My father isn’t the number one fan of Journalism as a profession—that I’ve been certain since he dropped me off in front the CAL in Diliman on the day I took the UPCAT.
After all these years, he doesn’t make me forget about his opinion on Journalism either, with his usual comments on the newspaper’s decline in sales, relevance, and even it’s credibility.
But he’s always been keen on reminding me to keep on writing my ideals, maybe in the hopes that I may not forget them.
Why do you even write? I ask myself whenever I had the courage to confront my motivations and goals.
The answer is never because I think I have the talent—because I am certain there are still endless lessons to be learned and countless ways to tell stories, and countless even more so are the stories that are left untold.
Writing has always just been something I was comfortable doing, but the more I do it, the more I realize the complexities of its delivering.
But why do you write, and why do you choose to keep writing? I ask myself whenever I feel stuck in my comfort zone, lacking a dose of ambition that propels most people to achieve greater things, pushing for greater stories.
I still don’t have definite answers, but each time I try to face questions of relevance and worth there are moments—conversations, specifically—that immediately flash before me.
“Now I need to have this article framed so my kids can read it when they learn to,” one of the best photographers in Asia told me after he has read my article.
To this day, nothing compares to the way these words warmed my heart, fanning desires to meet new people to get to know the stories each is well capable of sharing—and making sure that these are told.
“I do not write to win, a writer should never write to impress,” a National Artist told me as I sat across the dining table in his home. “I believe if you’re good enough, you’ll get them eventually.”
And man, I’m never winning an award but all I want to do is keep telling stories.
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