Beyond the map
By Marcky Antonio and Miggy Antonio
Delivered at the 8th Harvard Club of the Philippines annual Filipino graduation event, co-sponsored with the Philippine Consul General in New York
MARCKY: The founding editor of the National Geographic magazine, Gilbert Grosvenor, said: “A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.”
When Miggy and I were born, instead of an epic poem, our parents were handed a haiku, a very restricted map containing 17 syllables of what our lives would look like. This map, like a travel advisory, had clear warnings: Exercise caution. Reconsider travel. No high risk areas.
MIGGY: We were diagnosed with severe hemophilia, a rare blood disorder that affects our body’s ability to clot blood normally. Due to medical breakthroughs, the symptoms of hemophilia are manageable, provided that treatment was regularly administered. These advancements, however, are expensive and inaccessible in the Philippines, where we grew up.
MARCKY: Without access to treatment, our bodies were fragile. A cut could lead to uncontrollable bleeding. Extensive physical activity could cause our limbs and joints to swell up. As kids, we could not run, jump, or walk a distance longer than a football field out of fear of damaging our bodies beyond repair. To prevent bleeding episodes, our parents hired caretakers to assist us with movement. At school, they would push us in wheelchairs to get to our next class. As we grew older, the contours of our map became increasingly constrained, its scale reduced to several familiar locations—home, school, the hospital. Everywhere we went, we were told the same three things: Exercise caution. Reconsider travel. No high risk areas.
MIGGY: Our parents were the first to widen our horizons. When we were 12, they left behind their lives in the Philippines to move our family to Boston. In crossing the Pacific Ocean and living in a new continent, the map of our lives had extended beyond the sheltered world our condition had forced us into.
Here in the United States, with access to treatment, we were able to participate in gym class, play pick-up basketball games during recess, and hang out with our friends after school.
In high school, I joined the crew team, throwing myself into grueling two-hour practices six days a week. Marcky, for one, picked up fencing, eventually joining a high school team that won six straight state championships.
For the first time in our lives, hemophilia was no longer the sole cartographer of our maps.
MARCKY: If moving to Boston expanded our maps, Harvard provided an atlas, with endless opportunity to redefine ourselves as more than just two patients with hemophilia. In my freshman fall, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of clubs I could join, a row of tables stretched out across Harvard Yard as far as the eye could see. In sophomore year, I
found myself switching between majors—computer science, social studies, until eventually I settled into Integrative Biology.
MIGGY: Soon, our maps were decorated with pins—bright-colored markers that denoted the identity we had constructed for ourselves at Harvard. My time in the College was filled with diverse experiences: my concentration in Economics with a Philosophy secondary, connected me with professors who challenged my thinking and classmates from around the world with different outlooks on life.
Through a semester abroad in Barcelona, I explored the vibrant cultural mosaic of Catalonia—wandering through the narrow streets of Barceloneta, experiencing local festivals, and discovering how another culture navigates questions of identity and belonging. The friendships formed during late-night conversations in Lamont, the diverse perspectives shared during classroom debates, and the unexpected connections made through cultural organization—these experiences colored my map with new emotions and sensations in ways I never anticipated, each interaction becoming a new coordinate, each relationship a new landmark on my expanding territory.
But, just as maps need a central meridian to orient its north and south poles, so did we feel disoriented, still unable to discern what lay at the core of who we were.
MARCKY: In April of last year, I received the Harvard Joseph M. Smith scholarship for my outstanding commitment to community service, but what this award doesn’t say, is how my life is forever indebted to public service—to the nonprofit aid organizations who donated me medication when I needed it the most.
MIGGY: My resume states that I was the president of the Harvard Philippine Forum, but it does not capture the years of struggling to balance my Filipino heritage with my American present, manifesting in an urgent need to connect with the community I identified with so intensely.
MARCKY: As children in the Philippines, we learned about Ferdinand Magellan, the explorer credited with “discovering” the Philippines. Setting sail with incomplete maps and grand ambitions, Magellan sought the Spice Islands but instead found the Philippines—a territory unmarked on his maps, yet infinitely more significant to our story. Like Magellan, we’ve navigated with imperfect maps, discovering new emotions, sensations, and experiences that added infinitely more color to our lives.
The difference is that while Magellan endlessly sought to add to his maps as he went forward, we learned that what is most valuable can be found looking back on where we came from. The territories already marked on our maps.
MIGGY: As we venture beyond the edge of the institutional map that has guided us these past four years, some of you have your next coordinates precisely plotted—law school, medical residencies, consulting firms, nonprofit organizations. Others are entering wholly uncharted waters.
I urge you—never lose sight of the history that has formed the coordinates of your path in life. Although they may not fit neatly into the map of success, those people, those challenges, those experiences have shaped you far more profoundly than any plotted course ever could. Our blood disorder. Our Filipino heritage. Our journey across oceans. These weren’t limitations to overcome, but foundations that gave our explorations meaning.
I spent the summer of my sophomore year as a Ledecky Fellow, writing stories for Rappler, an independent news organization in the Philippines. I found myself digging into issues that affected the country where I first learned what it meant to navigate limitations, speaking with everyday Filipinos whose resilience mirrored what I’d seen in my own community growing up. Those articles weren’t assignments; they were conversations with my cultural identity that I’d been putting off for too long.
MARCKY: This past summer, I returned to the Philippines to conduct a global health project, and obtain data to inform public policy that expands geographical and financial access to care for those with hemophilia like me. After graduating, I hope to go to medical school and become a hematologist to help those with blood disorders like us.
MIGGY: Twenty-two years after we were born, our maps have blossomed into epic poems, incorporating sights and sounds that span several continents, and the complexities of having multiple, cherished identities.
As we leave Harvard Yard today, we hope you have the wisdom to follow your maps when they serve you, the courage to fold them when they don’t, and the curiosity to create new ones when you find yourself in territories too beautiful and complex for anyone else to have charted.
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Photo Caption: PROUDLY DUMAGUETEñO. Antonio twins Miggy and Marcky during their graduation from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With them are their parents, Myrish Cadapan & Jojo Antonio, and their brother Mari.
