On Ice and Concrete
Past midnight on the first day of September 2026, my room smelled of warm electronics and half-finished tea. The blue glare of my code editor had been burning into my retinas for hours while I shuffled functions back and forth, desperate to turn a collection of side projects into something that resembled a career. Laufey’s Promise was looping in the background. I was never a huge fan, but its dramatic, theatrical melancholia felt strangely suited to the quiet panic of two in the morning. That was when the algorithm, acting with its usual unsettling mind-reading precision, slid a video into my feed: a girl in a sparkling dress gliding across a sheet of ice to the exact melody playing in my ears.
I knew almost nothing about figure skating. My understanding of the sport was pretty much limited to old news clips of our kababayan Michael Martinez, or the occasional highlight of Yuzuru Hanyu that crossed my feed years ago. But watching Alysa Liu move across the rink was completely disarming. The ice looked so smooth and stripped of friction, entirely unlike the noisy clutter inside my own head. I started reading the comments, clicked another performance, and spent the next few hours down a rabbit hole unraveling her story.
She was a child prodigy who hit the peak of her sport, stepped away completely at sixteen, and then returned years later to win Olympic gold.
The microscopic technicalities, the distinction between a quad and a triple Axel, or how judges calculate grades of execution, remained mostly a mystery to me. What lingered was the sheer, absurd irregularity of her departure. At sixteen, while the rest of us were agonizing over basic high school drama, she was carrying years of adult investment, and she simply said no. She enrolled in college, ate dinner without tracking numbers on a scale, and let herself exist in a space where nobody held a scorecard over her head. When she eventually returned, she was no longer performing to earn permission to be on the ice. She was just skating because she chose to.
Sitting alone at my desk, I realized why her story made my chest feel so tight. Alysa knew how to step off the track before it broke her. I, on the other hand, had spent my entire life running as fast as I could, terrified of what would happen if I stopped.
No one ever forced me to live like this. My parents never demanded perfection, but I built that expectation with my own hands. Somewhere along the line, I tied my safety and identity to output. Success became a shield. As long as I was achieving, working, and staying ahead, I felt like I had a right to exist. I dragged that instinct through every semester, every freelance assignment, and every sleepless night, while treating my own mind and body like disposable fuel until I finally walked across the stage Magna Cum Laude.
And how did I celebrate that peak achievement? By working myself so relentlessly into the ground a few weeks after graduation that my body literally pulled the emergency brake.
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I passed out cold, cracked my head straight onto the pavement, and spent the aftermath going from one hospital to another, now wondering how I managed to survive college only to get defeated by concrete. Nothing teaches you humility quite like realizing your grand reward for pushing past your physical limits is a head injury and a stack of medical bills.
That hospital room was where the contrast between my life and Alysa’s hit me hardest. She had the courage at sixteen to walk away from something she loved before it turned into resentment or exhaustion. I had to hit actual concrete at twenty-two before I realized my internal pace was killing me.
I genuinely believed that receiving my diploma would feel like reaching a final resting place, a moment where I could finally put my hands down and breathe. Instead, the boundary simply vanished and reappeared miles down the road. The diploma arrived, but so did the quiet, relentless demand to find a better role, polish the portfolio, learn another framework, and keep pace before the rest of the world leaves me behind. It feels like competing in a race where crossing the mark only grants you the privilege of running further.
Alysa’s story did not magically dissolve my anxiety or offer me a tidy blueprint for my life. I am still twenty-two, staring out into an open, unstructured future, and I still feel nervous whenever I think about falling behind. The fear of uncertainty is still very real. Yet, when I look back at every brutal exam, every overwhelming deadline, and every moment I felt utterly unready to step up, I somehow remained standing.
What hurts to admit is that it was never ambition driving me. It was pure, unrelenting terror. I dragged a frightened, exhausted version of myself through every brutal semester, every 3 AM coding sprint, every panic attack masked as discipline, constantly promising that once I reached the next milestone, I would finally let myself rest. But the finish line always moved, and I just kept dragging that same tired kid behind me. I burned years treating my own body like fuel, sacrificing my health and my youth for gold stars and pieces of paper, only to end up at twenty-two bleeding on a sidewalk with nothing to show for it but a hospital bill and an unread sent folder.
Laufey’s voice keeps repeating through my headphones .
“..it hurts to be something, it’s worse to be nothing without you.”
Sitting here watching Alysa, that line hits way too close to home. The “you” in my life was never a person. It was the output. It’s embarrassing how much power I give to things that mean nothing to anyone else: a rare compliment on a code review, an old honor ribbon, a Magna Cum Laude title, a clean portfolio deploy. Small, stupid scraps of validation that feel like life or death to me. I hate how much I depend on them, but I’m even more terrified of what happens if they stop coming. I’ve hitched my entire existence to what I can produce, genuinely believing that if I ever stop building, working, or proving myself, there will be nothing left of me at all.
I’ve spent my whole life frantically performing for an audience that was never watching, begging for permission to exist while forgetting how to actually live.
It’s almost four in the morning now. The video ended a long time ago. I still don’t have a job offer in my inbox, and I’m still anxious about what the next six months will look like. Alysa’s story doesn’t cure my burnout. But sitting here in the quiet, looking at my laptop, I think I’m finally ready to stop treating my life like a race I have to win before morning.
