AS THE sun sets and the breeze travels through JSEC on this cool March afternoon, allow me to pay homage to my college story. Hopefully, I get to impart some form of comfort to you as well, wherever you are.

There will be good days

There will be days of a more-good-than-bad nature throughout your life in the Loyola Schools (LS), and these should be treated as blissful—as is the way of things with tired college students. Then, there will be days when you feel absolutely unstoppable, when you float through Red Brick Road, groove along SEC Walk, and become filled with excitement at the sight of your friends in JSEC.

My college life—and I’m willing to bet most of my batchmates’ college journeys also—continues to be characterized by a plethora of people, each with their own unique and colorful identities. From afternoons in the PubRoom with GUIDONeers to the beer and sisig wings that have formed my happiest senior year memories, the vibrancy of college life can undeniably be attributed to the warmth of friends. There have been good days, and these good days are more often than not traced back to my time with those I’ve grown closest to.

These loved ones are those individuals who make everything worthwhile. You’ve failed tests with a few of them. You’ve walked through the sweltering summer heat on campus with some of them. You’ve enjoyed JSEC and Gonzaga food with many of them. And, you’ve gone on joyrides and sanity walks filled with stories and laughter around Ateneo with a couple of them. Then, there’s the handful that you’ve been lucky enough to experience everything with. They’re it, they’re them, and everything’s good.

There will be no other time like this. Enjoy it. Simultaneously, there will be so many other times like this. Cherish every single one of them.

Everything is as it should be.

There will be bad days

There will be days when it feels like the universe is playing one big joke on you. There will be days that are more bad than good, and then there will be days that are just plain awful.

There have been days when all I wanted was to get off campus. There have been times when not even my best friends could cheer me up—and they didn’t have to—anyway, it was never their responsibility to. I know that bad days are to be expected. Bad days are par for the course, and if they never existed, then I would have never really been pushed to figure out the things that truly matter. College is constructed in such a way that we’re afforded more opportunities to make mistakes, to experiment, to live and learn—and a lot of the time things will end up going wrong.

College experiences that go awry are what allow us to make peace with the fact of life that there’s no other way to deal with a bad day than to simply get through it. This is not a message of “everything will get better.” This is a message of “if it were meant to be, it either should have been by now, or it will be later.”

There will be days that don’t make sense

I have become intimately familiar with the in-betweener days, the times when everything just feels normal. Throughout my stay in the LS, there have been so many times someone has asked me how class went, and how a particular meeting, event, or even party was. All my feelings could be summed up in three words: “it was okay.” Responses like this are not for a lack of words to describe how I truly feel, or because my day was secretly bad; it really was just okay.

So often have I thought that I should always feel as if I’m on top of the world and beside myself with joy and excitement, as if that’s the only acceptable way to go through college. Yet, when it comes to actually preparing myself to leave campus, I can see now that the days that don’t make sense are actually much more significant than they initially seem to be.

On these days, do what you want. Go out. Sleep in. Be active in class. Cut class. Have a slow afternoon with friends in Matteo. Visit your org room. Stroll through the SOM Forest. Or, just talk to a loved one in JSEC. On days like these, stop worrying about how you think you should feel; sometimes just being is perfectly okay.