A reflection on becoming — through hip hop, motherhood, and memory.
I didn’t say it out loud at first. The word felt too big, too bold — like something reserved for people in museums or concert halls. Not someone quietly painting in the middle of the night, or singing lullabies between feedings, or writing verses in a crowded café between work shifts.
But I remember the moment the word began to fit. Not because I had a title or a following. But because something shifted inside me — a quiet knowing that what I was creating held truth. That the stories in my voice and brushstrokes mattered, even if no one else saw them yet.
Long before Mamamitta, I performed under the name Dhyana Mitta — a Filipina hip hop artist carving space for softness, power, and truth in a male-dominated genre.
I rapped about identity. About strength. About being the “bad b*tch” in her full wisdom. That season of my life gave me voice. Rhythm. Boldness. It taught me how to speak from the deepest parts of myself.
You can still read the Clavel Magazine feature on Dhyana Mitta — it holds a part of that chapter.
Art has never lived in one place for me.
It moves through sound. Through color. Through memory and emotion.
It’s in the rise and fall of melody. In the way paint holds movement. In the places where words fall short, and something else steps in to carry the feeling.
Calling myself an artist wasn’t a loud declaration. It was a slow unfolding. A series of small, sacred decisions to keep creating — in every form that felt real to me. To trust what my hands knew, and what my voice remembered. To believe that the soft, quiet way I saw and heard the world was enough.
Now, when I share my work, it carries that journey with it. It carries every version of me — the woman on stage, the mother in the studio, the girl who wrote poems in the dark and hoped they meant something. And when someone chooses to bring a piece into their home, I hope they feel that — not just the art, but the becoming.
There’s one piece that holds that story deeply for me. It’s called Bloom Beside Her – Fine Art Print by Filipina Contemporary Artist Faith Marie Aliño.
It’s about standing in softness. About growing in quiet company. About blooming in your own time — with every version of yourself beside you.
It’s the piece I come back to when I need to remember who I am — as a painter, a singer, a mother, a woman — and who I’m still becoming.
0 comments