Someone has to build the floor first
Nobody told me that surviving could make you the villain. I found that out on my own, slowly, as you find out most things that hurt, which is all at once and too late to brace for.
I go to school with people who look at a menu and see food. I look at a menu and see numbers. Somewhere between those two ways of seeing is a distance I’ve never quite figured out how to name, only to swallow. I watch them move through our university the way people move through their own homes, touching things without thinking, committing without counting. I’ve spent so long learning how to watch that I sometimes catch my own reflection in a window and have to remind myself what I look like standing here among them.
When they fail, they go out. When I come close to failing, something seizes in my chest, and I sit very still until my breathing comes back to me—which it always does. Yet nobody ever knows, as I’ve learned to keep it entirely off my face. I don’t remember when I learned that. I think I’ve just always known.
And still, they tell me to relax.
My groupmates once said I stressed them out. One of them said it with genuine concern, and I remember the exact texture of that moment—how I smiled and said I understood while something inside me went very quiet. There’s a specific kind of hurt that lives in being asked to be less so that people who’ve always had more can sit comfortably beside you, and I’ve never found a way to say it out loud without sounding like I’m asking for something I haven’t earned. So I don’t. I file it away in the same place I keep everything else I can’t explain in rooms like these, and I’ve been doing that long enough now that the weight of it has already settled into me—a low, dull pressure that sits just beneath everything I do and never fully goes away.
The word “relax” means something different depending on who’s receiving it. For them, it means the ground is steady, and the consequences of stopping are soft and temporary. However, what I hear when I receive it is something else entirely. I hear: let go. But I just can’t, because what I’ve built my place here on is my grades and nothing else, and asking me to loosen my grip is asking me to trust a floor I haven’t yet finished laying beneath my own feet.
Then my family told me I had become shameless.
The word arrived before I was ready for it, as things do when they carry enough weight to outrun every defense you’ve built. I sat with it for a long time afterward. Time moved strangely. I was in the room but also somewhere slightly outside of it, watching myself hold still from what felt like very far away. They said I was small. They said the people around me were evidence of it. They said the reaching was the embarrassing part, and that I should stop before I made a fool of myself any further.
I know they love me. That’s the part I keep returning to, because it’s the part that makes everything else so much harder to hold. The people who’ve known me the longest looked at what I was building toward and saw something they needed to protect me from. I think they’d already watched me fall inside their heads, had rehearsed it so many times that the warning felt like the only mercy left to give.
Yet I still couldn’t make my life smaller to fit inside their fear of what it might cost me to keep going.
Because there are footprints on the moon, pressed into the dust of somewhere every generation before them had already agreed was beyond human reach—left by people who were told, in all the ways the world knows how to say it, to stop. We didn’t call them shameless. We named things after them and offered their stories to children as proof that “impossible” isn’t a verdict; it’s only a sentence someone else wrote before you arrived, and you were never under any obligation to finish it.
I’m not saying I’ll walk on the moon. I’m saying I’ve watched the boundary of what I’m allowed to want move every time I reached for it, and I’m beginning to understand that it was never a real boundary at all. It was only ever a line drawn by people who found my reaching inconvenient.
Some nights, the exhaustion settles so deep it stops feeling like tiredness and starts feeling like something that belongs to me now—something woven into the way I move through the world. Sleep doesn’t fix it because what causes it doesn’t stop when I do. I carry the weariness of someone who’s been holding something invisible across a very long distance, through rooms full of people who never once thought to ask what it was. Yet I’m still here. Still building. Still laying the floor down in the quiet hours after everyone who told me to rest has already fallen asleep.
Someday I’ll stand on it and feel it hold beneath me.
But someone always has to build the floor first, and I’ve known for a long time, without anyone having to tell me, that it was going to be me.
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Nathaniel Gabriel Escueta, 20, is a student-journalist studying communication at the Ateneo de Manila University on a full scholarship.
