OF ALL THE friends I met in our venerated institution, whether they were from the classroom or a publication’s office, failure is perhaps the one I’ve become most acquainted with. It is a force that is omnipresent, one that always strikes at our nadir, and it was this entity that tempered the idealistic and fiery boy who entered our institution’s walls four years ago.
My batch was the first to experience a physical setup during their freshman year, as our country was still reeling from the aftermath of the pandemic. I fondly remember the panic attacks I’d experience before most of my academic reports and instances of public speaking, due in part to the two-year long isolation.
Eventually, I found myself in The Bedan and had a glance into the person I’d become in the future. It was an experience of a lifetime, putting my talents into something that would make a genuine difference in the university.
Every article I wrote had a facet to be perfected, and constituents to fulfill. Here, I realized just how passionate about something I could be, that I was willing to give myself into something I really wanted. It reached the point that I’d prioritize journalism over academics.
Slowly but surely, I planted the confidence of being superior to everyone who came before, eventually coming to a head during my application for editorship wherein I challenged every practice and tradition of the publication. Every statement had been grounded through my own experiences–I said to myself. On the contrary, it was precisely that hubris that led to the rejection of my prospective editorship, having been dubbed as a “perfectionist” and “dictator” at worst. I was stopped dead in my tracks, questioning everything I thought myself leading to.
As a person who’s usually objective and calculated in everything he does, it was the first time I’ve experienced pain that rattled me to my core. I experienced my greatest failure and lessons, first of which was that I could have been more tactful, perhaps. But as an even more transcendental point of reflection: why did I even choose to become a journalist in the first place? Was I doing it for myself or for others? If I were to subject myself to the same toil, even tenfold, would it have any meaning?
And so I embarked on a quest for service, to find answers to those questions which still ache at the back of my mind to this day. The pain manifested into a record of over 50 articles written in a single year, many of which had sought to call out unjust practices in university athletics and discrepancies in school policies; the foundation of the Res Pvblika: Political Science Journal, the very first student-led online journal in the College of Arts and Sciences; the co-organization of the first rally in San Beda University in years; and the pioneering of blueprints for a college-wide repository which will hopefully be perfected in my absence.
It was an extremely fulfilling endeavor, having sacrificed so much to prove that anything is possible. Perhaps I never moved on from that initial failure, but that is arguably for the best, as to have done so would have been tantamount to silencing all the lessons that I learned.
In the end, I’ve come to realize that these failures are akin to pushing a huge boulder atop a mountain, only to falter at its peak. But the very absurdity of this metaphor is ultimately a litmus test–can we find meaning in this seemingly senseless toil?