takot akong mahalin sa paraang kailangan kong tiisin.

siguro ang pinakanakakatakot para sa akin is not being unloved. it's being loved, but in a way that makes me question myself every day. yung mahal naman ako, pero kailangan kong tanggapin na may mga araw na hindi niya ako kayang alagaan emotionally. yung mahal naman ako, pero may mga bagay na kailangan kong paulit-ulit na intindihin kahit ako naman yung nasasaktan. yung mahal naman ako, pero kailangan kong maging okay sa mga bagay na hindi naman talaga okay sa akin. ang hirap kasi, paano mo naman kasi tatanggihan ang pagmamahal kapag meron naman? paano mo sasabihing kulang kapag alam mong may effort din naman?

i'm scared that if someone loves me enough, i'll become willing to accept things i wouldn't accept from anyone else. baka dahil mahal ko siya, gagawa ako ng excuses na hindi ko naman gagawin kung ibang tao. baka sasabihin ko sa sarili ko na pagod lang siya, na hindi niya naman sinasadya, na may pinagdadaanan lang siya, na baka ako naman yung masyadong sensitive. paulit-ulit kong babawasan yung sakit para hindi ko kailangang harapin yung possibility na maybe this relationship is hurting me.

and if i'm being honest, i don't trust myself enough to know when i've had enough. alam ko kung ano ang dapat kong sabihin sa ibang tao kapag sila yung nasa situation. ang dali magsabi ng "you deserve better" kapag hindi ako yung nakakabit emotionally or wala ako ron sa posisyon nila, kasi kapag ako na yung nandun, iba pala. may mga araw na genuinely masaya kayo at may version ng taong mahal mo na sobrang lambing at sobrang genuine. kaya kapag may masakit na nangyayari, hindi mo naman kayang burahin lahat ng mabuti dahil lang sa isang pangyayari.

we keep remembering the good parts and those good parts are enough to make us stay longer than we should.

natatakot akong masanay sa paghingi. ayokong maging taong kailangan pang magsabi kung paano siya gustong mahalin, tapos after a while, mapapagod na lang siya sa kakasabi ko. ayokong maramdaman na ang basic reassurance ay favor. ayokong mag-isip kung deserve ko bang humingi ng oras, lambing, honesty, or reassurance dahil baka "ang needy" ko na. ang totoo, hindi naman ako humihingi ng perfect na tao. gusto ko lang maramdaman na kapag may kailangan akong sabihin, hindi agad ako magiging problema na kailangang ayusin.

may part din sa akin na takot maging vulnerable because once i show someone where i am soft, they know exactly where they can hurt me. ang bigat sabihin nito, pero totoo. kapag mahal mo ang isang tao, binibigyan mo siya ng access sa mga bagay na hindi mo basta sinasabi o ipinapakita sa lahat. your insecurities, your fears, the things that make you overthink at night. kaya nakakatakot isipin na baka one day, yung mga bagay na sinabi ko habang nagtitiwala ako, maging ammunition kapag galit na siya. baka yung weakness na pinakita ko dahil safe ako sa kanya, maging dahilan para maramdaman ko hindi pala ako safe at all.

ayokong maging relationship na puro recovery. yung okay kayo, may mangyayari, masasaktan ako, magkakaayos, magiging okay ulit, tapos uulit. after enough repetitions, baka hindi ko na mapansin na umiikot lang pala kami. baka mas maging proud pa ako sa fact na nalalagpasan namin yung problems kaysa tanungin kung bakit kailangan naming lagpasan yung parehong problema nang paulit-ulit. i don't want to confuse surviving a relationship with being happy in it.

and i know myself. kapag mahal ko ang isang tao, kaya kong maging understanding hanggang sa ako na yung nawawala sa sarili ko. kaya kong mag-adjust nang mag-adjust dahil ayokong makipag-away at kaya kong lunukin yung gusto kong sabihin para hindi maging "another problem" sa araw niya. pero ayokong someday, mapansin kong hindi na pala ako nagsasalita because i learned that keeping things to myself is the easiest way to keep someone close.

siguro, that's the kind of love i'm afraid of. not the loud kind nor the obviously cruel kind. mas nakakatakot yung love na may enough good in it to make you stay, but enough pain to make you slowly lose yourself. yung hindi mo maipaliwanag sa ibang tao kung bakit nahihirapan ka because from the outside, okay naman, you still have good days pero ikaw lang ang nakakaalam kung gaano karaming parte ng sarili mo ang tinatago mo para hindi na naman magkaroon ng problema.

kaya gusto kong matutong mag-observe ng sarili ko kapag nagmamahal ako. kapag napapansin kong lagi akong anxious, hindi ko gustong i-romanticize yun as proof na importante sa akin yung tao. kapag lagi kong iniisip kung galit ba siya, kung okay ba siya, kung may nagawa ba akong mali, gusto kong magkaroon ng enough honesty to ask myself why. kapag kailangan kong hulaan palagi kung nasaan ako sa buhay ng isang tao, ayokong tawagin agad na "normal relationship problems." hindi naman lahat ng discomfort ay red flag, pero hindi rin lahat ng discomfort kailangan tiisin hanggang mawala na yung sarili mo.

siguro ang pinaka-personal na takot ko is baka mapunta ako sa relationship na magiging expert ako sa pag-intindi sa ibang tao pero estranghero ako sa sarili ko. baka isang araw, alam ko na lahat ng triggers niya, lahat ng kailangan niyang marinig, lahat ng bagay na kailangan kong iwasan para hindi siya ma-upset, yung saulo ko na sya, pero hindi ko na alam kung ano yung kailangan ko. that scares me more than being alone because being alone can hurt, but losing your ability to hear yourself while you're with someone feels like a different kind of loneliness.

i want to love someone without constantly negotiating with my own boundaries. gusto kong makapagbigay nang hindi feeling ko may utang akong dapat bayaran. gusto kong magkaroon ng relationship where both of us can say, "love, nasaktan ako," without either person immediately becoming the enemy. if there comes a time when something really is not working, i hope i have enough respect for myself to admit it before resentment becomes the only language left between us.

hindi ko alam kung anong klaseng pagmamahal ang darating sa buhay ko. baka hindi ko rin agad malaman kung tama ba o hindi. i know i'll make mistakes. baka may mga bagay akong matutunan only after experiencing them myself. pero sana kapag dumating yung taong mamahalin ko, hindi ko maramdaman na kailangan kong paghirapan ang karapatang maging comfortable beside them. sana hindi ko kailangang maging less emotional, less honest, less demanding of basic respect just to keep the relationship peaceful. i want to be loved in a way that doesn't require me to disappear quietly. kasi kung kailangan kong mawala sa sarili ko para manatili ang isang tao, i don't think that's the kind of love i'm looking for.

isa pa, ang gusto kong tandaan kapag dumating yung araw na mahal ko na nang sobra ang isang tao ay hindi ko kailangang patunayan na kaya kong tiisin siya para mapatunayan na mahal ko siya. i don't want to measure the depth of my love by how much pain i can survive. ayokong maging proud someday na kahit ilang beses akong nasaktan, nanatili pa rin ako. gusto kong matutong umalis sa mga bagay na unti-unting kumukuha ng peace ko, kahit mahal ko pa. gusto kong piliin yung sarili ko bago pa ako tuluyang maging taong hindi ko na kilala dahil lang ayaw kong mawalan ng isang tao.

at kung may isang bagay akong ayaw kalimutan, iyon ay ang hindi ko gustong mahalin nang hanggang sa kaya kong tiisin. gusto kong mahalin nang hindi ko kailangang tiisin ang pagmamahal mismo.

ang-gelo ng isip ko kaya isusulat ko na lang series #2

mag-aalas dyes na ng gabi pero nagtutulak pa rin tayo ng plato sa lamesa nang walang kaimik-imik.

the electric fan is oscillating on speed three, turning its head slowly from left to right, making that familiar squeaky sound every time it hits the corner of the room. the television is playing pepito manaloto in the background, but nobody is actually watching it. the volume is kept low, just enough to fill the heavy space between us.

“galit ka ba?” i ask, keeping my voice as flat and neutral as possible, even if my chest feels tight.

“hindi,” you say.

you don’t look up from your phone. your thumb just keeps scrolling through an endless feed of reels you aren’t even reading.

“sigurado ka? kasi kanina ka pa hindi nangungusap diyan.”

“okay nga lang ako. kumain ka na diyan.”

and that’s it. the conversation is officially over before it even had a chance to start.

we all know this scene because we have lived it a hundred times, either as the person scrolling on the phone or the person sitting across the table, trying to decipher the exact weight of a four-letter word: okay.

Subscribe now

in filipino culture, we give this specific behavior a soft, almost cute name. we call it tampo.

we frame it as an endearing trait, a romantic quirk, or a harmless dynamic that comes naturally with loving someone. we make jokes about it on social media and we post memes about how girls get quiet when they are hungry or how boyfriends have to buy milk tea just to figure out what they did wrong.

but if we are being completely honest with ourselves, tampo is not cute. it is not a romantic sign of devotion, nor is it a cozy little trait we should be proud of carrying into adulthood.

at its core, tampo is a failure of emotional literacy. it is the wall we build when we lack the words, the courage, or the safety to say five simple words: nasaktan ako sa ginawa mo.

nobody wakes up at five years old and decides that the best way to handle pain is to freeze out the people they love. we had to learn it somewhere. and for most of us, that school was our own living room.

growing up in a typical filipino household, emotional expression was rarely a clear, structured conversation. feelings were complicated things that usually got in the way of daily survival. if you were a child and you cried because your feelings were hurt, you were often met with confusion or anger.

“umiiyak ka na naman? napakababaw naman ng luha mo.”

“ayan, kaka-cellphone mo ‘yan.”

“huwag ka ngang maarte diyan.”

when emotional pain is met with dismissal, a child learns a very quick, very permanent lesson: my hurt is an inconvenience to the people around me.

what happens when a child grows up without an emotional vocabulary? they improvise. if you cannot speak your pain, you have to wear it. you make sure your body language carries the weight of everything you aren’t allowed to say out loud.

you watch how the adults around you handle conflict. your parents didn’t sit down at the dining table after a disagreement to say, “hey, when you said that earlier, i felt disrespected, and i need us to talk about it.”

no. they pulled the blinds down.

your mother would walk around the house with her jaw set tight, washing the dishes with just a little too much force. the ceramic plates would clatter against each other in the sink—blag, blag, blag—a loud reminder to everyone in the house that she was furious. your father would go out to the garage, sit on a plastic monobloc chair, and stare at his motorcycle for hours without saying a single word to anyone.

there were no apologies. there was only a cold silence that lasted for two, three, sometimes four days, until one morning someone casually asked, “may kanin pa ba sa rice cooker?” and just like that, the fight was magically over.

the issue was never resolved; it was just swept under the linoleum rug, left to rot until the next argument pulled it back up.

we grew up in houses where silence was the default setting for conflict. we were taught that emotional maturity meant suppressing the outburst and waiting for the storm to pass on its own. we were never given the tools to name what was happening inside us. we were never taught the language of emotional vulnerability.

and it wasn’t just our homes. school didn’t teach us this either. we had subjects for algebra, for the parts of a cell, for the provinces of luzon, but there was never a subject that taught us how to say “sumasakit ang dibdib ko dahil sa sinabi mo.”

there was no textbook chapter on how to name a feeling without turning it into either a joke or an accusation. we memorized the mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell decades before anyone taught us that anger is often just a mask worn by hurt, or that silence is a symptom, not a solution.

today, when our partners do something that stings, we don’t know how to reach across the table and say, “hey, that hurt me.”

instead, we revert to the only language we were ever fluent in. we pull back our hands, lock the gates, and retreat into tampo.

we know how to make people feel that something is wrong without ever saying what went wrong.

when you feel helpless, when you feel like your emotions don’t matter or that your words won’t be heard anyway, silence suddenly feels like the only control you have left in the relationship.

it becomes a non-violent form of warfare. you don’t have to raise your voice or you don’t have to risk looking “crazy” or “too emotional.” you just have to remove your warmth.

you start using micro-behaviors designed to send a signal without ever having to take responsibility for the message.

you reply in messenger with single words instead of your usual paragraph.

you leave out the usual “ingat ka” or the heart emoji at the end of a text.

you walk slightly faster than them when walking through the mall.

you make a cup of instant coffee for yourself in the kitchen, deliberately leaving their mug in the cupboard.

you “seen zone” their message for six hours, and both of you know that you were online the entire time.

you post a vague, moody song lyric on your instagram notes, hoping the right person reads it as a distress signal without you having to actually send it to them.

and when they finally notice the shift in the temperature and ask you what’s wrong, you deliver the ultimate defensive shield: “wala.” or “bahala ka.”

it is a trap, and both people in the room know it.

if they take your “wala” at face value and go back to doing whatever they were doing, you get angrier because they didn’t care enough to break through your wall. if they keep pressing and asking what’s wrong, you get annoyed because they are “nagmamagaling” or bothering you when you clearly said you were fine.

we use tampo because it keeps us safe from the terrifying prospect of vulnerability.

saying “nasaktan ako nung sinabi mo na wala akong ambag” opens you up to the possibility that the other person might disagree with you. they might tell you that you’re being oversensitive, and they might get defensive and throw a past mistake back in your face. direct communication requires you to stand bare-chested in front of someone and admit that they have the power to hurt you.

silence, on the other hand, is a fortress. inside tampo, you are untouchable. you hold the high ground. you force the other person to sit in anxiety, constantly guessing what they did wrong, replaying every interaction over the last 48 hours just to figure out which minor offense triggered the cold war.

it is exhausting for the person doing it, and it is torturous for the person receiving it. but because we never learned how to process discomfort out in the open, we keep holding onto silence like it’s a shield, unaware that we are slowly suffocating the very thing we are trying to protect.

the most frightening thing about growing up is realizing how much of your parents’ shadow lives inside the way you love.

we spend our teenage years promising ourselves that we will never be like them. we tell ourselves that our future home will be quiet, peaceful, and full of soft understanding. we swear that we will never pull the same passive-aggressive games our mother played, or give the icy stares our father gave.

then you turn nineteen, and you find yourself sitting cross-legged on your bed, phone propped up against a stack of books, mid-video call with your partner.

something goes wrong. they showed up thirty minutes late to your date without a single “on my way” text, or they left you on seen while replying to everyone else’s stories for the whole afternoon. and before your brain even has time to process a calm response, a switch flips inside your body.

your shoulders tense up. you yank your earphones out and drop them on the bed with a staticky thud.

and just like that, you are your mother. or you are your father.

pinoy couples get endlessly stuck in these cycles because we are trying to run modern, emotionally aware relationships using an outdated, emotionally suppressed operating system. we want deep intimacy, but we only have access to ancestral coping mechanisms.

think about how rare it is to see a healthy argument modeled in a filipino household. for most of us, conflict had only two extreme modes:

1. explosive confrontation: shouting matches, slamming doors, broken items, personal insults, and threats of leaving the house.

2. complete emotional abandonment: the cold shoulder, total silence, pretending the other person doesn’t exist, and waiting for time to numb the pain.

there was no middle ground. there was no scene in our childhood where two adults sat on the sofa with two warm mugs of water, took a deep breath, and said, “i am really frustrated right now, but i love you, and i want us to figure this out together.”

because we never saw what healthy conflict looked like, we naturally assume that any conflict is a threat to the relationship. we treat every small disagreement like an impending disaster.

so when our partners disappoint us, we get terrified. we don’t know how to navigate the space between minor annoyance and total breakup. and so, we default to mode number two: we drop the temperature of the room to zero. we use passive-aggressiveness as a buffer because we don’t know how to collide with each other safely.

we repeat the exact same scripts. we hand down the exact same silence to our partners that our parents handed down to us. we keep the cycle alive, pretending it’s just a normal part of being filipino, while quietly wondering why we feel so alone even when we are lying in the same bed.

the part we don’t like to admit is that: tampo is rarely a private affair.

in a culture built around hiya and pakikisama, our conflicts almost never happen in a vacuum. somebody’s tita is always listening through the thin sawali wall. somebody’s mother is already standing by and ready to referee. we grew up in households where a couple’s argument automatically became a family event—where a fight between two adults could summon an entire barangay’s worth of opinions by the following morning.

so we learned, early on, that tampo has an audience. it is not just a private wound between two people but a small act staged for whoever might be watching.

you post the sad instagram notes, nagrepost sa tiktok, and you leave your notifications on read so the other person can see the little checkmarks and feel the sting of being ignored in front of an invisible crowd. tampo, in the age of social media, has evolved from the silent dinner table into the public group chat and the sudden unfollow that everyone notices but nobody addresses directly.

there is also an older version of this audience: utang na loob and family hierarchy. many of us were taught that voicing displeasure to an elder was itself a kind of disrespect, no matter how legitimate the hurt. we learned to swallow our complaints toward the people who supposedly “sacrificed” the most for us, and tampo became the only socially acceptable outlet: a silence loud enough to be noticed, but polite enough to never be called defiance.

this is why tampo survives so well in filipino culture specifically. it is not an individual bad habit but a coping mechanism shaped by a collectivist society that punishes direct confrontation and rewards quiet endurance. we call it pakikisama. we call it being mapagpasensya. but strip away the kind words, and what’s left is a whole generation of people who learned to perform harmony instead of practicing honesty.

to understand why tampo runs so deep in our culture, we have to zoom out from the dinner table and look at how filipinos communicate in general.

anthropologists have a term for this: a “high-context” culture, as opposed to a “low-context” one.

in low-context cultures, meaning lives mostly in the words themselves—you say what you mean, plainly, and the listener isn’t expected to dig for subtext.

in high-context cultures like ours, meaning lives everywhere except the words. it lives in the tone, the timing, the posture, the fact that someone offered food three times before you were supposed to accept it. the actual sentence is almost secondary to everything surrounding it.

we live and breathe inside this high-context world. we heavily rely on pahiwatig, the indirect cues or the art of saying one thing while meaning another, to navigate almost every layer of our social lives. we don’t tell a guest “you have overstayed”; we start washing the dishes loudly and say “ay, antok na antok na ako.” we don’t say “no” outright; we say “medyo mahirap yata” and expect the other person to read the closed door behind that sentence.

and at the center of all this sits pakiramdam, that almost mystical skill of sensing what another person feels without them ever opening their mouth. growing up, pakiramdam was practically a moral virtue.

the “matalino” child was the one who could tell, just from the sound of a slammed cabinet, that tita was in a mood and it was time to make herself scarce. the “mabait” daughter-in-law was the one who could sense, without being told, that her mother-in-law wanted the extra piece of bangus on her own plate. reading a room correctly, without needing anyone to spell it out, was rewarded. asking directly was often seen as makapal ang mukha, or worse, walang modo.

even our old courtship rituals ran entirely on pahiwatig. the harana outside the window instead of a direct proposal. the tingin-tingin across a fiesta crowd instead of a text that says “gusto kita.” the go-between relative who tests the waters before either party has to risk a direct rejection. an entire romantic tradition built on the idea that love should announce itself sideways, through gesture and implication, never head-on.

this system works beautifully for maintaining group harmony. it lets an entire barangay function without anyone having to bluntly tell anyone else “wala kang kwentang kapitbahay” to their face. it lets families absorb conflict without it exploding into open warfare every other week. pakiramdam, used well, is a genuine social intelligence—a way of being gentle with each other in a country where everyone lives close together, sees each other every day, and cannot afford to burn bridges.

but the exact same skill that makes us gracious neighbors makes us disastrous romantic partners.

the trouble starts the moment we quietly convert pakiramdam from a social nicety into a requirement for love. we start to believe, without ever saying it out loud, that if our partner truly loves us, they should be able to read our minds the way a good neighbor reads a mood. we begin treating direct communication itself with suspicion. “ang labo naman, parang therapy session” or “bakit parang kausap kong foreigner, sabihin mo lang sa akin nang normal” are things people actually say when their partner tries to name a feeling plainly. somewhere along the way, we decided that stating your hurt in a full, clear sentence is “too western,” or too try-hard, as if clarity were a personality flaw instead of a basic form of respect.

i have heard people say, almost proudly, that explaining your hurt makes it less “sweet,” and less authentic, as if love loses its magic the moment it needs a sentence to survive. “kung kailangan mo pang sabihin, wala nang saya doon,” someone once told me, genuinely convinced that having to ask for what you need cancels out the tenderness of receiving it. what they are really asking for, underneath all that, is the labor-free version of intimacy: they want the warm, satisfying feeling of being understood, without ever having to do the uncomfortable work of being clear.

the quiet cruelty of that belief is that it turns love into a trivia game with no rulebook, where your partner is graded on a test they were never given the syllabus for. pakiramdam might be enough to tell a jeepney driver that you don’t want to talk right now. it is not enough to carry the full, specific, complicated weight of why a particular comment cut you exactly where it did. no amount of “sensing the vibe” can transmit the very specific memory from your childhood that makes a certain joke unbearable, or the exact insecurity that a certain silence reopens. some things are simply too detailed, too personal, too yours, to be delivered through a hint.

this is the real cost of high-context love, it lets us mistake being guessed correctly for being loved well, and it lets us mistake having to ask for something as proof that we were never loved at all.

underneath every episode of tampo lies a desperate fantasy:

gusto kong maramdaman mo na nasaktan ako nang hindi ko kailangang sabihin sa ‘yo.

we want emotional telepathy. we want the people we love to look at us, read the subtle angle of our eyebrows, detect the slight shift in our voice, and instantly understand the exact context of our emotional wound.

“kung talagang mahal mo ako, alam mo dapat.”

“bakit ko pa kailangang ipaliwanag? mukha ba akong tanga?”

“dapat kusa mong nararamdaman.”

this is a deeply human longing, but it is also a childish one. and i don’t mean “childish” as an insult; i mean it as a literal psychological reality.

Share angelojace

when we were infants, we had no words. we couldn’t say “i have gas,” or “my clothes are damp,” or “i feel lonely.” we relied entirely on our mothers or caregivers to guess our needs. an attentive parent would look at a crying baby, sense what was wrong, and fix it without the baby ever having to articulate a single sentence.

that was the first time we experienced being loved: being understood without having to speak.

when we enter romantic relationships as adults, we often carry that old infant need with us. we want our partners to play the role of the magical, all-knowing parent who can read our minds and fix our discomfort before we even have to name it.

but our partners are not mind readers. they are just fallible, tired human beings who are also trying to navigate their own messy heads and their own unlearned childhood traumas.

when we expect our partners to guess why we are hurt, we are setting them up for a test they don’t even know they are taking. and when they inevitably fail that test, because they can’t read our minds, we use their failure as proof that they don’t care enough about us.

“nakita mo nang tahimik ako, hindi mo man lang ako tinanong nang maayos.”

“tanungin pa ba kita? alam mo naman siguro kung anong ginawa mo.”

it becomes a cruel endless game. we hold the answer sheet behind our back and get angry at them for guessing the wrong letter.

the frustration of wanting to be understood without having to explain yourself is one of the heaviest taxes we pay in our relationships. it feels exhausting to explain your hurt. it feels humiliating to have to break down your boundaries step-by-step for someone who is supposed to love you.

it feels so much easier to stay silent and wait for them to figure it out. but the truth is, nobody is coming to read your mind. no one has the map to your internal triggers except you. holding back your words while expecting someone else to understand your silence is an impossible demand.

tampo is also not gender-neutral, even if we like to pretend it is.

when a woman withdraws, she is often called malambing, maarte, or simply “just being emosyonal”—her silence gets folded into the broader, almost affectionate script of what a filipina girlfriend or wife is “supposed” to do. society has practically scripted her lines for her: pout, go quiet, wait for the milk tea or the flowers, then forgive.

when a man withdraws, he’s rarely given the same soft vocabulary. he’s called matigas ang ulo, malamig, or accused of “hindi marunong makipag-usap.” nobody buys him milk tea to coax him out of his silence. he’s expected to simply “get over it,” because filipino masculinity was never given permission to be hurt in the first place—only to be angry, or to disappear into work, alcohol, or the garage with the motorcycle.

this double standard doesn’t make either experience easier. it just means men and women learn two different flavors of the same broken habit. women are taught that silence is an acceptable, even attractive, way to communicate pain, so they lean into it as a legitimate strategy. men are taught that any expression of hurt—including quiet withdrawal—is itself weakness, so they bury it even deeper, until it leaks out sideways as irritability, distance, or a sudden, unexplained coldness that looks a lot like tampo but is never named as such.

neither script actually teaches anyone the one skill that matters: naming the feeling, out loud, without a costume on it.

we tend to talk about tampo as something that only happens between boyfriends and girlfriends, between husbands and wives. but if we’re honest, most of us learned to do this long before we ever had a partner.

we do it with our mothers when they forget to ask how our exam went. we do it with our best friend when she goes out with the new barkada without inviting us. we do it with our siblings over something as small as who gets to use the family motorcycle on a saturday. we even do it at work—giving a curt, one-word reply in an email thread, or “forgetting” to loop in a colleague on a group chat after a disagreement in a meeting.

this matters because it tells us something important: tampo is not really about romance at all. it’s about what happens to any human being who was never taught how to say “you hurt me” safely, in any relationship, to anyone. romantic relationships just tend to amplify it, because that’s usually where our expectations for being understood are highest and our defenses are thinnest.

recognizing this pattern outside of romance can actually make it easier to catch. it’s much easier to notice you’re doing the silent-treatment thing with a coworker over a missed credit in a report than it is to notice it with someone you’re in bed with every night. and once you can name the pattern in a low-stakes relationship, it gets a little less scary to name it in a high-stakes one.

Subscribe now

so how do we actually break out of a habit that has been baked into our culture and our families for generations?

it doesn’t start with a grand, sona vibes speech. it doesn’t mean you will never feel the urge to do tampo again. the urge will always be there—it’s muscle memory. your body will naturally want to pull back, lock up, and drop its jaw whenever a conflict hits.

breaking the cycle starts with noticing that urge in real-time, stopping for three seconds, and choosing to make a fool out of yourself by being honest instead.

vulnerability is embarrassing, yes. it feels awkward and raw, especially if you spent your whole life pretending that nothing bothers you.

it means swallowing your pride then looking at your partner across a small room while the electric fan hums, and saying something wildly uncool like:

“nasaktan ako sa sinabi mo kanina. pakiramdam ko hindi mo nirespeto ‘yong ginawa ko.”

or:

“nagagalit ako ngayon, pero ayaw kong manahimik lang. kailangan ko lang ng kalahating oras para lumalamig ang ulo ko, tapos mag-usap tayo.”

look at the difference between those statements and a cold, flat “wala.”

the first statement opens a door, while the second statement sets a boundary with a promise to return. neither of them uses silence as a punishment. both of them require you to step out of the safe fortress of tampo and risk being seen in your actual, unpolished human state.

a small trick that helps: give the feeling a name before you give it a face. instead of jumping straight to “galit ako sa’yo,” try separating the emotion from the accusation. “nasaktan ako” is different from “masama ka.” the first one is information about your internal state. the second one is a verdict on their character, and verdicts always trigger defensiveness. the goal isn’t to win the exchange—it’s to be known.

it also helps to agree, ahead of time, on a shared signal for “i need a minute, but i’m not disappearing.” something as simple as saying “time-out muna, babalikan ko ‘to” turns silence from a boundary with an expiration date instead of a wall with no door.

learning emotional literacy is like learning a brand-new dialect in your adulthood phase, or your twenties, thirties, or whenever you finally decide to pick it up. you will stutter. you will sound weird to yourself. you might even feel a little bit humiliated the first few times you admit out loud that your feelings are hurt, because everything in your upbringing told you that showing pain makes you weak.

but the alternative is far worse.

the alternative is living in a house full of unsaid things. the alternative is sitting across from someone you love ten years from now, sharing a bed and a surname, but remaining complete strangers because neither of you ever had the courage to say “i am hurt” without hiding behind a wall first.

we don’t have to keep repeating the silence of our parents. we don’t have to pass down the cold shoulders and the heavy dinners to the people we love today.

the next time you feel the cold air rising in your throat or the next time you feel like retreating into the safety of “bahala ka,” take a breath.

stay at the table.

put down the phone.

and give your pain the voice it was denied when you were young.

at some point, someone has to be brave enough to say what our families taught us to swallow: “nasaktan ako.” not “wala lang,” not “bahala ka,” not “dapat alam mo na.” just “nasaktan ako,” even if your voice shakes and even if saying it feels awkward as hell. because maybe we were never asking to be read like a book. we were just too scared to open the page ourselves.

o siya, wag ka na magtampo ha? sabihin mo na kung anong masakit, tapos kain na tayo bago lumamig ang ulam. kain tayo team ryzza.

“try mo lang. ano ba namang mawawala?”

i have spent a long time hating how easily people say that phrase. it usually comes out during moments when you are sitting across someone at a coffee shop or standing by a bus stop, staring at a crossroad in your life that feels entirely too large for your shoulders. someone listens to you talk for five minutes, tilts their head, and offers those three words as if they were hand cream—something soft and easy you can just apply to smooth over every rough edge of a decision.

i want to be clear about something right away: i am not against taking risks. i do not think trying is a bad thing, nor do i believe we should all just stay frozen in place out of fear. my issue with “try mo lang” is much simpler than that. the person who gives you that advice almost always gets to finish their drink, pick up their bag, and leave the room right after saying it. they go back to their own routines. meanwhile, the person receiving the advice has to go home and figure out how to live with whatever happens after the attempt is made.

people speak as if trying is a single, isolated moment in time. you decide, you jump, you see where you land. it sounds cinematic when you describe it like that. but real life does not work in neat cinematic beats. a decision never arrives alone in a vacuum. by the time you sit down to consider an attempt, that choice is already weighed down by things that came long before it. it brings tuition fees into the room. it brings gas prices, the remaining balance on a family bank account, the hours spent in traffic, and the quiet expectation that you are supposed to be building a stable future for everyone around you.

what does “try mo lang” actually mean when you are living in a place where you do not have much room to be wrong?

it is easy to tell someone to take a chance, to just try, when you aren't the one who has to figure out what happens after the chance is taken.

Subscribe

if you look at the way decisions are made in a typical filipino household, you will notice that almost every choice has the word sayang floating somewhere in the background. 

we are often painted as a nation that lacks long-term vision, or worse, a people who do not know how to dream big. but that is completely false. mataas mangarap ang pinoy. we dream in big, sweeping strokes. we want the degree, the house, the stable job, the break that finally changes our family's trajectory. the issue has never been a lack of imagination. the issue is that most of us grow up knowing exactly what every single peso represents before we even learn how to earn it.

money in a working-class or middle-class filipino home rarely belongs to the person holding it. by the time a paycheck or an allowance arrives, it already has a list of destinations attached to it. it belongs to the electric bill due on the fifteenth or the buffer fund for when someone inevitable gets sick.

you do not need a formal education in economics to understand this. you learn it simply by growing up around the dinner table. you hear adults having tense conversations about whether buying a slightly better brand of rice is worth the extra thirty pesos. you watch a parent pause at a store counter, look at an item in their hands, and then slowly put it back because they remembered an upcoming payment they forgot to factor in. you see people put off dentist appointments or long-overdue checkups because the money set aside for those things suddenly had to go to someone else’s immediate need.

because of this, you learn how to calculate long before you ever learn how to take a risk. 

when a young filipino is faced with a major decision, the primary question is almost never, “do i want this?” wanting something is relatively easy to figure out. the question that actually determines our lives, the one that sits heavy in the throat before any real move is made, is simply: “kaya ba?”

those two questions live in entirely different universes. 

“do i want this?” assumes that your desire is the main variable that matters. it assumes a world where you can follow your passion or test out a new path just to see if it feels right. but “kaya ba?” carries a suffocating weight. when you ask if something is possible, you are not just asking about your own stamina or talent. you are asking if your family budget can absorb a mistake, asking if the time you spend trying something new will delay the timeline everyone else is relying on. you are asking if you have enough safety nets to fall back on if the door swings shut in your face.

we live in a country that constantly urges young people to be bold, to innovate, and to chase their dreams, while simultaneously offering almost zero structural margin for error. we are told to reach for the stars, but the floor beneath us is so fragile that falling even a few inches can break a home’s entire monthly budget. 

i did not fully grasp how much that contradiction was shaping my own life until i became the person who wanted to try something different with my own education.

Comment

i am nineteen years old, and i am currently a student at the university of the philippines.

from the outside looking in, sitting inside a UP campus is something you are supposed to be profoundly grateful for. and i am. believe me, i know what it means to hold a slot in this institution. UP na 'yan, eh. it is the country's national university, the place people study for years just to enter, the institution that carries a level of prestige that can open doors for the rest of your life. every time i tell relatives or old high school classmates where i study, there is an immediate nod of approval, a silent consensus that i have somehow made it onto the right track.

yet, for months now, i have been sitting in classrooms, staring at the whiteboard, and asking myself if i should leave. i have been quietly looking into what it takes to transfer to a local city college—yung public college na dito lang sa aming lugar.

to understand why someone would even consider making a move like that, you have to look past the institution's name and look at the daily logistics of staying inside it. 

i am a working student. on top of my academic load, i have to balance work just to ensure i can cover my day-to-day costs. i am not the only child in my family putting themselves through school either; dalawa kaming nag-aaral sa college nang sabay. every peso that goes toward my daily survival is a peso that is constantly being weighed against my family’s collective pool of resources.

physical distance adds another layer to the decision. going to UP means more than getting yourself to class every day. tuition may be covered through free higher education, but the cost of going to college never begins and ends with tuition. there is the commute, the hours spent getting there and back, the food you have to buy along the way, and the small expenses that quietly pile up until you realize how much simply being able to attend school is costing you. you have to consider the daily burn of gasoline, the skyrocketing prices of public transportation, the hidden costs of endlessly commuting back and forth, and the physical wear and tear on your body before you even set foot on campus. every hour spent sitting in traffic or waiting for a ride is an hour i am not working, studying, or resting.

on top of all that, there is my living situation and my family. my parents are getting older, and i have started noticing it in small ways that i probably would have ignored a few years ago. they move a little slower now. i notice the tiredness on their faces at the end of the day. when i am far from home, especially after a long commute, i sometimes catch myself thinking about how much time i am actually spending away from them. it bothers me more than i know how to explain. i keep thinking that while i am busy trying to build my own future, time with them is quietly passing too. and i do not know how much of that time i am willing to spend watching the road through a window when i could simply be home.

people outside academia rarely talk about what actually happens inside UP. they hear the success stories—the topnotchers, the famous alumni, the fierce activists, the graduates who land lucrative corporate jobs right out of the gate. but behind every single one of those success stories is a massive, unspoken weight of struggle. the pressure inside the university is relentless. you carry the daily weight of knowing that pinapaaral ka ng taumbayan, which sounds noble until it translates into a constant, lingering guilt that every mistake you make is a waste of public funds. you absorb the self-imposed pressure to perform, because the unspoken rule of being a UP student is that you are expected to be brilliant, resilient, and completely self-sufficient at all times. the assumption is always that because you are in UP, your future is automatically secured.

even the degree program itself carries a layer of quiet conflict. i have always loved the performing arts. it is where i feel most alive, where my mind actually wants to expand. but when it came time to choose a college track, my mother and i sat down and made the choice that almost every working-class family makes: we picked the practical option. 

we chose the path that seemed like it had a clearer, safer line to employment. i told myself i could live with that compromise. but over time, when you combine a practical degree you didn't fully choose with long commutes, financial stress, working night shifts, and missing your family, the exhaustion doesn't just sit in your muscles—it gets into your bones.

it all accumulates slowly. it is not one dramatic breakdown on a tuesday afternoon; it is a hundred small moments of sitting in a crowded jeepney or staring at a laptop screen at three in the morning, realizing you are running on empty.

a few weeks ago, the thought of transferring stopped feeling like a distant possibility and started feeling like an actual decision i might have to make. i remember opening my laptop and realizing that i was no longer just imagining what life would look like somewhere closer to home. i was looking things up. i found the transfer guidelines of the local city college near us, opened its curriculum, and placed it beside my current subjects. i went through them one by one, trying to figure out which units might be credited and which ones i might have to take again. then another question followed. how much longer would i actually have to stay in school if i transferred? i ended up opening my notebook and doing the most unromantic part of the whole thing: calculating. i compared what i spend getting to and staying in UP with what my daily expenses might look like if i studied at a school barely ten minutes from my bedroom. the numbers were small in isolation. put together, they started to feel like an argument.

it was already late when i looked at the page again. i remember staring at the figures for a while, then feeling that familiar discomfort creep in. part of me was thinking about how much easier it could be to study closer to home. another part kept dragging me back to everything that came before this decision. getting into UP had not been some casual achievement i could simply set aside when things became complicated. i thought about the nights i spent studying, the anxiety that came with the entrance exam, and the way my parents looked at me when the results finally came out. they were proud of me. i was proud of myself. so why was i sitting there, months later, calculating how much it would cost to leave?

that question stayed with me longer than i expected.

after everything it took to get into UP, am i really considering leaving?

Subscribe

this is where the concept of sayang returns to choke you. if i speak to people about this, i already know what they will say. "UP ka na, oh. ang hirap-hirap makapasok dyan, bakit ka pa lilipat sa iba?"

those statements come from a real place. i understand why people say them. but those comments never actually answer the question that is keeping me up at night: is staying here still working for me, or am i just staying because i am afraid of what people will say if i leave?

i had spent so much time thinking about how difficult it was to get into UP. i didn't expect that one day i would have to think about how difficult it was to stay.

wanting to step away from something people see as a major achievement comes with a guilt that is difficult to explain.

in the philippines, getting into a state university like UP carries immense symbolic weight. to the public, the name itself is synonymous with opportunity, upward mobility, and intelligence. when people look at you, they see the potential future and the prestige. they do not see the daily reality of your mental health, your empty wallet at the end of the week, or the sheer physical exhaustion of trying to balance survival with academic excellence.

it creates a strange emotional trap. you find yourself feeling like an ungrateful child simply for admitting that an environment might not be right for you. you can deeply appreciate the fact that you passed a competitive entrance exam, you can respect the institution and its history, and you can still realize that the daily cost of staying inside it is draining you faster than you can recover. 

yet, society rarely gives us room to hold those thoughts at the same time. the moment you express a desire to leave, people treat it as a moral failure. they treat it as though you are throwing away a golden ticket that someone else would have killed to have.

when people warn you against leaving, they keep pointing to sayang. but what exactly is being wasted here? is it sayang to walk away from a name if staying means burning out your health, draining your family's daily resources, and missing out on the final years you have with aging parents? or is it more sayang to spend four or five years forcing yourself through a system just to satisfy everyone else’s definition of success?

i do not villainize the people who tell me not to leave. i understand where their reactions are coming from. their logic comes from a deeply ingrained filipino survival instinct: you hold onto what is certain, no matter how painful it is, because uncertain things in this country are dangerous. if you have a foot in the door of a prestigious institution, you do not pull it back, because you never know if another door will ever open for you again.

that logic makes total sense when you are living in a country with no safety nets. but it also creates a culture where we are expected to endure unnecessary suffering simply because we are terrified of the unknown. it turns our decisions into acts of endurance rather than choices made out of genuine hope.

when someone hears that a student is "thinking of transferring," it sounds like a crisp personal choice. you pack your bags, sign a few papers, and walk into a new building. but if you sit down and look at the actual operational mechanics of transferring in the philippines, you realize it is an absolute logistical maze.

first, you look at the transfer guidelines. then you quickly realize it isn't as simple as swapping one school for another.

you have to ask a cascade of practical questions. will the general education units you took in UP be credited by the local city college, or will they make you retake basic subjects all over again? if they don't credit your units, you will end up being delayed by a year or two. graduating late means an extra year or two of not being able to work full-time to support your family. what happens to the money you already spent on papers, commuting, and food over the past semesters? even if you don't pay direct tuition fees, every single peso spent surviving those semesters is money that cannot be recovered.

then you calculate the forward-looking costs. how much will the daily transportation cost at the new school? is the schedule flexible enough to let you keep your job, or will the new class hours force you to cut back on your work hours and earn less? how will your family's daily routine change if you are suddenly studying ten minutes away instead of hours away?

this is not an organized list you make. it is a terrifying mental loop that plays out every night before you go to sleep. one practical question immediately generates three more. the more you dig into the mechanics of making a change, the less simple the choice becomes.

this brings you to a brutal realization: the hardest part of making a choice isn't figuring out what you want. the hardest part is realizing that simply wanting something doesn't automatically make it feasible.

this is where the phrase "try mo lang" completely collapses under its own weight. okay, let's say i want to "just try" transferring. but how? under what specific conditions? with whose money am i going to pay for the transitional period where i might not be able to work as much? how much time am i allowed to lose if the process gets bogged down in administrative delays?

the attempt begins long before the actual transfer. it begins with figuring out whether you can survive the decision to try.

when an outsider watches a young person navigate a decision like this, all they see is the surface level. they hear you say, "iniisip ko kung lilipat ako," and they judge your action based on two simple choices: you stay or you leave. if you take months to decide, they assume you are soft or indecisive.

they see the choice, but they never see the vast web of conditions surrounding the choice.

Subscribe

a nineteen-year-old student can appear deeply indecisive when, in reality, they are trying to hold ten different variables in their head at the exact same time—trying to balance their own mental health against their mother's medical expenses, their commute time against their job shift, their personal dreams against their family's immediate financial survival.

a young adult can appear terrified or weak when they are actually being remarkably responsible, refusing to make a leap until they are 100% sure it won't plunge their family into debt.

a student can appear completely unambitious when they choose a smaller, less famous local college over a prestigious national university, when in reality they are simply making a rational, mature assessment of what their current resources allow them to sustain.

sometimes what looks like hesitation is actually someone trying to calculate the cost of being wrong.

when you have no safety net, hesitation is a coping mechanism. it is the quiet, invisible work of someone trying to make sure that if things go wrong, the damage stays contained to them and doesn't spill over to destroy the people they love.

and I'm only nineteen.

culturally, nineteen is supposed to be an age of profound lightness. 

people love to romanticize your late teens and early twenties. older adults look at you with a nostalgic smile and offer comforting platitudes: "bata ka pa. you have so much time ahead of you. you can still change your mind. you don't have to have everything figured out yet."

it sounds lovely but the material reality of living in the philippines doesn't pause just because you are young. the electric company doesn't care that you are nineteen and still searching for your true purpose. the price of gasoline doesn't lower itself because you are going through an existential crisis about your college major.

we live in a system that forces young people to make life-altering decisions long before they have the safety or experience to navigate them. you are expected to choose a lifelong career track at seventeen or eighteen, before you even fully know who you are as a person. you are expected to commit to an institution before knowing if its environment will destroy your mental health. you are forced to make high-stakes financial choices before you have ever had the chance to build a financial cushion of your own.

i don't know if transferring to a local city college is the right answer for me. i really don't. some days i wake up convinced that staying in UP is the only way to secure a real future, and that i just need to toughen up and bear the exhaustion. other days i look at my life and realize that staying is slowly breaking me down, and that moving to a local school would give me the breath of air i desperately need to actually survive my youth.

i don't have a clean resolution to this choice, and i am learning to accept that this lack of clarity is okay. 

i don't think i should have to prove that i deserve to try by first proving that i can afford to fail.

when you start examining a story like this, it initially looks like an isolated, personal problem. it looks like the story of one tired nineteen-year-old student, sitting in a messy bedroom, struggling to choose between two colleges. it is easy to frame it as a story about individual grit, personal choices, or emotional resilience.

but when you strip away the personal drama and look at what is actually driving the stress, you realize that almost none of this stress is purely personal.

why does a student have to choose between their physical health and the name of their university? why does an everyday commute eat up four hours of a person's life every single day? why is living near a university campus so obscenely expensive that working-class students are forced to travel across entire provinces just to attend class? why are local city colleges often viewed as a "downgrade" or a fallback option rather than fully funded, high-quality institutions that every student can access equally in their own neighborhood?

these are not individual personal failures. these are structural realities.

Join the chat

the broken public transportation system that turns a fifteen-kilometer trip into a two-hour ordeal is a political reality. 

the spatial inequality that concentrates top-tier educational resources in a few overcrowded metro centers while leaving regional and local options underfunded is a political reality.

the stagnant wages and high inflation that make two college tuitions or daily allowances a crushing burden for a working-class family are political realities.

i did not create the conditions i am navigating. i did not set the price of gasoline. i did not design the geography of our university campuses. i did not choose to build a society where higher education is treated as an olympic survival sport rather than a basic public service. yet, like millions of young filipinos, i am the one who has to make life-defining decisions entirely within those restrictive conditions.

we keep telling people to be brave about choices that society has made unnecessarily difficult.

we love to celebrate stories of poor students who walk ten miles to school, or working students who sleep two hours a night to pass their exams, framing their struggle as inspiring proof of the resilient filipino spirit. but we rarely stop to ask why education in this country requires that level of self-sacrifice in the first place. the problem isn't simply whether an individual student has enough courage or work ethic. sometimes the problem is that the conditions around us leave very little room for courage to be useful.

despite everything i have written here—i still want to try.

i do not know if i will actually submit those transfer papers by next semester. the decision remains unresolved in my life. i am still sitting in my classes, still looking at the local college guidelines, still weighing the costs every single day. i am not writing this from a place of triumphant victory where i have everything figured out.

i am writing this simply to acknowledge that the desire to try something different exists, and that wanting a different life is not a crime.

i still want to know what would happen if i chose a path that allowed me to sleep a few more hours a night. i still want to know what it feels like to go to a school ten minutes away from my family, where i can have dinner with my parents before they get too old, without feeling like i am committing career suicide. i still want to know if i can build a life that is defined by something other than raw, relentless endurance.

i am not asking for a life without consequences. i know that every choice carries a trade-off, and i am willing to work hard for whatever future i pick. what i am asking for—what i think every young filipino deserves—is simply some room to make choices based on hope rather than sheer panic. we deserve the structural space to figure out who we are without feeling like a single wrong step will ruin our entire lives.

at the beginning, the phrase "try mo lang" annoyed me because of how casually people throw it around without understanding the cost. 

now, i realize that my anger wasn't directed at the idea of trying itself. i was angry because the phrase is incomplete. i don't need a stranger or a friend to tell me to be brave and try. i already have the desire to try inside me. what i need—what all of us need—are the material and social conditions that actually make trying possible.

try mo lang.

it sounds like three harmless words you can throw into a conversation to fill the silence when someone tells you about their fears.

then you look at everything that quietly sits behind those three words. you think about the bills your family is already trying to keep up with, the commute that gets more expensive the farther you have to go, the work you take on because school expenses do not pay for themselves, the plans you put off because something else needs the money first, the expectations that come with being young and somehow already having to know what you want, and the fear that one wrong decision could set you back more than you can afford.

i still want to try. i really do. but this country has taught me to sit down and count every single peso before i even allow myself to ask whether i actually want the dream.

walang masama sa pag-try. ang hirap lang talaga kapag sa pilipinas ka natutong magbilang bago mangarap. sana hindi kailangang maging mayaman muna para magkaroon ng karapatang malaman kung saan ako talaga bagay.

Comment

ayoko maging kagaya ng mga magulang ko.

minsan naiisip ko, ang weird pala maging adult kapag ang isa sa mga pinaka-malaking pangako mo sa sarili mo ay hindi naman tungkol sa career, pera, or kung saan ka titira. ang pangako ko sa sarili ko is much simpler, pero somehow mas mabigat siya: ayokong maging kagaya ng mga magulang ko.

i know how harsh that sounds. lalo na kapag sinabi mo siyang parang final answer tungkol sa mga taong nagpalaki sa'yo. mahal ko sila. i know they did what they knew how to do with the kind of life they were given. may mga bagay din silang pinagdaanan na hindi ko lubos na maiintindihan dahil hindi naman ako nabuhay sa katawan nila. pero habang tumatanda ako, mas naiintindihan ko rin na loving my family does not require me to inherit every part of them. hindi porke't pamilya ko sila, kailangan kong ulitin ang buhay na nakita ko sa kanila.

hindi lahat ng minana ay kailangang ipasa.

for the longest time, i thought growing up meant eventually understanding your parents enough that everything they did would make sense. parang may edad lang na darating na bigla mong maiintindihan kung bakit ganito sila magsalita, bakit ganito sila magmahal, bakit may mga bagay na hindi nila kayang ibigay kahit kailangan mo. maybe i was waiting for that moment. yung moment na sasabihin ko sa sarili ko, "ah, kaya pala." pero adulthood has made me realize that understanding someone doesn't automatically make what happened okay. pwede kong maintindihan kung saan nanggaling yung galit nila and still remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end of it. pwede kong malaman na pagod sila and still admit that i was hurt. those things can exist in the same room.

siguro kaya kapag iniisip ko yung future ko, hindi ko agad naiisip kung anong wedding ang gusto ko or kung gaano kalaki yung bahay. ang naiisip ko, gusto kong umuwi ang magiging anak ko nang hindi kinakabahan sa tunog ng pagbukas ng pinto. gusto kong may bahay na hindi kailangang hulaan ng bata kung anong mood ng mga matatanda bago siya magsalita. if i ever get married, i want a relationship where disagreement does not automatically become a war. kung magkaka-anak ako, gusto kong lumaki siyang hindi kailangang maging emotionally aware sa lahat ng problema ng matatanda just so everyone else can breathe a little easier. i want to build a family where a child can ask for something without immediately calculating whether asking will make life harder for everyone. ang liit pakinggan ng mga bagay na 'yon kapag sinulat lang. pero para sa batang nakasanayan ang tensyon, sobrang laki pala ng ibig sabihin ng tahimik na hapunan. sobrang laki ng ibig sabihin ng isang bahay na hindi mo kailangang salubungin nang naka-ready ang buong katawan mo.

i don't want my future child to know what it feels like to hear footsteps outside a room and immediately wonder what version of a parent is coming through the door. i don't want them learning the difference between a normal silence and the kind that means everyone should stay quiet. i don't want them memorizing the sound of a cabinet being closed too hard. maybe other people would think these are small things. for someone who grew up around them, they are not small. they stay in your body longer than you expect. sometimes you become an adult and realize you still lower your voice when you're upset. you still rehearse what you're going to say. you still think about whether your feelings are worth the trouble they're going to cause. then one day you wonder, bakit kailangan ko pa ring mag-isip nang ganito?

and i think this is where i finally understand something about family that took me years to admit.

pagmamahal din sa pamilya ang pagpiling huwag maging katulad nila.

Subscribe

hindi ito pagtataksil. hindi rin ito pagtalikod sa lahat ng ginawa nila para sa akin. in fact, maybe one of the most honest ways i can honor the parts of them that hurt is to make sure those parts end with me. ayokong maipasa sa magiging pamilya ko yung mga bagay na dati kong tiniis dahil lang "ganito talaga sa bahay." ayokong maging adult na ginagamit ang pagod bilang dahilan para manigaw. ayokong maging parent na naniningil ng emotional debt sa anak dahil "ang dami kong isinakripisyo para sa'yo." ayokong may batang matutong magbasa ng mukha ko bago pa siya matutong magsabi ng problema niya. hindi ko gustong maranasan ng anak ko yung pakiramdam na kailangan niyang maging maliit para magkasya sa isang bahay na hindi naman dapat siya ang nag-a-adjust.

there are days when i feel guilty for even thinking this way. kasi filipino family culture has a strange way of making boundaries feel like betrayal. you can spend years being hurt by something and still feel selfish for wanting it to stop with you. may part sa akin na nagsasabi, "pero magulang mo pa rin sila." i know. that's exactly why this is difficult. they are my parents. i cannot rewrite that. i cannot go back and become the child who needed something different. what i can do is become an adult who knows better now. maybe that's the only part of the story i have any control over.

and honestly, i don't want to spend my whole life angry at them either. ang exhausting nun. i don't want every decision i make to secretly be about proving that they were wrong. i don't want my future family to become some elaborate revenge against my childhood. i want something quieter than that. i want to wake up one day and realize i am doing things differently because i genuinely believe they are better, not because i am still trying to win an argument with people who aren't even in the room anymore. that's probably the hardest part of breaking a pattern. eventually, you have to stop making your life a reaction to theirs.

maybe that's also why i am so careful with the idea of having my own family. kasi ang family para sa akin is not just something you eventually have because that's what adults are supposed to do. it is something you build consciously, especially when you grew up seeing what happens when people build a home without ever questioning what they brought into it. kapag nagkaasawa ako, kung magkakaasawa man ako, i want to remember that the person beside me is not someone i am allowed to hurt just because i am angry. i want to know how to apologize without making the apology another way of asking to be forgiven immediately. i want to know how to be quiet without making silence feel like punishment.

kapag nagka-anak ako, i want to remember that my child did not ask to be born into whatever unresolved things i carry. gagawa ako ng pamilya na hindi kailangang maging perfect. gagawa ako ng bahay kung saan pwedeng magkamali nang hindi natatakot. gagawa ako ng tahanan na kapag sinabi ng anak ko na, "may kailangan akong sabihin," ang unang mararamdaman niya ay safety at hindi panic. maybe they will grow up thinking this is normal. sana nga. sana hindi nila maintindihan kung bakit mahalaga sa akin ang isang bahay na walang sigawan. sana para sa kanila, ordinaryong bagay lang yung kumatok bago pumasok. yung pwedeng magsabi ng "galit ako" without being punished for having the feeling. yung pwedeng umiyak without someone telling them to stop being dramatic.

i think about the child i might have someday and i wonder what they will remember about me. maybe they won't remember the expensive things i bought. maybe they won't remember what job i had or how tired i was after work. i hope they remember that when they were scared, i came closer instead of making them feel like a burden. i hope they remember that home was where they could put their bag down and finally unclench their shoulders. i hope they never have to ask themselves if they are still loved after making a mistake. that matters to me more than being the kind of parent other people admire.

and maybe this is the part people don't talk about when they tell you to forgive your parents. forgiveness, if i ever get there, doesn't mean i have to become them. healing doesn't mean pretending the house was warmer than it actually was. sometimes healing is painfully practical. you notice the thing that hurt you. you notice yourself almost doing it to someone else. then you stop. you take a breath. you choose another response even when the old one feels automatic. nobody applauds you for it. walang moment na suddenly okay na lahat. you just make a different choice in a room where nobody knows how hard that choice was.

i can know why my parents became who they were and still decide that i want to become someone else. i can carry gratitude without carrying every wound. i can love where i came from while still being honest about what i refuse to bring with me. maybe that is what adulthood has been teaching me all along. you inherit a family before you understand what inheritance means. then eventually, you get to decide what stays.

if i ever have a family of my own, i don't want my children to grow up knowing that i broke a cycle. i don't want them to know how much of my childhood i had to unlearn just to give them something gentler. i want it to be invisible to them. i want them to think a peaceful home is the most ordinary thing in the world.

baka balang araw, mapatunayan kong hindi pala kailangang mamatay sa parehong sugat ang batang galing sa pamilyang unang nagturo sa kanya kung paano masaktan. at kung mangyari man na makagawa ako ng pangarap kong pamilya at tahanan, baka doon ko maramdaman na kahit hindi ko nabago ang pamilya na pinanggalingan ko, nakagawa naman ako ng tahanang hindi na kailangang pagalingin ng mga susunod sa akin.

ang gelo ng isip ko kaya isusulat ko na lang series #1

growing up in our house, sunday afternoons always smelled like banana cue frying in hot oil.

my tita would sit on the plastic stool near the doorway with her hair wrapped in a towel while the old wall fan hummed its low unsteady tune. on the small tv in the corner, eugene domingo would be doing something absurd. she would be rolling her eyes or screaming a line with perfect dramatic timing or making a face that was so unbothered and loud that my tita would drop her mug of instant coffee from laughing so hard.

i used to stand by the kitchen counter with a glass of water in my grip and just watch her. i did not just laugh at her. i wanted to be her.

later at night when everyone was asleep, i would stand in front of the foggy bathroom mirror and practice. i would try out funny faces and exaggerate my eyebrow twitches and deliver imaginary monologues to the plastic basin and the laundry soap bar. i thought to myself that someday i would be on a big stage with bright yellow lights shining on my face. i thought i would make a crowd of strangers laugh until their stomachs hurt.

i did not know back then that wanting to be an artist costs money. i did not know that acting requires time you cannot afford when your family is trying to figure out how to pay the electric bill before the five-day grace period runs out.

last month i sat in a dark air-conditioned theater watching ang babae sa septic tank 4. the room was quiet except for the rustle of popcorn bags and the collective gasp of the audience every time a good joke landed. on stage, the actors moved with so much freedom. they screamed and threw their bodies around and inhabited their roles with zero hesitation.

sitting in row h seat 14, my throat felt dry. my chest felt heavy like someone put a wet sack of rice right on top of my ribs.

i was not just enjoying the play because… i was grieving.

gusto ko magtheater. gusto kong sumali sa up repertory at umarte sa entablado. gusto ko magsulat. gusto ko umarte at magpatawa na para bang si eugene domingo.

instead of doing any of that, i checked my work phone under my jacket to see if my boss had sent an urgent slack message about a client spreadsheet.

there is an old twitter post that pops up on my feed every few months and every single time i read it my heart aches in the exact same spot. it talks about mourning the version of yourself that was never given a chance to happen. it talks about the deep existential sadness of knowing that the wealthy version of you would have been a global success while the current version of you is just trying to survive the week.

i think about that alternate version of me all the time.

in some parallel universe, my parents had a stable emergency fund and a house that was fully paid off. in that universe, when i got into college i did not have to calculate the daily cost of jeeps and meals before picking my course. i did not have to choose a practical degree just so i could become a corporate worker straight out of graduation.

in that universe, i walked straight into the up repertory company auditions. i stood on the wooden floorboards with my shoulders back and my voice booming off the walls. i spent my life covered in stage paint and sweat. i wrote funny script pages on yellow pads until two in the morning while drinking cheap coffee with fellow theater nerds in katipunan.

in that universe, i gave myself permission to fail because failure would not mean my family goes hungry.

rich me is an artist who takes big creative risks and travels the world and makes people laugh on stage.

current me is a person who calculates how much money will be left in my digital wallet after paying groceries and wi-fi bills. current me is someone who gets anxious when a tricycle ride costs fifty pesos more than usual because of peak hour surge pricing.

Subscribe

when you live in survival mode for too long your brain starts to treat art like a dangerous waste of time. you learn to cut off your own desires before they even have a chance to grow. you tell yourself that theater is just a silly hobby and writing is just for people who do not have real responsibilities.

pero ang sakit pa rin. it hurts because you know the talent was not the thing that was missing. the fire was there. the passion was there. the only thing missing was the safety net.

the saddest thing in the world is not a lack of talent. the saddest thing is talent that gets swallowed whole by the monthly cost of living.

everyone is an artist until the rent is due

i think about this line more than i should. everyone is an artist until the rent is due. everyone has a voice, a rhythm, a way of seeing the world that is entirely their own, until the landlord's text message arrives on the fifth of the month and that voice gets folded up small enough to fit inside a budget spreadsheet.

we like to say na malikhain ang mga pilipino. that we are a nation of natural performers, natural singers, natural storytellers, natural mimics who can make a whole room laugh at a party using nothing but a borrowed videoke mic and a bad accent. and it is true. i have seen it in every fiesta, every karaoke night sa kanto, every jeepney driver who narrates traffic like a sportscaster, every tricycle barker who turns a simple spiel into a small stand-up routine just to get one more passenger inside. talent is not the missing ingredient in this country. it never has been.

what is missing is an economy that lets that talent breathe.

kasi paano ka magiging buong-panahong artist kung minimum wage pa lang ay hindi na sapat sa pagkain, pagpapaaral, renta, at pamasahe? paano ka mag-aaral ng acting o magsusulat ng dula kung ang trabaho mong pang-araw-araw ay tumatakbo mula alas-siyete ng umaga hanggang alas-otso ng gabi, tapos may commute pa na dalawang oras pabalik-balik? sa ibang bansa, may mga grant, may mga fellowship, may mga institusyon na nagbabayad sa mga writer at artist habang sila ay lumilikha. dito, kailangan mo munang mabuhay bago ka makapaglikha, at ang pagbuhay mismo ay isang full-time na trabaho na kumakain ng oras, lakas, at pangarap.

ito ang katotohanang mahirap tanggapin. hindi tayo kulang sa galing. sira lang talaga ang sistema. sira ang ekonomiya na gumagawa sa sining bilang luho imbes na karapatan. mahal ang matuto. mahal ang mag-aral ng theater workshop, mahal ang bumili ng camera o laptop na pang-edit, mahal ang mag-book ng studio para lang makapagpractice ng isang eksena. at kung wala kang extra pera dahil unti-unti na lang ang natitira pagkatapos ng grocery at bills, wala kang oras para sa bagay na sasabihan ka lang ng ibang tao na "sayang lang, walang kinikita diyan."

kaya heto tayo. isang bansang puno ng aktor na hindi nakaka-audition, manunulat na hindi nakakasulat, mang-aawit na kumakanta na lang sa banyo, pintor na gumuguhit na lang sa gilid ng notebook habang naka-standby sa isang eight-hour shift. talented, pero pagod. malikhain, pero natatakot. may boses, pero walang panahong pakinggan ito ng sarili.

at ang pinaka-malungkot na parte ay hindi tayo iisa lang dito. kapitbahay mo, katrabaho mo, kaklase mo noon — halos lahat sila may unlived na buhay ding nakatago sa likod ng kung ano sila ngayon. lahat tayo umaarte na masaya kahit alam nating may bahagi sa atin na hindi nakakuha ng pagkakataong lumaki.

Subscribe

when you grow up in a working-class filipino household, you absorb a very specific kind of guilt. it is the guilt of wanting things that do not have an immediate financial return.

if you tell your family that you want to be a theater actor or a full-time writer, they do not usually tell you that you are bad at it. they look at you with worried eyes and ask how much it pays. they ask if there is job security. they ask if you can buy a house with it or help pay for your younger sibling's tuition fee.

and they are not wrong for asking those things. their worry comes from love and from decades of living on the edge of poverty where one big sickness can wipe out everything you own.

so we listen to them. we tuck our scripts inside a cardboard box at the bottom of our closet. we stop going to auditions. we apply for office jobs with health insurance and steady monthly paychecks. we convince ourselves that we are doing the smart thing and the mature thing. but that does not stop the word sayang from echoing in our head every time we watch a play or read a great book.

sayang.

it is such a heavy tagalog word. it carries the weight of wasted potential and ruined timing. it is the feeling of looking at a glass of milk that spilled on the floor before anyone could take a sip.

i look at old videos of eugene domingo and i do not just see a funny actress. i see someone who conquered the stage with pure unapologetic presence. she owned every single inch of the room she walked into. she did not shrink herself. she did not apologize for taking up space or being loud or being foolish.

when you spend your entire life trying to be safe and practical, you spend all your energy shrinking yourself. you learn to speak softer in meetings so you do not make waves. you learn to write plain dry emails. you learn to stay within the lines so you can keep your job and pay your bills on time.

you become very good at surviving and very bad at living.

we live in a culture that loves to tell us that everything is our own fault.

if you are burnt out, modern self-help books tell you to buy a scented candle or go to a spa day. if you feel unfulfilled, wellness influencers tell you to fix your mindset or manifest a better reality. they make it sound like our sadness is just a personal failure of discipline or positivity.

but you cannot manifest your way out of a broken economy. you cannot buy a scented candle to fix the fact that art has become a luxury item reserved for people who do not have to worry about rent.

when we isolate ourselves in our individual struggles, we start to think that we are the only ones feeling this way. we sit in our small rooms scrolling through social media and looking at other people's creative achievements and we feel ashamed of our own mundane routines. we think that we just did not try hard enough or that we were not talented enough to make our dreams come true.

but that thinking is a lie. it is the same lie the whole system needs us to believe so that we blame ourselves instead of asking harder questions. why does a country this rich in talent produce so few people who get to live off their art. why is a stable, dignified life still treated like a reward reserved only for the lucky few who were born with a safety net already built underneath them. why is rent the thing that decides who gets to keep dreaming and who has to fold their dream into a drawer.

so what do we do with the ghost of the person we never got to become?

for a long time i tried to kill that ghost. i stopped watching live theater for years because it made me too sad. i stopped writing stories because reading my own drafts felt like looking at a broken promise. i tried to convince myself that i was completely happy with my quiet routine and my regular paychecks and my safe boring life.

but you cannot kill a ghost that is made of your own honest desires. it will always find a way back in. it will tap you on the shoulder when you hear a good theater soundtrack on the radio or when you watch an actor nail an emotional monologue on screen.

now i am learning to let it sit next to me instead.

i do not have to audition for up repertory today to honor the person who wanted to be on stage. i do not have to quit my job and throw away my financial stability just to prove that i am a real artist. that would be foolish and unrealistic for the life i have now.

instead, i can start small.

i can write this essay on a quiet weeknight while my laundry dries on the rack. i can crack a joke with my friends at dinner and let myself be loud and silly without worrying if i look foolish. i can buy a ticket to a local play and support the young actors who are up on that stage right now carrying the torch for all of us.

you do not need to perform on a grand stage to live a life that has art in it. sometimes the act of writing one honest line after a hard workday is enough to keep the pilot light burning inside you.

the person who wanted to act like eugene domingo is not dead. they are just living quietly inside someone who survived a lot of hard years.

they are there every time we make our tita laugh over a bowl of hot lugaw on a rainy evening. they are there every time we write down a funny thought in our phone notes while riding the jeep home. they are there every time we refuse to let our heart turn cold and bitter despite how exhausting adult life gets.

rich me might have been a global success on a huge stage surrounded by flowers and applause. but current me is still here, still feeling things deeply, and still finding ways to tell the story. and maybe for now, that has to be enough.

Comment

a small thank you to you, dear subscribers!

hindi ko rin akalain na magiging ganito. wala akong plano na aabot ako sa punto na may 2,000 subscribers na sa substack sa loob lamang ng isa o dalawang linggo. hindi ito exaggeration ha! literal na sa loob ng ilang araw, biglang may mga estranghero na nagbabasa ng mga sinusulat ko, nagko-comment, nakakarelate, at nag-uusap tungkol sa mga karanasang akala ko ay akin lang, akala ko ay sarili ko lang na dinadala.

kaya salamat, taos-puso, sa lahat ng nagbasa, nag-subscribe, at naniwala sa pagsusulat ko. salamat sa bawat isa na hindi lang basta dumaan at nag-scroll, kundi tumigil, nagbasa, at nag-share ng sarili nilang bahagi ng kwento sa comments. hindi ninyo alam kung gaano kalaki ang epekto niyan. muling nabuhayan ang apoy sa loob ko na sumulat pa nang sumulat — hindi lang tungkol sa personal na buhay, kundi tungkol din sa kalagayan ng pilipinas, sa mga sistemang ayaw nating tanggapin na sira, at sa mga munting bagay na parang hindi mahalaga pero siya pala ang bumubuo sa atin araw-araw.

hindi kailangang malaking entablado at maliwanag na ilaw para may saysay ang isang kwento. minsan, ang isang linya lang na nasulat nang tapat at binasa ng isang taong nakarelate ay sapat na para muling maniwala na hindi tayo nag-iisa.

sa lahat ng bumabasa dito — salamat. patuloy tayong susulat.

the red plastic platter sitting in the middle of my grandmother’s dining table in laguna always had one occupant left at the end of sunday after mass lunch.

it was usually a single piece of lumpiang shanghai. the spring roll was glistening with translucent vegetable oil, its pork filling exposed at one jagged edge where the frying wrapper had split open. next to it sat a tiny melamine saucer filled with spicy sweet-and-sour sauce, skin forming on its surface like a thin film of plastic.

every person at that table was still hungry. my cousin mark had just finished his second bowl of rice, scraping his spoon against the bottom of the aluminum pot until it made a metallic sound. my uncle was fanning himself with an old manila times insert, eyeing the platter while chewing on a toothpick.

yet nobody touched that final piece.

huwag na, nakakahiya.

that was the unspoken rule. to take the last item on a shared plate was to declare your own appetite more important than the dignity of the group. it was an unspoken admission of greed. we called it the hiya piece. my lola would sit at the head of the table, her thin wrists resting on the worn floral tablecloth, watching us with quiet satisfaction. she had spent five hours in the kitchen since four in the morning, chopping carrots and scraping pork fat, but she would never push us to clear the dish entirely. the presence of that solitary lumpia proved two things at once: we had been fed enough to leave something behind, and we were raised well enough to pretend we did not want it.

looking back at those lunches now, i feel a strange ache in my chest. my grandmother passed away three years ago during the heat of october. but that cold lumpia stays with me. it haunts me because i spent half my life believing that quiet restraint was our greatest national virtue. i thought pagpapakumbaba and pakikisama were the invisible threads holding our families together across bad weather and lean months.

lately, looking at the news streaming through my phone late at night, i realize how thoroughly that virtue has been weaponized against us. we are a nation of people trained to starve ourselves of the last bite out of politeness, living in a country run by people who bring plastic bags to the buffet and empty the entire tray into their trunks.

Subscribe now

walk down any side street near the mrt stations in kamuning during lunch hour. the small carinderias tucked between metal repair shops and pawnshops tell a story that official economic statistics try hard to soften.

a decade ago, twenty pesos could get you a generous mound of pinakbet or a bowl of tinola with two thick chunks of green papaya and a real chicken thigh. today, the wooden counters are lined with square stainless-steel trays, but the portions look like they were measured with an eyedropper.

the shrinkflation of our daily food is not just a matter of smaller plates. it changes how we look at each other across the table. when food is abundant, hiya is a small cultural tax you pay to look gracious. you leave the last piece of fried banana or the last spoonful of adobo sauce because you know there is more rice in the cooker and another meal coming at six in the evening.

what happens when the food runs out before the hunger does?

i watched a worker in a faded blue uniform sit down at a wooden bench near v. mapa last month. he bought a single order of tokwa’t baboy and two cups of rice. the tray contained mostly fried tofu cubes soaked in dark vinegar, with two papery thin slices of pig ear floating on to. a younger boy, probably an apprentice from the nearby vulc-seal shop, sat down beside him with just a plain block of rice wrapped in wilted banana leaf.

the older man looked at his small bowl. he paused for three full seconds, his spoon hovering over the largest piece of tofu. you could see the internal calculus running behind his eyes: do I offer this, or do i survive the rest of my twelve-hour shift?

he did not offer. he ate quickly, staring straight at the corrugated iron wall ahead of him, his chin dipping low over his plastic bowl.

that brief hesitation was the sound of our social fabric snapping under financial weight. when basic survival becomes a daily gamble, hiya ceases to be a noble practice of community care. it turns into a luxury that only the comfortable can afford to keep. we are slowly becoming a society where remaining polite means giving up your spot in line, your seat on the bus, or your fair share of a meal you worked eight hours to earn. the struggle to stay afloat is chewing through our daily manners, leaving behind a desperate instinct to grab what we can before someone else remembers to be polite.

Subscribe now

there is no hiya at the turnstiles of the lrt 2 station in recto at five-thirty in the afternoon.

if you stand on the concrete concourse above the traffic noise of avenida, you will see thousands of office workers, call center agents, and students compressed into a tight, damp mass of human bodies.

the moment the steel doors of the train hiss open, the polite filipino who leaves the last lumpia on the platter vanishes entirely.

people push. shoulders lock into ribs. canvas bags are rammed into the small spaces between kidneys. an elderly woman holding a plastic bag of groceries gets swept sideways like driftwood in a flood. nobody apologizes. nobody says tabi po or paki-daan. the only objective is to get two feet inside that aluminum train before the warning lights start flashing.

in front of a dinner table, we step back out of shame. in front of a train door, we step forward out of terror.

this is not a moral failure of the commuters because this is the natural result of living in a system designed around artificial scarcity.

our public transport infrastructure operates on the basic assumption that your time has zero value. when there are only three functional buses for every five hundred people standing under the pouring rain on quezon avenue, the cultural ethic of pakikisama becomes a death sentence for your evening. if you wait for everyone else to go first because you were taught to be humble, you will still be standing on the sidewalk at midnight, watching empty taxis barrel past you with their red lights turned off.

we reserve our gentleness for spaces where we believe there is enough to go around. the moment we enter the public square we instantly recognize that the system is rigged to feed only those who push their way to the front. the hiya piece disappears because we know, deep in our bones, that no one is coming to refill the tray once it goes empty.

this panic over who gets to claim the final slice extends far beyond transit lines and street corners. it cuts right through the center of the filipino home.

when carlos yulo won his two gold medals at the paris olympics, the entire country celebrated for about twenty-four hours before the narrative curdled into a bitter public feud over family, money, and ownership. suddenly, the talk shows and comment sections were not discussing his floor routine or his vault landing. they were dissecting his mother’s financial disclosures, his prize money, and who had the right to claim a piece of his success.

it was a public trial about the limits of utang na loob.

in the traditional filipino family structure, an individual’s triumph is rarely treated as private property. your success is viewed as a communal dish placed in the center of the table. the parents who paid for your schooling, the aunts who lent you money for tuition, the neighborhood that watched you grow up—they all sit around that plate with their forks ready.

if you attempt to pull your prize toward your own side of the table, you are immediately branded as walang hiya.

nakalimot na sa pinanggalingan. that is the ultimate insult in our culture. it is the accusation that you ate the whole meal without waiting for the elders to take their portion first.

parents raise children on a diet of deep emotional indebtedness. they tell them that every sacrifice made by the family is an invisible ledger that must be balanced the moment they enter the workforce. when a child breaks out of that cycle and tries to set boundaries around their own life, their own income, or their own sanity, the family structure responds with overwhelming shame.

sino ka para kumain nang mag-isa?

we fail to ask why the burden of family survival rests so heavily on the shoulders of one child in the first place. why must an athlete’s victory double as a retirement fund for an entire household? why must a young nurse sending money home from dubai live in a tiny bedspace with six strangers just so her relatives back in cavite can buy groceries?

we demand that individuals display absolute hiya toward their families, while the state abdicates its responsibility to provide basic healthcare, elderly pensions, and decent wages. we turn familial love into a guilt-driven distribution system where everyone is terrified of being seen as selfish, even when they are starving.

while ordinary citizens monitor their own behavior at every meal, counting their portions and agonizing over whether they took too much, an entirely different set of rules operates at the top of our society.

look at the political landscape over the past year.

we watched legislative hearings reveal billions of pesos shifted through government offices like pocket change. we listened to public officials answer questions about missing funds with blank stares and smug smiles. we saw former mayors linked to illegal gambling hubs and human trafficking rings, comfortably walking into courtrooms wearing designer jackets while their lawyers argued over technicalities.

there is no hiya in those air-conditioned rooms. none at all.

an ordinary clerk working at the department of social welfare and development will feel an ache of anxiety if they accidentally overcharge a client by fifty pesos. a public school teacher in leyte will spend her own salary to buy chalk and visual aids because she feels nahihiya when her classroom lacks basic supplies.

yet the people sitting in high political office can look straight into a television camera and justify secret budgets that could fund three thousand rural health clinics for a decade.

the tragedy of the filipino condition is that our poorest citizens suffer from an excess of shame, while our most powerful leaders suffer from a total lack of it.

the poor citizen steps back from the plate even when their stomach is rumbling, worried about what the neighbors might say. the politician pulls the entire table toward themselves, clears the dishes into their lap, and demands that the waiters bring out another round of dessert at public expense.

this contrast is the core operating system of our politics.

our cultural obsession with hiya acts as an effective mechanism of social control. it teaches the working class to be patient, to wait for hand-outs, to accept small favors with tears in their eyes, and to avoid making noise when they are given less than they deserve. we treat protest and anger as bad manners. we call people who demand accountability mga walang modo, npa or rebelde, while we describe corrupt politicians as maaasahan simply because they threw a few gold coins into the crowd during an election parade.

we have normalized a political culture built on total entitlement. the public treasury is treated like an endless buffet at a high-end hotel, where those in power pile their plates high with pork barrel funds, confidential allocations, and land deals, completely indifferent to the long line of hungry people waiting outside the door.

walk through any trendy cafe in bonifacio global city on a saturday afternoon and you will see the modern antidote to traditional hiya.

young people sit under warm, track-lit ceilings, shooting videos for social media. they stage their coffee cups next to expensive leather bags, holding their phones at precise angles to capture the perfect light. some of them step into crowded walkways, forcing pedestrians to stop while they dance for a fifteen-second clip.

we have imported the hyper-individualism of western digital culture and slapped it over our old social anxieties. the message on every screen is clear: be the main character.

do not wait for your turn. do not worry about disturbing others. flaunt your wealth, project your success, and take up as much space as possible. in the digital economy, the person who hesitates loses. the person who feels hiya gets scrolled past. the winner is the one who claims the whole plate, takes a photo of it, and posts it online with a caption about hard work and manifest destiny.

it is easy to look at this modern entitlement and simply blame social media, but the root goes much deeper.

this performative selfishness is a protective response to a society that has consistently broken its promises. when you grow up in an environment where working hard does not guarantee a decent life, where your taxes vanish into the pockets of mayors, senators, and the country’s vice-president, and where your public services are broken beyond repair, you stop believing in the collective contract.

you stop caring about pakikisama because pakikisama never fixed the flooding on your street or lowered the price of onions.

so you turn inward. you decide that your only duty is to secure your own plate, your own brand, your own circle of safety. you retreat into a private life where you can control the outcome, abandoning the public square to the bullies and the thieves.

in doing so, we risk losing the one concept that makes our culture worth saving: kapwa.

kapwa is not the shallow politeness that makes you leave a cold piece of fried meat on a platter to avoid looking bad. it is not the performance of obedience to authority or the uncritical acceptance of unfair family demands.

kapwa is the deep recognition that the person sitting across from you is not a competitor for limited resources, but an extension of your own humanity. it is the understanding that your stomach cannot be truly full while the person beside you is chewing on air.

when we reduce hiya to mere self-effacement, we turn it into a weakness. we make it an excuse for accepting tiny crumbs from the tables of the powerful. real hiya should not mean staying quiet when you are being robbed. it should mean feeling a profound, burning shame at the sight of unfairness.

my grandmother’s table in laguna is long gone now. the house was sold two years ago to a developer who tore down the old mango tree in the backyard and built three grey townhouses with tall steel gates.

sometimes i still catch myself looking at the last piece of food on a shared plate at a restaurant with friends. my hand will instinctively pull back, checked by twenty years of cultural conditioning. huwag. nakakahiya.

i am trying to unlearn that hesitation, not so i can become selfish, but so i can see the difference between true respect and forced submission.

we need to stop teaching our children or our kapwa as general that staying polite means staying hungry. we need to destroy the belief that asking for your fair share of food, wages, or governance is a sign of bad manners.

if there is only one piece of lumpia left on the plate, we should stop staring at it in awkward silence while our stomachs rumble. we should look around the table, ask who needs it most, break it in half, and offer it clearly.

and when we see the people at the top of our society grabbing the entire platter and walking away with it, we need to stop lowering our eyes out of respect. we need to stand up, block the doorway, and remind them—loudly and without a single drop of shame—that the food on that plate never belonged to them in the first place.

ang sarap ng lumpia. libre mo ako lumpia, ano tara?

Subscribe now

the metallic ring of five-peso coins clinking against each other in the palm of my hand used to mean freedom.

when i was fourteen, twenty pesos was an entire afternoon. it covered the jeepney ride to school, a stick of kwek-kwek near the gate, and the ride back home with two shiny pesos to spare. you dropped the coins into the driver's tray, called out your destination with full confidence, and waited for your change to travel back to you through a bucket-line of tired palms.

yesterday, i sat on the faded red vinyl bench of a traditional jeepney, wedged between a nursing student reviewing index cards and an older man carrying a sack of rice. the driver called out the new base fare. fifteen pesos.

i looked down at the loose change resting in my palm. ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

kulang ng piso.

i had to dig through the bottom of my canvas tote bag, past crumpled receipts and half-empty water bottles, just to find a single copper coin. my cheeks burned hot under my kn95 face mask.

eto na ba 'yun? is this what adulting is supposed to feel like?

we do not notice ourselves growing up through grand events. we notice it in the small escalations of everyday life. we feel it when the things that used to be simple suddenly demand more from us than we prepared to give.

in the philippines, there is a specific kind of math you learn when you commute. it is not the kind of math sir castillo teaches you in his calculus lectures. it is the real-time arithmetic of survival on the road.

you calculate the exact balance in your wallet against the days left in the week. you calculate how far you can walk before your knee gives out just to save a ten-peso tricycle fare. you learn to gauge if a sky blue sky means rain in twenty minutes, because rain means surge pricing, and surge pricing means you do not eat dinner at school.

the real tax of growing up is realizing that the destination remains unchanged, but the cost to reach it keeps rising.

Subscribe now

when i was younger, i thought money was just something adults complained about during sunday family dinners. naririnig ko lang sa gilid habang kumakain ng jollibee na pasalubong pa ng kapatid ng tatay ko. i heard my mother sighing over the electric bill. i watched my father inspect the receipt at the grocery store and whispering under his breath about the price of onions or milk.

back then, it sounded like background noise. it sounded like an adult habit, something you automatically inherit once you start working, like drinking black coffee or complaining about back pain.

now that i am nineteen, i realize it was never a habit. it was a slow and suffocating weight.

the base fare going up by two or three pesos does not sound like a national tragedy on paper. the news anchors read the statistics in flat, neutral tones. but on the ground, inside a moving metal box swaying along asphalt roads, those extra pesos mean everything.

it means a high school student skipping a meal. it means a street vendor walking three blocks further to keep their profit margin alive. it means realizing that your allowance, which felt like wealth five years ago, is now barely enough to keep you moving in a straight line.

are we outgrowing our cities or are our cities outgrowing us?

i spent my childhood thinking that the world would stay still until i was ready for it.

i thought the landmark bakery on the corner of our street would always sell five-peso cheese pandesal. i thought my childhood friends would always be available for a random tuesday afternoon hangout. i thought the route from my house to the city center would always cost the same amount of effort, money, and heart.

perang pambili ng oras. that is what fare really is. you are paying someone to move your heavy body across a crowded space because you do not have the energy to walk it yourself.

lately, every trip feels heavier.

i look at my classmates in college. for context, i study at up, so very evident na palagi kaming sumasakay sa jeep. we are all nineteen or twenty, standing right on the terrifying threshold of real adulthood. we talk about midterms and internship applications, but underneath all that academic noise, we are talking about the exact same fear.

natatakot tayo na baka hindi natin kaya.

we are terrified that by the time we graduate and the world will have priced us out of living comfortably. we watch housing costs skyrocket while entry-level salaries remain frozen in time. we watch our parents get older, their shoulders slumping just a little lower every year, and we realize that the safety net we relied on was made of human flesh and blood all along.

one day, you are a passenger holding your parent's hand while they pay for your ticket. the next day, you are the one digging through your pockets, praying you have enough change to cover your own seat.

and nobody warns you about the transition. you just wake up one morning and realize that you are responsible for getting yourself home.

isa sa mga napapansin kong sobrang gandang tradition sa jeepney ay ang pakikisuyo. yung hindi ka nga mautusan sa bahay pero some complete strangers ayy nakikisuyo sayo.

you sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers whose names you will never know. when someone at the far end of the vehicle says, "bayad po," you do not ignore them. you reach out your hand. you take their sweaty coins, feel the warmth of their skin for a fraction of a second, and pass it down the line to the person next to you until it reaches the driver.

when the change comes back, the reverse happens. "sukli po ni ma'am," someone says, and the coins travel back through five pairs of hands until they land safely in the lap of the person who asked.

it is a quiet system of trust. we just assume that everyone in the vehicle agrees on one thing: we all just want to reach our stop.

a jeepney ride is proof that we are capable of carrying each other’s burdens, even if it is only for three kilometers at a time.

lately, i have been thinking about how much emotional labor we pass down the line in the exact same way.

when chenlee, my friend tells me she failed a quiz because she had to work a late night shift at a cafe, i take that pain and pass her my notes. when jiro, my classmate forgets his lunch, someone splits a meal with him without asking questions. we pass small acts of kindness back and forth because we know how cold the city gets when you have to face it entirely alone.

pero nakakapagod din.

it is exhausting to live in a culture that romanticizes our ability to suffer together. we praise the "resilience" of commuters standing in line for two hours under the blazing sun. we make heartwarming videos about people wading through floodwaters just to get to work on time.

we turn economic hardship into a test of character, as if surviving unfair conditions is something we should be proud of instead of something we should be furious about.

why must everything be a test of endurance? why does existing here feel like an endless series of minor sacrifices? what happens to the grief that has nowhere to go?

when you are eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty one, or as you navigate the adulthood, people treat your sadness like a temporary condition.

"bata ka pa," they tell you with a dismissive wave of their hand. "marami ka pang kakaining bigas."

they assume your anxieties are simple and temporary. they think you are only stressed about exams, broken hearts, or social media drama. they do not realize that young people today are grieving things that do not have names yet.

we are grieving the future we were promised when we were children. we are grieving the quiet certainty that if we worked hard and stayed in school, we would easily build a comfortable life.

nawawala na 'yung kasiguraduhan.

every time the price of gasoline goes up, every time the jeepney fare adjusts, every time the price of a basic meal creeps higher, a small piece of our security dissolves. it is the realization that the world is getting harder to survive in, and we are entering it with empty hands.

yet, we do not scream.

instead, we tap our silver coin against the metal roof of the vehicle. we whisper, "para po." we step down onto the wet asphalt, adjust the strap of our heavy backpacks, and keep walking toward our destination.

we bury our grief deep in our chests because there is no time to unpack it. the traffic keeps moving behind us. the crowd on the sidewalk keeps pushing forward. if you stop to cry on the side of the road, you miss your next ride.

so you keep moving. you pay the higher fare. you drink your cold coffee. you tell yourself that you will figure it out tomorrow.

Subscribe now

i reached my stop near the university campus around eight in the morning.

the sun was hitting the pavement, turning the rising exhaust smoke into an eerie golden haze. i handed my fifteen pesos to the driver, making sure to include the tiny copper coin i had salvaged from the bottom of my bag.

"salamat po," i whispered.

the driver did not look back. he just grabbed the coins, tossed them into his wooden box, and stepped on the gas pedal. the engine roared that released a dark cloud of smoke as the jeepney surged forward into the morning rush.

i stood on the curb for a long moment and watched it disappear into the sea of private cars, buses, and motorbikes.

i am nineteen years old. i do not have all the answers. i do not know how i am going to navigate the next ten years of my life in a country that often feels like it is running on borrowed time and empty gas tanks.

growth is not a clean, victorious march forward.

it is a messy, uncomfortable adjustment. it is learning how to hold space for your disappointment while still finding the strength to buy your morning commute. it is recognizing that the world will keep changing its prices, but you can choose not to let it bankrupt your capacity for kindness.

i checked my pocket. i still had twenty pesos left.

it was not much. it was certainly not as powerful as twenty pesos used to be when i was a child with clean shoes and zero worries. but as i walked through the campus, surrounded by hundreds of other students carrying the exact same unspoken fatigue, i realized something important.

we are all paying a higher price to be here today than we did yesterday.

the fare has gone up, the road is bumpy, and the air is thick with diesel and doubt. but we are still getting on the ride. we are still passing each other's coins down the line. we are still making sure that everyone, no matter how tired, gets their chance to call out their stop and safely step down onto the earth.

and maybe, for nineteen, that has to be enough.

Subscribe now

i am turning 20-something this year and if there is one smell that has followed me through every version of myself, it's vicks. not perfume, not the smell of new notebooks in june, not even the smell of rain on hot pavement that everyone likes to romanticize. vicks. that blue tub with the white lid that somehow ends up in every filipino household regardless of income, region, religion, or political affiliation. i have genuinely met people who disagree on everything, who cannot sit at the same table without arguing about the president or the traffic or whose lola cooks better adobo, but they will all nod in agreement the moment you mention vicks for sipon.

i used to think this was just a funny quirk of being pinoy. a bonding topic and something to laugh about during family gatherings. tita opens the tub, dips her finger in like she's about to bless you, and rubs it on your chest, your back, sometimes your feet if she's feeling generous. you sleep smelling like a walang tigil na eucalyptus tree and somehow wake up slightly less sick, or maybe just distracted enough by the smell to forget you were sick in the first place.

but the older i get, the more i realize vicks is a whole philosophy. it is basically the unofficial national healthcare plan.

think about it. what other product gets applied to sipon, ubo, sakit ng ulo, kagat ng lamok, pasa, pigsa, minsan pati sprain kung wala nang limang gulong ointment sa bahay. i've seen it used on stomach ache. i've seen an entire barangay health worker recommend it for stress, which medically makes no sense, but emotionally makes complete sense, because when your tita rubs vicks on your temples while telling you huwag ka nang mag-alala, you do feel a little bit okay. not because of the menthol. because someone cared enough to reach for the nearest thing they had.

and that's the part that gets me. the nearest thing they had.

because that's what vicks really is, if you strip away the branding and the childhood nostalgia. it's the nearest thing filipinos have when the actual thing, real healthcare, is too far, too expensive, or too complicated to reach.

let's be honest about how healthcare works here. a simple check-up can already eat into someone's grocery budget for the week. lab tests cost more than a day's wage for a lot of people. and god forbid you actually get admitted, because then you're not just paying for medicine, you're paying for the hospital bed, the doctor's fee, the miscellaneous charges na hindi mo alam kung saan galing, and eventually you're praying na sana may libreng gamot sa city hall or sana may medical mission dumaan sa lugar niyo this month.

so what do people do instead. they treat the symptom at home for as long as they can. they wait it out. they take paracetamol, drink kalamansi juice, and rub vicks on everything that hurts, hoping the body figures the rest out on its own. and honestly, a lot of times it does, because the body is resilient, because filipinos have had to become resilient by default, not by choice.

i keep thinking about that word, resilient, because it gets thrown around so much whenever there's a typhoon or a crisis. ang tibay ng loob ng mga pilipino. and yes, that's true, but i've started to notice that resilience is also just what happens when a system keeps failing you and you have no other option but to keep functioning anyway. we didn't choose to be resilient out of pure strength of character. we became resilient because falling apart was never really allowed.

Subscribe now

you get sick,

you rub vicks,

you go to work the next day kasi may pasok,

may shift,

may deadline,

walang sick leave na sapat,

walang ipon na pang-tigil,

so you push through with a chest that smells like menthol and a body that hasn't actually healed, just numbed enough to function.

there is something almost poetic and also kind of heartbreaking about that. a whole nation self-soothing with the same small blue jar because the actual cure, actual accessible healthcare, feels like something reserved for people who can afford private hospitals and hmo cards with high enough coverage. vicks became the great equalizer not because it's actually medically strong, but because it's the one thing almost everyone can afford. thirty pesos, forty pesos, maybe less pa kung sa sari-sari store. it's cheap enough to be democratic. everyone gets to participate in the same ritual of pretending to feel better.

i remember when i was a kid, everytime i'd get sick, my mom would sit beside me on the bed, open that familiar tub, and start rubbing it slowly on my chest while telling me stories or just humming something under her breath. i didn't know yet that we were poor in the way adults define poor, i just knew that vicks meant somebody was taking care of me. it wasn't really about the medicine (kumbaga ito ang tinatawag nating vicks theory). it was about the ritual of being looked after when everything else in the house felt uncertain, when the bills were due, when tatay didn't have work that week, when there wasn't extra money for an actual doctor's visit kung tumagal pa ang sakit.

so vicks, in a weird way, became proof of love disguised as a home remedy. and i think that's true for a lot of filipino households. we don't always have the resources to give each other the best possible care, so we give whatever we have, applied with as much tenderness as we can manage. a small jar of menthol standing in for what should have been affordable healthcare, free checkups, accessible medicine, a system that catches you before you fall apart instead of a home remedy that just softens the landing.

now that i'm older, i notice this pattern everywhere, not just in sickness. filipinos have gotten so good at diy-ing solutions for problems that shouldn't require diy-ing in the first place. we build our own version of a social safety net through padala from relatives abroad, sending money home so a sibling can afford insulin or a parent can finally get that x-ray they've been putting off. jeepney drivers fix their own engines with parts held together by sheer determination kasi wala namang sapat na suporta mula sa gobyerno. even our coping mechanisms are homemade. barkada chismis sessions at 2am basically function as therapy for a lot of us kasi therapy is expensive pa rin and the stigma around it hasn't fully gone away in a lot of families. we've turned survival into a diy project, and we've gotten so good at it that people mistake the workaround for the actual solution. pinoy resourcefulness naman, sabi nila, without asking why we had to be resourceful in the first place.

vicks vaporub is basically that same story in a tiny plastic tub. it works, sort of, temporarily, enough to get you through the night, enough to let you sleep, and enough to convince yourself you're healing even if what you actually needed was rest you couldn't afford to take, medicine you couldn't afford to buy, or a doctor's visit you kept postponing until the symptoms became too loud to ignore.

i'm not saying vicks is bad. honestly i still use it. there's comfort in familiar smells, in rituals passed down from lola to nanay to me, in the specific memory of someone rubbing it on my back while whispering huwag kang mag-alala, mawawala din yan. that kind of care matters too. it's not nothing. but i think it's worth sitting with the fact that an entire generation grew up trusting a menthol ointment more than the healthcare system meant to protect them. that says less about vicks and more about what we've had to normalize just to get by.

so here i am, entering my 20s, still rubbing vicks on my chest whenever i feel a cold coming and still finding comfort in the same blue tub my mother used on me as a kid. except now i notice the deeper stuff underneath it, the healthcare gaps we've quietly learned to fill with home remedies, and the resilience nobody actually gave us a choice about, and the way filipino families turned a menthol rub into a stand-in for a system that was supposed to take care of us in the first place.

maybe that's the real universal panacea. not vicks itself, but the love people force into these small workarounds when the bigger structures keep letting them down. a whole country rubbing menthol on its wounds, literal and otherwise, and calling it healing because it's the closest thing to healing we can actually afford.

honestly, i don't know if that's something to laugh about or grieve about. i think it's both, most days. that's what it means to grow up here, i guess, entering your 20s with a tub of vicks somewhere in your bag, a joke you make about your own family and a small quiet proof that somebody, at some point, tried to take care of you with whatever they had on hand.

salamat vicks.

Subscribe now