All Existence Is Entwined By Fragments



The alarm blares and I hit snooze—not once, but twice, sometimes three times. It’s less an act of defiance than one of delay, a refusal to confront the day as I am: half-formed, slightly behind, a detritus of another restless night. The dream I just departed feels important, but it is gone. In its place is the dim contours of my room, thick with the residue of an unfinished life. On my desk, calculus worksheets curl at the edges, career plans half-scrawled in the margins of planners I swore I will follow. I tell myself this mess is temporary. I know it is not.



In the bathroom mirror, I meet someone I do not quite recognize. The face is mine. Sort of. Familiar, yes, but like an actor’s in a role he’s played too long to quit. There is a fatigue there, not from sleeplessness, but from suspension — the kind that comes from living between identities, between promise and performance. My friends, it seems, have committed fully to their next acts: future lawyers, data scientists, people with defined missions and well-calibrated goals. I, too, have goals. I even have a 5-year plan post-undergrad. But that is different from feeling inhabited. The haunting question is not whether I will do something meaningful. It is whether I will ever feel located in what I do.



The city wakes while I stall. Outside, cars pass with an enjambment I don’t understand. I brew coffee because it is what mornings demand of people trying to believe in their own momentum. I step out to the balcony. The air is light, warm. There is movement all around me that feels like clarity. And for a moment, the world seduces: everyone in their place, en route, in sync. But I know that beneath each destination lies a negotiation. What looks like direction is often just persistence dressed up in certainty. I sip, and it tastes like ritual. This, too, is a kind of survival.



I have come to think that youth is not a season of freedom, but of fragmentation. We live in a house of mirrors and mistake each reflection for the original. Every version of me—academic overachiever, filial son, secretly poetic, performatively ambitious—competes for continuity. I contort. I accommodate. I compromise. And yet, no matter how faithfully I play the part, no single iteration ever feels complete. It's not that I do not know who I am; it's that I know too many versions, none of which have learned how to coexist.

The self, I suspect, is not a project of coherence but of acceptance. The sooner we abandon the idea that there is a final form, the closer we get to something truer. The culture tells us otherwise. It peddles linearity. It asks us to optimize: for personal branding, for productivity, for potential, for peace. But there is no peace in self-optimization. There is only fatigue that masquerades as growth. And beneath it, perhaps a quieter fear: that if we stop reaching, we will sink.



But I have begun to wonder: what if the reaching itself is the distraction? What if the work is not to “arrive” but to be present to the nonlinear, recursive rhythm of becoming? I think about how Murakami runs to write, how each mile is a negotiation between pain and persistence. The first mile is always the worst. The breakthrough comes after the numbness, after the voice in your head tells you it’s over. Maybe that is how identity works, too. You don’t reach it; you run through it.



These days, memory feels less like recall and more like excavation. I will be chopping vegetables and suddenly I am brought back to the kitchen tiles of my grandparents’ house — the ones I used to trace with my toes while Lola stirred sinigang. The past does not announce itself. It ambushes. It lives in textures: the sting of soap on a papercut, the hum of a fridge at 2 a.m., the way some light falls too perfectly not to mean something. These are not memories, exactly. They are residues. The imprints of selves that were not fully witnessed when they first appeared.



And maybe this is a problem. We believe life is made up of milestones, of events that can be recounted in tidy narrative arcs. But most of my life has happened in verse. In pauses. In spaces between things. In the silence after a conversation ends and before the room forgets what was said. These moments resist plot, yet they shape everything. Perhaps the work of growing up is learning to name the in-between.



It is strange, watching the years collect behind you like dust on a bookshelf — soft, almost invisible, until one day you run your finger across and realize how much has settled. I used to think possibility was spatial: that it lived in cities I hadn't moved to yet, relationships I haven't started, career paths I am yet to chart. But I have come to suspect possibility is less about location and more about reception, which is an internal condition of being willing to meet the future without needing it to confirm your worth.



I no longer believe in the “true self” as a singular artifact waiting to be found. I believe in selves as plural and seasonal. Some will live short lives, others will carry forward in quieter forms. They are not masks. They are residues of contact. With others. With context. With who we needed to be at the time. What binds them isn’t essence, but attention. The willingness to sit with the version of yourself that surfaces when the noise dims.



And maybe that’s what wisdom is — not arrival, but the ongoing work of staying. Of noticing. Of saying: this version, too, is worthy of my presence.

The world teaches us to strive. But striving, untethered from inquiry, becomes performance. The real work — the quiet, sacred, difficult work — is to stay in the discomfort long enough to ask better questions. To recognize the beauty of persistence not as forward motion, but as return: to the page, to the practice, to the mirror, again and again.