How much is ‘utang na loob’?
The concept of “utang na loob” is something we, as Filipinos, know too well. I know I do. And I know my mother does.
I grew up knowing my mother was the only one who made it out. She was the only one who graduated from college in her family, through the collective effort of her aunts and uncles. In return, she did the chores, cleaned the house, took care of the kids, and cooked the meals. She taught me these important lessons: always work hard, always stay grounded, and never turn your back on where you came from.
My mother is a teacher, and evidently so. But she once told me it was never what she wanted. It was simply the course that cost the least back then, and since she wasn’t the one paying, it wasn’t her choice to make. Still, she did her best, and with gratitude. But in the rare moments when she feels safe enough to dream, she tells me what she had always wanted—to become a nurse.
Ironically enough, that’s what I ended up becoming.
As a child, I’ve always wanted to become a doctor. I knew I always wanted to help people. That was my biggest “why” for pursuing this career. Nursing was my childhood dream, forever immortalized in my kindergarten yearbook. I actually wrote that because I thought nurses were essentially “girl doctors.” As I grew older, I understood the difference. Nursing became the practical choice. My dreams shifted, my priorities changed, but that “why” stayed with me.
So that’s what I asked my mother. Why did she want to become a nurse? She smiled: “I want to go abroad. I want to enrich our life. I want to fix our house.”
In that moment, I realized, just like her choices, even her dream wasn’t fully hers, it was simply just a hopeful answer to hardship. And that realization sat heavy.
Because what do you do with a dream that was built out of necessity? What do you call a choice that was never really yours to begin with?
I had always believed dreams were deeply personal. That they came from passion, curiosity, or some quiet calling. But listening to her, I realized that for many Filipino families, dreams are shaped long before we are even old enough to choose them. They are measured against tuition fees, siblings still in school, and mouths that still need feeding.
Utang na loob is dressed up as gratitude, respect, and culture. And yes, at its core, it is all of those things. It is remembering who fed you when you had nothing. Who believed in you when there was no reason to. Who gave, even when it meant they had less. But somewhere along the way, it starts becoming something else.
It becomes the reason you don’t say no. The reason you feel guilty for wanting more. The reason dreams are negotiated, dismissed, sometimes buried. After all, how do you even think of choosing yourself, when everything you have is because of someone else?
The difficult part is that no one ever asks you to carry it forever. There is no contract, no number that tells you when the debt has finally been repaid. Instead, it quietly follows you into every decision you make. It lingers in every dream you convince yourself can wait. The line between love and obligation becomes so blurred, it’s almost indistinguishable from betrayal.
I think about my mother often. About how she built a life that wasn’t fully hers to give me mine. How gratitude can slowly start to shift into obligation when you’ve lived it long enough. And I wonder, if she had been allowed to want, to dream without debt attached, would she have lived differently?
I wonder the same about myself.
Being the eldest daughter, if I pursued my dream of becoming a doctor, someone else would have to adjust. If I chose differently, someone else would carry the burden. I couldn’t ask that of them. And I’ve seen how that works in a family like ours—someone always steps back so someone else can move. And it’s never framed as a loss. It’s framed as love. As a duty. As utang na loob.
Now that I am a nurse, I often think about what it means to care for others. Nursing taught me that care is not measured by how much of yourself you can give away before there is nothing left. We are taught that we cannot pour from an empty cup, yet so many of us were raised believing that love means emptying ourselves anyway. I see echoes of my mother in that lesson. I chose this profession because I wanted to help people, yet I sometimes wonder how easily purpose can become another form of obligation when we forget to extend the same compassion to ourselves.
Perhaps the greatest way to repay the people who gave us everything is not to inherit every burden they carried, but to make sure that gratitude remains a gift instead of a lifelong debt.
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Ruth Anne G. Tudoc, 23, is a Philippine Registered Nurse and a graduate of University of the East Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center.
