Stories

I just came from my LitCritters meeting when I realized that most of the stories we took up were sad. They dealt with isolation from the family, and alienation from the world.

The beautiful works of Gregorio Brilliantes in "Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro" and Jaime An Lim in "The Axolotl Colony" were depressing but forgivable, mainly because I could relate to them. I always liked sad stories. But that morning weighed on my shoulders, and at the back of my mind, I kept coming back to them, over and over again.

Perhaps I'm feeling this way because I am writing for the last issue. If anyone asks, I can only say everything we did was worth it. Admittedly there were times when I just wanted to stay in bed when the alarm went off for my Tuesday morning consultations with Ma'am Gina. But the paper was our baby. We fussed over it; we prioritized it.

I entered tWS back in 2003 as an associate editor, after getting the guts to apply as a feature writer. I was so hesitant then, after my first papers in BC 12 got low grades from Dr. Dale Law. When I started working, I didn't expect the weekly grind.

tWS has always been hard work. As an editor-in-chief now, there is a lot to be said about the responsibility to our publishers (the students) and to the staff. I totally agree with former editor-in-chief Mark Trayvilla when he said that Weekly was work that you had to love in order to appreciate its pressures.

I'd like to believe that this year, we did our best to set a standard for the paper that the next staff would maintain and surpass. I'd like to believe that we somehow made a difference in student life. It's one year at a time, I tell myself. The progressive campus paper envisioned by this campus paper 103 years ago will materialize.

Now, working in close proximity with 20 people, week in, week out, caused a lot of stress. Mind you, I say this now with fondness. But there was honestly a time when I found myself morphing into someone I never thought I would be: too unemotional to deal with other people's problems, too proud to admit mistakes. The fact that I am letting the whole Silliman read this means we have resolved it, and come to terms with it. But it was a turning point in my life, and I find it too universal a lesson to not share.

I abused my staff then, to be particular my editors, because I abused myself as well. Some might not be able to relate to this, but if you know what I mean, you know what I mean. I was dead set on perfection that I focused more on the person's output (on whether it passed our, my, standards) rather than on the person him/herself.

I occasionally scrapped articles, without explaining why, because I thought it was obvious they were trivial. I once asked an editor, "Are you sure you edited this?" without considering the vast improvement already made from the first draft. I rolled my eyes at the slightest indication of what I deemed incompetencies. We were good on the outside, but it could only carry us so far.

We have had a lot of successes this year like the website and regular circulation schedules. We beat deadlines. We had parties. We watched movies. We made friends. But it's the major heartbreaking and reawakening stories that people remember, and I remember this one.

If it hadn't been for the Weekly, I wouldn't have learned lessons I would learn later in life to doubly disastrous results. Like on compromise, priorities, discipline, commitment. The office was our collective laboratory of sorts, with our experiments on human limits and capabilities tested on ourselves.

With this last issue, we would move on and all we would have are memories of a staff that, despite diversity of orientation or attitude, complimented each other. That makes me sad, but in a way, grateful. I couldn't have imagined my year otherwise.