Letterman Blues
It's all about the education.
I feel like I’ve already told the conventional story of my college life ad nauseam whenever I’m introducing myself to people. It’s gotten to the point where I’d have a tried and tested script ready that promptly encapsulates this stage of my life. It’s the same set of stories that different people have heard: peers, acquaintances, relatives, hiring managers, co-workers, my barber whenever he offers a little chitchat while he’s spraying my hair down. The only aspect that I have to calibrate is the formality to which I tell these stories, because I didn’t want to make a job interview feel like a press conference, nor a water cooler conversation feel like a therapy session.
This time around, I want to try out a different approach. I felt like a newer, more poetic viewpoint not only does the medium justice, but also my collegiate phase. They say college is the best four years of your life. I don’t necessarily disagree with that notion, but I feel that is too simplistic of a superlative to describe a phase that had been so transformative, not only in a positive sense, but also in a negative sense. Especially the latter. Hear me out!
For my college retrospective, I want to talk about the difference between regret and hinayang.
Semantically, I might already be going off the wrong foot. They could very well be the English-Tagalog equivalents of each other, but alas, I’m no linguist. While it could be said that they’re tightly coupled in terms of meaning, in my dictionary, I see a singular yet significant difference between the two words. A difference so significant that that alone can encapsulate my thoughts about college.
I have many regrets, which is something that’s not necessarily exclusive to my college life. It’s omnipresent, in fact. To regret something can go two ways: you either regret doing it, or not doing it. This eventually launches the question of “what if I did/didn’t do the thing?”. The double-edged nature of remorse increases the probability of it happening twofold, to which I’ve encountered many a situation where I felt either one of the two edges.
Why didn’t I clock in more hours to study for this exam? Why did I ever think that taking this professor was a good idea? Why didn’t I attend this org event? Why did I attend this org event?
Regrets came in at a drastic pace from both ends during college that I’ve grown desensitized to its effects. This was the result of me juggling multiple personas that I had to maintain for different classes, friend groups, extracurriculars, and more sub-communities prevalent in University. From how I viewed it, the aftermath of my collegiate regret would usually last only a couple days, tops, and it’s on to the next one.
I’m a firm believer of Tagalog being one of the more beautiful languages in our world. Historical lineage aside, what certain Tagalog words have come to carry the intent of exacerbating emotion to get a point across, much like you run-out-of-the-mill Filipino. Hinayang is one of such words.
I first heard of hinayang when I lost my first ever spelling bee in grade school. After destroying the hopes and dreams of other spellers en route to the final round, I squandered it all away when I gave the word “pavilion” an extra “L”. “Nakakahinayang!,” was the second word of that day, one that I constantly heard from teachers and relatives alike supporting my bid while I was still trying to process the horror of misspelling a word in front of the student body.
I ended up getting over that mishap quickly for obvious reasons, but the word hinayang stuck like glue. Years later, I realize that it’s not about what I did or didn’t do, that’s what regret’s for. Hinayang, on the other hand, transcends the decision-making agony that begets regret and hinges on what I could have done more in the position of leverage that I was in. It launches the question of “why didn’t I do more?”.
Prolonged instances of hinayang earmarked my college life. For how stressful college was, there were a lot of occasions wherein the actions that I took actually paid off. There were various points in time where I thought I had life figured out and was dead set for success; the type of college life that I would only see on brochures for the entrance exam seemed like it was coming into fruition. The connections, the increased responsibilities in extracurricular organizations, the academic-life balance: at one point, it felt like I had all of them at the palm of my hand.
But just like how I felt when hundreds of eyes were peering at me trying to picture what combination of letters made sense for “pavilion”, I became overwhelmed with pressure and shriveled under the limelight. Whimpers. The fact is, you don’t feel regret nor hinayang in the moment, but you will almost always feel the sting afterwards. It just so happens that the latter carries more weight, mostly because of the intensity of the question “what could have been?” given that you were oh, so close to unraveling the answers to that. As Filipinos would exclaim, “sayang, nandoon ka na ‘eh!”.
Still, I don’t want to end my college retrospective on a melancholic note. That wouldn’t do the four transformative years any justice, especially considering the amount of growth it took to reach these realizations. For all the great people, good grades, lunch gatherings, Discord calls, first experiences, alcohol-driven nights, coffee-driven mornings, and everything in between, the one element that encapsulates my gratitude for college life was growth.
The truth is, while there’s nine other versions of how this college life could have possibly panned out, I couldn’t feel any form of regret nor hinayang for those, because they’re the road I never travelled in the first place. What is certain is that there’s a lot of things that I can look back on and be grateful for in the road that I did, and a lot of things that I can learn from as I step out of the pristine white halls of University, however labyrinthine it was. Take that for translation.