Time simply passed over us and declared us done.

Graduation ceremonies were beautiful in the way endings are designed to be. Everything is polished. Everything timed. Smiles plated carefully across faces. Even the applause felt rehearsed, rising and falling like waves that knew exactly when to stop.

Completion.

That is what they called it.

Most people would say the hardest part is the leaving. The goodbyes, the distance, the sudden absence of everything familiar.

But I think the scariest part is not that. Not at all.

It is realizing I left unfinished.

That I stood there in borrowed confidence, gown draped neatly over shoulders that still felt unsure, and accepted a diploma like it was proof of something complete, when all I could feel was the quiet, undeniable truth that I was still in the middle of becoming.

So when it was over—when the chairs emptied, the music faded, and the air lost its celebration—I felt it again. That lingering, unfinished taste. Somewhere between each bite, there is hesitation.

Until I look down at my plate and realize…

I am not just the one being fed.

I am also what is being eaten.

The world bit into our generation early. Took the pandemic years, when we should have been learning to be human beings in physical space and forming ourselves in the friction of other people.

It took that and left us to finish growing on our own: behind screens in a kind of isolation that we dressed up as resilience because what else do you call surviving something you did not consent to?

We are fed just enough to move forward, but not enough to feel certain. Given pieces of knowledge, fragments of understanding, glimpses of the world—but never the whole picture. Never the warning that outside these walls, the table would look nothing like what we were used to.

Because outside, the table is not set for us.

It is already occupied.

And it is already burning.

You can see it in the way oil prices rise without mercy. In the jeepney fare that crept up while your allowance did not. In the electricity bill that made your parents go quiet at dinner. In the prices of rice that somehow kept climbing even as the harvest was supposedly fine.

You studied through all of this. You took your exams while the peso weakened and the cost of living did not flinch.

The Philippines, our Philippines—this archipelago of over seven thousand islands and one stubborn, aching people—is run by names we did not choose and policies shaped for stomachs that are never empty.

Controlled by systems that tell us to trust, to wait, to endure. Controlled by leaders who serve promises, but leave us questioning what we have actually been given. Controlled by a cycle that repeats itself so often, it starts to feel normal—even when it should not.

We graduated inside a system that feasted on us and calls it development.

You can hear it in the news—countries at war and conflicts stretching across borders. The world feels loud with destruction, yet strangely quiet when it comes to accountability.

And so they tell us: go abroad, seek opportunity, send money home. As if diaspora were a career path. As if the correct response to a broken country is to become its remittance center.

We absorbed all of this in between finals week and thesis defenses. We carried geopolitical grief alongside our review notes.

This is not self-pity. What I am describing is something stranger and more difficult: the experience of being genuinely grateful and genuinely furious at the same time, in the same body, on the same day, wearing the same cap and gown.

Grateful for what this chapter fed us. Furious at what the world is serving next. And the exhausting, necessary work of holding both truths without letting either one swallow us whole.

The gratitude is real. I am grateful for every lesson that tried to make sense of things, even when things did not make sense.

For teachers who showed up and who gave us more than what the system required of them.

For friends who turned pressure into something lighter and who made the hardest days feel survivable.

I was fed. I was genuinely fed. I do not take that lightly.

But the fury is also real. For we are entering a world already struggling, already strained, already demanding more than it gives. While we were preparing for our future, the present was already becoming something harder to navigate.

The fury at being handed a degree in a country where it does not guarantee dignity. Where you may still have to leave to be paid what your labor is worth. Where the connections matter more than the credentials. Where the political class dines while we stand outside calculating whether we can afford the meal.

The fury at watching those in power make decisions about our future as if we are not in the room. At being told to be patient in a burning house. At the way certain people look at us—the half-formed young—and see idealism to be managed, not a generation to be listened to.

But we take it.

Half-eaten, half-warm, set by hands that will not be eating from it, we take the plate.

Not because it is fair. Not because we are satisfied with what we have been given.

But because we are here, we are young, and we are half-formed in all the ways that still leave room for shaping, and the world is half-broken in all the ways that still leave room for repair.

We carry our gratitude like a meal that sustained us, and we carry our fury like smoke that lingers long after the fire has died.

We graduate not finished but in motion—not ready, but here.

We step into this half-broken world not to fix it quickly and cleanly, the way the speeches suggest, but to stay in it. To bear witness. To refuse comfort when it costs someone else their truth.

To do the slow, exhausting, necessary work of people who know they are eating from a damaged table and choose, anyway, to set a better one.

For every graduate who walked across that stage still becoming themselves.

For every table set by hands that deserved a seat at it.

For the half-eaten among us—may we be enough.

The Frontman