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 year i tried to buy a personality from Apple
in 2020, i decided i was going to start journaling.
normal enough.
unfortunately, i could not simply open a notebook and write down what happened to me. that would have been free. instead, i bought an iPad.
but i didn’t stop there. i found more ways to make journaling expensive: journaling apps. premium templates. digital sticker packs. nothing says self-awareness like recurring charges.
the idea was that i was going to journal every day. draw. organize my life. become one of those people who prepares for monday instead of simply being attacked by it.
and for a while, i loved it. every day got its own little page.
but like all good things, once documenting my life started requiring to make 23 aesthetic decisions about a completely uneventful tuesday, i decided tuesdays could remain undocumented. then wednesday. then the rest of my life.
so after a successful 30-day trial, i was ready to never do that again.
2021: the person who made reading her entire personality
in 2021, i started reading again and immediately found ways to make this financially complicated.
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 strangers online.
the growing inventory included 1Q84, Crime and Punishment, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, 1984, The Midnight Library, The Book Thief, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Secret History, and many others.
ideally, people would look at my bookshelf and assume i was both deeply interesting and emotionally complex. in reality, i’m still the same person who opened the calculator app for basic 1+1.
buying scented candles also became a hobby of its own because reading was impossible unless the room smelled of lavender and financial irresponsibility. i scoured small local candle makers across the philippines, which was how i discovered scents like Angel’s Breath and Fresh Bamboo. honestly, i loved this part. i kept finding these small businesses making gorgeous scents i would never have come across otherwise, and every new discovery gave me another extremely legitimate reason to place an order.
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. which reminds me: i should start posting ridiculous reviews of these books. not proper literary analysis, the world has plenty. 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. my collection kept growing, my opinions got increasingly difficult to keep to myself, and reading eventually stopped being a personality i was trying on again 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. but searching for those two specific 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, and spent real money collecting tiny photographs of the same man in several different crop settings.
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 i didn’t have time to sell it one photocard at a time. no one was willing to inherit an entire year’s worth of my financial irresponsibility all at once, unfortunately.
which, in hindsight, was probably for the best. the binder became one of the first things i packed, and several times a year, i still pull it out and flip through every page with the same ridiculous fondness i had while collecting it.
and you know what i realized after having a completely ridiculous collection? some things are worth keeping even if they are objectively useless. these photocards take up space, cost me an embarrassing amount of money, and have contributed absolutely nothing practical to my life. but i still look through them and remember exactly how much fun i had collecting them—and of all the ordinary days that became exciting because of it.
and so at the beginning of 2022, i had never wanted a collection. by the end of it, i was glad some version of me 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, but 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.
nespresso had always felt offensively expensive in the philippines, between the high upfront cost of the machine and the tiny aluminum capsules you had to keep buying forever. 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.
being back in school also helped my case. i had engineering classes where trying to answer one question regularly resulted in discovering 18 more.
that year, in an effort to help ease the poverty, i also 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. 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, which meant i now had a little extra money and absolutely no intention of letting them remain extra.
for almost a year, i regularly paid to have my nails professionally maintained. this version of me had a standing appointment, strong thoughts on nail shape and length, and hands that looked significantly 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 which shade of red was actually the right shade of red. it was silly, expensive, and such a specific kind of girlhood. i never really chose my nails alone after that.
however much i enjoyed her, the nail girly eventually had to be terminated. 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 were 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. veja recifes. new balance 520s.
each pair was for a different mood, 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’s no deeper philosophy behind it. shoes are 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 i found a small group of people i genuinely liked spending time with.
our favourite way to hang out was to find somewhere to eat. most of the time, this meant somewhere cheap and delicious. occasionally, when we were feeling culturally ambitious, we worked our way through Michelin-recognized spots and Filipino fusion restaurants.
no matter where we ate, the night almost always ended with milktea, which people in north america insist on calling boba, despite “milktea” being both accurate and self-explanatory and boba being the name of the stuff sitting at the bottom. but i digress.
by then, the person i was spending money on was different from the previous ones. instead of buying supplies for a better lifestyle or a more interesting version of herself, she was mostly paying for meals with good friends, around whom she never had to be anyone else.
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, and 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.
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