Riding the Wave — How My College Friends Carry Me Through Adulthood’s Undercurrents
Amber B. Garma
For Kat, Darrell, Parcha, Inna, and all our college besties.
There are very few things I’m more grateful for in this world than the friends I met in college, who I more appropriately call my ‘college besties’, because ‘college friends’ just doesn’t cut it. It all started when I formed an instant bestfriendship with my coursemate Kat, who was already a package deal with her best friend Darrell. Outside Darrell, Kat and I’s worlds further collided through our respective friendships with Parcha from a batch below, and the four of us would constitute the core of this wide network of people we would eventually call our college besties. It did get confusing at times, but the natural consequence of calling everyone ‘bestie’ was having a lot of besties.
Our adventures began the summer before senior year. Kat and I had scored an onsite internship that allowed us to do meaningful work (escape from our homes). With Darrell motorcycling in to Katipunan from Rizal, we built college constantship on the pillars of cute boys, afternoon drinks, expensive dinners we clearly deserved, and a lot of musical walking.
When I think back to what made our friendship so valuable, it was really all the musical walking. We just walked and roamed around so much, with musical accompaniment. We traversed the extreme ends of our university on random afternoons for no reason at all, taking the longest, most uphill, and most inconvenient paths, and there was always singing involved. Together with our friend Parcha, Kat, Darrell, and I would play staple karaoke songs on our walks and jeep rides, harmonizing and laughing like no one was watching.
But we did the usual stuff, too. We recorded perfect attendance during the August 2023 party frenzy, and as the nights went on, we collected a roster of party friends that became best friends soon enough. These people were just one call away at every party, but they could just as easily get on board for a spontaneous DIY retreat at Darrell’s house in Rizal, which consisted of made-up rituals, mindfulness activities, and a complete program flow. We brought in our own sets of close friends and convened them through campus jogging sessions, karaoke nights at Ukiyo, our favorite bar, and trips to faraway lands like Sumulong Highway.
We were the kind of friend group that just got along. With our friend Inna, we established a group chat called “magkakasundo” (people who get along), not because we had the same thoughts about everything, but because we didn’t treat each other’s complex and flawed lives as though it were our own. I can count our solemn moments on one hand, already including the silence of our made-up rituals, but our moments of boisterous, unbounded joy are countless.
My college besties taught me what real friendship meant. But beyond this, they taught me what it meant to live.
I feel like it must be quite rare to encounter people who are able to show you what it means to live. I tend to be uptight and rigid about my routines. But my friends would whisk me away to our next excursion during breaks that were meant to be study breaks. Nights I already allotted for soul-crushing thesis work would turn into long hours of karaoke or deep conversations in the darkness of our campus chapel. And we all graduated, didn’t we? It was never that deep. As the students who lost two years of college to the pandemic, senior year was all we had. And thanks to my college besties, I came out of it with no regrets.
Seven months after graduation, in the thick of my big girl job, it’s precisely these moments I find myself coming back to. In spite of our carefree college lives, we all graduated and landed jobs in government and NGOs. A few months ago, we were doing fuck all. Now, our monthly meetups are peppered with conversations about jobs and money and licensures and career goals.
Recently, we spontaneously got together to watch the sunset at UP Sunken Garden, and talked about ‘old’ times. I asked them:
… isn’t it weird that in college, we had no money, but we had so much fun and got to do so many things?
It was true — we had no savings, no semblance of financial responsibility, and no backup plans — other than the promise of next week’s allowance. But we were loaded, life-wise. We went on spontaneous dinners and movie dates way past our daily budget, tried out a bunch of sports, spent a ton on alcohol, and just always seemed to have enough to do the things we wanted — the things that made us feel alive.
But now, at least for me, it doesn’t feel as simple anymore. Every fun thing on my horizon gets preceded by worries about money — about not having it, having it but being afraid to lose it, or being torn between enjoying now or making good decisions for the future.
Why is it that now, even with a job that pays me and nothing big to pay for, I feel like I don’t deserve a life-filled life?
It’s been less than half a year since I started my first job, but I already feel like the storm of adulthood has rained down on me — the rent and utilities, the tireless search for my next meal, the urgent calls of two week-old of laundry and hair that needs to be picked up off the floor, and the back-end guilt of not having everything figured out.
I’ve begun to understand how people’s lives just end up slipping away from them. When you bank your week’s worth of happiness on two days that go by like it’s nothing, your supply dries up pretty quickly, and the race towards a good life feels both futile and deathly important.
A few weeks ago, Kat, Darrell, and our other college bestie Santi started planning a trip to La Union. We plan a lot of things, but the rate at which this particular plan was materializing was alarming. I had said yes, but by the time we reached the hotel reservation, I started to panic. At the time, I was right in the middle of moving into my own place. All my money was being funneled straight into condo expenses, and I felt like it wasn’t the right time at all to be going on a short notice trip. An overnight trip to La Union wouldn’t make a dent in long term, but it felt wrong to not prioritize.
On the other hand, it would be my college besties and I’s first out of town trip. The fact that not going was even an option for me drove me absolutely crazy. What have I become? If the possibility of this trip came up back in college, I would give up everything I had to be able to go, not because I was irresponsible, but because I understood the value and irreplaceability of an experience like this. After my boyfriend and Kat knocked some sense into me, I asked Santi for a delayed payment on our hotel reservation and made it to the 3 AM call time, armed with everything I had left.
The trip surpassed all of our expectations. 48 hours have never felt more like 48 hours than it did then. Everyone knows La Union is beautiful, but it was so beautiful, and I can’t help but think it was thanks to our friend group’s gift of looking upon anything with excitement and appreciation. That’s something I’ve always loved about us — that we’re never above any experience. But it definitely helped that the weather was perfect. That every restaurant hit the spot. That all the places we wanted to go to weren’t crowded. That we watched the sunset on an empty beach as Bon Iver played in the background. That at night, we decided to take our chances on a bar the locals told us was closed, and it turned out to be very open.
On a red-lit patio, we looked up at a star-filled night sky and saw a shooting star whizz past. We talked about our lives and our futures and our desires to feel loved and fulfilled. Then we drank with some bodybuilders and went home.
The morning after was the real highlight because it was surfing day! It was the most fun I’ve had in a while, and my friends must have felt the same because as soon as we got out of the water we sat down with our instructors and extensively planned our next trip. The euphoria of getting to stand on that board and ride my way across the shore, no matter how small the wave, was just an unmatched feeling.
This is what it means to live, I thought, as I lay amidst that wide water and watched the silhouettes of my friends stand and fall. How did I almost let this pass me by?
If I weren’t self-aware to a fault, the undercurrents of adulthood may have begun pulling me under without me realizing. Actually, even self-awareness doesn’t guarantee immunity. I find myself at these decision forks on the daily — do I get a nice lunch or save money? Do I finish up this Powerpoint or watch a movie with a friend I haven’t seen in a while?
The reason I feel miserable, even with a job that pays me and nothing big to pay for, is because I’ve devalued the things and people I clearly love, seeing them as hurdles to being a good, upstanding adult. But who am I kidding? Who loves food more than I do? Who loves the beach more than I do? My friends — are they not who I live for?
In Korea, young people coined the term sibal-biyong, which loosely translates to fuck-it expense. The term describes how young people tend to spend on small, inconsequential things, like iced coffees and toy figurines. The other half of the definition attributes this spending habit to gaining short-term comfort. But sibal-biyong is an ingenious concept because its appreciation for inconsequentiality is exactly what gives it positive utility in the long-term.
Think about it — your entire future doesn’t rest on this iced coffee, which is exactly why you can buy it and enjoy every last drop of it and allow it to turn a bad day into a good one. And it’ll be your good days that propel you forward.
My friends have always been my sibal-biyong. Our big and small moments have given me the strength to push forward, over and over. And the genuine happiness I’ve experienced from their friendship is worth more than all the time and money I’ve ever put into it. That’s a rule Kat and I have always bonded over. If it’s with friends, it’s worth it. I refuse to let adulthood make me lose sight of that, especially after that afternoon we spent sitting on the beach, watching the sunset and singing Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper.
My biggest apprehension about adulthood was that every action and decision would feel like it were entirely mine — mine, mine, mine to bear, mine to suffer, mine to grieve.
But where there’s responsibility, there’s also freedom. I get to create a life that doesn’t feel like a punishment. I get to decide what matters. And I get to determine how to make everything else fit around that — what work I need to get done so I can give more of myself to the things and people I love.
On the surface, the many good memories my college besties and I formed in college are reminiscent of a more carefree, spontaneous era, where we could live our lives the way we wanted and not carry any of the consequences.
But nestled underneath all that reckless abandon was a lot of effort to make up the difference. I’d finished that essay early enough to make it to the party. I’d gotten that transcription job to have just enough to enjoy that last week of summer with my friends.
I’ve never been afraid of paddling twice as hard to get to where I want to be. There will always be work to do, but I’ll do it all for another surf with the people who make life worth living.
