What “Busy Season” Really Means When It Never Ends
The message came in at 11:47 p.m., three minutes before Marielle finally fell asleep. Need this deck by 6am, client moved the call up. Sorry for the late notice!!!
Three exclamation points from Ricky. That was always the tell. Calm bosses used one, if any. Ricky only reached for three when he already knew the ask was unreasonable and wanted the enthusiasm to cover for it.
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Marielle sat up in the dark of her studio apartment in Makati, the aircon rattling against the Manila heat that never really left even at midnight.
Her phone screen lit up her ceiling. She had been at her desk on Ayala Avenue until eight that evening, had eaten a late dinner of sinigang from the carinderia downstairs standing up because her back hurt from the chair, and now here was another night with maybe three hours of sleep ahead of her.
She typed okay, on it because that was the only sentence that ever got her anywhere in that office. Not I already left. Not this could have waited until morning. Just okay, on it, the same three words she had been saying since she started at the agency two years ago, back when she still believed hustle was a personality trait and not a symptom.
By 5:40 a.m. the deck was done. Twenty-two slides, three of them redone twice because Ricky had sent voice notes at 2 a.m. changing the numbers on slide fourteen, the kind of voice notes where you could hear him eating something crunchy in the background like the fate of the client relationship wasn’t currently resting on a twenty-six-year-old woman’s ability to function on no sleep.
The call happened. It went fine. Client didn’t notice a thing, because clients never do. That’s the part nobody tells you about work-life balance when you’re twenty-two and hungry and still figuring out career growth tips from LinkedIn posts written by people who’ve never had to choose between rent and a decent lunch. The system is built so the exhaustion is invisible from the outside. Only the output matters. The person making the output disappears into it.
At 9 a.m., Ricky walked past her desk holding a coffee from the place downstairs, the good one, not instant. Great work on that deck, ha! he said, already looking at his phone. You’re really becoming one of my go-to people.
Marielle smiled the way you smile when someone hands you a compliment shaped exactly like the thing that is destroying you.
Her officemate Jhun, who sat two desks over and had been at the agency four years longer and therefore had achieved a kind of tired, permanent calm that Marielle both admired and feared becoming, rolled his chair over once Ricky disappeared into his glass office.
“Go-to person,” he repeated, italicizing it with his voice the way you do with a phrase that’s become a private joke between people who’ve survived the same thing. You know what that means, right? It means you’re the one who says yes.
I don’t say yes, Marielle said. I say okay, on it. Different thing.
Same thing, Jhun said, and went back to his monitor.
She thought about that for the rest of the week, in the gaps between meetings, on the jeepney home, in the two-minute window each night before her eyes gave out and she had to put the phone down.
She thought about the TikTok she’d seen the week before, one of those five-second clips with a caption underneath, quiet quitting is just called having boundaries now, ninety thousand comments, half of them from people who clearly still couldn’t do it either.
She had watched it, laughed, sent it to Jhun, and then opened her laptop again at nine that same night to finish a report nobody would remember by Friday.
There is a version of this story where Marielle finally sends the message she drafts in her head every single night, the one that says I’m not doing this anymore, I need actual boundaries, I need you to respect my time, and hits send, and something changes.
There’s a version where she doesn’t, where the deck gets done and the client stays happy and two years become five and one day she wakes up thirty-four and can’t remember the last time she read a whole book or called her mother back on the first ring.
What actually happened is smaller and messier than either of those, the way real weeks usually are.
On Thursday, her mother called from Cebu, the kind of call that comes with no warning and just a voice saying anak, are you eating well?, and Marielle, mid-deck, on her third cup of coffee, said yes po, a lie so automatic it barely registered as one. Her mother, who had raised four kids on a nurse’s salary and understood something about survival that no career blog could ever teach, said, quietly, you sound tired, iha.
I’m okay, Marielle said. Just busy season.
It’s always busy season with you, her mother said, and there was no anger in it, just something closer to grief, the kind a parent carries watching their kid repeat a pattern they can see clearly from the outside and the kid can’t see at all from the inside.
Marielle didn’t have an answer for that. She said she had to go, there was a meeting, and there was, there always was, and she hung up and looked at the blinking cursor on slide nine and felt something crack open in her chest that she didn’t have time to examine.
That Friday, Ricky sent another message at 10:15 p.m. Quick one, need the revised timeline before tomorrow, should only take 20 mins, sorry again!!
Marielle looked at her phone for a long time. The cursor blinked on the group chat where the message sat, unanswered, the three dots that mean someone is typing appearing and disappearing on her side twice, three times, four.
She thought about her mother’s voice. She thought about Jhun rolling his chair over with that tired little laugh. She thought about the deck, the client, the twenty-two slides, the version of herself two years ago who thought this was just what your twenties were supposed to feel like.
She put the phone face down on the kitchen counter and walked into the shower, letting the water run longer than usual, long enough that by the time she came out, fingers pruned, the apartment quiet except for the hum of the fridge, the message was still sitting there unanswered, and for the first time in two years, that felt less like something she had failed to do, and more like something she had decided.
