when the time came to choose a field of study, I selected healthcare.

This time, no one had told me to do it.

At least, not directly.

Maybe it really was my choice.

Or maybe the way I had been raised since childhood—taking care of those younger than me, helping people who were more vulnerable, making myself useful—had already planted something inside me.

Probably a little of both.

I wasn’t going to become a doctor.

I wasn’t going to become a pastry chef either.

I simply didn’t know yet what I was going to become.

But without realizing it at the time, I had just made a choice that would profoundly shape my life.

I had chosen healthcare.

And soon, taking care of others would no longer be something I had simply been taught to do since childhood.

It would become my profession.