I used to think that turning thirty would come with a fanfare or at least a clear signpost—some definitive moment when everything would click into place and I’d finally feel like an adult. There was a time when I imagined it as a ceremony: candles, maybe, or a toast, or some metaphysical unveiling of a grown-up self. Instead, it’s arriving like a quiet and hazy morning. No grand ceremony. No sudden burst of clarity. Just the steady unfolding of another chapter in my book, and the realization that life doesn’t hand you a certificate of completion for surviving three whole decades of barely figuring things out.
Lately, I’ve been getting this awful nagging feeling to look back. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s anxiety disguised as reflection. Or maybe it’s just the strange gravity of aging—that slow and inevitable pull toward memory.
I remember my first birthday, a Power Rangers cake on the table of our old house in Barayong, my tiny hands covered in frosting and joy. I remember watching Jurassic Park on VHS, equal parts terrified and thrilled, hiding behind the couch cushions and peeking through my fingers. I remember running barefoot through the house, convinced I had superpowers, leaping from one piece of furniture to the next like the floor was lava. I remember being scolded for refusing to nap at noon, eyes wide with a kind of wonder too loud to rest.
First grade is mostly a blur. But by Grade 3, things begin to take shape. That was the year we learned about plant tropism, how plants grow toward sunlight, bending quietly but persistently toward whatever keeps them alive. More than mitochondria or cell diagrams, that idea stayed with me—how even without eyes, roots, or reason, there is something in all of us that leans toward survival.
Back then, research meant no Google, no AI prompts—just dusty shelves in the school library, hours spent flipping through tables of contents and glossaries, praying we’d land on the right paragraph before the bell rang. Between those chapters were awkward dance routines during field demonstrations, Christmas cheers, culminating activities whose themes we only half-understood but performed with full effort anyway. There were puppy love and crushes too big to name, playground quarrels over reasons we can no longer recall, and that one afternoon when our adviser, fed up with our refusal to clean the classroom, made us sit on the floor among the very trash we left behind. Somewhere in the midst of it all, we found ourselves inside a church, singing At the Beginning from Anastasia, voice trembling, heart loud.
I was a transfer student. I didn’t know anyone. Back in elementary, I had a big friend group—loud, messy, always there. But high school felt like a reset I didn’t ask for. I turned inward. I became quiet, detached, always hovering at the edges of things. Instead of joining in, I watched. I became more spectator than participant, moving through hallways like a shadow. The internet, Tumblr mostly, felt more real to me than the world unfolding around me. It was where I could exist without being seen, where I could speak without being interrupted, where everything felt distant but safe.
There were hours spent burning CDs—carefully curating playlists of Boys Like Girls, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, and All Time Low—pouring adolescent ache into cheap discs, hoping someone would understand what I couldn’t yet say out loud. I’d lie in bed, earphones in, volume just high enough to drown out the world, playing the same songs on repeat like some kind of prayer. Around the same time, I discovered The Law of Ueki, an anime that somehow made the world feel both stranger and more manageable. Ueki fought not just with powers, but with principle—and I clung to that idea: that doing good could be ordinary, quiet, persistent.
Over time, I found myself settling in. Still reserved, still slightly on the fringe, but no longer invisible. Friendships began to form in quiet ways: conversations in the hallway about Marvel comics, long before the MCU turned them into cultural currency. I’d stand beside classmates as they talked about cars I didn’t understand but pretended to. Some days, we’d skip class and head to Gaisano, not because we were rebellious, but because we were restless and needed to feel like we had a say in our own schedules. One night after graduation, a friend and I rode his motorbike, cruising along the boulevard with the wind in our faces and nothing urgent to return to.
Somewhere in that blur, I stumbled upon Percy Jackson. One book at a time. One week’s allowance at a time. That series opened something in me. And then came The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Catcher in the Rye—books that didn’t just tell stories but made me feel seen. They put language to the quiet, to the awkward pauses, and the ache of not having a clear understanding of yourself. They made it okay to be unsure.
But the moment that shifted everything came quietly. A teacher, without ceremony, handed me his worn copy of Sophie’s World. That book cracked something open. It wasn’t just the story, it was the realization that ideas could be thrilling, that philosophy could be personal, that questions were worth holding onto even if they didn’t have answers.
I was never the smartest in the room. But somewhere deep inside, there was this quiet, stubborn belief that maybe, just maybe, I could pull it off. That I could make it to a university in Manila, build a different life in a city that felt bigger than my doubts. That didn’t happen. I didn’t make it. And for a while, it felt like failure—not just of a plan, but of a self I had been constructing in my head. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that detours don’t erase dreams; sometimes they just change the route. And sometimes, not getting what you wanted becomes the thing that prepares you for what you didn’t know you needed.
I fell in love with Naga City. There was something grounding about its pace: slower than Manila, but no less alive. It didn’t pretend to be more than it was, and somehow that honesty gave me space to grow. Ateneo opened my world. Not just academically, but in all the subtle, unspoken ways that matter. It taught me how to think, yes, but more importantly, how to be. It taught me how to drink and smoke—a decision, a habit, a vice I still carry with me, sometimes with pride, sometimes with regret. It taught me how to be spontaneous, to say yes to late-night road trips to the nearest beach or resort, to let go of the script I’d written for myself and make room for detours.
Ateneo taught me how to doubt, how to listen, how to sit with questions without rushing to answer them. Within its classrooms and corridors, I found people who challenged me, conversations that stayed with me long after they ended, and a version of myself I hadn’t known was possible. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I was catching up. I felt like I belonged. Not because I had everything figured out, but because uncertainty was welcome here. And for someone who had once built their life around silence and observation, that felt like home.
Maybe turning thirty isn’t about reaching some mythical summit where all the questions get answered. Maybe it’s about finally learning to live with the questions, to let them sit beside you without shame. What once felt like failure now looks a lot like redirection. What once seemed like silence now feels like space. Space to build. To begin again. To become.
If there’s a lesson stitched through the years—from Barayong to Naga, from burned CDs to philosophy books, from anime battles to existential ones—it’s that becoming isn’t loud. It doesn’t announce itself. It happens slowly, in conversations that linger, in detours that redefine the map, in quiet decisions made in dorm rooms, classrooms, sidewalks, and city streets.
And so here I am, thirty on the horizon, not with a finish line but with a compass. There’s no grand ceremony. But there is motion. There is memory. There is meaning—not in the clarity, but in the unfolding.
