Fragments of the Quiet Mind

It was 3:17 PM when I realized I wasn’t tired—I was just bored. I had no one to blame. Not the deadlines. Not the caffeine crash. Not even the algorithm. Just me. Sitting there. Staring at a blinking cursor that wasn’t judging me, but it also wasn’t applauding. It just blinked. Patiently. Indifferently. Like it knew I’d try to run. So I did what I always do. Opened another tab. Made another cup of coffee I didn’t want. Pretended I needed to check something. I scrolled. I organized files I’d never open again. I looked productive. But all I was really doing was hiding—from a silence I had no excuse not to face. I used to think the opposite of burnout was inspiration. That if I could just land on the right idea, feel that electric pull toward something meaningful, I’d be okay. I didn’t realize I was skipping the part where nothing happens. The quiet middle. The unsponsored, unposted moment where you have to sit in your own skin without any applause for existing. Burnout, at least, mak...

There was something cinematic about my collapse. You know the kind. The aching stare into space. The playlist suddenly making sense. Ashtrays filling up like metaphors. That slow descent where even your breath feels like dialogue from a French indie film. You can romanticize that. You can write about that. But healing? Healing is brushing your teeth. Again. It's drinking water when it doesn't taste like anything. It’s putting your phone down because there’s nothing to say and nothing to scroll for. It’s the slow erosion of the version of you that needed chaos to feel alive. No one writes songs about oatmeal. No one makes a montage out of "I got out of bed today." You sit in silence. You count breaths. You rearrange the furniture hoping something inside moves with it. And yet—this is where life actually begins again. Not at the peak of the heartbreak, but somewhere on the third Tuesday after it, when you realize you haven't cried in a week and you’re not sure h...

Sitting in the jeepney with my child, I found myself quietly observing the scene next to us—a mother with her own little one, perhaps six years old. Unlike my kid, who seems to have inherited a relentless curiosity, drilling down into every detail until the universe surrenders its secrets, this child sat silently, her eyes wandering around in a restless search for something to latch onto. Boredom, perhaps—a boredom she couldn’t quite contain. Every so often, she would ask her mother a question, her voice a soft interruption to the hum of the journey. “Ma, may baon na ba ako?” “Ma, nagbayad na tayo?” “Ma, bakit nagjeep lang tayo?” Simple, practical questions. And each time, the mother would respond with a brief nod or a shake of her head, her attention never fully leaving that small compact mirror she kept pulling out to pat her face with powder. It’s funny, isn’t it?  the things we notice when we let our minds wander?  There she was, clutching a designer bag, scrolling through...