This is the third time I have entered the rehabilitation center.

I thought I was done. I thought I had finally made it out. After eight long months inside these walls, I walked out those doors — and for two weeks, I breathed free air. Two weeks. That was all I got before everything fell apart again, and I found myself right back here.

times I was brought back to the same white walls. Three times, someone still came for me. That is either tragedy — or the most stubborn form of love I have ever known.”

Labeled

✦

This is the third time I have entered the rehabilitation center.

Three times. Three returns to the same white walls, the same fluorescent lights, the same faces that looked at me like I was both a tragedy and a warning. By now, even the admission forms felt familiar in my hands — a terrible kind of homecoming for a fifteen-year-old boy who only ever wanted to be ordinary.

People around me called me a “pathological liar.” They were not entirely wrong. I learned early that the truth, unfiltered, could burn. So I shaped it, trimmed it, made it presentable — the way you fold a letter you are too afraid to send. But the truth always has a way of arriving.

Magaling akong magsinungaling at maghabi ng kuwento,

Subalit madalas akong nahuhuli.

I am always lying. But I was caught, again and again, by the people who refused to stop watching over me — not because they enjoyed my failure, but because they could not afford to look away. My mom keeps on telling me, “ Hindi ka pa ba naniniwalang matalino ako, bakit paulit-ulit kang nagsisinungaling? Nalalaman ko naman kaagad ang totoo. [“Don’t you believe yet that I am smart? Why do you keep lying repeatedly? I can always figure out the truth right away.”]

They called me the joker, too. The one you laugh with but never fully trust. I wore that costume willingly, because humor is armor, and armor is survival, and survival — at fifteen, with a brain that worked against you — was the only goal that mattered.

The Diagnosis That Did Not Belong to Me

✦

When I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I refused it completely.

The words sat on the doctor’s lips like a verdict, and I rejected the verdict. I was a normal teenager. I was just a young person who needed freedom, who needed space, who needed the world to slow down and let him breathe. I was not ill. I repeated this to myself the way you repeat a prayer — not out of faith, but out of desperation.

I kept telling my mind: I am a normal young adult. I am fine. I am fine. I am fine.

Wala akong sakit! Hindi ako magkakasakit nang ganoon! [“I don’t have any illness! I will not get sick like that!”]

But the mind, when it is in crisis, is a poor witness to itself.

So I stole. From my mother’s wallet — those crisp bills she kept folded with care, money she had earned through hours I never counted. I used it for vape cartridges — grape and Yakult flavors, sweet and milky on the exhale — and for game credits on Crossfire, where, at least, the battles were ones I could control.  Sa virtual na mundo ako ay makapangyarihan. Sa virtual na mundo, ako ay maaaring manalo, [In the virtual world, I had power. In the virtual world, I could win.]

Sa aming tahanan, ang daming bawal. Ang daming hindi pwedeng gawin. Ang daming pumipigil sa aking kalayaan. Ilang beses na akong humihiling nang kalayaan; ayaw nilang ibigay sa akin! [“In our home, there are so many things that are forbidden. So many things that cannot be done. So many things that restrain my freedom. I have asked for freedom so many times — they just won’t give it to me!”]

Most of the time, I hated my mom. I never cared about her feelings. I used to see her crying. I don’t even care.

In our house, I was losing something I could not name.

THE ROOTS OF CHAOS

✦

I went to rehab because I had lost control of myself — and I didn’t even realize it until it was almost too late.

It started with online games. What began as something fun, something that made me feel good, slowly swallowed me whole. I wasn’t just playing anymore. I was addicted. The screen was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I stared at before I finally crashed at night. The game became my whole world — and everything outside of it felt like an interruption.

But the games didn’t just steal my time. They stole something darker from me — my temper. Every loss, every lag, every moment that didn’t go my way ignited something inside me that I couldn’t put out. The rage would rise so fast, so hot, that I couldn’t think straight. My hands would shake. My vision would blur. I wasn’t me anymore.

And then the rage needed somewhere to go.

It went to my mom.

I said things to her — threatened her — that I can barely bring myself to write. She was just there, trying to reach me, and I turned on her like she was the enemy. Like she was the reason my life felt so out of control. She wasn’t. She never was. But in those moments, I couldn’t see that.

I was fifteen years old, and I was falling apart in ways I didn’t have words for.

That’s why I went to rehab. Not because I was forced. But because somewhere underneath all that anger and addiction and chaos — I knew I needed help before I destroyed the one person who never stopped loving me.

 Words That Break Bone

✦

I hated being lectured. I know that sounds like something every teenager says, but this was different — this was a specific, suffocating, and exhaustion that crept into my chest like smoke every time someone opened their mouth to correct me.

“Magpakabait ka!”

“Magbago ka na!”

“Magtapos ka ng pag-aaral para maging maganda ang buhay mo.”

Be good. Change now. Be good. Change now. The words circled me like birds that had forgotten how to land. I knew they came from love and concern. I knew they were spoken by people who could not watch me disappear. But knowing the origin of a wound does not make it hurt less.

It just makes you feel guilty for bleeding.

I wanted power. I wanted freedom. I wanted to press vape to my lips and feel the calm spread through me like warm water — because calm, for me, was not a natural state. It was something I had to manufacture, again and again, in increasingly destructive ways.

Ako ang kontrabida ng sarili kong karakter [I am also the villain of my own character.]

I felt it deeply — that I was the problem. The black sheep. The cursed one. The person my family wished they could love more easily. I did not blame them for struggling. I struggled, too. The difference was that their struggle had a face — mine.

The Night of October 4

✦

It was night when everything broke open.

October 4, 2025. I remember it not the way you remember a date, but the way you remember a wound — by the shape of it, the depth, the specific quality of pain.

My mother stood before me and said words I will carry for the rest of my life:

“Wala kang silbi! ‘Wag ka nang pumasok, ganoon din naman, puro problema at perwisyo ang iyong dala.”

[You are useless. Don’t bother coming to school — all you ever bring is trouble.]

I do not know if she meant it. I do not know if pain spoke through her that night the same way pain spoke through me. What I know is that those words found the hollow places inside me and filled them with something dark and absolute.

I had taken my medication — Olanzapine and Valproic acid — but the doses were wrong, the timing was wrong, everything was wrong, and the pills that were supposed to steady me only deepened the storm. My mother left the house. My grandmother, Nanay, was left behind — small and frightened, carrying years of my storms in the lines of her face.

The episodes came in waves. I could not stop them. I did not know how.

At 8:00 in the evening, the police arrived. This was the fourth time they had come to our door. I was not afraid. I had learned to read them — the soft knock, the careful voices, the offer of advice, and then the retreat. I thought this was another ordinary visit.

I was holding a stem cutter when I told them to leave. I said this was my kingdom. I told them what I would do if they stayed. I watched fear move across their faces and felt something I am ashamed of now: power.

Then — without warning — the calm came. The terrible, sudden calm that follows a storm. I was sleepy. I went to rest.

I did not know it was the last rest I would have in my own room for a long time.

The Door That Broke

✦

I woke to noise — loud, purposeful, urgent.

They were breaking down my door.

Before I could speak or move, the handcuffs were on my wrists. Cold. Tight. Absolute.

Ang posas ay malamig, mahigpit, at napakasikip.

Halos hindi ako makagalaw.

Senyales ito ng pagpaparusa. Senyales ng kasalanan.

Subalit napakabata ko pa para maranasan ang pait ng mapanghusgang posas na ito!

Hindi ako isang kriminal, ang nais ko lamang ay kalayaan!

[The handcuffs were cold, tight, and unbearably small.

I could barely move.

This was a sign of punishment. A sign of guilt.

But I am far too young to feel the bitterness of these judging handcuffs!

I am not a criminal — all I ever wanted was freedom!]

They injected me with something — a sedative, I think, though I could not name it. They wrapped me in a blanket like a child being carried from a burning house, and they brought me out into the night air where the neighbors stood watching.

Judging. Speculating. Building stories from the pieces of me that were scattered on the pavement.

Mapupunta kayong lahat sa impyerno! [“You are all going to hell!”]

That is what my mind was screaming, though I do not know what sounds, if any, escaped my lips. I was inside the ambulance. The ceiling moved above me. And somewhere beyond the wail of the siren, I understood — without being able to fully accept it — that something had ended.

Ang ilang taon na pakikipaglaban sa bipolar ay hindi biro.

Three years of fighting a disorder I did not choose, in a body I did not ask for, at an age when I should have been worried about nothing more serious than exams.

at the Batangas port

✦

I woke in Batangas Port.

Standing before me were Sir Dennis, Sir Jose, and Sir Alex — faces I recognized from the last time, and the time before that. My batchmates from the rehabilitation center. Once, we had been colleagues. Officers. We had sat in the same circles, spoken the same language of healing, and then I had left and returned to my old life, and here we were, standing at the edge of this moment with no easy way to cross it.

Sir Alex looked at me and said, quietly:

“Papang, tara. Sama ka na sa amin. Magbago ka na uli.”

Come. Come with us. Change again.

Again. Not for the first time. Again.

My mind fought against it. I did not want to go back. I was afraid — not of the center itself, but of the family haircut: the ritual where patients gather and speak honestly to one another, sometimes harshly, sometimes cruelly, the way truth can feel cruel when it arrives without softness. They would see me. They would say everything I already knew about myself but had not yet learned to hold.

My mother was crying. I made her cry again. I made a deep wound again.

I wanted to ask her not to take me back. I wanted to bargain. I wanted to plea. But the words would not come, and my body was no longer mine to command, and all I could manage was a small gesture — I told the facilitators that I had made my mother some ice cream. I do not know why I said this. Perhaps it was the only tenderness I had left.

the Prospect Chair

✦

I was on bed rest for two days.

Then, for seventeen days, I sat in the prospect chair — a seat reserved for reflection, for sitting with the weight of what you have done and what it has cost the people who refused to stop loving you.

Seventeen days is a long time to think.

I thought about my mother’s crisp, folded bills. I thought about the grape-and-Yakult taste of the vape I used to feel calm. I thought about my grandmother’s face — how fear had settled there like weather, how she had learned to flinch before I even raised my voice. I thought about the neighbors watching from the dark, and the ambulance ceiling, and Sir Alex saying, softly, again.

I thought about what it means to be fifteen and already on your third beginning.

And slowly, through the stillness of those seventeen days, something shifted.

If I had just controlled my pride and ego —

I stopped myself. Because that sentence — the one I had been finishing with blame, with shame, with the familiar weight of self-contempt — was not the whole story. The whole story was bigger, more complicated, and more human than that. The whole story included a brain that worked differently, a world that did not always know how to hold that difference gently, and a boy who had been trying, in all the wrong ways, to be okay.

This is the third time I have entered the rehabilitation center.

I thought I was done. I thought I had finally made it out. After eight long months inside these walls, I walked out those doors — and for two weeks, I breathed free air. Two weeks. That was all I got before everything fell apart again, and I found myself right back here.

I was devastated.

I sat with that feeling for a long time. The shame. The disappointment. The quiet, crushing weight of knowing that I had failed — not just myself, but the people who believed in me. It hurt in a way that is hard to put into words. Like falling just when you thought you had finally learned how to stand.

There were moments I didn’t want to face anyone. I didn’t want to see my mom’s eyes or my dad’s face because I was terrified of what I would find there. Anger, maybe. Or worse — sadness. The kind of sadness that comes from watching someone you love keep hurting themselves.

But they didn’t give up on me.

Not the first time. Not the second. And not now.

My parents have given me chances that I honestly don’t feel like I deserve. Every time I fall, they are still there — arms open, hearts somehow still full of hope for me. That is not something I take lightly anymore. That is something I carry with me every single day I wake up in this place.

So yes, I am still here. Again.

And I am choosing to accept it — not with bitterness, but with gratitude. Because I am still alive. I still have people who love me. And as long as that is true, I still have a reason to try.

This time, I want to make it count.