Growing up and growing tired

Becoming an adult is exhausting.

It was around the end of my sophomore year in college when I decided to take a leave from my work and my friends. It was as sudden as a last-minute decision to cut classes and to dine at some place to ease the pressures of living. The burden of paper requirements, final examinations, and unhelpful group mates was too much to bear; I seemed headed to an academic breakdown.

Not only that, people were entering and leaving my life like I were some door. I had grown attached to some people, which is not usually my social practice. But the attachments were selfish and lost causes; the repeated disappointments failed to leave me. The sadness was not anymore the usual animated frowns, beer nights with friends, or the crying-to-sleep habit. I just kept on spacing out. It simply ate me up.

I began to lose hope, just because I could not handle the things going on in my life. The spontaneity all but disappeared. An all-nighter and cups of coffee did not solve the lingering distress. Meeting my responsibilities made me feel obediently nonhuman and incomplete. Every day felt like a nightmarish suicide: from waking up and thinking about what I had to do on that day to sleeping at night with the next day’s plan written in the alarm set for tomorrow. Writing papers, making calls, and keeping a rein on my emotions became my daily agenda.

I grappled with big life questions. I pitied myself and nearly reached a point of total dejection. It was a mess.

It was then that I came to a conclusion: I was growing up and growing tired.

I needed a break, to prevent further breaking. And then, at one time when I was browsing my Facebook feed, I came across a post from the volunteer arm of the university. It was calling for volunteers to an immersion service program during the vacation. I took a week to decide whether I could handle the 14-day program in a rural setting.

To hell with it, I thought. I might as well take the drama elsewhere. It was what I sought, and there it was. I signed the online form and, a week later, I was notified that I had been assigned to Polillo, an island in Quezon east of the Luzon mainland.

It was uncommon for me to decide to leave the perimeters of home; I did not even have a province to go to during summer breaks. The city is and has been my hectares of land, and the metro lights my moon and stars.

I sighed at the prospect of relief. The things I didn’t have to do anymore became the highlights of my impending happiness. The thought of not having to see the same faces and not having to encounter thoughtless rants in social media were a stroke of kismet.

By that time, midyear classes had just begun. I performed the valiant act of choosing, and confirming my participation in, the immersion program over another term of academic hassle and whatnot.  It was the first time for me to be separated for two weeks from family and friends. It was a leap of faith.

In the next days all I ever thought about was the trip. I was not interested in what the place or my living conditions would be like. The impending trip felt like leaving home and going to the Island Far Away, although it was only six hours from Laguna. To me, it felt like liberty.

Finally, traveling in a large boat at the rim of the Pacific Ocean felt like the time I entered college: Innocence was fresh, excitement was valid. There were no curbs to stepping into the next phase of adult life. The blue calm reminded me that I was in a new season of my life—a harsh rebuke that I should no longer be wallowing in adolescence and exploration. Yet here I am, I told myself, off to live on an island, with no personal agenda or purpose, just exploring.

All that time I was looking at the sea, I thought about how it would be as an adult. I didn’t want to be one. I didn’t know if I was already one, or if I was just trying to act like one. I wanted badly to go back a phase in my life, to make immature decisions, to ward off responsibilities, and to just immerse in video games and YA novels.

When I disembarked I met the members of my assigned foster family and came to live with them. The early days were hard; I was still adjusting to the provincial lifestyle. But I soon blended in. It was only there that I slept without a mattress and an electric fan. I had to get water from a well. I helped out in the farm, leading the carabaos to graze and cleaning and cutting open pili nuts. I went to the mountain to harvest coconuts. I fed the dogs, chickens and turkeys.

I ate all sorts of mountain fruits. I took siestas outside the house in a hammock. I survived life without my iPad and laptop, and even my phone at times (because mobile reception was cruel).

It was the other side of the mirror of my life. Responsibilities, though simple there, remained responsibilities. I realized that responsibilities don’t take forms; they are what they are. There was no difference in writing due papers to walking for two hours in the rice fields to get to the other side. It was always “to get the job done” in this phase of life.

I had to talk with the locals because I was the new guy in town. How I felt special when eyes locked on me whenever I walked through the fields, or when I went to the town proper. I was a foreigner to them, interviewed day and night about my location and purpose on the island. During our conversations, my heart was impressed because despite the fact that the islanders face harsher realities than we do, they look on these without today’s worry. They were indirectly telling me that my petty problems were nothing compared to what others carried.

It was the complete escape: Nobody there knew who I was. I knew that I’d be wearing a new suit of adulthood when I came home. I made the decision of transition in the island.

My stay in Polillo amounted to 17 days, with a three-day extension to cover the day of the fiesta. As I returned home with my baggage, I realized that the sadness had gone away. Its departure was as sudden as my decision to travel to the island.

Miguel Carlos Lazarte, 18, studies development communication at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.