i still have a life to live
For a good part of my childhood, I wanted to become a chef. I don’t remember what spawned this aspiration, as none of my earliest memories were spent in the kitchen. I wasn’t particularly fond of food as a child, nor did I habitually sit on a stool and watch my mom create magic in front of the stove. In fact, I didn’t have a great relationship with food growing up. My mom used to be strict with my sister and my diet, always filling up our plates full of rice and viand. “Maraming bata ang nagugutom,” (There are a lot of children who are starving), she would always say as she forced us spoonfuls of food, not letting a single grain go to waste. It did not help that I was a slow eater, and there would be times when I’d be left alone in the kitchen to finish my dinner while everyone else had gone to bed.
To put it shortly, food and I could not be further apart. And yet, I wanted to use it as a medium to create, going so far as wanting it to be my future source of income. In the end, I only learned how to crack an egg and cook rice — a staple in every asian household — when I was fifteen. Presently, I cannot do so much as make instant curry in my dorm without reaching a level of stress that necessitates a FaceTime call with my mom in order to calm down.
I spent most of my high school wanting to be an engineer in the (nearer) future. Being surrounded by engineers of different kinds in the family — electronics, mechanical, computer — must have heavily influenced this. While food and I could not meet, I was pretty much best friends with STEM from the start. I won high school Science quiz bees and was always eager to learn anything about space. I liked innovation and was later awarded an undergraduate scholarship from the Department of Science and Technology.
The only downside — I suck at math. And while math is technically a branch of science, a subject I most ardently love, I could not seem to grasp the abstract formulas and theories involved. The numbers and equations float in a giant soup inside my head whenever I try to befriend it. Anything with numbers gives me anxiety, a shameful thing for a STEM student to have. It took three calculus subjects during my last year of high school before I tearfully crossed off chemical engineering in my list of potential careers. In college, chemistry and statistics remained my lowest subjects, even disabling me from renewing my dean’s lister status for one semester because of it.
Along the way, I had many other aspirations. Different careers seemed like great prospects — Psychology when I was in a very dark place and wanted to understand myself better, Information Technology when I was offered a program at a state university in Manila, and International Studies during times when I questioned my ability in STEM. I eventually landed in Microbiology purely on the basis of my love for science. In spite of that, I still feel like a child blindfolded in the middle of the woods without any clue which way to tread next.
Most of my colleagues would proceed to medical school, and some will continue to graduate school already with a subfield in mind. All those sound like terrific options, but none I have a fiery passion for.
There’s still a gap that I’m trying to fill, and within that must be an answer that could save me. Perhaps I’ll have it in the future, perhaps I won’t. Maybe it’ll take me sixty years to find what I’m here for, maybe in the next two. Until then, I’ll try to keep in mind that I still have a life to live.
While the question of who I want to be seems like the biggest question mark at the center of my life, the world does not only revolve around it. Maybe the entire point is to spend your life finding it, and the search itself is life unfolding. In the meantime, there are other things in the forest to look upon. The birds in the trees sing at dawn. The trees hum in the night, in tune with the moonlight. The air gives long caresses — cold and soothing. You may be lost for now, but you are not lost forever.
This piece was originally posted on Substack on May 13, 2024 and migrated to BearBlog on March 19, 2026.