How the Philippines became my breathing room, my rehab clinic, and eventually my pulse

I didn’t leave the United States so much as I escaped it.

Picture 2011 Tucson: six lanes of traffic, desert heat shimmering off chrome bumpers, hot enough to fry bacon. Radio spots promising “90 Days Same-As-Cash!” on furniture nobody needs.

I was languishing on disability, depressed, anxious, unable to relax with voices screaming through my head. The nights were worse: weed, prescription-strength benzos, and the hypnotic glow of a 24-hour Walmart, where I would wander the aisles, trying to clear the demons from my head.

I was 42, divorced, coughing through three packs a day, and so chemically pickled that I sometimes nodded off in the drive-thru.

One morning I looked at the mirror and didn’t recognize the guy brushing someone else’s teeth.

So I saved for a few months, eating ramen and stale peanut butter sandwiches, sold the rust-brown sedan for parts, and booked a one-way ticket to Manila: no plan, no backup, just a hunch that anywhere had to be saner than the all-you-can-eat American buffet that passed as life.

The First Five Years: Bruises & Short Paychecks

If this were a hero’s journey, right about now the mentor would show up and hand me a lightsaber.

Instead I got culture shock, travelers diarrhea, and a wallet that evaporated faster than the noon humidity.

I moved to the Philippines to marry a woman 18 years my junior. I’d already failed at marriage once, and she was wet behind the ears and had never dealt with someone with a severe mental illness.

I thought the tropics would cure me, but I was terribly wrong.

Freelance gigs paid in “exposure.” Disability only went so far, even in an economy more favorable to the US dollar. I once withdrew the equivalent of $14.07 from an ATM because that’s literally all the pesos I had.

Filipinos are honest to a fault, and if you are fat, they will tell you. I had to develop thick skin quickly if I didn’t want to be depressed all the time. Nothing fit me. I was 6 feet 300 lbs. Jeepneys, tricycles, and pedicabs were all built for people much smaller than me.

I couldn’t even find underwear and shoes that fit me.

I learned the hard way that healing is not a tropical juice cleanse. It is grubby, lonely, and slow. But every bruise came with a lesson:

Smile before the selfie.
Sing off-key at karaoke — nobody cares.
If it rains, it rains warm.

The Gradual Reboot of a Personality

Somewhere between year two and year three, my writing stopped sounding like an SEO article and started sounding like me again. Blame it on afternoon siestas with a notebook on a bamboo porch, or on the fact that Hiligaynon verbs feel like jazz — fluid, playful, unconcerned with how you thought they should be pronounced.

I dumped the marketing buzzwords and wrote confessionals about debt, about missing my kids in the USA, about lying to my doctor when he asked how many pills I’d taken.

Hardly anyone read my blog, but a few strangers emailed to say “I felt that — keep going.” It was the first time in years anyone had used my words instead of my billable hours.

That feedback loop repaired neural wiring the benzos had frayed. My drafts grew teeth: short, punchy sentences; no filler. Raw, unfiltered, real, because fake almost killed me.

Triage: Body Edition

Physical healing lagged behind the breakthroughs happening in my head. Cigarettes were my first war.

After three false starts I finally gave heed to my wife’s constant nagging. She meant well. Shame proved stronger than nicotine; I started buying single sticks from the neighborhood sari‑sari, the embarrassment of whispering “isa lang po” four times a day slowly beating the cravings. I finally gave up cold turkey.

Six months later I could smell rain again.

The benzos came next and fought dirty. After my doctor got in trouble with authorities for keeping people strung out on a controlled substance, she cut me off cold turkey, and no other doctor would prescribe to an obvious junkie. I went cold turkey and almost died. But a year later, I was free.

It was the most difficult thing I ever did.

Between cravings I propped a wheezing ThinkPad on a bamboo table and finished the last twenty‑seven credits of a degree I’d abandoned in Arizona. Typhoons blew the roof open; brownouts swallowed my drafts; I rewrote by candlelight and typed each paragraph back in when power returned.

May 2015 almost ended the rewrite. I emptied all my pills into a bowl and double-fisted them down my throat, gagging on the bitterness. Then I sat back in my beanbag chair and waited to die. The last thing I remember was to publish my suicide note on Reddit and remember thinking, “I don’t want to die.”

Seven years later came the clinical encore: a heart attack in 2022. Maybe chainsmoke, maybe lechon fat. I sat in the ER and realized I had the arteries of a sixty‑year‑old politician. One had burst and I was bleeding into my chest. I would die if something wasn’t done.

My rockstar of a cardiologist worked magic with a stent and I left with a ₱500,000 (about $10,000) bill, but, for the first time, owing my heartbeat absolutely nothing.

Each crisis sanded away another layer of varnish until only honest grain remained.

What the Philippines Taught an American Refugee

I used to think productivity was proof of life — billable hours, inbox zero, sprint velocity. Then I found myself on a jeepney stalled in gridlock, sweat soaking my collar while the driver sang 80s songs and the conductor counted coins one…slow…peso at a time.

Nobody honked. Nobody fumed. In that blast furnace of an afternoon I felt my pulse level out, like a clenched fist finally opening. The city of Iloilo was teaching me to breathe between beats.

Life is actually a marathon.

When travelers diarrhea put me flat in a hospital bed and struggling on the toilet, my Mamang shuffled in with a bowl of tinola — rice, ginger, a scrawny chicken wing — food she could barely afford to give away.

She took care of me and cleaned my underwear, despite having just met me, and didn’t ask for a thank‑you selfie, or a five‑star rating. She just said, “Kaon ta” (let’s eat).

Generosity here isn’t something difficult; it’s given without thought.

Filipinos weaponize laughter the way Trump weaponizes stupidity. They’ll roast your big nose, fat belly, and pasty skin until your cheeks burn, and then slide over to make room at the dinner table, passing the adobo.

Mockery without malice becomes glue; you learn to laugh at yourself or stay lonely.

Back in Arizona I chased dopamine hits. In Iloilo City I squeeze calamansi over my soamai at the street-food vendor in the market, fingers still scarred from withdrawal tremors. The juice is puckering, almost painful, and exactly enough.

No algorithm required.

Finding Family, Love, Purpose

I met Flora online 8 months before my suitcase ever hit the scale at Phoenix Sky Harbor. Thirteen‑hour time‑zone gaps meant I was typing half‑delirious at 3 a.m. while she taught English to Japanese students online.

Those chats ballooned into 12 hour marathon sessions with our laptops— childhood bruises, failed marriages, playlists, grocery receipts — until the internet connection felt more solid than anything wired into my own house.

Everything was stacked against us: an eighteen‑year age gap, my closet of mental illness, my modest paycheck, immigration hoops big enough to swallow a Buick. Yet commitment out‑muscled logic.

Love showed up wearing work boots, not wings.

We built a life on stubborn faith in each other and baling‑wire budgets. First came our daughter, all curiosity and eyelashes; then our son, diagnosed on the spectrum before his third birthday. Autism rewired my definition of success: no longer corner office or follower counts, but tiny victories: a spontaneous hug, a new Hiligaynon word whispered over morning pandesal, five minutes of eye contact that felt like sunrise.

Flora calls me “Babe” or “my love”when I burn the toast or get angry in bumper-to-bumper traffic. She’s taught me that romance isn’t fireworks; it’s Tuesday night dishes, pharmacy runs, and choosing the same person even when the dopamine high has long since left the building.

She has her own issues with anxiety and panic attacks, but we help each other. We are each other’s therapists and best friends.

Somewhere between medications for depression, fish balls from the cart, and midnight coughs soothed by Vicks and prayer, I learned the real spelling of love: C‑H‑O‑O‑S‑E.

And every dawn in the tropics I choose them again.

The Dark Mirror of “Home”

I fly back to the States every couple of years. Each visit feels louder, faster, more brittle. The algorithm sells outrage two-for-one; strip-mall parking lots sprawl like asphalt oceans; even a trip to Target feels like an exercise in insanity.

It isn’t that America is unlivable, plenty of folks thrive there. It’s that I can’t live there without relapse. The treadmill hum reminds my bones of every panic attack, every “last cigarette,” every pill that was never the last.

So I board the return flight grateful for the U.S. passport that still opens doors, and even more grateful that the door back to Iloilo City opens wider.

The Forever Home Base

Maybe someday we’ll test-drive life in Japan or Spain or wherever the next nomad-friendly visa springs up. But the Philippines will remain my anchor. My lungs owe these monsoon winds. My sobriety owes Tinola Tuesdays. My writing owes the jeepney clatter that drowns out self-doubt.

If you’re reading this from a fluorescent-lit cubicle, shoes pinching, phone buzzing with the latest crisis — political, financial, existential — I’m not saying move here tomorrow.

But know that there’s a place on this planet where strangers will hand you coffee on a rooftop and call you “kuya” before they know your last name.

You deserve a life big enough to hold your breath without counting clicks.
You deserve dinner that costs less than the tip you used to leave.
You deserve to write sentences you actually mean.

The plane door isn’t an exit; it’s an entrance to the version of you that breathes a little easier after a tropical breeze and a Buko shake.

And if your path ever points toward these islands, drop me a line. I’ll have a cup of 3-in-1 ready, same way someone once saved me.

Epilogue: Counting Blessings, Not Wounds

14 years, one suicide attempt, one heart attack, zero cigarettes.
Summa Cum Laude.
One marriage knit under mango trees.

Wherever I may roam, the archipelago’s 7,641 islands keep tugging at my tide.
America taught me hustle; the Philippines taught me grace.
Grace wins.

So here’s to the next chapter, written in a raw voice, salt air, and the sure knowledge that healing isn’t easy, but it sure loves when the warm rain falls on the banana trees.

If this story thumped somewhere inside your ribcage, share it. Maybe the person who needs it most is standing on a rooftop right now, waiting for coffee.