agballa to kapwa: the story behind the names

welcome to the creating in kapwa blog!

the vision for my practice, business, & work is expanding, and I needed a place for letting it spread out, arms stretched out in the sunlight. I wanted to keep my newsletter relatively short, a quick, sweet, loving read in the inbox. and so, this blog is so that I can ramble a bit more lol, and just let my ideas SPEAK.

(cuz as neurodivine folks, sometimes that’s all we need. to let our ideas & ways of seeing the world be laid out in front of us, even if no one else reads it).

I’m starting with this: I have changed the name of my business again. for the THIRD time.

(tell me you have ADHD without telling me)

and also, friends, don’t be afraid to pivot!

I love a good pivot. it shows you are attuned to the work. it shows you aren’t forcing yourself. it shows that you’re going with the flow. and we’re all about creative flow around here.

but, here’s why I changed the name, a-gain.

agballa creatives to creating in kapwa

if you’ve been with me for a while, you might remember how I started: as a writer & English teacher hosting writing workshops online under the name Agballa Writers back in 2020.

then a shift again in 2022 when I crossed out the “Writers” part and changed it to “Creatives,” to widen the scope of the practice and call in creators of all kinds. I also wanted to start hosting creativity workshops along with the writing ones, which never really got off the ground.

and around that time, Agballa Creatives morphed into a virtual assistant business cuz I found out I was pregnant & needed more async work instead of being “on” with live teaching all the time.

I’ve worn many identities: poet-writer, writing teacher/coach, project manager & virtual assistant. None of which name the multitudes within me (a title, of course, never will be able to).

they also failed to name what it is I actually do.

agballa was a name that came to me while chiron was in aries. a time where we, as a collective, were redefining ourselves as a whole. cuz the pandemic, cuz the way we worked started to shift, cuz more folks started engaging with their own liberation in real ways.

agballa was meant to speak to our queerness, our neurodivergence, our otherness.

meant to speak to the reclamation of all of that, along with the power & potency of our ancestors and ancestral ways of being.

chiron in aries speaks largely to the wound around identity

our voices as Black, Indigenous queer, non-binary folks and women/femmes of color/culture being suppressed
the codeswitching and italicizing our culture’s words for palpability within English and its culture
the perfectionism, overthinking, under/oversharing

creating in kapwa was the name I gave to our co-creating/co-working gatherings.

speaking to the communal element of creating, the kind our ancestors engaged with, the kind that Indigenous communities continue to celebrate & weave into their everyday, the kind that our diasporic communities have naturally carried over into wherever we landed across the globe.

it speaks to part of us that gathers around the lumpia to slice & cut, wrap & fry.

the part of us that weaves & crafts & dances together, the part of us that marks the seasons with ceremony & celebration, that pools together money & resources and shares it across the ocean, that shares multi-generational homes with the many ad-hoc sections that accumulate as more & more of our relatives come to stay.

this is the part of us I want to continue to speak to.

it is the one that holds our revolution, in both macro and incredibly micro ways.

creating in kapwa holds the vision

and I want to take this into the virtual/online realm. into a true online community, not just the packaged membership kind (though, we’ll have that, too).

but a group of like-hearted humans coming together virtually to do life together. to hold each other during transitions, in our grief, in our joy, in our chaos & celebration. in our conflict & in our peace.

to show up for each other in very real, tangible ways: with money, with opportunities, with tools & feedback & resources to help each other grow & expand.

all this to say: the vision is expanding and creating in kapwa is going to hold it.

agballa is still here, we’re still reclaiming, we’re still healing our voices, we’re still queer & moonstruck AF. that’s not going anywhere.

but we are also making space for both/and. space for the wound & past hurts to be see & heard & loved on, AND ALSO, fueling ourselves for the long-haul of BUILDING this new world, one piece at a time…

…in kapwa, in solidarity, in love & community & care as verbs, as practical action steps we can take every single fukkin day. pakikipagkapwa, the moving kind of love, the one that acts instead of just proclaims. that shows up, again & again.

co-creating systems & structures

in running my business & those of my clients’, I also started to realize that the systems & structures holding our lives, our businesses, our homes, our creative practices needed to be shaped around us, build based on our locality, our inner landscapes: our natural ways of being & thinking, the kind of grounding we need on a daily basis, the complexity & nuance & magic of our lives, & the ever-evolving motion of the work coming through us.

where the productivity industry seeks to impose an external system onto our bodies, minds, & lives, & we very quickly begin to feel like we’re not enough.

I began to see that well-designed, intentional systems & structures are alive, organic & bending & meant to shapeshift with us.

just as much as our work is alive, as each offer, each book & character, each poem, each painting, each family & home has a season. sometimes the work ebbs, sometimes it flows.

our systems & structures need to be able to accommodate these, without us feeling behind, like we need to constantly “catch up,” or send us into a should-shitting shame spiral.

our ancestors had a systems like this, ecosystems of care, protocols for chaos & calm, conflict & celebration, fallow periods & creative ones.

and so must we.

this is what we do inside creating in kapwa

together, we attune to:

your inner landscape (your natural patterns & ways of being & working)
your life & capacity (your mama/parenthood, your caretaking, your self-tending)
the stars, celestial bodies & how these energies run through & affect you (astrology)
your ancestors, your guides, the soul of your work (you are never creating alone)

we attune to kapwa, the Tagalog word for interconnectedness, the self in the other, the other in self. we are not separate for anything or anyone. I believe it is a frequency to attune to, a web of life to relate to, a remembering at the deepest yet most practical level.

come, stay in the flow & join the journey

things are moving & grooving over here in quiet yet very exciting ways! jupiter in leo is LIGHTING ME UP.

I’d love if you came along for the ride.

here’s where you can start:

if you haven’t yet, download the internal weather check. It’s a little, sweet 2-10min practice you can use daily/as needed to attune to kapwa, to your inner landscape.
you’ll also be subscribed to agballa notes, my bi-weekly email newsletter on sustainable creativity & work, astrological rhythms, and reclaiming your natural way of being. sent on the new & full moons. read the archives.
you can also read more about my work on my website.

thank you, agyamanak, maraming salamat for being here with me. I’m honored.

in gratitude & kapwa,
teresa