Life after college will always feel like an endless highway, but we are kept reminded that time is a thief. It takes away everything that seemed so significant and all that come with them, leaving mere traces, fragments, and scars. Regrets come easier now, and voices in your head will keep butting in on your choices. You will fall into the trap of self-pity and compare yourself with your classmates and colleagues who, you think, are more successful now just because you don’t see them stressing as intensely as you do.
The days are bereft of bouncing hope. Eventually, even the most optimistic heart pulls over at its own “doubt points,” either to breathe deeply or to break down. Or maybe to take it all in, to sort out stuff and carefully separate fantasy from reality. But there is a greater verity behind all these: You will find yourself just as confused and scared as everyone else, after thinking things through.
I submitted my credentials to potential employers at the city malls, like they were some kind of product marketing flyer. I took and passed the licensure examination, along with other hopefuls. I now work in a hospital drawing blood and signing laboratory reports, like all medical technologists do. But something still feels off. Something within me tells me that this is not it, that I was not born just for this. Sometimes I am driven to the point where I don’t believe in what I do anymore. Even the greatest dreams that I once had and considered as part of my DNA feel like they are slowly mutating into nothingness.
We believed that reality would unfold starting on Day One and that it would get stuck the moment we discovered life’s technicalities. So we aspired as though tomorrow would never become a hindrance. Our hopes, our goals, got so big, even bigger than all our dreams combined, than all our lives combined. Most of those goals are the most ambitious we could set in our whole lifetime. We have all become selfish in our own right, in order to set something that could make us believe that everything is possible with direction and dedication. A little disappointment would not hurt, we even said.
Perhaps we are not looking for the actuality of those dreams for which we keep working hard. It’s not about the certainty that dreams really do come true. It’s about having the kind of dream that could transcend all our selfish ambitions, something that would make us live for others far more than we will ever live for ourselves. Now that we are in a wider and tougher field, we want to be more engaged in way that could affect human lives deeply. It is more than just having that blind faith in leaving a mark, and in mattering in this world.
Certainly, most people would deem us outrageous and foolish, but never has there been a dreamer that was not described thus. People would say, “You won’t get rich doing that,” or “Rizal died harboring such an ideal.” But I believe that our hearts should beat in the rhythm of love for others, of service for others, and of hope for others.
When people ask me what profits a person to live for others, I tell them: Honest, I don’t know. I have no way of knowing as I have not yet tried it myself. But from the looks of it, all those who have tried it, have done it, now know what happiness really feels like.
My friend once told me that if you do not choose what you really want to do in this world, there will be no fulfillment, there will be no self-actualization. But I told her that self-actualization is something so personal that it would only benefit one’s egoistic self. Sure, in the process, it would somehow radiate to and among other people, but the finality still falls within the benefit of one’s self. I want to do something that even at the very end would benefit others apart from that natural egoistic heart of a man or woman.
This may sound like a prefab speech of a politician trying to win the hearts and minds of voters. But to have a dream that can transcend a person’s every selfish gratification is what the world needs today.
One can’t be everything one wants to be, but one can do everything to attain even half one’s noble dream. Life after college has left me in the stage where I am starting to realize that there’s more to life than being an achiever and having one’s essay published in the official school organ. That there’s more to life than doing things that provide a temporary thrill. That living is more than trying to get to the top of Maslow’s pyramid. One has got to surpass that pyramid.
Today I am still working as a medical technologist in a hospital in our city—drawing blood, doing microscopy, and signing laboratory report forms. I am part of the diagnostic team serving the patients we want to heal, to save. For some, our job is mediocrity and normalcy. Some even ask, “What exactly do you people do?” I cannot blame them because during difficult times I, too, think the way they do.
But I always come back to my dreamer self, who earnestly sees it as an opportunity to serve and a chance to work for a greater cause.
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Danica Cabutaje Cayme, 21, aspires to become a doctor and says she is doing the change she wants to see in the world “the med tech way.”