But the meeting left me crushed. My only solution, the lawyer said, would be to get back to the Philippines and accept a 10-year ban before i really could apply to go back legally.
If Rich was discouraged, he hid it well. “Put this problem on a shelf,” he told me. “Compartmentalize it. Keep going.”
The license meant everything in my opinion me drive, fly and work— it would let. But my grandparents worried about the Portland trip and also the Washington internship. While Lola offered daily prayers to make certain that I would not get caught, Lolo told me that I became dreaming too large, risking a lot of.
I became determined to follow my ambitions. I happened to be 22, I told them, in charge of my own actions. But it was different from Lolo’s driving a confused teenager to Kinko’s. I knew the thing I was doing now, and I knew it wasn’t right. Exactly what was I expected to do?
A pay stub from The San Francisco Chronicle and my proof of state residence — the letters to the Portland address that my support network had sent at the D.M.V. in Portland, I arrived with my photocopied Social Security card, my college I.D. It worked. My license, issued in 2003, was set to expire eight years later, to my birthday that is 30th Feb. 3, 2011. I had eight years to ensure success professionally, and also to hope that some form of immigration reform would pass into the meantime and enable us to stay.
It appeared like all the right time in the planet.
My summer in Washington was exhilarating. I was intimidated to stay a major newsroom but was assigned a mentor — Peter Perl, a veteran magazine writer — to help me navigate it. A couple weeks into the internship, he printed out one of my articles, about some guy who recovered a long-lost wallet, circled the initial two paragraphs and left it on my desk. “Great eye for details — awesome!” he wrote. Though I didn’t know after that it, Peter would become an additional member of my network.
During the final end of this summer, I returned to The bay area Chronicle. My plan was to finish school — I was now a senior — while I worked for The Chronicle as a reporter when it comes to city desk. But when The Post beckoned again, offering me a full-time, two-year paid internship that i really could start whenever I graduated in June 2004, it had been too tempting to pass up. I moved back to Washington.
About four months into my job as a reporter when it comes to Post, I began feeling increasingly paranoid, as though I experienced “illegal immigrant” tattooed to my forehead — and in Washington, of all of the places, where the debates over immigration seemed never-ending. I happened to be so desperate to prove myself that I feared I was annoying some colleagues and editors — and worried that any one of these professional journalists could discover my secret. The anxiety was nearly paralyzing. I made the decision I experienced to tell one of the higher-ups about my situation. I turned to Peter.
By this time, Peter, who still works in the Post, had become element of management because the paper’s director of newsroom training and development that is professional. One afternoon in late October, we walked a few blocks to Lafayette Square, across through the White House. Over some 20 minutes, sitting on a bench, I told him everything: the Social Security card, the driver’s license, Pat and Rich, my loved ones.
It was an odd kind of dance: I happened to be wanting to stand out in a highly competitive newsroom, yet I was terrified that if I stood out a lot of, I’d invite scrutiny that is unwanted. I attempted to compartmentalize my fears, distract myself by reporting on the lives of other people, but there is no escaping the conflict that is central my entire life. Maintaining a deception for so long distorts your feeling of self. You start wondering whom you’ve become, and just why.