Oh, to be part of the student government—a dream to some, a fulfillment to others, a title to brag about for a few, but to me, it has always felt like a purpose I accidentally grew into. Funny how a simple surname can suddenly sound like a customer service hotline.
The moment teachers call my last name, I already know there’s a concern waiting behind it. The moment classmates call me, I can almost predict the follow-up sentence before they even say it. Sometimes I joke to myself that I’ve developed “manghuhula” abilities—not because I can see the future, but because being a student leader means constantly anticipating what everyone needs from you.
Being a student leader is probably the only thing in my life that has remained consistent. It’s something close to my heart. I genuinely love serving students—to see smiles after events we spent sleepless nights organizing, to raise student concerns to the administration, to become part of solutions instead of just witnesses to problems. Somewhere in between meetings, paperwork, and deadlines, I also found pieces of myself I didn’t know existed.
But passion, no matter how genuine, still comes with pressure.
The moment your name carries a title, it suddenly feels like you live in a different world. No one has to say anything directly. Sometimes the pressure exists quietly—in the way people look at you, in the way they expect you to always know what to do, in the way mistakes suddenly feel heavier when your position is attached to your identity. Being a student leader can sometimes feel like there’s no room for failure because every mistake feels public: disappointing teachers, the administration, fellow students, and most painfully, yourself.
And maybe that’s why burnout becomes such a familiar feeling among student leaders. We become so used to being available for everyone that we forget we’re also allowed to become unavailable sometimes.
I remember one recitation where I couldn’t answer a question. I felt embarrassed at first, but strangely enough, I also felt relieved. For one brief moment, people saw me not as “the student leader,” but simply as a student who didn’t know the answer. And honestly? That felt human. It reminded me that leadership does not mean having everything figured out all the time. Sometimes leadership is simply showing people how to recover gracefully after getting something wrong.
Because student leaders are still students first.
We are still people trying to survive deadlines, family responsibilities, breakdowns, and random moments of self-doubt. We are still friends, sons, daughters, classmates, and ordinary young people attempting to figure life out one school day at a time. Titles may add responsibilities, but they do not remove our humanity.
One thing my student council adviser always tells me is, “Take it one step at a time.” Such a simple sentence, yet it always finds me during moments when my responsibilities begin piling on top of each other. And somehow, those words remind me that slowing down is not laziness. Delaying a reply does not make us irresponsible. Resting does not erase our dedication. We can care deeply about service while still caring for ourselves too.
What I eventually realized is that sometimes the heaviest expectations are not even coming from other people. Sometimes, they come from us. We create versions of what we think people expect from us, then pressure ourselves trying to live up to assumptions that may not even exist. We become prisoners of imagined standards, carrying invisible weight we placed on our own shoulders.
And maybe that’s the real challenge of student leadership—not the workload, not the endless tasks, not even the sleepless nights—but learning how to separate our worth from our performance.
In a world obsessed with productivity and perfection, maybe doing our best is already enough. No impossible expectations. No constant pressure. Just purpose.
At the end of the day, before we become officers, presidents, governors, or representatives, we are students first. Young people learning as we go, making mistakes, growing through them, and trying our best despite everything.
So perhaps, these expectations were never meant to be heavy burdens after all. Maybe they are reminders of why we chose to serve in the first place. We already knew leadership would cost us something, yet we still said yes—because our reasons for serving will always weigh more than the pressure that comes with it.
