the people i keep buying things for are all actually me

i have spent the last five years financially supporting a rotating cast of people.

they’re all me.

every year, a new person appears with a detailed vision for our future and a list of supplies they consider essential. they are always more organized than me, more interesting than me, and completely certain that the only thing standing between us and a new life is free shipping.

sometimes they last a year. sometimes 3 weeks. sometimes only until the package arrives.

2020: the person who thought an iPad would make her interesting

the first person i remember seriously investing in believed an iPad would turn us into someone who processed her emotions through colour-coded journal spreads.

this required an iPad, digital planners, journaling templates, sticker packs, new fonts, and several matching colour palettes for both good days and mandatory breakdowns.

apparently, no diary entry could be processed until it had been placed inside a layout that took longer to arrange than the memory took to happen.

the iPad was going to become the headquarters of my soon organized life. i would journal everyday. i would track my habits. i would preserve meaningful moments partly for the memories but mostly because i had already paid for the premium templates.

and for one month, i actually did.

my june 2020 monthly spread documented father’s day, complete with photos of my dad holding the ube cake i bought him. it also recorded the first gold jewelry i ever bought for myself—a necklace and a ring—which absolutely deserved permanent historical preservation, seeing as it was the closest i could get to owning property without surrendering my firstborn and a blood sacrifice.

the spread also included the new show my sister and i became obsessed with, Central Park, which we watched because the iPad came with free Apple TV and we were determined to extract every possible benefit from the purchase.

for one glorious month, the system worked.

then july arrived, and journaling began to require too much time, too many creative decisions, and far more artistic ability than i had available.

the iPad remained fully operational. nothing was wrong with the system except that it required me to keep using it.

2021: the person who made reading her entire personality

in 2021, the digital journalist was replaced by a person who believed being well-read required both serious literature and the right scented candle.

books began entering our house at a speed completely unrelated to how fast i could read them.

paperbacks. hardcovers. new books. random secondhand books. serious books that looked impressive on a shelf and popular books that had been recommended by enough strangers online to begin feeling legally compulsory.

the growing inventory included 1Q84, Crime and Punishment, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1984, The Midnight Library, They Both Die at the End, The Book Thief, The Happiness Project, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Secret History, and many others.

together, they belonged to a person with exquisite literary taste. someone who read russian classics for intellectual prestige, literary fiction for psychological complexity, dystopian novels for political awareness, and some popular books to remain only moderately pretentious.

ideally, people would look at her bookshelf and assume she was both deeply interesting and emotionally complex. in reality, i was still the same person who opened the calculator app for basic addition.

i also bought scented candles because reading was apparently impossible unless the room smelled of lavender and financial irresponsibility. i scoured local candle makers across the philippines and developed particular loyalties to scents like Angel’s Breath and Fresh Bamboo. i no longer remember which shops sold them, but since moving to canada, i have spent months trying to find candles that smell remotely the same.

to my credit, i did read. not every book, and not always under the beautifully scented, candlelit conditions i had imagined, but enough of them to develop several strong opinions. (side note: i should start posting ridiculous reviews of these books. not proper literary analysis. more like, “this book changed my life although not necessarily for the better.”)

and unlike most of the people i bought things for, this one actually stayed. i never stopped reading. the collection kept growing, the opinions became stronger, and reading eventually stopped being a personality i was trying on and became one i actually kept.

2022: the person who thought she needed a collection

at the beginning of 2022, i had never particularly wanted to collect anything.

then i became a huge fan of seventeen, spent too much time on stan twitter, and discovered photocards—tiny glossy photographs of k-pop idols that fans buy, sell, and trade with the frantic energy of a stock exchange.

initially, i only wanted two: one of wonwoo and one of mingyu, both of them dressed as pilots. unfortunately, searching for those two photocards required looking at hundreds of others, and some of those quickly became just as necessary.

one photocard became three. three became a whole-ass binder.

for more than a year, i searched listings, competed against other collectors, waited for parcels, completed binder pages, and developed emotional attachments to tiny photographs separated by distinctions of enormous personal importance such as whether wonwoo was looking slightly to the left or slightly to the right, two completely different products that no reasonable person could be expected to choose between.

when i began preparing to move to canada, i tried selling the collection for additional funds. plenty of people wanted to buy individual PCs, but with my departure approaching, i did not have time to sell the collection one photocard at a time. unfortunately, no one was willing to inherit an entire year’s worth of my financial irresponsibility all at once.

i still pull the binder out several times a year and flip through every page with the same ridiculous fondness i had while filling it. over time, the binder began to hold the memories around the photocards as much as the photocards themselves. it held all the tiny thrills of finding something i had wanted, opening the mail, completing a page, and caring deeply about something completely unnecessary.

and you know what i realized, maybe the things we love most do not always need a practical reason to exist. they do not have to improve us, make money, or justify the space they take up. sometimes it’s enough that they preserve the version of us who once cared about something so completely—and the ordinary days that became exciting because of it.

at the beginning of 2022, i had never wanted a collection. by the end of it, i was glad some version of me had decided i needed one.

2023: the person who believed poverty should not include bad coffee

having just moved to canada, i was operating under severe budgetary restrictions. by which i mean i was dirt broke. every dollar already had somewhere more urgent to be, usually rent, tuition, and groceries.

there was no money for a new personality. poverty had already taken plenty, and i decided it would not be getting good coffee too.

so i bought my first nespresso machine. secondhand, naturally, though even at secondhand prices it was a deeply serious purchase for someone in my financial condition. i was dirt broke, gang.

nespresso had always felt offensively expensive in the philippines, both because of the high upfront cost of the machine and because owning one also meant signing yourself up for the recurring expense of tiny aluminum coffee capsules that cost far too much to sustain as a daily habit.

in canada, however, the pods felt slightly less absurd. they were still a little expensive, but compared with local wages and the general cost of everything—they were easier to justify.

the case became even easier to justify since i was back in school and i needed coffee for class. i needed coffee while studying. i needed coffee before attempting engineering material that could turn one unanswered question into 7 new ones.

that year, in an effort to help ease the poverty, i started working part-time at a jewelry store and began buying silver jewelry because employees received a discount.

an employee discount is a fascinating psychological weapon. it presents itself as money saved while being exactly like money spent.

still, i had moved across the world, gone back to school, and was living on very little. most days were built around what i could afford, what had to be paid, and what could wait. good coffee and an occasional silver ring made the whole thing feel slightly better than it actually was.

2024: the person who discovered disposable income and immediately disposed of it

by 2024, i had started my co-op and entered the dangerous financial stage of having a little money which i quickly found two new ways to spend it: nails and shoes.

for almost a year, i regularly paid to have my nails professionally maintained. this version of me had a standing appointment, strong opinions about shape and length, and hands that looked significantly more established in their career than the rest of her.

the whole ritual was genuinely fun. over lunch, my co-workers and i would discuss what design i should get next, pass around reference photos, and debate colours until lunch was over and absolutely nothing else had been discussed.

it was silly, expensive, and such a specific kind of girlhood. there was something lovely about turning a tiny decision into a group project then returning with the finished result for everyone’s approval.

the nails also suited the corporate version of myself i was trying on at the time: professional, put together, and deeply pleased by how her hands looked against the keyboard.

however much i enjoyed her, the nail girly eventually had to be terminated on economic grounds. in this economy, my fingers could not continue operating on a higher monthly budget than the rest of me. besides, short, unmanicured nails were also a personality, and one i discovered i liked just fine.

the budget cut did not actually save me any money. the money i stopped spending on my hands was quickly claimed by my feet.

i started buying shoes. asics novablast 3s in platinum white for running. onitsuka tigers. nike cortezes. grey fog dunk lows. adidas stan smiths. new balance 520s.

each pair was for a different mood, activity, social setting, and degree of ankle visibility. i was not collecting them, and i was nowhere near informed enough to call myself a sneakerhead. i simply enjoyed opening my closet and having several answers to the question of what to put on my feet.

there was no deeper philosophy behind it. shoes were just fun.

between the nails and the shoes, 2024 was the year i let myself enjoy looking like the life i was working toward.

2025: the person who acquired a social life

making close friends in canada had been harder than i expected. most people already seemed to have their core group, and while i met plenty of people i liked, very few relationships crossed that strange invisible line between being friendly and actually becoming part of each other’s lives.

then, somehow, i found a small group of people i genuinely liked spending time with.

most of the time, we ate somewhere cheap but delicious. occasionally, when we felt culturally ambitious, we went to a michelin-recognized restaurants and even filipino fusion restaurants. we ordered food to share because the whole point was trying what everyone else had ordered.

we repeatedly bought milktea, which people in north america insist on calling “boba,” despite the name “milktea” being both accurate and self-explanatory as opposed to naming the whole drink after the stuff at the bottom.

anyway, milktea became the natural conclusion to almost every gathering. if we had met, somebody was leaving with a sealed plastic cup full of tapioca.

usually me.

this person was different from the previous years. she was not buying supplies for improving a lifestyle or attempting to become someone more interesting.

she was mostly paying for meals with good friends around whom she never had to be another version of herself.

the funny thing is that none of these versions of me disappeared when i stopped funding them. they stayed in smaller ways, long after the phases themselves had ended, until i realized i had not spent five years trying to become a better version of myself at all. i had spent five years giving the smaller parts of who i already was enough room to exist, and somewhere along the way, they added up to the person i am now.

so, as it turns out, the people i keep buying things for were me all along.