Sharon

They wrote a code for my life. I burned it. Memoirist. Exited founder. Filipino-American. Ancestral memory & freedom. The Code — coming soon.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

I want to tell you something funny about my life.
I grew up with no electricity in a beautiful island in the Philippines.

Gas lamps. Manual labor.

Making sure the lamps had enough gas before dark because when it got dark out there, it was really dark.

I learned Mathematics and Physics not from privilege but from necessity.

First principles, because there was nothing else to work with.

Then I left for Taiwan. Factory worker.
Sent money home every month.

Read philosophy books on my breaks because I didn’t know what else to do with the questions I had.

Somewhere in all of that… I learned how the world actually gets built.
With hands.
With repetition.
With people who show up and don’t ask for applause.

Fast forward.

I married a Caucasian man.
We rebuilt a business.

Attended acquisition meetings not once but 6 times without MBA🥹

Exited Co-founder.

I retired at 42.

We live in the San Diego countryside now and yes, I know how that sounds against a gas lamp🤩

And the part that makes me laugh every time?

The chips powering the AI?
Made in Taiwan.
The stocks quietly growing in my portfolio? Taiwan semiconductors.

I went from no electricity… to investing in the electricity of the future.

But the real joke isn’t the money.

The real joke is what the writing showed me.

The part that made me start writing in the first place…

I thought my story was about the struggles I overcame.
The factory floors.
The sacrifices.
Helping my family rebuild.
Becoming millionaire before most people figure out what they want to be.

Those are all true.
And they are all great.

But that’s not my story.

My story is what the writing revealed underneath all of it.

The girl from the island who had to travel the entire circumference of the world through Taiwan, through marriage, through wealth, through retirement, through AI and chip stocks just to finally turn around and see where she actually came from.

I thought I was building a life away from where I came from.

I was actually building the distance I needed to finally see it.

You cannot read a room you’ve never left.

The Filipino consciousness I write about now…. the inherited belief systems, the colonial residue, the sacrifice dressed up as virtue…

I couldn’t have named any of it from inside it.

I needed the factory floor.

The philosophy.

The exit.

The countryside.

Jim.

I always wanted to be a philosopher growing up but I became engineer instead and I didn’t know I needed both.

The West gave me the mirror.

But what I saw in it was always the girl from the island.

And now I write about her.
For her.
For whoever is lighting a gas lamp somewhere right now and wondering if any of this leads anywhere.

It does.
It just doesn’t go where you think✨

N.B. My Dad sent me this video, this was our playground growing up.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@japan_nobunaga I felt it like crazy NPCs or looshers and I stopped, not worth your energy.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@tanpukunokami We have Daiso here in CA. I stayed away from those long ago, thanks to Marie Kondo😆

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@japan_nobunaga The coastal expert, the credentialed class, looks down on the heartland, and the heartland knows it and pushes back. The resentment is alive.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@Topo_G Amen to that!

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

The “too simple to be good” feeling is actually the feeling of a force lifting. You’re not discovering something trivial. You’re discovering something that was kept invisible, and the ease with which it now sits in your mind is the measure of how much weight was on it before.
That’s what I’ve been uncovering & writing about… inverting the thing colonial conditioning does best, which is making a constructed cage feel like natural ground.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@PapiTrumpo Loving this timeline ✨

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@Prolotario1 this is wild 😝

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@garrytan One of my favorites, St. Augustine of Hippo✨

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@GadSaad That seemed to be the pattern everywhere. Extraction.. and in the country where I came from, you’re called a hero for leaving the country so you can send back $ to fuel the extraction machinery.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@PapiTrumpo So beautiful ✨🤍

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

😆😆😆

[TSA @TSA]

If you’re visiting for a very large sporting event & you happen to discover RANCH while you’re here… pls pack it in your CHECKED BAG on the way home.

Thank you.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@4biddnKnowledge A common pattern I’ve noticed is how often ancient civilizations are dismissed as “primitive.” I’ve found the same label repeatedly applied to our own ancestors, despite the evidence of their sophistication.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@RobertKennedyJr Wow! Amazing

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@tanpukunokami Same thing in my home country as well, Philippines. I used to have classmates and some are nice and some are hard to explain in one word.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@p_kuperman My ancestors were doing this long before colonization interrupted them, replacing their work with forced labor and tribute demanded by the crown.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@tanpukunokami thank you for the laugh 🤭

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@PapiTrumpo we rode in that escalator last December😄

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@paulg I discovered reverse engineering at 18 during our electrical engineering finals exam in college. I didn’t even know there was such a thing😆 looked like a trick but you have to do the basics first to go back and replace everything.

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@PapiTrumpo Everyone should be that kind of rich😄

[Sharon @gratefulheart]

@MichaelDell the literacy that makes your advice possible for the people you’ve never had to think about.