I have been trying to write the About Page for this site for two weeks and every version makes me want to delete the whole thing and go work in a bank (nothing against banks). The first draft opened with “welcome to my little corner of the internet.” I typed it, looked at it, and felt the full-body cringe of catching yourself doing the thing you swore you’d never do (again). It’s 2026. It wasn’t even good in 2010. I deleted it.
Second draft. Tried “I’m so glad you’re here!”, which, glad you’re here doing what? Reading the page where I explain the pages? I’m not a host at a boutique hotel. There’s no welcome drink. If anything you’ve wandered into my actual brain and I should be apologizing. Deleted.
Third draft, I got ambitious and wrote something about “living intentionally” and “being present” and I genuinely could not finish the sentence because I do not live intentionally, though I do try very hard. I bought planners in January that I used only until maybe March 9th (for the record, it’s now May 30). I forget to eat when I’m hyperfocused and wonder why I’m shaking and dizzy by 6pm.
Here’s the problem I kept running into, and I think it’s the actual point, so I’m going to stop chacha-ing and just write it down and press Publish:
Every About Page move I reached for was a move designed to make you trust me faster. Welcome you warmly. Establish my credentials. Tell you what you’ll get out of being here, in a tidy list, so you can decide efficiently whether I’m worth your time. And every single one of those moves is the thing this site exists to not do.
The whole reason I started writing here is that I got tired of content that performs certainty it doesn’t have. The confident roundup. The five lessons from someone’s burnout. The person who has Figured It OutTM, available now in their newsletter.
I have not figured it out. That’s not modesty, it’s just the reality of things. I’m a Filipino woman in my 30s with ADHD, dogs and cats to fill a farm, more fountain pens and stationery than I can justify, and a running suspicion that being an adult is not a phase you complete but a thing you keep doing, badly, just with more money. Hopefully.
An about page that promised you anything more confident than that would be lying, and the lie would be the first thing you read, which is a bad foundation for a site whose entire premise is that I’m telling you the truth.
Anyway!
The site is called A Well Spent Life, where well means: by your own measure. Not necessarily (just?) spending less. Not exactly spending “wisely” by some grid of aspirational Sundays, either. It’s more about the harder question: are the tradeoffs you’re making the ones you’d actually make again, for the life you actually want? I write about travel and money and adulting and the tech industry I work in and the texture of ordinary days in Manila, and underneath all of it is the same math:
This cost me something. Would I pay it again? Yes or no.
When the answer’s yes, it was well spent, even if someone else might say otherwise.
And the thing I won’t do is tell you what your answer should be. I genuinely don’t know what’s well spent for you. I know someone who’d blow a week’s food budget on a single concert and ride the high for a year. I also know someone else who’d think that was insane and yet spend the same money flying abroad to enjoy a hotel room they never leave. No one’s better than the other here. They’re both right because they each knew what they’re spending on. And I don’t just mean the ticket or the hotel room. What it was for.
The only wrong move is not doing the math at all, just absorbing what a feed, or your family, or society tells you a good life looks like, and wearing it like it’s yours.
What you’ll actually find here is a person figuring it out in public, who has been figuring it out since she was 16 and has slowly accepted that’s just the permanent condition. Some posts are useful like how I actually save money in a country that doesn’t make it easy, what I learned booking a solo trip, the tech stuff I can explain because I work in it. And them some posts are just me, at 1am, working something out with no promise of neatly-packaged takeaways at the end. I don’t always know which kind I’m writing until I’m done.
That’s it. That’s the welcome I couldn’t write. The tab where I’d typed “Thank you for joining our community” is still open, three tabs to the left, and I’m going to close it now without saving.
