Why the in-between can be beautiful, too
Every week, PhilSTAR L!fe explores issues and topics from the perspectives of different age groups, encouraging healthy but meaningful conversations on why they matter. This is Generations.
Some endings are easy to recognize: the massive, drastic kind with a fixed time and witnesses, like 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31, the shifting of a sablay across our shoulders, the end of a relationship, the plane ride home after years, or only months, spent working in a different time zone.
To me, it's being 27, sometime in August, sitting with my dad over lunch, talking about not pushing through with law school after having been admitted.
Anyone who knows me knows I'm not one to share the ins and outs of my everyday, so perhaps this is enough to paint the picture: I started living alone in 2023, in an apartment three kilometers from my office, and two years passed in the rhythm of a 10-to-7: sitting before a screen, making sense of data, attending and leading meetings. My promotion, in hindsight, was the best thing that happened to me then, as it gave me the most remarkable colleagues, who became even better friends. I knew the work and my people like the back of my hand; to leave simply to discover another path felt almost absurd.
Still, I did.
A few months of traveling, part-time jobs, and an admission to one of the top law schools in the country later, I found myself at the foot of an ending, having decided not to push through with that journey for now, for reasons I only talk to my walls about.
To say I’ve been a little too used to the familiar question, “What’s next?” would be an understatement.
We’ve all heard it, perhaps from a co-worker, a friend, or a tito at a family gathering. I think I’ve finally cracked it: They don’t always mean to rub salt in the wound. Sometimes, it’s just because it’s the only rhythm they know, where an ending is supposed to trigger some seismic change immediately after.
Movement only matters if it gets us somewhere. Stillness requires a reason.
I was never a fan of that whole thing.
The weight of being in-between
With possibilities parading themselves online, it’s easy to lose ourselves in what could happen next, and in the anxiety of choosing wrong. My world alone holds an entire range of “nexts”: from going back to corporate to completely moving to a foreign land, and everything in between.
So what do we do when we don’t know what to do? Turn to YouTube and TikTok, apparently, to see how others did it. But eventually, they stop working and add to the noise, because we realize there’s no one manual for starting over.
Then there’s the loneliness that comes with it.
There have been countless nights sitting quietly on a bench in Forbes Town or at a random café in Morato, looking around and finding no one there. Or perhaps there are people, but they are different people: unfamiliar faces standing where your people used to stand. Everyone kept moving, following their own timelines, at their own pace. The world kept spinning.
I've just gotten better at living with the idea that it's not always about arriving, but about constantly arriving—finding myself in different moments, again and again, and letting myself actually be in them. To accept that I may not know the next step, or where exactly it leads, and to go anyway.
I might not have liked it, but I realized I have outlived that version of myself: the one with the most loving workmates, the funniest roommate to joke around with, the one person I could spend hours talking to about anything—our unspoken depths in the same breath as our favorite kinds of fish to imagine having at 2 a.m.
On days when sleep lets go of me, and I find my to-do list nearly empty, I carry the uncertainty. I carry the versions of myself I once was. I carry, through and through, the unknown.
And still, I show up for the next moment.
Constantly arriving
There's always been pressure to get somewhere: to do something grand, to accomplish something significant, to become someone. We are taught to move toward a destination, as though there must always be a "there" waiting for us.
But after several endings and even more beginnings these past months, I’ve found myself holding on to one small thought: Maybe there’s nothing wrong with being here, for now. Maybe sometimes, there just isn’t a “there” to get to.
I don’t mean this as a rejection of ambition, or an argument against having goals and next steps. Only that there might be another way to hold them: to let myself simply be here.
The uncertainty hasn’t gone anywhere. I’ve just gotten better at living with the idea that it's not always about arriving, but about constantly arriving—finding myself in different moments, again and again, and letting myself actually be in them. To accept that I may not know the next step, or where exactly it leads, and to go anyway.
Every moment seems to carry a little bit of an ending and a beginning with it. Most of the time, we barely notice, which is why “starting over” has felt less dramatic to me now.
It can look surprisingly ordinary, actually. Right now, it can be waking up without immediately worrying about what we’re supposed to rush to do. Or playing mini golf with friends for five hours. It can be inviting old friends to a matcha run—because, yes, we never really lost them. Or courageously writing this essay.
None of these feel particularly momentous—only quietly, deeply grounding.
Finally, I can admit (and truly believe) that the middle can be a beautiful place to be in. Maybe “starting over” already begins in that quiet, unofficial stretch of light even before the sun comes up—just enough possibility for ourselves to work with, with the brightest stars still there to marvel at and guide us, only if we look.
Perhaps it's really the in-between that tells us we've already begun. Then the sun comes, and we don’t even notice.
Generations appears weekly at PhilSTAR L!fe.