It was the Best of Times, it was the Stressed of Times

I cannot believe it’s come to this. You, sitting there reading my article. Me doing line after line of espresso to try and get that week’s issue done on time. Things have been the epitome of insanity at The Exponent since I became culture editor, and I’m not sure how to feel about it. On one hand, I got to write some of the best jokes I’ve ever written for this paper. On the other, I had stress niggling itself into the gray matter of my brain each week trying to get things in on time. I was happy and miserable. Small things piled up and so did my anxieties.

There was one thing that probably made me survive school, and it wasn’t the constant crushing weight of anxiety that held me together like plastic wrap around a gingerbread house: the student mental health facilities. The greatest thing that a student could take advantage of came in the shape of people who were paid to sit down and listen to my problems. If there is one thing I could tell every student on this campus, it would be to take advantage of these free facilities. Everyone can benefit from therapy — just because professors are getting you down doesn’t mean you can’t break your focus to try and be better for yourself once in a while.

If there’s one thing I wish I could have done for the newspaper, it would be correcting the fact that we haven’t printed a single profanity, and that’s a damn shame. With freedom of the press should also come the freedom to say what you mean, regardless of language. If people get too bogged down in the semantics, they won’t get to say what they want to talk about, and nobody will learn anything if they are too hung up on how they should be said. An argument always has two sides, and if one side says that the other cannot speak the way they want to, then walls are built around them.

Finally, we need to combat hate with love. Who has ever been told that they are loved in an angry tone and felt that it was real? Not me.