A year and a half ago I quit my job to become a writer. And no, not a digital nomad. Because if anything, I wanted to hole up and stop travelling.

I’d spent six years as an OFW in Singapore, no doubt Southeast Asia’s brightest city and holder of its highest exchange rate. Living in gentrification the size of Metro Manila was exciting at the start. To a less than violently wealthy Filipino from the lower middle-class suburbs of QC, it was a curiosity: Tropical but first world, immaculate streets and sidewalks, public buses on schedule, cleanest subways in the region, highest rents in the world. It helped that I was being paid enough to offset said highest rents and splurge on decent enough bachelor-sized lodging.

You know how sometimes countries like to form into cliques or clubs for one reason or another—trade (WTO), security (NATO); disapproving of or abetting genocide (UN Security Council)? I was in one of those. A jetsetter gig. A large part of it was putting on a suit every couple of months, packing a suitcase a la Up in The Air and jumping on a plane to spend weeks in a hotel some place exotic (Port Moresby) or cool (Seoul).

Point is I was an OFW who could get away with calling himself an expat, and a wife & child and house & lot short of a life I could take home to meet my mother. Now, I’ve never been a fan of living like an SMDC billboard. In fact it’s always been a little inconvenient that, for people my age at least, the targets have always been set and we had little say of it. But there’s nothing like being in striking distance of something to make you wake up one day and think, yes: Good life’s the good life.

But, yeah, everything changed when COVID-19 attacked. The world stopped moving; I was one of the fortunates—sure I couldn’t travel, home or anywhere else, but I kept my job. Days became an ostensible eight hours in front of my computer and sixteen asleep or self-medicating. Being alone inside an apartment for a year does things to your head, makes you think of what’s important and what isn’t.

I tell you about my old job and the benefits that came with it to emphasize the impracticality of the decision I made inside my Singapore apartment in between binge drinking and learning to cook from YouTube. I wasn’t alone of course. The Big Quit was everywhere. But whereas my uncle who used to work in Adidas or my cousin who IT’d for SMART would go on to either get right back on the horse or become a (there’s that word again) digital nomad, my game plan was to get down and stay down, because the goal wasn’t a family or properties or investment or all that sweet stuff that you’ll have to admit make life a peach. The goal was to be a novelist.

I’m 41 years old as of this writing. In my twenties I wrote short stories. I edited literary folios and read a lot. I kept a blog that posted not so much logs but fictional vignettes. I was middling but it was fun. For money I edited academic papers through a BPO company that knew how to monetize Filipino literateness. Are all Filipinos surrounded by people who like to interrogate about future plans? I was, so this wasn’t easy: In my head, the only plan was to write novels—super unlucrative—until life, and politics weirdly enough, got in the way.

Those of you old enough will remember this. Gloria Arroyo had been president for nine years, and for many of those years her government endured allegations of corruption and fraud. The end of her last term coincided with a big boom in social media use, which meant that people who were angry could tell everyone they knew about their anger. Politics was rife in the air. Young people wanted her anointed successor (and therefore her) to lose the elections. Being a young person myself at the time, I took up a friend’s offer to join one of the campaigns that ran in opposition. After months of unhinged goings-on, I somehow ended up as staff to a new president, kickstarting a career as not just writer, but political and/or  policy communicator, which eventually led to said Singapore and jetsetter gig.

In that pandemic apartment, I planned my escape. I knew that what I was doing was going to be seen as, because it was, a kind of arrested development, or regression, or midlife crisis. But also, in my head, it was the only logical move. I’ve had a great career as an adult person of some consequence, I’ve had the inklings of a rut for a while now (which 2020 turned into a crater, what can you do), why not get back to that other thing I was doing, it seemed important.

So, I talked to my employer, told them the plan, got a deal to stay on remote for a while just to get them through the crisis, then once moved and settled, I let go. Got my vaccination papers in order, sold the furniture and gadgetry I could on Carousel and gave away the rest. Found an apartment in Quezon City, turned it into an office. Met old friends and family and gave them versions of the spiel you just read. Then live off savings, write novel. After that? Who knows.

Harder than I thought, naturally. For one, years of policy work has made me the slowest writer in the world. Maybe I developed ADD. Also, upheaving your life, even if it’s the right thing, can be incapacitating. I remember what my old boss from government told me when we were about to step down from office: “Being important one day and being unimportant the next will be a shock.” And it was then and it was again.

A year goes by. I deal with my head; I buy a bike, try to get healthy; I binge a few shows, have more than a few drinks with buddies, pour more of my savings down a hole every day, and I write. It’s great, but it’s slow. Or, it’s so, so slow, but it’s great. When it’s there. I got a two bedroom, the second bedroom converted into a far-from picturesque office space. The very few moments I spend in there a day are the only ones wherein I feel like I’m doing something important again. It isn’t important in the real-world sense. But I’ve somehow convinced myself it’s the only worthwhile thing to do, and so it is.

And even before the time money ran out I stopped being in a hurry. It’ll come, I tell myself, rushing it will just make it bad. Still, I need to earn a living, have to go freelance, as an editor or writer. That’s what I did, just like I did in the aughts. Not full circle, but something like it.

So, here we are, holed up in an apartment, a freelance writer and an aspiring novelist—the first thing struggles to pay the bills but it’s the second unfinished thing that keeps the show going. A novel in this country won’t turn out to be a big payday someday, but that’s not the point. The point is the work, the creation, or the process of it. One day, maybe soon, it will be finished (and, just maybe, published), and then the thing that will keep the show going will be the next one, which I’ll write between freelancing, drinks, bike rides around the city. While it’s not something you’d take home to meet your family, I don’t think I’ve enjoyed myself as much as I do these days.

Pocholo Goitia is a fictionist and freelance writer from the Philippines. He was, for six years each, managing editor of the Official Gazette under the administration of Noynoy Aquino, and communications manager for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Secretariat based in Singapore. He has published short stories in various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. Today he lives in Quezon City with his bike and three laptops.