I didn’t figure it out in one big moment. It just hit me one random day, the way realizations do when you’re not even looking for them.
I’m Nemie, a college student from Pit-os, Cebu City. Other than studying, most of my mental energy goes into trying to rationalize my decisions and my thoughts, even when I’m not sure if they’re good ones or nuh. It’s just how my brain works. I’m always turning something over, looking for the angle that makes sense, even when the answer isn’t clean.
The thing I lose track of time doing is cooking, but if I go deeper, it’s really the conversations. Not the surface kind, but the ones where someone comes in with a completely different point of view and you feel your own thinking shift. I will stay in those for hours without noticing. There’s something about hearing how other people see the world that makes me feel more awake than almost anything else.
For a long time I let myself be a back burner. I carried other people’s weight because I wanted them to feel like they had me. My close friends were always there shouldering me when I got stuck in a cycle that had no peace at the end of it, the kind where you keep going around and nothing resolves and you can’t figure out how to stop. I told myself I wasn’t the loser in any of it. But I was exhausted in a way I didn’t have words for yet.
Then in one completely random moment, it hit me: what truly matters is my peace of mind. Not the cycle. Not proving anything to anyone. Just peace. I knew it was starting to affect my studies, but honestly it wasn’t even about that. I just realized I needed to build some self respect, to stop absorbing everything from everyone and start protecting the version of me that was still trying to grow.
What I didn’t expect was that my friends started to shift too. I wasn’t trying to teach anyone anything. But somewhere in the middle of my own mess, they started to widen their point of view, to understand other people’s perspectives a little differently. That’s kind of funny to me, that something so personal quietly became useful for someone else without me even planning it.
“I feel most alive when I am with the right people who give me peace of mind and I can do what I want without thinking about the negative things behind my progress.”
What cycle have you been staying in long past the point you knew it wasn’t giving you peace?
Every life has a story worth telling. Thank you for reading this one.
☕
SUPPORT US
If this story moved you
Help us keep collecting real stories from real people.
✦
SHARE YOUR STORY
Your story deserves to be told too
You don’t need to write a word. Just answer a few questions.
KEEP READING
