Remember those classroom exercises where teachers asked where you’d see yourself in ten, fifteen years? You’d write it down dutifully: a successful professional, an apartment of your own, maybe a car, definitely traveling, always happy. I remember scribbling my answers with the kind of certainty only a child who’s never paid rent can have.

In a Joan Didion book I read a few months ago, she wrote about arriving in New York at twenty-one with her head full of movies and songs about the city, believing somehow that what happened there wouldn’t count. That’s the arithmetic of youth: consequences exist but never quite apply to you. What Didion discovered—and what most of us eventually learn—is that everything counts. The real betrayal isn’t that adulthood is difficult; it’s that we spend years treating it like a distant country only to discover we’ve been living at its borders all along.

College promised to be the buffer zone—the training ground where you prepare for real life while still protected from it. But that’s the first bubble that bursts. One failed major doesn’t just hurt your GPA; it sets you back a year while you watch your batchmates post graduation photos. The job market demands two years of experience for entry-level positions (ano raw po?!). Dream jobs only accept Latin honors graduates from The Big Four. Postgraduate degrees cost more than most of us can afford, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to get in.

I used to tell people I was going to be a lawyer. Not arrogantly, just with the certainty of someone who genuinely believed they knew their trajectory. It felt like a calling. Then I shifted courses, and now I’m studying computer engineering. When anyone asks, I give them the sanitized story: change of heart, discovered I liked programming and electronics. But the truth? I was terrified.

My father told me that sometimes life demands we make choices we never imagined making. The hard route. The one that makes us unhappy, but we’ll find happiness elsewhere, somehow. I nodded like I understood. I didn’t. I thought choosing the practical path meant choosing safety. What I’ve learned since is brutal: there is no safety. Even supposedly stable fields offer no guarantees. Hard work doesn’t always pay off. The meritocracy is mostly mythology we cling to because admitting the alternative—that luck, connections, and timing matter more than talent—is too depressing to process at eighteen.

They say cynics are just disappointed idealists. We don’t start out cynical; we start believing that good grades lead to good opportunities, that passion translates to fulfillment, that wanting something badly enough makes it possible. The cruelty of college is its speed. Four or five years that felt infinite when you started but evaporate before you’ve figured anything out. And suddenly, that “good life” that seemed decades away when you were a kid with your nose buried in books is supposed to be within reach. 

The distance between childhood and adulthood wasn’t as vast as it seemed. We thought we were preparing for something far ahead. We didn’t realize we were already living it: every choice was counting, every mistake had weight. And now here we are, one foot already out the door, looking back at a bubble we didn’t know we were living in until it burst.

I don’t have answers. I can’t promise it gets better or that everything eventually works itself out. What I can say is this: we’re all standing at the same threshold, looking at a world that doesn’t match what we were promised, trying to figure out how to move forward without losing ourselves completely.

Maybe the question isn’t how we got here so fast. Maybe it’s what we do now that we’ve arrived unprepared. And maybe it’s time we stop measuring ourselves against dreams we wrote down in our homeroom notebooks from middle school.

The bubble has burst. But we’re still here. And maybe that’s the only thing that actually counts. Malayo pa, pero malayo ka na.

Originally published in Heraldo Filipino Volume 40, Issue 1.