Hi, I’m Christa.

I have lived enough past lives to become who I am today.

For over a decade, I’ve moved between worlds: coordinating clinical trials at major medical centers while my own body refused diagnosis. Facilitating grief workshops for QTBIPOC communities while learning to mourn parts of myself I never knew existed. Editing medical school applications for future doctors while fighting to be believed by the ones already practicing.

Each life taught me something about survival. About the gap between what systems promise and what bodies know. About finding language for experiences that don’t exist in textbooks.

I’m a queer, disabled, nonbinary Filipine-American writer whose work explores chronic illness as cosmic phenomenon. My essay “Capturing a Real Live Black Hole in HD” was nominated for Best American Essays 2025 because it does what I do best: turn medical trauma into mythology, pelvic pain into portal, MRI machines into spaceships for the alien experience of existing in a body that won’t cooperate.

Through my newsletter Is This What You Want, I write toward collective survival. My 460+ subscribers and I explore disability justice, queer grief, and the messy beauty of bodies that refuse to make sense. On Instagram, 5,000+ followers join ongoing conversations about chronic illness, polyamory, and finding community in the margins.

I’ve presented workshops at major community events, always centering the voices and experiences that get erased from mainstream narratives. My professional background spans death work, clinical research, and trauma-informed community facilitation—each role teaching me how systems fail the people they claim to serve.

Now I’m entering a new chapter as a graduate student, studying systems change and macro practice. This means my 1:1 consultation availability is limited as I focus on coursework and manuscript completion. But the writing continues. The community-building continues. The work of making space for bodies like ours continues.

If you’re looking for someone to hold space for your complexity, to witness your contradictions, to help you find language for what hurts—you’ve found your person. I just might be in graduate school while I do it.

Welcome to whatever this becomes.