Chapter 2: Transition 2.0

OFW

I wasn’t the type who dreamed of working abroad. I was the type who knew exactly where the cheapest good food was within a 3-kilometer radius and considered that a superpower. Turns out, both things can be true.

Let me set the record straight before this story goes any further.

I did not have a five-year plan that included a passport stamp and a Kuala Lumpur apartment. I was not one of those people who spent their lunch breaks scrolling job boards for overseas opportunities, fantasizing about a life elsewhere. I had no dramatic dissatisfaction with the Philippines, no burning itch to escape, no vision board with a Malaysian skyline on it.

I was fine. More than fine, actually.

Growing up and living in Manila does something to you that no corporate training ever could. It teaches you how to read a room before you’ve fully entered it. It teaches you to negotiate, to adapt, to find a solution before the problem has finished introducing itself. It teaches you that resources are rarely handed to you, but they are almost always findable, if you know how to look.

In other words: Manila made me street-smart. And I wore that like a badge.

When I entered the BPO industry in Metro Manila, I wasn’t naive about what I was walking into. I knew the industry. I knew the grind. I knew about the shifting schedules that would slowly rearrange my concept of “morning,” the accounts that would test every last thread of my patience, and the peculiar camaraderie that forms among people who are all collectively surviving the same controlled chaos.

And I knew something else, too something a lot of people overlook when they talk about Philippine BPO:

The opportunities here are real.

The Philippines isn’t a stepping stone. It’s a stage. The BPO industry in this country is world-class, and the people running the floors, managing the accounts, and holding the whole operation together are some of the sharpest, most emotionally intelligent professionals I’ve ever worked alongside. I didn’t need to go abroad to find a good career. I was already building one.

So for 3 to 5 years, that’s exactly what I did.

I won’t romanticize it. The domestic BPO life is not a highlight reel.

It is EDSA traffic at 6am when your shift starts at 7. It is eating your lunch in 30 minutes because the queue doesn’t care that you’re hungry. It is learning, very quickly, the difference between a customer who is frustrated and a customer who has decided that you specifically are the reason their life isn’t going well, and knowing how to handle both with the same measured, professional tone.

But in all of that? I was growing.

Every difficult call was a negotiation class. Every irate customer was a lesson in emotional regulation. Every process I had to memorize, every system I had to navigate, every team I had to collaborate with, it was all quietly building something in me that I wouldn’t fully understand the value of until much later.

I was becoming someone who could handle pressure without flinching. Someone who could communicate clearly in the middle of confusion. Someone who could show up, perform, and deliver, consistently, even on the days when “consistently” required a lot more effort than anyone on the outside could see.

Manila taught me that. The streets taught me half of it, and the headset taught me the rest.

I had no plans to leave. I had a career I was building, a city I understood in my bones, and a life that made sense.

And then as life tends to do, something happened that I did not see coming.

Here’s something most people don’t know about me: I grew up in a family of OFWs.

My mother was one. Other people I loved were, too. And from a very young age, I had a front-row seat to what that life actually looks like not the remittance, not the balikbayan boxes, not the Instagram posts from abroad. The real version. The missing birthdays. The phone calls that never feel long enough. The quiet sacrifice that nobody posts about.

I understood what it felt like not from experience, but from their stories. And those stories were enough to make me say, clearly and firmly, to myself:

Not because I judged anyone who chose that path. I never did. But because I had seen what it cost, up close, and I had made a quiet decision that it wasn’t the cost I wanted to pay.

So when the recruiter called, that was the first wall I had to climb over not the logistics, not the compensation package, not the relocation. It was that old promise I had made to myself. The one that said: not me, not this.

But here’s the thing about walls. Sometimes you build them to protect yourself. And sometimes, you build them before you have the full picture.

The call came out of nowhere, the way the best and most disruptive things usually do.

A recruiter reached out about a position in Malaysia. International BPO. Account Specialist role. A compensation package that made my current salary look like it was still figuring itself out.

My first reaction, in true Manila-raised fashion, was: What’s the catch?

Because growing up street-smart means you don’t take anything at face value. You ask questions. You look for the fine print. You hold the offer up to the light and check if it’s as solid as it appears. I wasn’t cynical, I was careful. There’s a difference, and Manila taught me that difference early.

But the more I looked into it, the more legitimate it was. Real company. Real role. Real numbers. A genuine opportunity that had, for some reason, found its way to me specifically.

I was intrigued. I was skeptical. I was doing the math.

And then there was the other variable in the equation. The one that made all the careful, logical reasoning slightly beside the point.

The love of my life had already taken a job there.

She had packed her life into luggage, said her goodbyes, and moved to Malaysia with the kind of quiet, determined courage that I had always admired about her, and occasionally found deeply unfair, because how was I supposed to argue with that kind of courage?

There she was. Building something new, in a new country, in a city that wasn’t Manila. Thriving.

And there I was, holding a legitimate job offer in one hand and the full weight of that realization in the other:

She’s there. The opportunity is there. And I’m here, comfortable.

Now, I want to be clear, I am a person who believes deeply in the opportunities the Philippines offers. I wasn’t leaving because I thought the grass was greener. I was leaving because the person I loved was on the other side of that grass, and a genuinely good career opportunity had essentially knocked on my door and asked if I was coming.

I had not planned any of this. Not one part of it.

But street-smart people know something about unplanned moments: sometimes the best move isn’t the one you prepared for. Sometimes it’s the one that shows up and asks you to be brave on short notice.

Saying Yes to Something I Didn’t Know I Needed

Making the decision wasn’t a dramatic, cinematic moment. It was quiet. Almost practical.

I ran the numbers. I weighed the pros. I called her and we talked about what this could look like together, in a new city, building parallel lives that intersected every evening when work was done. I thought about the Manila version of me, who had always been resourceful enough to figure things out wherever she landed.

If I could navigate EDSA at rush hour and come out the other side intact, I could probably figure out Kuala Lumpur.

I said yes. Not because I had always dreamed of working abroad. Not because I was running away from anything. And definitely not because I had forgotten that promise I made to myself about never being an OFW.

I said yes because the opportunity was real, the love was real, and the version of me that had spent years being street-smart enough to recognize a good thing when it showed up? She recognized this.

I’ll be honest with you: working here as an expat is worth it.

The pay is genuinely good. And beyond the compensation, there’s a freedom in how you live here that I didn’t fully expect, you get to choose your lifestyle. The infrastructure is already in place. Things work. The transport system alone is a different world compared to what I was used to back home. Clean, reliable, connected. The kind of public transit that makes you realize you spent years commuting on hope and EDSA prayers.

Of course, good pay only matters if you manage it well and that’s on you. But generally speaking, the cost of living here is manageable in a way that makes the math work in your favor. I’ll get into the specifics in a separate piece, because Malaysia deserves its own full article. This city, this country it’s become my second home, and it earned that title.

As for homesickness? I genuinely didn’t struggle with it the way I expected to. I have Filipino friends here. I kept my lifestyle. And the love of my life is here with me ,which makes any city feel liveable.

And when I’m craving Filipino food? Kuala Lumpur has you covered. “ The Narra”, “Laguna “ there are spots here that will hit exactly the right note when you need a taste of home without having to book a flight.

What I didn’t anticipate was how much this move would shift my perspective.

It’s been an eye-opener in the truest sense. I’ve realized things about myself, about work, about what’s possible realizations that I’m still processing and that deserve their own space. (A deeper breakdown is coming in a separate piece — stay tuned.)

But here’s what I can say now :This move opened up opportunities faster than my original timeline ever would have. Things that might have taken years to reach in Manila accelerated here. The exposure, the environment, the network, it compresses your growth in ways you don’t fully appreciate until you’re already inside it.

I came here with a promise I had made to myself about never becoming an OFW. And in the technical, traditional sense I kept it. I didn’t leave because I had to. I left because I chose to. Because the reason was real, the opportunity was solid, and the person I wanted to build something with was already there.

That distinction matters to me more than I can explain in a single chapter.

Every year in the Philippine BPO trenches was a deposit into an account I didn’t know I was building. The communication skills. The resilience. The ability to read people quickly and respond intelligently. The street-smart instincts that made me sharp in a way that pure technical skill alone never could.

I didn’t arrive in Malaysia as someone starting over. I arrived as someone fully formed by a city that doesn’t raise you soft — who was now ready to find out what she was capable of when the stakes got higher and the environment got bigger.

Manila didn’t hold me back. Manila built me up and sent me forward.

I just hadn’t known that “forward” would have a different area code.

If you didn’t read Chapter 1, feel free to check it out. Chapter 3 is coming.

Originally published at https://open.substack.com.