If you’ve somehow been on the wrong side of the internet and haven’t heard of Substack yet, then welcome! You’re in for a treat. Think of it as X but for personal essays and blog posts—or, if you will, like elongated and more eloquent exposition of one’s thoughts and feelings. For Filipino creative writers, it’s where they can write about everything—from deeply personal experiences to random shower thoughts, usually with a casual, low-pressure style.

On Substack, you’ll find real stories with thought-provoking ideas, polished essays, and pieces that embrace conversational grammar, relaxed punctuation, and the little quirks that make each writer’s voice uniquely theirs. Substack gives everyone a platform to write and build an audience. You don’t have to seek out an internship with a media company or get published by a big website to have people read your work (wink wink).

So if you’re in the mood for something personal and relatable, here are 8 pieces by Filipino writers for you to peruse on Substack!

“being an ambitious breadwinner in the philippines feels like a sin”

As the title suggests, this essay explores the costs of being a breadwinner, especially in a third-world country like the Philippines. We know Filipinos tend to put others before themselves, but what happens when a simple purchase—something small to bring joy to your life—turns into a spiral of how that money could’ve been better spent?

We often don’t realize how much breadwinners sacrifice—how much of their own happiness, their own lives, until they just become a shell of the person they were, until they become their title of the breadwinner and only that.

“the most expensive thing i own is guilt because i’m a financially aware kid”

This piece tackles the toll growing up financially aware takes on children—and no matter how different your situation turns out to be, how financially stable, it lingers and lasts. It’s a part of you.

Mirroring the essay on breadwinners, this piece talks about why many Filipinos find it so hard to spend on themselves but so easy to spend on others, with the takeaway that hard work deserves something in return, because what’s the point of life if you can’t enjoy it?

“Grief Served Warm”

This essay tells the story of a couple brought together by their shared love of food, and how that same love becomes a way of holding on after one of them falls ill and passes away. It’s a tender reflection on grief and the small ways it creeps up on us—sometimes in the quietest moments or the most ordinary things and sometimes, simply, through a warm bowl of noodles.

“Confession of a No-Lover-Since-Birth: What Could Have Been”

I admit that I’ve long since believed that I’m destined for a great love—and yet, time after time again, reality has shown me I’m wrong. It’s like I’m grieving a life I never had, one that was never mine to begin with—and it feels so lonely, being lonely. But the author of this essay showed me that I am certainly not the only one who’s been waiting for something that very well may never come.

“Confession of a No-Lover-Since-Birth” is a must-read for those who have never had a serious partner before, those who have never experienced love in its entirety—yet is still holding out hope it’s coming, anyway.

“jeepney fare adjustments and other unspoken griefs”

Go to school, study hard, get a job. That was the wisdom imparted to us by every adult when we were young. We were taught that, if you do well, you’ll be set for life. And yet, that security we were promised is slowly slipping out of our grasp, because the world is changing.

And as someone who’s currently in her last semester of college, chasing every internship opportunity possible just to bring some of that security back, that realization hit hard.

But, as the author points out, maybe we can find comfort in coexisting with everyone else who carries that burden. Maybe, through small acts of kindness, that burden feels a little less heavy.

“lumpia theory: why filipinos never take the final piece”

For the longest time, Filipinos have left the final piece of food on any plate, because who are you to take the last one? Nakakahiya.

This piece delves deeper into that phenomenon, about how it stems from a place of politeness, something that quickly disappears when thrust into the real world, when it’s every man for himself.

“bakit hindi ako kasing talino nila?”

It’s human nature to compare ourselves to other people: I’m smarter than him, she’s prettier than me, they’re cooler than us. But who are we when we strip away the labels we’ve given ourselves and the ones others have given us? Who are we when there’s no one left to compare ourselves to?

“If Heaven Were a BPO Company…”

People experience grief in different ways. I get emotional over every Ed Sheeran song about death, because they remind me of my grandmother. Other people, like the author of this article, imagine heaven to be a BPO company. It sounds funny, but beyond the picture of “heaven” this essay lets us imagine, it is a surprisingly tender way of making sense of grief, loss, and what it might mean to be reunited with the people we miss.

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