Still, He Showed Up

There is a particular kind of courage that does not look like courage at all.

It looks like a student retracing a route he has walked before — and still getting turned around. It looks like arriving uncertain, or having to ask again. It looks, to most people passing by, like nothing remarkable.

But Kidd, 25, a BSEd English major at Saint Louis University, has been showing up his whole life to places that were not entirely ready for him.

Still, He Showed Up — to a Campus That Kept Moving

He will tell you, without drama, that navigating campus is a daily struggle..

The word is simple and honest. Some days the route is familiar enough. Other days, he finds himself turned around — “naliligaw-ligaw,” reorienting quietly, without asking for an audience.

There are people here, he admits, who are still traditional. Not inclusive. The kind of tradition that has not yet learned to make room for him, for his people.

Still, he showed up.

Still, He Showed Up — to the Version of Himself He Did Not Expect

On a Monday, in a class about massage therapy, something opened.

Not dramatically. But he sat in that room and understood, perhaps for the first time, that dignified work could belong to him. The Dagupan massage training center would sharpen this into something concrete — a certification, a skill, a different way of imagining the years ahead.

“Maraming nabago sa buhay.” (Much has changed in life.) The trajectory he once thought was his has quietly shifted. He does not speak about this with grief. He speaks about it the way someone does when they have made peace with a detour and realized it was never a detour at all.

Success, for him, is not a fixed destination. It is the fact of change itself.

Still, He Showed Up — to the Page, When No One Thought to Hand Him One

In high school, Kidd found the school newspaper. Or perhaps it found him.

Either way, something happened there that is difficult to name but easy to recognize: he found himself. Not the version others had already decided on, but the one underneath — curious, capable, with opinions worth printing.

In 2020, he had tried to enter ICT, drawn toward technology with the instinct of someone who simply understands it. He was turned away. Made to feel the hardware-and-software world was not quite his to enter.

But the newspaper was a door that opened. And inside it, he recognized something. This is who I am.

Still, he showed up — to himself.

Still, He Showed Up — on October 27, 2021

There is a specific date he remembers.

October 27, 2021. The day he completed his massage therapy certification at NLAB, guided by a friend who believed in him before the credential existed to prove it.

“Kaya ko pala.” (I can do it, after all.)

He has said this in different forms, about different things — about softwares and emails that once felt impossible, about volleyball for the blind, a game he did not know existed until he was inside it. 

“Meron palang ganun.”  (There’s actually something like that.)

This is how his world has expanded: not through grand gestures, but through specific moments of quiet revelation.

Still, He Showed Up — carrying more than people noticed

Behind the dean's list, unexpected, even to him, is a person who almost was not seen at all.

Not in the dramatic sense. But in the ordinary, accumulated sense of a student navigating a campus that was built around a different kind of learner, adjusting without acknowledgment, achieving without guarantee.

On the days when it is difficult, when the thing keeping him going is something he cannot name or see — he moves anyway.

“Something I can't see, but it kept me going.”

He does not have a word for it. He does not need one.

Still, He Showed Up — because of who was waiting

His grandfather. The answer comes without hesitation.

And his grandma’s cousin on his mother's side who wholeheartedly treated him as her own grandson. People who are perhaps not the ones others would expect to name, but who have held the most.

Free will, he says. Disability is not a hindrance. These are not borrowed lines, rather, they are conclusions arrived at through his own life, on his own terms.

He is his own inspiration, too. He says this without arrogance. He says it the way someone does when they have had to be.

Still, He Showed Up

There is a particular kind of courage that does not look like courage at all.

It simply returns, day after day, to a campus still learning how to include him. To a degree that demands more than it accommodates. To a life that keeps opening in directions no one predicted, least of all him.

The dean's list. The certification. The newspaper. The court. The route he walks again even when he loses it. His grandfather. The unnamed thing.

He showed up to all of it.

And somewhere between getting lost and finding his way, he became exactly who he already was.

Still, he showed up.

Kidd Suleta, 25, is a third year BSEd English major student at Saint Louis University.