There is a certain type of quiet that settles over a state university when the end of the academic calendar draws near.
While it is easy to notice in the classrooms, it unfolds slowly in the faculty room. My colleagues begin packing up their desks, decluttering their drawers, and counting the days leading to the break. By the final week of classes, everyone is laser-focused on one thing—the finish line. I hear it in the way they talk about their upcoming trips, the joy of not having to get up early, and the relief of doing absolutely nothing.
I nod along and grin. However, while they rejoice over the long-awaited stillness, I quietly prepare for it.
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I am afraid this might make me sound like a civil service pick-me, but I am the type to stay behind and accomplish tasks after five in the afternoon as my colleagues pack their bags and go home. I would work on tasks assigned by our immediate supervisor, hold meetings with student journalists under my care, or review their work. I revel in my busyness.
My fellow employees took notice of this pattern over time. They see me staying in the office long after the school halls and campus streets have emptied. I became the person to check whether you left something in the office or to confirm if everything has been unplugged.
But I also heard “pa-hero,” “pabibo,” “tagapagmana,” and more thrown in the same sentence as my name. At first, I did not give it much thought. I let people think I was trying to win over the school administration, or that I have this savior complex by trying to carry everything on my back.
Eventually, however, I took the time to pause and reflect on the space between others’ perception and my reality. Those extra hours spent working were not my bid for any recognition. They were my anesthesia.
It was the difference between how we view breaks. For others, vacation means rest, while for me, it is a loss of structure. My mind inevitably starts racing without loads of tasks to complete. The idleness at the end of the academic year allows the shadows in my head to take up more space.
This compulsion to stay restless did not begin at the university. It passed through it. It started years ago. Long before I started teaching, I learned that quiet could be as detrimental as chaos.
I know this because I pray with my eyes open. I always have. Staring into nothing allows me to focus far better than seeing nothing. No one ever told me I should not, so I went with it.
But about eight years ago, on my 20th birthday, I knelt in the quiet pews of then St. Dominic Parish Church (now Minor Basilica of St. Dominic) and made the mistake of closing them in my bid to pray as “fervently” as other people would. In a moment, a vision of my mother popped into my head, smiling, before abruptly fading out to black.
Terrified, I opened my eyes and hoped it meant nothing. However, four days later, she suffered a cardiac arrest due to hypertension and passed away the day after.
My understanding of quiet was altered by her death. Every bit of silence felt like an omen, hinting that the fading black void was coming back. Grief became a silent paranoia.
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic locked everyone inside their homes, stillness trapped me in my own head completely. The only way I could fall asleep was to force my mind to simply collapse from exhaustion. Now, as I watch the pandemic loosen its grip while the world recovers, I can still feel its fingers wrapped around parts of me that are yet to heal.
We all respond to grief differently and how we bear the brunt varies. From where my colleagues stand, they may see a “pa-hero,” “pabibo,” or “tagapagmana.” From where my family stands, I am sacrificing my rest for a job that could replace me in an instant. And from where I sit now, at my desk long after everyone has gone home, I sense the void between who I was and who I have become. It is in this space that I see how the extra hours I spend at work and my resistance to rest reveal the true cost of survival. Somewhere between my old wounds and my current habits, I have realized how deeply my coping mechanism had taken root.
What started off as a tragedy has become a lens through which I look at my very existence. It is why I keep working long after the work is done or why I fear the idleness when there is nothing left to accomplish. Work has ceased to be mere work. It has become the sound that keeps silence at bay.
From a distance, it is easy to mistake this for heroics in the service of the university I am currently employed in. The truth, however, is far less noble.
I am well aware that the university will continue to exist with or without me. It does not need saving.
