I only wish it had been gentler
There is a particular kind of loneliness that does not come from being physically alone, but from living a life that feels perpetually interrupted. It is the loneliness of watching things almost happen.
I have learned to exist in the space between beginning and undoing. Opportunities arrive briefly, convincing, close enough to imagine, and then dissolve under the weight of circumstances that never announce themselves publicly. There are paths I did not take, not because I lacked the will, but because the ground beneath me was already unstable. When life is built on margins thin enough to tear, risk begins to resemble irresponsibility more than courage.
Some people move forward assuming they will be caught if they fall. I have never known what it feels like to fall without first calculating the cost of impact.
I come from a family where stability has always been provisional. Where one illness can rearrange everything. Where money is not just currency, but time, medicine, electricity, options, and sometimes even dignity. Decisions rarely belong to one person alone. They expand, quietly and inevitably, into the lives of others.
People speak about following a passion as if desire alone guarantees access to it. As if wanting something badly enough could make it possible. If only they knew how many things I have wanted that I could not afford to want.
There were job applications I opened and closed more than once, knowing that saying yes would mean leaving behind the fragile structure that keeps me running. Some opportunities required savings I did not have, others demanded a kind of stability that still felt imagined. Over time, I learned how to step back from things that might have changed my life, simply because my life could not afford to change. There is grief in watching possibilities close, not because they were impossible, but because the timing was incompatible with survival.
Around me, life seems to move in a more continuous way. My peers build careers that advance, relationships that endure, and futures that appear coherent when spoken aloud. Their milestones accumulate, each one leading naturally to the next. Meanwhile, my own life feels composed of interruptions.
Progress, when it happens, comes in fragments. I learned to keep moving, even with the quiet anticipation of expenses that had not yet arrived but already felt certain. Opportunities came and asked for risk I could not afford, and so I let them pass, not because they meant little, but because everything else meant more. Even the choices that felt right had to be set aside, slowly traded for the smaller, necessary work just to stay afloat.
It’s a peculiar place to live, where things are not unstable enough to be seen as a struggle, but never stable enough to allow rest.
I crawled my way out of a life that could have remained permanently limited, not in a single leap, but through years of careful, deliberate movement. Studying when I could, working when I had to, choosing each step with more caution than certainty. From the outside, it might look like progress, and perhaps it is. But there are days when it still feels like I am negotiating with gravity. As someone in his 20s, I do not feel young in the way youth is usually described. Youth, as it is imagined, allows for experimentation, for reinvention, for risk. But risk assumes there is room to recover, and that margin has never really existed for me.
Sometimes I wonder who I might have been if stability had not required so much of my attention.
The question does not interrupt my life, but it lingers quietly within it, shaping the texture of my ordinary hours. I imagine versions of myself that made decisions out of curiosity rather than necessity. Versions that moved forward without calculating what might collapse if they did. It is difficult not to feel left behind by timelines that were never equally available.
When people often speak of resilience as something admirable, it only proves that the world is not ruled by loving people. In a life where alternatives are limited, resilience is not a choice. It is simply what survival looks like.
I do not know where my life is heading. I do not know if persistence guarantees anything beyond the ability to persist a little longer.
Sometimes it feels like the deepest grief is not for what has been lost, but for what has never been allowed to fully begin. The plans that remained drafts. The risks that never became real. The versions of life that hovered briefly at the edges of possibility before quietly receding.
Perhaps life has always been this way. I only wish I had learned it more gently.
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John Dexter Canda, 28, is a medical doctor who divides his time between General Santos City and Zamboanga City.
