It was past midnight, and I couldn’t bring myself to sleep.
Not because the baby needed me. She was sound asleep.
It was something else.
A restlessness I couldn’t name. An anxiety with no clear reason except this quiet, heavy feeling that I could no longer plan ahead. That I could no longer grow. That somewhere between the feeding schedules and the sleepless nights and the endless caregiving, the life in front of me had somehow become smaller than the one I had imagined.
So I did something I hadn’t done in a long time.
I picked up a pen. I opened a notebook. And I gave my thoughts somewhere to go.
I didn’t know then that was the beginning of everything.
And somewhere in those pages, past midnight, in the silence between one day and the next – she showed up.
The part of me I had stopped asking about.
My diwa.
“I gave my thoughts somewhere to go. I didn’t know that was the beginning of everything.”
I had spent five years in a career that rewarded me financially.
Every day I sat across from clients. Helped them navigate their finances. Solved real problems for real people.
It was good work. Useful work.
But if you had asked me to do it for free, I wouldn’t have.
That answer was trying to tell me something.
I could do it. But I was never fully there.
There is a difference between work you are capable of and work that is actually yours.
My diwa knew which side of that line I was standing on.
Motherhood cracked something open. The anxiety of that sleepless night was not really about my baby or my schedule or my plans.
It was my diwa – finally refusing to be quiet.
Diwa is a Filipino word for the inner self.
Not just your thoughts or your feelings, but the animating spirit of who you are. The part of you that has always known what you love, what you value, what you were made for. The part that existed before anyone needed anything from you.
In the busyness of early motherhood, your diwa often goes quiet. Not because she is gone. But because no one asked her how she was doing.
Including you.
Alaga sa Diwa is the practice of asking. And then actually listening.
That night I didn’t find answers. I found questions.
Better ones.
What would I do even if no one paid me?
What would I do even if no one clapped?
What is the work that teaches, that helps, that heals, and happens to also sustain me?
There is a Japanese concept called ikigai, your reason for being. The place where what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for all meet in the same point.
It sounds almost too neat. Too philosophical for a mom past midnight with a journal and an anxious chest.
But I kept writing. And the answer came slowly, through weeks of mind mapping and trial and error and long quiet days of introspection.
It came in the shape of this.
Daily Ginhawa. The blog. The community. The conversations with moms who needed the same map I had been building for myself.
And somewhere along the way I realized, I had become a teacher after all. Not inside four walls with students looking up at me. But here, in this quiet corner of the internet, sharing what I’ve lived so that another mom doesn’t have to figure it out alone.
My diwa knew this long before I did.
She just needed me to sit down, past midnight, and finally listen.
Matrescence asks you to let go of who you were and trust that who you are becoming is worth it.
That disorientation, that loss, that quiet grief for the old version of yourself — it is not the end of your story. It is the clearing.
Your diwa does not disappear in motherhood. She waits. She accumulates. She gets louder in the silences between feeds and nap times and past-midnight wakings that have nothing to do with the baby.
She is trying to tell you something.
The woman who loved to create. Who wanted to teach. Who had a dream she filed away because the practical path seemed safer. She is still there.
She just needs to be asked.
Daily Ginhawa begins in the body.
But it deepens in the diwa. Because a body that is cared for can finally rest. And a diwa that is cared for can finally speak.
And when she speaks, really speaks, she will tell you things that five years of practical safe choices could not.
She will tell you what you are actually here to do.
“Even if no one claps. Even if no one is watching. That is how you know it is yours.”
With love,
Kristen
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