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, a 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 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, opened a notebook, and gave my thoughts somewhere to go.
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.
There is a difference between work you are capable of and work that is actually yours. I could do the job well. But I was never fully there. And some part of me had always known it.
Motherhood cracked that open. The anxiety of that sleepless night wasn’t 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 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 better questions. 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 also happens to sustain me?
I kept writing toward those questions, through weeks of mind mapping and long quiet days of sitting with myself. I’d read about this idea — the place where what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what can sustain you all meet at the same point. Slowly, the answer came into shape.
Alaga sa Diwa is the practice of asking. And then actually listening.
Daily Ginhawa. This blog. The conversations with moms who needed the same map I had been building for myself. Somewhere along the way I realized I had become a teacher after all. Not inside four walls. 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.
Your diwa does not disappear in motherhood. She waits. She gets louder in the silences between feeds and nap times and past-midnight wakings that have nothing to do with the baby. 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.
Matrescence asks you to let go of who you were and trust that who you are becoming is worth it. That disorientation, that quiet grief for the old version of yourself — it is not the end of your story. It is where you find room to breathe.
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.
So here is the question I want to leave you with, the same one I found past midnight in a notebook when I had nothing left to perform:
What would you do even if no one clapped?
That answer belongs to you. And it has been waiting.
With love,
Kristen
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