What to Do with a Failing Body and a Deteriorating Mind?

Twenty-five, a quarter, an expectation—why do some numbers carry more meaning than others?

Is 25 like Icarus, daring and intoxicated with ambition, desiring the heavens? Or is 25 more like Hamlet, self-aware, yet remaining confused and suspended, unable to distinguish what is certain in this world full of uncertainty? Or is it possible that 25 is both, the gray area between two contrasting personalities? Can we even identify 25 to begin with, and why is it even mythologized? Overwhelmed and disoriented, one is forced to ask: should one seek comfort or a longing unmet?

Though never expressed in complete sentences and quite direct, the body speaks first. It articulates itself through pain in many forms—a stomach heavily reliant on omeprazole, unexplained fatigue, eyes wet with unshed tears, an insistent thumping in the chest, and breaths arriving faster than one can catch them. And at times, the body squeezes itself, holding so tightly that the hand loses its grip.

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However, none of these can be healed without first treating the condition from which they arise. And while the mind tries to recuperate, reorganize, and fight its way back, the body cannot help but yield unconditionally. The body-mind dichotomy fractures in an internal struggle: every plea from the mind exacts a toll from a body already too weary to answer.

Perhaps 25 is, cruelly, a juxtaposition of endless desire and shrinking capacity. The paradox between expected ascent, the growth that youth is presumed to yield, and the language of decline that lies in how one is forced to live in retrospection with the realization that maybe one is merely a big fish in a small pond. How does one reconcile desire, which becomes humiliating as it begins to consume the image and perception one has of oneself, with a shrinking capacity that deprives one of the strength to pursue it? When forced to pause, is this so-called “rest” an act of resilience or an admission of resignation?

It may be that 25 comes in the guise of a Pyrrhic victory—marching in pomp across scorched Earth. Movement exhausts; stillness incriminates. Agency sinks into limbo, not of despair but of zugzwang: compelled to move, though every turn exacts a litany of concessions. And yet, the crusader within the self persists—to salvage what remains from a kingdom divided between the body’s surrender and the mind’s refusal. Amid the war of attrition, agency reasserts itself through its most primitive impulse: to speak the language of onwardness—dragging the tired self forward through the mind’s deterioration, taming the ego’s demand for glory while exalting the very fact of existence.

The absurdity of asking a broken person what to do with a failing body and a deteriorating mind is to mistake survival for understanding. The question persists not because an answer is presumed to be held, ready to be drawn on a whim, but because leaving it unasked permits brokenness to answer in one’s stead. The answer may never restore the body nor rescue the mind. To ask may restore agency: the capacity not merely to endure, but to choose, to act, and to heal even the worst of wounds; it may ennoble by insisting that the flame of moral ascent still burns. The question rightly asks: will the broken surrender the better parts of themselves that brokenness has failed to claim?

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Troylan John Calvario,

Quezon City, Philippines

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