Beyond the Struggle

Welcome! I am at a very important part of my life's journey and I am really excited to share my plans for the next one. I have been given this once-in-a-lifetime chance to actually change my life and I'm just speechless. But I'm also very excited since it's been a while since I've had something like this. I'm starting a new chapter in life with everything looking good/okay and I am fully free from all existing burdens or restrictions.

It took a lot for me to get here. The road here has been difficult, but I think I should tell my story of how I got here in the first place.

Finding meaning in the struggle

The current chapter in my life is titled, "A Meaningful Struggle" and that's how my life has been so far. It's been filled with unimaginable struggles like being put in horrible situationships, career stagnation, and I even lost my closest friends at one point. This spanned from 2018 to 2025 so it's a good 7 years of character development, right? Haha.

I think my main struggle in this chapter of my life was with myself and finding out where to go from here. In 2018, I was 19 years old working at a small company and I was doing multimedia work with Adobe Flash and JavaScript. The year after that, 2019, I was a front-end software developer. Two years later, in 2021, I became a DevOps engineer. I had struggled through life trying to find my fit within my career and who I was to become. It wasn't easy becoming a full-time corporate developer after dropping out of college a few months ago and I looked towards my past friends as an anchor. On my first few months of work, I remember crying about my old high school friends as I was heading into work, knowing full well that they were all still in college.

It was hard, honestly. But after settling in, I eventually found new friends in my own places, namely Xavier, Nikka, CJ, Badet, and my other friends from work that followed like Maxine, Meryll, Beni, AJ, and so on. And, with the passage of time, I eventually reconnected with my old high school friends and even contacted older friends like Jaze, Batao, and Abbey.

Life was starting to get good, despite going through the pandemic. And in 2022, I met a girl. I literally thought that I was going to share my future with her. And in that year, too, my struggle started.

Things went bad fairly quickly. I started losing friends, the girl tried to pit me and her ex into one, dumb open relationship thing, and my career stagnated by having my workplace make me do WordPress and PHP fixes, both of which I have poor experience in and despite my title of DevOps engineer. It was a struggle to keep afloat. To juggle having the girl, my happiness at work, my friends, and even my own dreams for the future. Something was bound to give.

Eventually, some did and I lost the vast majority of my friends in 2023. I lost my guy and girl best friends. I was able to regain control of my career, thankfully, and had full-fledged DevOps tasks in 2024. I was able to salvage what I could with the girl and I still maintained a "situationship" with her, and it was a weird time because I dedicated so much of my time, energy, and money to someone who wasn't my girlfriend, but I also did things with that I wouldn't do with "just a friend." But even so, the relationship was just that: stagnant and on life support.

It was a struggle, every day. I would wake up at 8 a.m. in the morning for work and stay up until 4-5 a.m. the following day just to keep her company. And, despite it all, it eventually gave way, too, in 2024.

What I only have right now are the fruits of my labor over the years: my career, my fleet of websites, and my knowledge of the DevOps process. What I got from losing it all was something greater: the actual meaning of those struggles.

So what does it all mean?

The meaning I found was actually very simple: we go through struggles to grow in life. Despite everything I've been through, I can say that I've grown into a better person. I can also say that I've grown into a bigger person (ha!) but that's another story.

I've learned lessons along the way, none of which I would've actually taken into heart had I just read about it or watched it online.

That said, I need to grow further as I reach my 30s and I've decided that it is time to find another career opportunity and resign from my current one. It has been almost 6 years since I started at this company. 5 years and 9 months, if we're keeping count. I have grown so much from starting at 20 years old as a front-end developer who knew nothing about how to code in a framework, to being 26 years old as a DevOps engineer who manages an auto-deploying fleet of his own websites. I even have sites written in 2 famous, different front-end frameworks. And, of course, there's still room for me to grow.

In all my interviews, I stated my reason for looking was this one thing: to have larger responsibilities and be part of a bigger team. To be in something bigger than what I already was in. After quite a bit of searching, I think I now have what I have been looking for. My resignation came afterwards and I'll be leaving my coworkers with a happy goodbye. I'm looking back and passing all my knowledge on to the people who will take over my tasks, and you can very much tell that I've done a lot for this company over the past years.

So, here I am now. On a path towards more growth and, if I play my cards correctly, a better future.

What lies beyond

I think 2025 is going to be an interesting and exciting year for me.

In fact, it's been that already! This is the first year in a while where I didn't have a single bad day in January. No crying because I was overburdened or going through hardship. Just me being able to dictate how I would spend the day. Without the stress of thinking that I'm not spending enough time with X or they threw a tantrum because of Y. In January 2023, someone got mad at me because I spent time with my friends, someone who wasn't even my significant other, or a person who was committed to me. That just goes to show how bad things were. Now, I don't have any of that. I can freely run/walk with my sister in the afternoon to BGC, and no one would even bat an eye.

Having no commitments, no "strings," is nice and I intend to keep it that way, too. I don't want to have any obligations to anyone, even to friends. I want to have the full freedom to just disappear and focus on my own thing now because I honestly need it. I've been stagnant in the skills department for so long, that I think they've been atrophying. I've scheduled my weekends to be just for me and improving my knowledge of a particular tool, and doing that takes some serious time and dedication.

What's in front of me is actually more struggle, but it's a struggle that I know how to guide myself through. I don't think I'll turn much to friends much for advice or support. I know what's ahead this time. The only way I get through it is to have a strong will towards that goal and focus on what I need to learn in order to achieve something great.

That means I won't have time to play video games anymore, if at all. No more Discord calls or evenings spent having fun and playing games with friends. If I would be with friends, it would probably be out on weekends with them, but that's honestly it. I don't think I can commit to anything more than that, at the moment. Even though I have the full, free will to throw all my time away (again) to someone else and have them be the center of my life, I'm not going to do that again. I'm not going to throw away all my time towards one person. If I wanted to, I could, but I'm not going to anymore. I actually want to use my time towards something productive so that my future self can live that happy life I've always dreamed of.

And this is that moment. That "next stage of my life" I alluded to in Lost in Transition, this is it. Words cannot explain how happy and excited I am to start my life anew.

My goal is to be a person 3-4 years from now who looks back at my 2025 self and is proud of everything I accomplished. And hey, if everything goes right, I'll probably be relaxing by the end drinking Mai Tais in front of a beach, happy that I've changed my life for the better. I would be happy that I finally made it. Cheers to that.