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How to Survive as a Quiet Promdi in the Big City

A quiet promdi braves the big city to learn lessons on resilience, overcoming fears, and happiness.

Tin Mariano
ILLUMINATION
8 min readMar 29, 2023

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Photo by Yannes Kiefer on Unsplash

The world around me was in a quiet pause after the traffic light changed from yellow to red. Diesel and smoke fumes permeated the air. Inside a jeepney, the passenger beside me shifted, perhaps attempting to get a better seat. He smelled of early morning sweat. There were twenty of us passengers squeezed inside, ten at the left, ten at the right. I can turn only my face to the small window space.

Outside, the sunburned seller of homemade wipers just approached the jeepney driver with all the nonchalance of someone fearless to get hit. A long line of habal-habals (single motorcycles bearing passengers) waited alongside the jeepneys and private vehicles.

The lights turned green. The world around me roared. The jeepney harrumphed forward, and so did the motorcycles and the private vehicles. It was just another ordinary Monday at the busy intersection of Ayala, Makati, and Mckinley, Bonifacio Global City (BGC). It was 2014, and I was a freshly licensed accountant doing my first year of fieldwork for one of my clients in a local firm. What defined the next four years of my life in this big city were daily lessons on resilience, overcoming fears, and a…

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ILLUMINATION
ILLUMINATION

Published in ILLUMINATION

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Tin Mariano
Tin Mariano

Written by Tin Mariano

International work experience, the expat life, and everything in between

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