✍︎ Julia Marie Estrella
There is a familiar exhaustion in staying too long at a table meant for passing.I am still here—hands folded, back bent, eyes trained on a future that keeps being served to others.
In a country where resilience is praised like a virtue and endurance is mistaken for success, waiting becomes an unspoken requirement. We are taught to endure traffic, deadlines, disappointments, and delayed dreams. To smile through fatigue. To trust that staying put will eventually be enough.
So I place another order.
Another application.
Another draft.
Another promise to myself that this time, it will be different.
Around me, people rise from their seats. Some leave with confidence, others with relief. Their footsteps echo with certainty—the sound of moving forward. I watch them go, measuring my worth by their departure, wondering why my time never seems to arrive.
I want to say something. I want to raise my hand and remind the world that I am still trying—that I am not lazy, not lacking, not done. But the room is loud with productivity and success stories. Voices like mine are easily swallowed by noise, by algorithms, by expectations that demand progress without pause.
This is how burnout disguises itself: not as collapse, but as quiet persistence. As showing up even when hope feels rationed. As staying seated because leaving feels like failure, and staying feels like responsibility.
For many Filipino youth, the restaurant is familiar. It is the classroom that promises opportunity but delivers uncertainty. The workplace that demands passion while paying survival. The creative space that asks for originality but offers no room to rest. We are told to wait our turn, yet the line keeps moving without us.
Still, I remain.
Not because I am content,
but because giving up feels heavier than waiting.
I am not asking to be rushed. I am asking to be remembered. To be seen as someone still in the process of becoming—unfinished, but not invisible.
So if you pass by my table, know this: I am still here not because I lack ambition, but because I am holding on. Because some dreams take longer to serve, and some of us are brave enough to wait—despite the hunger, despite the noise, despite the fear of being left behind.
