THE BLUE EAGLE ISSUE august ‘12
20 $
Under Ateneo’s Blue Feathers Ateneans reveal their secrets.
Find out what they consider private.
04 06 09
The Lost Art of KEEPING SECRETS The Five Stages of "COMING OUT" A Breakdown of the CONFESSIONAL
CONTENTS 03 UNDER ATENEO'S BLUE FEATHERS Editor’s Note
04 THE LOST ART OF KEEPING SECRETS Main Feature
06 THE FIVE STAGES OF COMING OUT Secondary Feature
09 A BREAKDOWN OF THE CONFESSIONAL Hodgepodge
11 PASSION Extra
WARNING: PROCEED WITH CAUTION
BECAUSE THE STAFF IS COOL and we all had our own assignments
august ‘12
AU ARANAS JACKIE FRANCISCO TINTIN LONTOC
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20 $
postcards, lay out, photography
ANYTHING WITHIN THIS MAGAZINE SHOULD NOT CHANGE ANYONE'S PERCEPTION OF STUDENTS FROM ATENEO. THEY MIGHT HAVE JUST MADE THEIR SECRETS UP.
postcards and article postcards, articles, cover
AUGUST 2012
AUGUST 2012 UNDER ATENEO’S BLUE FEATHERS
TINTIN LONTOC Editor
HUSH
“Your secret’s safe with me,” says a closelytrusted confidant as you make a decision you might begin to regret three seconds from the onset. You speak and begin to relieve yourself of that awful feeling — that queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach that’s been waiting to be let out. But something’s not right, because you haven’t relieved yourself at all. In fact, what you’ve now done is expect someone to share the burden with you. So now there are two possible scenarios to expect: that your secret is safe, or it isn’t. Maybe your secret does stay kept but you’ve transformed into something unbecoming in the eyes of your company. Maybe your secret isn’t kept and, well, make of that what you will. Secrets — or the things they can do, rather — are not notoriously fickle; they can make or break a
relationship. There’s a fixation with keeping up appearances now more than ever, with so many avenues for exposure, that makes vulnerability an unappealing prospect. So, who do you tell your secrets to? The idea behind HUSH is exactly that. Primarily a repository, but of altogether a different sort: the secrets are addressed to the people who might, somehow, learn to understand. The secret to this is that by exposing your secret but not yourself, you’ve relieved yourself of the burden but taken the losses out of the equation. In Ateneo de Manila, these secrets range from the petty (“I cheated in my Physics exam”), to the obsessive (“I stalked a teacher”), to the deeply disturbed (“I hate Ateneo”), to the soul-crushing (“I’m afraid of never being able to find love”).
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THE LOST ART OF KEEPING SECRETS What most Ateneans keep private
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BY TINTIN LONTOC
A cartoon made by Peter Steiner for The New Yorker came with the adage, “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” which first made it in print on July 5, 1993. Now it’s a fact that’s given rise to one of the greatest sociological phenomena of the 21’s century — anonymity. Suddenly speaking up isn’t so difficult, with a simple mask giving rise to the same disinhibition the stiffest drink could ever hope to conjure. On the internet, nobody knows you. The risk of mockery for being a little off-kilter is nonexistent. There’s the off chance that the likeminded people come to accept the untempered
AUGUST 2012
There are two kinds of secrets: those you keep from others and we hide from ourselves.
frustrations, fears, longings of an unknown voice. But where there used to be a confidant involved, the audience itself is only potentially there. Are you really accepted, or are you now mocked from afar? What becomes of the confidant now? Is there really still any such thing as keeping secrets when there is no person to expose? Perhaps there isn’t. There’s the irony in that with anonymity comes little pride. Instead of owning up to anything, people have gotten better at cowering behind whatever it is they’ve got to hide. And so with the internet giving rise to
HUSH
a more anonymous disclosure comes a more secretive way of living, sans burden. So now, while many may be as sensitive as ever in public, but come online and the censors no longer apply, the liberation that secret-sharing leads to is limited. The public image is still sterilized for the sake of an image. That’s the thing with secrets, isn’t it? They are kept for the sake of a personal image to be kept. Secrets are kept because of expectations that might not be met, and thus relationships that might be ruined. Who are you liberating when you’ve, at best, bared your soul to a
person you might not ever truly interact with, at all? So what’s the point in weaving indirect relationships? Maybe the point is not to be understood, nor be relieved, but to be heard. Maybe while the secret-teller has nothing to gain, however the reader has everything to gain. Somehow there is somebody out there who has put your thoughts into writing, as if to reach out and take you by the hand, and tell you that it is all right. However little intimacy there is to be had, there is the hope of it, which seems to be enough.
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THE FIVE STAGES OF COMING OUT BY TINTIN LONTOC & JACKIE FRANCISCO If the secret you’re keeping is too big of a burden to bear alone, or if by “secret” you actually mean a problem that needs sorting out, then the best way to deal is to either accept your secret completely, or let others accept it first if that means eventually accepting yourself. Perhaps a five-step program is all it takes to finally come out.
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ANONYMOUSLY ON THE INTERNET
A COMPLETE STRANGER
To Write Love on Her Arms and PostSecret first began the trend in 2005, creating communities where pent-up frustrations and aches began being shared and read regularly, and where depression — many claim — came to die. The effect of sharing secrets anonymously online, according at least to several web users who’ve closely followed, even participated in either two, was spiritual. Historically, Jerusalem has had its own version of this years before the internet, in the form of a wall. The Wailing Wall by the western side of the Temple Mount, traditionally called “god’s ear,” is where many pilgrims come to whisper their worries away as a form of spiritual cleansing.
There’s always the bar tender, or the bar tender’s cousin, or the person sat beside you on a late night bus ride, or absolutely anybody who you are sure you will either never see again, or who won’t remember you the morning after. Either way, the point in this is that you are finally ready to share something with somebody vis-á-vis, regardless of how they react. If you find you are uncomfortable with sharing your secret to a real person, there’s always your cats — your twenty cats.
Today there are no less than a hundred variants of the anonymous secret phenomena. Find one, take your pick, and cleanse your soul, prejudice-free.
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AUGUST 2012
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YOUR CLOSEST FRIENDS
YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER
YOUR PARENTS
If some random person can accept your deep dark secret, then maybe it won’t be so bad when you tell your best friend whom you’ve known since you two were both in your mom’s bellies. A friend like that can always be trusted to keep a secret safe. Unless, of course, your big dark secret is about them. Then you’d have to tell your second closest friend.
“Love is blind”, as they say. Whatever major flaw, dastardly deed, or troubling problems you are hiding, your significant other will still accept you for who you are in the name of true love. Of course, there is always some fear that they would reject you after finding out your secret. It isn’t easy telling one of the most important people in your life. But if you really are significant to your significant other, they would try to understand you and your problems.
Most of the time, one wouldn’t even think of dragging the skeletons in their closet onto the family dinner table. Especially if it’s something that we did or some characteristic flaw we discover or acquire, parents are the last to know. No one likes disappointing the two people that expect the most of them. But remember, these are also the people who have birthed you into this world and they supposedly love you unconditionally. If you really need their help, don’t be scared to ask for it.
Remember, your closest friends have probably shared some deep dark secrets of their own, secrets that can be used as potential blackmail to encourage them to keep matters confidential.
HUSH
Otherwise, they probably are not worth your time.
Even if you think that you aren’t that close to them, they still have more life experience than you and are familiar with deep dark secrets.
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AUGUST 2012
A BREAKDOWN OF THE CONFESSIONAL Out of the 150 secrets Ateneo students submitted to HUSH
24
PERCENT
28
PERCENT
15
PERCENT
12
PERCENT
21
PERCENT
HUSH
showed signs of passive aggression Raging against the norm is just another thing for some students.
HAVE QUITE THE APPETITE Sex in the library, sex on the grassfield, sex in places on campus you’ve never even heard of.
LIVE FOR THE DRAMA There’s a suicidal confession and an extreme case of the blues, and more secrets straight out of the soapbox.
HAVE DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS From somebody liking the smell of their own feet to peeing in the sink, some secrets are just too filthy to own up to.
JUST NEED THAT EXTRA PUSH Hot for blockmate or hot for teacher? Some people just can’t seem to take that extra step.
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PASSION “strong, barely controllable emotion; a state of outburst of such emotion; intense sexual love; an intense desire of enthusiasm for something BY JACKIE FRANCISCO
ILLUSTRATION BY SOPHIA MIROEDOVA
The secrets that these students have shared are more or less reflective of the kind of people that compose the Atenean student body. So what exactly concerns these teenage-toearly-twenties students the most? The answer is sex. Twenty-eight percent of the secrets that were submitted were about bumping uglies in the weirdest places in Ateneo or the things that people have done just to get some. It isn’t that surprising though if you think about it. These students are in the height of adolescence and are at the stage where every little step they take could set off their raging hormones. Some of these students, seeing as a lot of them come from exclusive schools, are not quite used to being in an environment where they interact with the opposite sex in a classroom on a daily basis. Years of repressed or unrealized attraction once unleashed are bound to spark a steamy affair or two. This puberty-induced chemical imbalance is also probably the reason for all these secret crushes and obsessions take up the third largest portion (21% percent) of the secrets submitted to our online confessional . Your brain is thinking of that one single person 99.9% percent of the time and you can’t even tell them about it. All those repressed feelings need an outlet. Whether it be in the form of cheesy poetry, love songs, or an anonymous post spilling your secret on the internet, you’ll need to let it out somehow. Secret crushes aren’t the only thing people have tried so hard to repress. Rage and passive aggressive tendencies rank second in our list of secrets. If the law or even the school magna carta didn’t ban some things, then there would probably be chaos and death everywhere. Especially in a stressful environment like a university, where you have to pass all your classes and deal with pressure from your peers and teachers, it’s hard not secretly plot against that douche bag who’s making your life a little bit harder than it already is. If there are highs, torrid passion and fiery rage, there are also lows in this roller coaster of raging hormones. Some students are just unfortunate enough to consecutively have bad things happen to them day after day or even week after week. With all these natural chemicals in your system magnifying everything you feel, these things are at times enough to make people spiral into depression. When you feel like there is no one that cares about you, at least you can share your troubles to the person reading your anonymous confession.
HUSH
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THE BLUE EAGLE ISSUE august ‘12
20 $
SEND US YOUR SECRETS www.hush.com
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ILLUSTRATION BY vladimir Stebenev