There’s a pins and needles feeling sitting on the nimble nails of my feet, inching slowly up my thigh as I write this. An eighteen-kilo toddler nurses on my lap, asleep, and I chase a deadline that has been so dead for two days. Articles keep piling up like sand in a sandstorm. I badly need to pee too, but one move and my daughter wakes up and all this quiet is over. I’d live better with a UTI than with five more minutes of shrill toddler whining.
1. Surf and/ or climb another mountain.
2. Gorge on chocolate cake for my birthday.
3. Land a full-time home-based job that pays sufficiently for the bills and allows a little extra for travel and savings.
I didn’t get to do the loftiest of the three, but there was chocolate cake.
But most important was the icing on the cake: a week before the fourth, I landed a full-time online job as the lead writer in a web solutions company.
On weekends, I accept freelance assignments – and magically enough, they are pouring in ceaseless these days – as well as before and after my nine-hour weekday shift. My stubby fingers, my back, and my head have never been this beaten and quashed so badly. Read, curate, type, examine. Rinse, repeat. Over three weeks into the barely-no-weekend, 16-hour work days, and I am thankful to the Muses there’s still juice left to carry on.
True sacrifice comes from a place of love, not hate.
True sacrifice comes from a place of love, not hate.
Ten years ago, I heard this beautiful, life-influencing thought from Kenshin Himura in Samurai X: true sacrifice comes from a place of love, not hate.
Only now am I discovering its true meaning.
On days when my being mortal gets the best of me, I simply look back at the hard three months before this, when despite the countless daily pitches and applications, I only seem to be losing opportunities. Clients going toward directions that don’t require my skills, and potential ones who say they are dead serious but are nowhere to be found the next minute. Bills that always get paid 15 days late and debts that balloon and circle around payless days.
I will forever be grateful for the two years that freelancing has survived me and my family, but I am also tired of constructing and sending letters on why I’m good enough to be a temporal hire. I’m tired of the hand-to-mouth life, of sleeping without the security of what months from now will look like for my daughter. I would rather strain every fiber, every cell in my body till it’s black and bruised than go back to how things were.
For some people, that kind of lawlessness is exciting – and I admit I badly miss the freedom of not having to submit to time-dictated sheets and superiors – but this new future, though more predictable, also is. I am filled with new found love for this new scheme of things. Because I have always loved creating beautiful things out of wrecks, spawning new lives among tens of old ones, persevering in the bleakest of days.
This, especially now that I entered a realm that’s not covered by most rules, including that of the calendar.
Being 31 took me back to where I was 30 years before and where I am now. There are those things I have always wanted to do, like having a business of my own. Being that I am not a gifted entrepreneur, it needs to be something I know, something I want to do, something I’ll look forward to every day, and where I can still fit in writing and traveling. It’s high up on my list of to-do stuff before I die, but I have forever been aimless, unaware of what I want and how I can shape it in this country, on average wage.
But aging and aging in a way where you don’t count figures but the way years are lived, it makes fates clearer. As I hit 30, I decided that to make a difference in how those figures pan out, species-specific rules and expectations must be defied.
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| Two years ago, I used a carrier so she can go swinging. Now she’s swinging on her own. |
So I did, increasingly so as I pushed 31. I traveled alone with a toddler, under searing heat and with so little money on hand most times. It became clear that this is something I will never get tired of doing even with a kid around. I began to piece together a future where I can share trips to lesser-known central Luzon destinations (the section in the country I explore the most) with travelers and moms like me who can only afford a rate commensurate to public commutes.
The idea of being in an age where the exquisite taste of greater control and even greater dreams looms at a distance is out-of-this-world inspiring. Of hitting home in terms of financial freedom; of a purposeful life for that tiny great love of your life; of turning 35, 40, 50 brazen and unashamed of the years, knowing they were lived in deeds and thoughts that were led by meaning.
Of days filled with heart throbs from being able to do what I love most: writing, exploring territories, and building things out of love from a scary place called sacrifice. It’s what makes those 16-hour present days matter; what makes them so damn enjoyable despite the pain, what makes them collectively, a place of love.
