FR DIARIES | Clothed in Belonging: Thrive, not just survive

He learned to shrink before he was able to figure out what he was.

As a boy in a province where everyone knew everyone, he knew early on that his heart did not follow the script. The boys played basketball. He preferred stories. The boys talked about crushes on girls, and the girls giggled over boys. Inside him, he felt something quieter, wider, harder to explain.

Long before he learned the language for it, he already knew he was different. And in a place where difference could become gossip, judgment, or shame, he learned what many children like him learn too early: how to make himself smaller.

But his is not only a story about gender. His  is also a story about poverty, recruitment, ideology, fear, and the long road home. It is a story about a young student who searched for belonging in a movement that promised liberation, only to realize later that belonging built on silence is still another form of captivity.

A war inside his own skin — and outside it

“Growing up, society told me who I was supposed to be before I even got the chance to ask myself,” he says, eyes steady but voice soft. 

Before society’s labels became heavier, there was another chapter. He was just a student from the province chasing a brighter future. Poor, hungry for education, and told that there was a path out through scholarship.

That was how the door opened. He was recruited young. He believed he was fighting for change, for students like him, for the poor, for the marginalized, for a better tomorrow. He wanted to serve. He wanted his life to mean something.

Through his active participation in “programmed” immersions during summer breaks in remote communities, which also happened to be guerrilla zones and NPA armed unit camps, he was eventually drawn deeper into the movement. He was young, idealistic, and convinced that he was serving the people.

That was where, in 2016, he became a candidate party member of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Holding significant tasks and organizational responsibilities pushed him further. 

A year later, he became a full party member of the CPP. The cause gave him purpose, but it also demanded obedience. It gave him a language for injustice, but it also trained him to hide his own questions.

They placed him as a school administrator of a “Lumad” school in Mindanao. He knew the school was established and run by the CPP. It was the reason why he was installed there.

Every day, he signed papers, managed records, and faced young students. “I told myself I was teaching young minds for a better and brighter future ahead,” he recalls. “That’s what kept me going. I wanted them to have choices I didn’t think I had.”

That was what made the work bearable. In the faces of the students, he saw the younger version of himself: poor, hopeful, and looking for a way out.

But the work did not end in the classroom. His role expanded during the 2019 midterm elections, when he served as a Makabayan bloc coordinator. He emphasizes this now with painful clarity: “Serving with Makabayan bloc during the 2019 midterm elections is tantamount to serving the total cause of the Communist Party of the Philippines.”

At the time, he believed he was doing the right thing. He believed he was serving students, the poor, and the people he was taught to call the masses.

But inside that role, he carried two burdens no one saw. One: he was bisexual in a world with almost no safe language for that. Two: he was beginning to question a life that asked him to stop being fully human in order to belong.

The movement spoke often of equality. It had ideological discussions on the emancipation of women, on ending feudal and bourgeois views of love, and on building what it called “proletarian relations of the sexes.” On paper, it sounded progressive. In meetings and political education, it claimed to reject backward ideas and promised a future where people would no longer be judged by old prejudices.

But for LGBTQ+ members like him, much of it felt like lip service.

There were words for liberation, but not always real respect. There were slogans about equality, but jokes about gay men still passed from mouth to mouth. There were lectures about oppression, but silence when the oppression happened inside their own circles. The movement could explain class exploitation in long ideological terms, but it often failed to recognize the quiet violence of making someone feel less human because of whom they loved.

“At school, it was jokes. At the workplace later, it was silence. At home, it was fear,” he says. Fear that his parents would be ashamed. Fear that neighbors would whisper. Fear that the world, and even the cause he served, did not have room for all of him.

So he tried to perform. He tried to be “normal.” He dated who he was expected to date. He laughed at jokes that cut him. He listened to conversations that made people like him sound like problems to be solved, not persons to be loved.

Every day felt like wearing clothes two sizes too small. You can survive that way. But you do not thrive. “I wasn’t afraid of being bisexual,” he admits. “I was afraid of what it would cost me. My family. My future. My place in the world.”

Inside the movement, he learned discipline, sacrifice, and ideological certainty. But he also learned another kind of shrinking. The revolution had words for class, exploitation, oppression, and even the transformation of personal relations. But it did not always have tenderness for the person quietly breaking inside.

That became his first contradiction. He joined a movement that spoke of liberation, but he still did not feel free. So he decided to leave the movement, a decision that was very difficult for him at the time.

The turning: From CPP cadre to a ‘friend rescued’

His change did not start with a speech. It started with a question he finally allowed himself to ask: “What do I actually want for my life, for my family, beyond all these labels?”

For years, he thought belonging meant surrendering himself to something larger: the movement, the cause, the expectations of society, the image of a man he was supposed to become.

But slowly, he realized he wanted peace more than slogans. He wanted to teach and build, not hide. He wanted a life where service did not require secrecy. He wanted a future that did not ask him to disappear into someone else’s idea of struggle.

So he transitioned into becoming an FR—Friends Rescued—aiming for genuine change as he reintegrated into mainstream society.

“I left not because I stopped caring about students or about the poor,” he says. “I left because I finally started caring for the bisexual boy inside me who never got to speak. For the teacher who wanted to build futures, not contribute to destroying them.”

That is what many outside the experience often fail to understand. Leaving the CPP-NPA-NDFP is not always a clean break from compassion. It is not always the death of idealism. For many former rebels, it is the painful realization that love for the people does not have to be expressed through armed struggle, deception, or total submission to the Party.

He did not stop wanting justice. He stopped believing that he had to lose himself to fight for it. He says he did not abandon the poor. He abandoned a path that had begun to consume the very people it claimed to serve.

For him, becoming an FR was not just political reintegration. It was personal reclamation. It was the beginning of learning that peace is not only the absence of war. Sometimes, peace is finally being able to breathe in your own skin.

The house that chose him first

He did not survive alone. He survived because one house decided early: love without conditions.

His mother was the first. She noticed the silence. She did not demand answers about Barangay Litapan or the past. She did not force him to explain every wound before offering comfort.

She simply made space.

“She told me, ‘Anak, dili ka sayop. Gimugna ka sa Ginoo,’” he recalls. [Son, you are not a mistake. God created you.] For someone who spent years fearing rejection, those words became shelter.

His father did not have all the words. But he showed up where it mattered. In ordinary moments that became extraordinary because they said what he needed to hear: you are still my child.He taught his son that a man’s strength is in protecting, not in policing who others love.

Then came the friends. The genuine ones. The kind who do not ask you to explain yourself at the door. The kind who defend you in group chats you are not in. The kind who say, “He’s one of us,” before anyone else can say, “He’s different.”

“Acceptance and belongingness weren’t far from me,” he says, smiling for the first time in the interview. “Because my family built that table, and my friends pulled up a chair.”

For a long time, he thought belonging had to be earned by usefulness, loyalty, silence, or sacrifice. His family and friends taught him otherwise.

Belonging, at its best, is not a reward. It is a home.

Now: Thriving on his own terms

Today, he is not merely surviving. He is building. He found work where his mind matters more than who he loves or what his past was. He found community where peaceful dwelling places and secure homes do exist. He found a life where he can be former urban CPP cadre, FR, bisexual, believer, teacher, son, and friend — all of it, without tearing himself apart.

He still gets judged sometimes. The world has not finished learning. But judgment does not live in his house anymore. “I used to think peace meant everyone agreeing with me,” he says. “Now I know peace is knowing who I am, even when they don’t.

He laughs now. Not the nervous laugh from before. Not the laugh used to survive a cruel joke. Not the laugh of someone trying to pass.

It is the free one. The one that says: “I am not afraid of the days to come.”

“To every Friends Rescued finding your way back: returning is not weakness,” he says. “It is courage. Your story is not over. You are allowed to rebuild. You are allowed to serve without violence. You are allowed to love the people without losing yourself.”

Acceptance and belongingness did not come because the whole world changed. It came because a few people decided their house would be different.

And for one former CPP member who spent years shrinking under society’s judgment and the weight of a movement that could not fully hold him, that house became the first proof that another life was possible.

A life clothed, finally, in belonging.