The case for loving life, in all its mess and mundanity
A week before Christmas, in perhaps the most anticlimactic near-death experience of all time, I think I was bitten by a stray dog.
“Bite” even feels too intense of a descriptor. It was more like “grazed by a single tooth,” and not even deep enough to cause bleeding. Like many wounds I’ve come to sustain, physical or otherwise, I wasn’t quite sure how it happened. And like many wounds, etc., I couldn’t stop thinking I was going to die.
It felt like an apt closer to a very exhausting year. More than ever, I found myself wondering how other people do it—not even in terms of achieving success, but just carrying on from one day to the next. Where do they get the energy to resist the difficulty; the courage to keep going despite the knowledge that things will not change in our lifetime?
I wasn’t very good at having dreams, so in the beginning of 2024 I put forth a very modest New Year’s resolution: To be a “person in the world.” This meant trying my very best to be part of things, to meet new people, see my friends more, read new books, and maybe just listen to more music. I was attempting to jolt myself awake, to imagine myself beyond what I’d already been.
It was incredibly frustrating to fail at something so simple. But I was always too tired. I was perpetually 50 emails behind and there was always laundry to do. I chose to stay in my hometown after failed attempts to move to the city, so all the hours I spent not working, I spent traveling to and from work. I felt the loneliest whenever I was in Parañaque Integrated Terminal Exchange, standing in line for over an hour to catch the last bus to Dasmariñas City. I was at my most cynical whenever I had to travel three hours for an errand that took 10 minutes.
I couldn’t be a “person in the world” after I’ve spent all my energy being a commuter, worker, daughter, and older sister. I laid in bed and scrolled on TikTok because it was the only hobby my brain could comprehend, frying my neurons in the process. I would feel an emotion for 30 seconds then swipe it away. When I closed the app I would be paralyzed by the emptiness.
The dog bite, as minor as it seemed, triggered the strongest emotions I’ve felt in a while. It sounds funny, especially when I know how minuscule the wound actually is, but I was completely terrified. I Googled “rabies symptoms” and literally thought I was going to drop dead before Christmas Eve. (Reader, the bite didn’t even draw blood.)
I kept it a secret at first, denying its existence. Eventually I would confide in my boyfriend and heed his advice to go to an animal bite center. The line was surprisingly long; I was the oldest and the only one on my own. While waiting for my turn, I finally told my best friend, exchanging jokes with her about my misfortune. I overheard a father reassuring his young son that they would get ice cream after. I did the same.
At the time, it would have been easy to congratulate myself for not needing anyone else to help me, as if hyper-independence was an aspirational trait I succeeded at. Instead I felt proud of myself for sharing my dilemma with others. My friends laughed at how I thought this would be the cause of my death; I felt silly and embarrassed, but also braver.
We are incentivized to think we are better off without other people, but what rescued me last year was the knowledge that relying on others does not erase my personhood. In fact, it makes me more human.
I’m reminded of one “Dear Meg” advice column, written by psychologist and activist Meg Yarcia, about how one can be brave. Courage, Yarcia asserted, does not exist in a vacuum. Like other values, its meaning is derived from its context. For a communal culture like the Philippines, courage is a collective effort.
There emerged a pattern in my life that I didn’t recognize until I was in the waiting room of the animal bite center: I managed to survive another year, despite days when it seemed I couldn’t, because I was made braver by the people around me.
I remembered that I chose to stay in my hometown to be closer to my friends, so I could be present at every spontaneous dinner invite; to be with my family, so I could hear my mother’s work stories. And it’s true that I spent most of 2024 traveling between cities, but the memories I’ve come to treasure last year always happened in the in-between anyway—like the night before my friends and I went to Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour, when we walked around Singapore sleepless and delirious because we booked the cheapest red-eye flight; or the day after I officially enrolled my younger brother in college, when the two of us ordered fast-food burgers and couldn’t stop relishing the fact that we convinced our parents to let him pursue an arts degree.
Our loneliness often feels all-consuming. It’s only when we open our worlds up to others that we lose this nearsightedness and see that our loneliness is more common than we realize—which means overcoming it is not as impossible as we believe. Right now we are incentivized to think we are better off without other people, but what rescued me last year was the knowledge that relying on other people does not erase my personhood. In fact, it makes me more whole and more of a “person in the world.”
In the same sense that our loneliness is common, happiness is frequently ordinary, too. When I got waves of despair, I thought, “I need to journal about this,” then before I could put my feelings to paper, I’d be saved by some small thing, like the trees moving in the wind or a funny message from my brother, and I’d end up writing about how grateful I am to be the kind of person so moved by even the most mundane of things.
I’ve been getting so overjoyed over the simplest of things, like the presence of friends. I would get so overwhelmed at the serendipity of crossing paths with people who make us feel so complete, just by existing, listening, and being with us—actions that are inherently very ordinary.
It does feel a bit goofy to come to so many realizations after the tamest of dog bites, but I’ve never been the type to resist signs from the universe. A couple of weeks after the fated stray dog encounter, I tried looking for a place in the city again. One of my bracelets broke the second I stepped into the apartment complex—a positive omen signifying the attainment of goals, according to my frantic Google search. I don’t pray anymore, but I like to think that was God speaking to me in a language He knew I would understand.
