It’s Time
Entering college as a freshman can be surreal. It hasn’t been half a year since you were a high school senior, ruling the roost of whatever school you’ve called home for these past four years. And now you’re just another wide-eyed freshman in an eight-thousand-strong sea of people that’s new and wondrous and way too big. It’s a fresh start, sure, but sometimes, you maybe wish it weren’t quite so fresh because you’ve now got no idea where to begin.
And then there are all these big names on campus. You know the type—the legends, the superstars, the ones who do everything and seem like they have it all figured out. When I was a freshman, it was people like Gio Tingson, our Sanggunian President who worked with the Student Councils’ Alliance of the Philippines, and Chris Tiu, a basketball player for the Ateneo Blue Eagles who was also a double-major in BS ME and BSM AMF. You look at these people, and you know you’re never going to figure out how they got to where they are, and so the idea of trying to make the most of your own college life starts to look a little more intimidating.
Hence the question—just what are you planning on doing with the next four years?
It is at this point that I feel I owe any freshmen out there a bit of an apology. Four years after my OrSem, I find myself seemingly becoming that same kind of person I thought I’d never be. People actually know who I am, or at least what I do. Under duress, torture, or the influence of alcohol, I will sometimes even admit that I’ve managed to make a reputation for myself.
I don’t really believe any of this, of course. In my head, I’m still this awkward kid from the Ateneo High School who stumbled his way into a few great opportunities, was asked to do amazing work with amazing people, and got some fancy titles out of it. One thing led to another, but I’m really just this guy, you know? I’m this guy who asked himself who he was and kept on asking, like any other freshman, and after four years of searching and struggling came up with this working definition:
I’m AJ Elicaño, 5 BFA Creative Writing/AB Interdisciplinary Studies. I’m the President of WriterSkill, the Secretary-General of the Sanggunian, and the VP for Secretariat of IgnITE. I have a part-time job in the Ateneo Grade School, work with the League of Independent Organizations, and spent this past summer teaching with Alay Ni Ignacio. I write and submit to literary publications regularly, maintain decent grades, and still have time for naps, comics, and something resembling a social life.
And I have no idea what I am doing.
Living Louder
Choosing an arts course means dealing with a lot of questions. “Will you learn anything useful?” “Are you going to get a job?” “Why didn’t you pick something practical?” And we cope in many ways—laughing it off, defending what we love to do, shrugging and saying, “Trip ko lang.”
Me, I wanted to prove them all wrong—my father who thought that BFA CW could only lead to a job as a spin doctor, my friends who joked that I’d never make any money, my high school class of future doctors and businessmen who thought I was “too smart” for the School of Humanities. I told a councilor that I “wanted to do something great for SOH,” even though I had no idea what that might be, because I loved it and was sick of feeling like both it and I were perpetually under siege.
So when I got asked to run for student council, as a Central Board Representative for my SOH batchmates, it was that desire, weighing against all common sense and reason, that drove me to give it a shot. I’d never been a student leader, but if I could fight to get the School of Humanities the respect and the voice it deserved, then why the hell not?
Inexplicably, I won that election. And over the next three years, everything else fell into place like cascading dominoes. I chose to work with independent orgs in Sanggu, because all the SOH orgs were unaccredited, and from there I helped form the League of Independent Organizations. I won the next election, and the next, and the next. I grew to realize that Sanggu needed to focus more on student empowerment, and so I left my old political party and helped found IgnITE, the Ignatian Initiative for Transformative Empowerment.
And I met the founders of WriterSkill. During my first run, they’d been unknown Creative Writing juniors who wanted to create a place where anyone could write, express themselves, and learn to get better. They weren’t perfect, but they had a vision, one that resonated with me. Over the years, the org became my home in college, my insane, geeky, eternally accepting family of writers—many of whom who weren’t even in SOH, let alone CW—and it was my love for it that pushed me to run for President, even as my unopposed campaign for Sanggu Secretary-General was wrapping up.
Looking back, it all seems a little incredible, the road I’ve walked to get to where I am. And it may seem unbelievable to think that I might have done all this without having somehow figured my life out in a way that no normal person could stumble upon. A friend once told me that I had to have a plan, because otherwise, the amount of work I was doing was nothing short of foolhardy.
Wordplay
The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur says that every meaningful action can be read as text. This includes the act of writing, yes, but also the act of living, and of trying to determine who you are. To live your life and shape your identity is to tell your story, and living sincerely means making sure that the story is well-written. It means being consistent, it means knowing what you’re doing, it means Having A Plan and it means Sticking To It.
Conversely, the American writer Joan Didion, in her essay “The White Album,” says this of storytelling:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which…. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Where Ricoeur sees stories as the way to ensure that we lead ordered, meaningful lives, Didion sees them as life preservers, keeping our heads above water in lives that are by nature disordered and absurd. This, then, is the question which they both pose any writer:
Is your story about making your life, or about surviving it?
Whomever you believe, though, one thing on which Ricoeur and Didion would agree is this: “you” matter. Storytelling, whether you have a plan or not, whether you write to create or simply to endure, depends upon knowing who you are and what matters to you—or at least upon being willing to ask the question, and to keep asking it. The storyteller who cares about who he is will care about what kind of story he wants to tell; the storyteller for whom it does not matter will likewise tell stories that do not matter, and where’s the point in that?
Here I Am Alive
When people ask me how I do the things I do, I can never come up with a satisfactory answer. I tell them I’m good at cramming, I tell them I rely on great teams, I tell them I’m just lucky.
When I’m asked why, though, the answers come more easily. I’m passionate about writing, about stories that get people thinking. I want to give people the tools they need to make things happen. I want to help people believe in themselves, all the artists and nerds and outcasts who are told to shut up, stand in single file, and stop daydreaming about changing the world.
My college life has followed no script, no plan, no single guiding principle, except for this: what I care about. Every choice, every title and commitment, everything from taking Creative Writing to trying to be both an org president and a Sanggu officer at the same time, has come about because I asked myself something.
“What do you love?”
That’s it. No master scheme, no grand design for greatness, just someone trying to make a meaningful story out of the cascading domino chaos of his college life. I started out as a confused freshman who knew nothing except what he cared about and what he wanted to do, and so I began there, with nothing else. Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ says that nothing is more practical than finding love—“fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.” So I took a chance on what I loved, on writing and empowerment and service and belief, and it is that that decided everything for me.
I’m AJ Elicaño, supersenior double-major, org president, Sanggu officer, political party VP, part-time teacher, writer, nerd, student, friend—and I’m also just this guy, one out of eight thousand fellow Ateneans, the same guy who wanted to do something good without having the slightest idea of how to do it. And it is because of being that guy, not in spite of it, that I am everything else.
Any story worth telling begins in chaos—the darkness before Genesis, the fire of the Big Bang, the disorientation of freshman year. It is in that nothingness, in not having even the slightest clue, that you most clearly remember what you love. And from there, you can begin to create, to endure, to put one foot in front of the other on the road that will lead you to a life that you’ll find meaningful.
Welcome to the beginning, freshmen. You probably have no idea what you’re doing, and that’s okay. Go write your story.
No comments:
Post a Comment