Brand New Day

This year has been really, really strange. Unlike 2025, my mood calendar, for this year has been all over the place, especially for these past few months. Compared to last year, there are now more "below average" and bad days than last year, and we're still not even done with 2026. Despite that, I've been mostly happy. There are rough patches, but that's how life usually goes. Around July and August were the last few months where I enjoyed my "old" life: I used to stay up with friends, just playing games. While that chapter was fun, it never led me to grow further than what I already was. It's funny that around August, I felt that it would all come crashing down.

Little did I know that it would come crashing down in ways I didn't expect. But the good part was that I also grew from it.

My life before this

It's funny because this post kind of builds off of the last post. So, I used to have a gaming group and we would often play games together, stay on call, and also just chat about life. I was very close to them (I think), and I'm especially close to someone there. We'd often go and have fun almost every day, just playing games and talking on call. We were playing Project Zomboid for a bit, and often rotating between several games like Peak, R.E.P.O., RV There Yet, or other "friendslop" games that we genuinely had fun playing.

At the same time, things in my life have become pretty much stagnant—stable, actually—and things were unchanging for the longest time. I thought I had settled in for the long haul, you know? Things would stay the same from here on out and incrementally get better with time. My gaming group would be stable, work would chug on as it has been, I'd continue with my same-old roster of friends. I was even trying to reconnect with old friends, like Earl, and we'd regularly play Apex together.

I was lacking in a lot of the things I wanted in life, sure. I didn't have any romantic prospects, no house of my own, and no car, too. But I was happy just playing games.

I had most of the things I ever wanted: stability, friends, and a fun routine. The only thing lacking in life was growth. You might not know this, but my life has just been so turbulent these past few years and I kind of just needed a breather. So I was happy to just stay in my little corner of the world with the same group of friends. That was until August happened.

August slipped away into a moment in time

August was a strange month for me. It had the elements of what my old life was like—my old work style, group of friends, even home routine. But it was where things started to go wrong.

It was on this day. Someone in our gaming group had met a new person and they would be "toying" with them, but also bringing them in so we could play games together. I immediately recorded a voice message to myself because I knew things would end soon. It was also in August when our group last played a game together, Project Zomboid. Then someone from my gaming group decided to pursue other things in life. I figured that they would also spend less time with me. It was also the time where my coworkers had started to resign and leave, which was kind of spooky on my part because our team lost people this month as well.

Losing people meant losing the routine and the familiarity of my day-to-day with them. Since my days were anchored on the people I was with, my days slowly started to look more foreign.

Near the end of August, I had slowly drifted away from the gaming group that I had. We didn't really chat anymore and everyone had their own life thing that we've kept from one another. If you know me, you'd know how much my friends mean to me, and losing yet another group in my life—in these already-fucking trying times—pains my heart. And what a way to end it on the last day of the month, too.

Losing it all means

August was such a horrible month. Not only was it constantly raining, but it was actually mentally challenging and hard to navigate through. Matter of fact, it wasn't just that month, it was the past 4 fucking years. Good God! Nothing has felt "normal" since 2022, I fucking swear. It was like I had drifted into a strange timeline where I'm sent on a rollercoaster every year or so. It feels like I've been on this path before many, many times, but I somehow always find my way back here.

I had actually put a hold on this post and I'm glad I did because I eventually lost someone this week. I don't know if I should laugh or cry at the fact that my prediction mid-August actually came true. Things were ending. And a month later, everything's truly gone. And here I am, picking back up this post in October, and it has been a month since we talked, and we didn't even properly say goodbye.

Losing it all, fucking once again, just brings me back to an all-too-familiar thing I've had in life: grief.

Good grief

Why am I always fucking grieving in this life? Sorry, but let me rant for a bit because this is, frankly, getting ridiculous. I'm kind of sick of this.

Why do I always have something to grieve about? I'm serious. I somehow never run out of reasons to feel sad and cry about a thing that's left or never happened. Whether it's losing people, losing friendships, losing chapters of my life, and even losing opportunities and what-could-have-beens. I grieved for a relationship that never happened, I grieved for friends that barely gave a shit about me, I grieved for a college graduation that I was never supposed to attend, and here I am now grieving over people that don't give a shit about me again.

To be fair, I was also grieving before this new chapter of my life. I was grieving a life I didn't think that I could ever have: This I Used to Believe. While my life before was fun and all, it didn't really offer that much change nor improvement. In fact, you could say that things got worse as time went on because I just saw the people I was with head on to other stuff and put more emphasis on other things, leaving me by the wayside. Things were drifting away already and I was grieving in advance.

I knew where things were headed and that I couldn't do anything about it. I've been here before, honestly. I've seen the signs of collapse in things, and back then, I'd try to fight it or put off the inevitable. I'd try to plead with the people involved, applied some band-aid solutions that barely worked, even tried to sink money into an already-sinking ship. What I learned from it all was... you can't do anything.

From the many things I've learned in this life, the only way to stop grieving over a predicted collapse was for people to actually care and put effort into stopping it. It made sense. The many times I've tried to stop a collapse were just me doing things to stop it alone. I didn't really see the people on the other side caring. So, when things finally collapsed, it was just me left under all the rubble.

This time, I played my part in not trying to fix a collapse. But I also just knew that I couldn't do anything about it. The people in my life were going to leave no matter what. They were going to prioritize playing games with other people, fulfill their own mission, and do stuff with other people that didn't involve me. I knew that I was going to get sidelined and left alone.

So, in my grief, I journaled. I wrote about it. All of it. I wrote about all the happy memories from all the times I could remember and I wrote about 2 months' worth of journal entries. 10 hours of sitting and writing on my MacBook at a coffee shop just to write about the last 60 days of my life.

Grief taught me that the most I could do at a point when things were inevitably ending was to just enjoy the moment for what it was.

Repeating history and you're getting sick of it

There's a Taylor Swift song that I have loved since high school, and it's titled "Change."

It's pretty obscure, but the first few lines go like this:

And it's a sad picture, the final blow hits you
Somebody else gets what you wanted again and
You know it's all the same, another time and place
Repeating history and you're getting sick of it

I've been here before. Time and time again. These are the same, old stories that my life has a cyclical way of finding itself in over and over again. Me, losing a friend group I held so dear to me; having the girl I loved choose someone new and seeing them appreciate their music, seeing them do new things; giving money to people who absolutely did not deserve it, while I know they're taking advantage of me.

I'm sick of these dumb, stupid fucking stories that life keeps showing me over and over. Seriously, I can't express enough frustration at this. I met a girl a few months ago who asked for money because they needed it for something, and every time they asked for money, it was always in the same damn amounts. Do they think I'm stupid? Seriously, can't the writers of my life write something more clever?

I've gone through the same type of people over and over again. It's always the usual suspects: the girl who can't commit, a person trying to take advantage of me, the friend group that doesn't last for more than a year.

Personally, I'm just done with those stories. I'm not young, I'm in my late 20s. I've seen practically every type of person twice, thrice, many times. I know their MOs, their ploys, the tricks people usually play. The sob stories, the "I actually still love my ex but I also love you, too," and the many silent goodbyes people have given me.

I'm really done with it. There's a reason why I don't often rewatch the shows, movies, or even games I like: I already know the ending. Re-reading or going through the same story over and over again doesn't change how it ends.

And that's part of the reason why I felt frustrated in my life. The writers of my life have gotten bored and lazy, and they've resorted to recycling old stories and plot devices. The girl who can't commit but will commit with another person? I had that in high school. Person trying to take advantage of me? College and early adulthood. Many such cases.

The only true way to grow out of these stories—these cycles—is to grow.

So, after love and loss

It literally started on a random Tuesday, September 1st. This chapter of my life is titled, "Brand New Day" because it's just like that Spider-Man movie. Peter lost everything, and even though mine started a bit differently, it still has me being alone, the same way Peter was.

This new chapter of my life began with me still having problems. I still had that person I liked, I had another person trying to take advantage of me. But in this chapter, the story isn't about how I'll accept and live with those problems, it's about how I'll deal with and move on from those problems. After I was trying my best for this person for over a year, seeing them pull away after I had just financially supported them was just disrespectful to me. So when they pulled away but still kept me as a friend on Discord, I shut the door behind them and removed them from everything. Same with the other person who was trying to ask for money. They kept saying that they'll "pay me back" but never did, not even a cent nor a single Peso was given back to me.

Old me would have prepared these long messages, speeches to send to them, or I would have called them and asked for closure and clarity that way. But I knew that they wouldn't care. So I'll just say nothing, too, and leave silently as they did, and move on.

A truly brand new day

So here's my life now. Fully alone and free from all the pains of yesterday.

I suddenly started going to the gym, and despite suffering a sprain in the first week, I got back up and kept going to the gym. I have a new routine where I'd go to the gym on the weekdays and I stuck to it. I had so much issues at the end of August that I just wanted to focus on making my life better. It's October 10th, and I've completed 29 gym days. It's actually hard for me to suddenly be that consistent at things. But like how I was with my mood calendar that I've just been writing on since 2023, one day I just started and stuck to it.

It's still not easy for me, though. I have to continuously wake up at 6 a.m. and leave for the gym, whether I want to or not. Even if the weather is bad, or if I woke up a bit late, even if I'm tired, and even though I was honestly sprained and injured. I have to choose to get up every single day.

I want new stories in my life. Like I said, I'm tired of the writers of my life coming up with the same boring, recycled storylines. I want new stories for myself. I want to feel how it's like for someone to actually choose me this time. To know what it's like to have someone take interest and actually care about how I'm doing. I want to know how it feels to have a fun friendship again and play games with a group of people that'll stay, or even have new things I'll start to like. Maybe, on this path of my life, I might actually get to be a father and have kids with someone I truly love.

That's the whole point of all this. It's a brand new day. A new day for me to go and make new stories to write and treasure.