Meizan Badrudin 

For the child who taught me that courage can live inside the smallest bodies.

There were 1,781 graduates that day.

I remember the figure vividly, my eyes locked on the number as our vehicle sat paralyzed in the gridlock outside the convention center. Two hours after the ceremony concluded, the streets remained hopelessly congested. Cars inched forward. Families leaned wearily against glass windows, while graduates adjusted the metallic weight of medals around their necks.

Somewhere in that sprawling standstill, someone was probably uploading a polished graduation portrait, pairing it with a caption like “Gradu-ATEd,” “1° hotter,” or “Spotify Student subscription just ended” before writing a few heartfelt lines about dreams finally manifesting into reality. Meanwhile, as names were being called one by one across the stage earlier that day, some people were probably scrolling through their phones already muting group chats, unfollowing old classmates, or deciding which relationships were worth carrying beyond graduation.

Blocked. Unfriended. Removed.

Graduations have always intrigued me in this paradoxical way: we stand on illuminated stages to celebrate beginnings, while in the shadows, we silently bring entire volumes of our lives to a close. Then again, some chapters have a habit of lingering long after we believe we’ve finished them.

I opened the small box of cake my family had bought for me and took a bite. Caramel Cheesecake. The kind Dadi always loved. For a brief moment, it felt as though she had somehow found her way into the moment. “Murag for dadi lagi ani?” I murmured to my mother. She offered a gentle smile. “Taday kan. Paborito inan ni dadi nengka.”

Allahu yarham. If my grandmother, my Dadi, had been there that afternoon, I think she would have been very, very proud. Nakwa den su kahanda. Nandito na tayo, Dadi.

I was still draped in my academic gown. Crumbs cascaded onto my lap, but nobody noticed, and nobody cared. Which was unusual. Under ordinary circumstances, even a single grain of rice falling onto the car floor would trigger an argument. But, that afternoon, nobody said a word. For once, there were no expectations left to discuss. It was an entirely mundane moment tucked inside what the world insists is one of the most monumental days of a person’s life.

When the traffic finally relented, we pulled over at Acacia.

“Magcelebrate diay ta?” I asked. The detour was completely impromptu. The original itinerary had been simple: attend the ceremony, return home, and sleep. But my parents insisted on a celebration. “Sige lang ka,” they told me. My father looked at me and said, “Mahal ka namin.”

There was no lavish banquet, no rented hall, and no extensive guest list. It was just the very people who had anchored me through a tempest of years that had nearly shattered me. “Mubarak, Kaka! Allahumma barik laha. You did well. Alhamdulillah, nakagraduate ka na.” These were the exact words they offered. Not a moment of wondering why my name was not called when the distinctions were announced.

Years ago, people might have asked. But somewhere in the grueling space between hospital admissions, insomniac nights, panic attacks, psychiatric evaluations, and desperate prayers whispered in the pre-dawn dark, our collective definition of success had quietly mutated.

I remember one of my hospital admissions particularly well. Even while lying in a hospital bed, my mind remained stubbornly occupied by examinations and the ever-present specter of Latin honors. My mother found the situation ridiculous. “Andito ka na nga sa hospital, ang isipin mo pa yung exam mo? Yung Latin honors mo?” she laughed. As though Latin honors were somehow connected to my IV line.

Na para bang mas importante pa ang grado kaysa sa buhay ko?

My parents had long ceased praying for medals. In truth, I suspect they secretly hoped those crushing expectations would vanish entirely. They no longer cared if I stood at the apex of my cohort; their only desire was that I remained alive long enough to walk across that stage. That afternoon, while I sat mourning everything I had lost, they sat celebrating everything I had survived. That is why my relationship with achievement has irrevocably shifted. I will not lie, I still harbor an admiration for accolades.

I mean, who doesn’t?

We applaud medals, distinctions, scholarships, and titles because they are the physical manifestations of sacrifice. Of hard work. Of sleepless nights. There is absolutely no shame in desiring them, just as there is no shame in grieving when they slip through our fingers. For some of us, the loss cuts even deeper. We spend so many years building an identity around achievement that success ceases to be something we do and quietly becomes who we are. We learn to introduce ourselves through grades and accomplishments. We become attached not only to the reward, but to the version of ourselves we believe those rewards confirm. And so when that identity fractures, the wound is rarely confined to a transcript. It feels personal. Almost physical. Like an injury to the self.

But the older I get, the more I find my mind wrestling with a different caliber of questions that no graduation program could ever hope to answer.

How many people breathed easier because you occupied this space? How many heavy burdens did your hands help lift?

As a Bangsamoro, I am frequently haunted by the question of what I have given back to my own people. In this region where poverty continues to affect a substantial portion of families, it is difficult to ignore how a person’s future can be shaped by the circumstances of their birth. As a daughter, I constantly interrogate whether I have adequately honored the sacrifices woven into my parents’ lives. As a future healthcare professional, I ask myself if I have genuinely learned to see the pulsing, fragile humanity behind the sterile diagnoses.

How many lives were made marginally better simply because Allah allowed your path to intersect with theirs?

This is the root of why I offer sadaqah whenever it is within my power. Sustenance for a wandering stray. A warm meal for someone who has forgotten what a full stomach feels like. A few pesos pressed into the hand of a sikad driver. It is maybe because every time I see these people, I remember my father.

My father was once a driver. At sa maraming paraan, siya ang naghatid sa akin sa kung saan ako ngayon.

Perhaps this is also why I spent years building things on my own. Sugar Cafe. Laba Boss laundry shops. MV Apartments. To others, they may look like ordinary businesses. To me, I see a possibility of handing them a life that is a little softer than the one they broke their backs to build for me. In many ways, they emerged from the same impulse that drives me to give back to lighten a burden that I once watched others carry.

That is why I have never been able to view achievement as something purely personal. Every accomplishment I celebrate is tethered to sacrifices that were never mine alone. Medals belong to dunya. My achievements are not mine to claim. They are provisions from Allah SWT. The Qur’an tells us, “Indeed, Allah is the Bestower of provision” (Qur’an 51:58). Whatever good I achieved was by His permission. Whatever I lost was by His wisdom.

I knew this. I believed this.

Yet belief does not always spare us from disappointment. Sometimes faith and grief occupy the same heart at the same time. I saw the hollow space where honors should have been. They saw the daughter they had been terrified of losing.

I remember sitting there in the silence of my own mind, acutely aware that everyone around me seemed vastly happier than I was. My family was overflowing with joy. And I would be lying if I said I was.

I was not.

Somewhere deep within my chest, a small, persistent voice kept hissing a single word. Such a quintessentially Filipino word. Such a profoundly dangerous word.

Sayang. Sayang.

I had started with such momentum. Twice a valedictorian. The child onto whom people projected grand expectations. The student who elicited approving nods from adults; the one whose trajectory felt securely mapped. And then, college happened.

There is a pervasive assumption that high-achieving students are fueled by a hunger for recognition. And maybe for some, that is true. It was not true for me. Or, at least, not entirely. The reality is that I did not claw my way to valedictorian for the applause. I did it because I desperately wanted options. I wanted scholarships. I wanted impenetrable doors to swing open. I wanted to alleviate the financial gravity bearing down on my parents. Above all else, I wanted the elusive comfort of security.

I am aware of my own limitations. I was never the type of student who could waltz into an exam hall and effortlessly secure the highest mark. I shared classrooms with peers who possessed a natural brilliance for test-taking.

I was not one of them.

What I had instead was discipline. While other people could rely on pure talent, I had to rely on showing up every single day. I forced myself to study harder, stayed in the library until it closed, and started prepping weeks before an exam. I did this not out of a belief in my own exceptionalism, but out of the knowledge that I simply could not afford to fail.

When I was named valedictorian in Junior and Senior High School, the overriding emotion was never triumph. It was a relief. The relief that I had done enough, that another pathway had cleared, that my parents would have one less anxiety to shoulder. That is precisely why missing out on Latin honors in college left such a unique, jagged wound.

It is painful. More painful than I expected.

My immediate thought was never, “What will society think?” It was, “What happens to me now?” What becomes of my meticulously laid plans? What becomes of medical school? What becomes of the vital opportunities I was so certain I needed? For a long stretch of time, terror drowned out all logic. But Allah has a way of reminding us that our provisions are not dispensed through a single door. Often, when one corridor goes dark, another illuminates in the very place we forgot to look.

I’m not going to list every single detail of how things fell apart in college. Some memories are better left buried, and reopening old wounds for an audience only guarantees they will bleed again. What I will confess is this: there were years when I was jolted awake at three in the morning, rushing to vomit due to anxiety. I was becoming such a frequent visitor at SPH and MDMRC that I half expected them to start offering a loyalty card.

Years when my parents commuted endlessly between Cotabato and Davao because their daughter could not stop shaking. Years when I sat shivering in psychiatric clinics. Years when I was tethered to diagnoses with names lengthy enough to dominate medical charts.

There were days when surrendering to death felt infinitely simpler than enduring life. I do not construct that sentence for theatrical effect. I state it because it is the truth. Some people survive the wrath of typhoons. Others survive the devastation of wars. Some of us must survive ourselves.

For four years, survival was my full-time occupation.

But nobody mints medals for surviving. Nobody broadcasts it over a PA system during commencement exercises. Nobody hands bouquets to the student whose sole triumph was managing to inhale and exhale for another day. But, there are thousands of us.

Legions of students sitting mutely in lecture halls carrying battles nobody else can see. Sons and daughters masquerading in normalcy. Young people dragging the dead weight of grief, panic, heartbreak, destitution, illness, and disappointment, all while submitting academic requirements a minute before midnight. Perhaps that is why graduation felt so utterly surreal. While the masses were busy celebrating the visible, I was paralyzed by the thought of the invisible.

I thought of the people confined to the last row.

The students who were forced to retake subjects. The students who wept silently in public restroom stalls. The students who watched their scholarships evaporate. The students who quietly dug graves for dreams they had never spoken aloud. Sometimes I wonder if society squanders too much breath exalting those at the pinnacle of the pyramid, leaving no air to listen to the gasping of those struggling at its base.

The top is easy to idolize. But the bottom is where humanity actually resides.

At the bottom are the fathers navigating tricycles in the freezing pre-dawn dark. The mothers who ignore their own hunger so their children can be full. The students enduring one or two-hour daily commutes. The patients lined up like ghosts in hospital corridors. The janitors scrubbing rooms they will never receive gratitude for cleaning. The security guards holding open doors for people who will never bother to learn their names. The vast majority of the world lives exactly there.

Not at the summit.

At the bottom.

Of course, the metaphor is imperfect. The last row is not always poor. The front row is not always privileged. Life is rarely that simple. Yet it would be dishonest to pretend that opportunity is distributed equally. In the Philippines, where a child’s future can still be influenced by their surname, address, school, family income, or access to healthcare, privilege remains one of the most powerful yet least acknowledged forces shaping success. Some students begin the race several meters ahead. Others begin it already exhausted. To recognize this is not to diminish hard work. Hard work matters. But so do stable homes, quality education, financial security, good health, supportive families, and the luxury of worrying about examinations instead of survival.

Privileges are not merely personal. They are political. A student with a private tutor and a student commuting four hours a day may sit in the same classroom, attend the same lecture, and take the same examination. Yet they are not taking the same journey. And perhaps that is why I keep returning to the last row because the people in the last row are often expected to work twice as hard just to be seen. And somewhere at the very bottom of that pyramid, I encountered a little girl named Zenara.

Zenara.

My first patient at CRMC.

Long before my name was called on stage, I was already thinking about her. I am not supposed to admit this as a healthcare professional, but I developed a soft spot for the child almost immediately. Some patients stay in your memory because of the diagnoses written on their charts. Others stay because of the people they are. Zenara belonged to the latter.

She had a smile that arrived before her words did. The kind that made hospital rooms feel less frightening than they actually were. I found myself looking forward to seeing her during rounds. And somehow, over time, she seemed to look forward to seeing me too.

“Bakit po Zenara ang pangalan niya, Ma’am? Ang ganda po ng pangalan niya.” I asked while preparing Zenara for a blood extraction. Before I could even reassure her, she had already calmly extended her arm as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Most children are frightened of needles. Zenara was not. That broke my heart. No child should ever become that familiar with pain.

“It means intelligent. Pinangalan siya ng lolo niya kasi nakakabasa na siya at the age of three.” Her mom said.

I remember smiling at that.

Zenara.

The name stayed with me long after the conversation ended. In fact, I once caught myself thinking that if Allah were ever to bless me with a daughter of my own one day, I would want to name her Zenara.

She was the other reason my graduation felt so heavy. For months, my mind had been tethered to a singular promise. It was not a vow made to my parents, nor to my professors, nor even to myself. It was a promise made to a child. She was one of the many fragile children occupying the pediatric ward carrying a diagnosis infinitely heavier than her tiny frame should have ever been forced to bear.

Leukemia.

It was a term I had dissected countless times in dense textbooks and clinical case presentations. But no volume of medical literature could have ever equipped me for the jarring reality of meeting a child who bore that word with a smile.

Children possess an uncanny ability to shrink illnesses down to size. Perhaps it is because they have not yet grasped the sheer cruelty of the world. Or perhaps it is because they retain a wisdom that adults have forfeited: the absolute mastery of living fiercely in the present tense.

I remember watching her beam. I remember absorbing her animated stories. I remember walking out of those swinging ward doors, crushed by the arbitrary unfairness of existence. But most vividly, I remember making a vow. I told her I would return after my graduation.

In my mind’s eye, I had visualized walking back into that hospital enveloped in my graduation regalia, carrying whatever gleaming medal or distinction I had earned from years of sacrifice. I didn’t want it to keep, to display on a mantle, or to flaunt on the internet. I wanted to drape it around her small neck. Even if only for a fleeting few seconds. Just long enough to capture a photograph. Long enough to hear her infectious laugh. Long enough to make her realize she was a protagonist in someone else’s story.

It was never actually about the recognition, not in the way people assume. That medal was intended to be an offering. A tangible symbol. A thank you.

Then graduation arrived.

There was no medal. No distinction. No special commendation. Just my name, dissolving into a sea of hundreds of other graduates. I would be a liar if I claimed it did not sting.

It did.

It hurt. For a long time, I kept replaying how close I actually was. It’s crazy how a single grade can completely rewrite your path.

Isang grado na lang.

By the devastation that years of unrelenting grit can be erased by a space next to your printed name. But grief is a peculiar, brilliant teacher of perspective. The longer I sat inside that disappointment, the more the realization crystallized: the promise was never actually about a piece of metal.

The promise was about returning. The promise was a silent oath refusing to mutate into the kind of healthcare provider who ceases to see the breathing human beings obscured behind the laboratory requests, the hospital ID numbers, and the clinical charts. But life has a way of reminding us that not every promise gets fulfilled in the way we imagine.

A few days after graduation, I returned to Cotabato. Part of me was excited. I had been thinking about Zenara for months. Through examinations, internships, graduation rehearsals, and the ceremony itself, I carried the thought that I would see her again soon.

I was late.

By the time I came back, Zenara had already passed away. I cried the whole night. Nobody prepares you for a sentence like that. One moment, a person occupies a corner of your future. Next, they exist only in your memory. I do not talk about it often. I still do not know how. For a long time, I thought the defining loss of my graduation would be the Latin honors I never received. I thought that was the wound I would carry into the years ahead. Then I learned that Zenara was gone.

Strange how grief rearranges priorities.

Decades from now, absolutely no one will remember if I graduated with honors. A vanishingly small number of people will recall my GPA. Even fewer will care about the distinctions I did or did not secure.

But I hope to Allah, I remember Zenara.

I hope I remember the children whose youth evaporated within the walls of hospital wards. I hope I remember the mothers contorted in sleep on rigid plastic chairs beside metal beds. I hope I remember the father standing in corners trying to figure out how to pay the next hospital bill. I hope I remember the patients who demonstrated that courage rarely resembles cinematic greatness. More often, courage looks like holding out your arm for yet another blood extraction.

Above everything, I hope I remember the purest reason I sought to enter medicine in the first place. Because somewhere in the wreckage and the healing, I discovered that true success is entirely unconcerned with what dangles around our necks. The world trains us to fixate on the stage. To stare into the blinding spotlight. To revere the individuals standing victoriously at the summit.

Yet, the most transformative lessons I have ever absorbed were taught by those who were never invited to stand on that stage to begin with. The child waiting patiently in the ward. The mother weeping in prayer beside the bed. The father emptying the final, crumpled bills from his wallet. The student who clawed their way out of a semester alive. The graduate whose ultimate achievement was simply surviving long enough to wear the toga.

For the majority of my life, I operated under the delusion that the goal was to reach the front row. To stand exactly where the world could witness you. To forge yourself into a creature worthy of standing ovations.

I know so much better now.

Humanity does not dwell in the spotlight. It dwells in the hospital corridors, the suffocating heat of crowded jeepneys, the cramped confines of small apartments, the agonizing stretches of sleepless nights, of unanswered prayers, and the acts of valor that will never be immortalized on a piece of paper.

It lives among the overlooked. The people waging invisible wars. The people exhausting their souls simply to survive. The people anchoring the absolute bottom of the pyramid. And perhaps, all this time, that was precisely where Allah had been urging me to look.

The last row.