Living Inside the Questions

As biology majors, we learned to trust that systems could be understood.

In our biology classes, systems were things we mapped and tested. We named inputs and outputs, tested our hypotheses, checked for contamination or isolated variables. And even when outcomes faltered, there was always a method to trace the error. If something endured through repeated trials, it earned our trust. Truth arrived through process, through replication, through proof.

That was the mindset we carried into Global Voices and Encounters, a required literature course in the curriculum at our university. We came prepared to read globally significant texts, discuss history, even write a paper or two. Creative writing was simply another task to complete. We certainly did not anticipate that the truths we were seeking in writing would come not just from the process of studying the text but from the more risky and consequential process of studying ourselves.

When we started George Orwell’s dystopian speculative work of fiction, 1984, many of us assumed it would be the familiar terrain of surveillance, propaganda, and authoritarianism. These were ideas we found on the internet so often that they almost became generic, like memes, warnings, and comparisons being thrown about ever so casually. The novel, we thought, would be confirming what we already knew about how the world works.

But we were reading 1984 in the Philippines in 2024.

Outside the classroom, language was already strained. Words like terrorist and communist circulated freely, often detached from evidence but heavy with consequence. Social media posts were archived by strangers, pulled from context, and misread on purpose. History itself was being rewritten in real time, flattened into slogans optimized for repetition. Speech felt abundant and dangerous at once. Yet none of us in the class had really connected the dots about how the book spoke to the time and place in which we found ourselves.

Rather than ask us what Orwell was saying about authoritarianism in the book, our professor gave us a deceptively simple-sounding prompt: “What does freedom mean to you? How does the importance you place on freedom help you navigate daily life and pursue your long-term goals?” We were told not to respond with an essay but with letters.

As students of science, we were looking for boundaries. We wanted the experiment defined. Instead, we were told to begin anyway.

In groups of three—assigned, not chosen—we opened a shared Google Doc. We were tasked with writing together, to converge on a thesis, and to shape our response as a letter addressed to each other. Then we would read these letters aloud. Initially the structure provided a reassuring cadence: a thesis statement, three examples, a well-defined through line. This was closer to something familiar to us. But this feeling of comfort was soon challenged. A letter needed a voice. It needed an audience. It made us have to choose to whom we were explaining freedom—and why.

Questions began surfacing almost immediately. Could we be political? Was freedom an abstraction, or a lived reality? Could a letter to oneself be honest, or did it require another witness? As students of science, we were looking for boundaries. We wanted the experiment defined. Instead, we were told to begin anyway.

My group sat in silence, all eyes fixed on the blinking cursor. Somebody started to type, then erased a sentence. Somebody else said we should write to “the future.” Another person suggested we write to a younger version of our classmate. We finally decided to write to a version of ourselves that took freedom for granted.

As we began to draft, 1984 hung over us not as fiction but as a kind of real-life pressure. Orwell’s world was one in which language was wobbly, the meaning of words often reversed to make contradictory concepts both appear true. It was a world where even private thought carried danger. Writing about freedom with that in mind seemed less about defining a concept than testing a boundary. We paused over words we normally used without thinking. Choice, safety, or voice. Each term felt unstable, as if to utter it might turn it against us. We debated whether freedom was internal or conditional, whether it was something granted or something practiced daily under duress.

Orwell’s world was one in which language was wobbly, the meaning of words often reversed to make contradictory concepts both appear true. It was a world where even private thought carried danger.

What surprised me most was the disagreement. In biology laboratories, disagreement often yields to data, but here it did not. One group member said freedom meant the ability to plan a future without fear. Another argued freedom was the capacity to change one’s mind publicly without punishment. I realized I had been treating freedom as the right to remain unremarkable.

When time was up, we were instructed to re-read our letter and to mark the sentence that felt most difficult to say out loud. That was the instruction that changed everything. The sentence was no longer part of an argument to be made but a diagnostic, a point of pressure, a site of risk.

When we read our letters to each other in class, the room felt unusually attentive. Not the quiet you often hear in classrooms, but focused and alert, as if everyone knew that what was being said could not be easily taken back. We were no longer performing for a grade. We were speaking into a shared risk.

Some groups addressed their letters to our classmates with subtle innuendo about the government, choosing the formal restraint of policy language before letting it crack. Others wrote to versions of themselves that had once believed freedom was permanent. One group wrote to a classmate wherein they tackled history itself, uncertain whether it would remember them kindly. Another addressed an unnamed reader, someone scrolling late at night, someone who might need the letter without knowing why.

As each group read, patterns emerged that were in tension with each other. One letter cast freedom as the ability to forget: to live without constantly archiving words and gestures for safety, without rehearsing explanations in advance. Another portrayed freedom as mobility or the right to leave, to return, to belong without justification, without suspicion following you across borders or through time. No one cut in. Nobody hastened to answer. We listened well, as if hearing was something we also needed to practice.

Then our group read a line that shifted the whole room: Freedom is not the absence of fear but the decision to move anyway. The sentence landed softly, without ceremony. No one clapped. It lingered with us, suspended between speaker and listeners, doing its quiet work. After a moment, someone said aloud what a lot of us were already thinking: “This doesn’t feel like fiction.”

That moment is what made 1984 stop being a novel from another time and place. It became a lens—one we were already using, though we hadn’t named it. Orwell wasn’t merely warning us about a distant future. He offered language precise enough to examine the present: to see how fear becomes normalized, how caution becomes habit, how freedom is quietly redefined until it feels abstract, theoretical, almost optional. In that classroom, through letters written and spoken aloud, we weren’t dissecting 1984. We were living inside its questions and learning how to answer them with care.

I did not leave that class thinking I had written a perfect letter. I left realizing how carefully I had been living.

As we talked through the letters, our conversation moved from ideas to wording. Which words felt safest? Which felt compromised? Which had been echoed so often in public discourse that they no longer meant what they claimed to mean?

As biology majors, we recognized the pattern immediately. This was environmental pressure: reduce diversity—of language, of thought—and adaptability withers. Orwell wasn’t only describing authoritarianism; he was describing what happens to any closed system deprived of variation. Writing our letters made this visible by making it harder to hide behind abstraction. We saw how freedom must be lived, located, and accountable. It must survive being spoken aloud. I did not leave that class thinking I had written a perfect letter. I left realizing how carefully I had been living.

Since that project, I have become more observant of the language I use. Not only in writing but in conversation, in research, more so in public spaces. I notice when terms lose meaning through repetition. I notice when silence is imposed under the guise of order. I notice when people revise what they are going to say before anyone asks them to. This awareness has followed me into my scientific work. I think of language now as part of any system I enter, capable of shaping outcomes, limiting inquiry, or opening possibility. Writing that letter taught me that observation is not neutral, and neither is speech.

More importantly, it taught me that creative writing isn’t an escape from reality but a means of engaging with it ethically. The project didn’t give us answers about corruption, power, or freedom in the Philippines. Instead it offered practice: practice in noting pressure, in articulating values, and in speaking with care when words are risky. It showed that writing can be a mode of inquiry when the other forms feel lacking.

Creative writing isn’t an escape from reality but a means of engaging with it ethically.

For the first time, I saw myself not as a science student fulfilling a requirement but as a writer: someone responsible for how language moves through systems of power—how words circulate, settle, harden, or fracture depending on how and where they are used.

That realization reshaped my sense of the future. Whether I work in research, education, or public health, I now understand that writing isn’t an accessory to knowledge but one of its conditions. The ability to frame a question, to address a reader, to recognize when language clarifies and when it obscures—these aren’t skills I can afford to treat as optional. The letter we wrote in that class didn’t stay as a classroom artifact. It altered how I speak, how I read, how I pay attention to what is said and, just as importantly, to what remains unsaid.

I notice now when words are repeated until they lose their heft, when slogans replace explanation, when silence is mistaken for consent. I notice the moments when listening requires more than hearing—when it demands restraint and discernment and the will to refuse what’s so easily offered.

In a country where history is contested and speech is always under watch, learning how to write a letter about freedom was not simply an academic exercise in skill-building but one of preparation—for citizenship, for caring, for responsibility. It taught me that writing ethically means not only choosing carefully what to say but also what not to echo, what not to amplify, and how to communicate without reproducing harm. This is a practice I intend to carry forward into laboratories, classrooms, communities, and conversations where language continues to shape what can be imagined and what can be lived. This practice is a manner of traversing the world with deliberate attention, knowing when to speak, when to listen, and when to unlisten.

Featured photo: George Orwell, c. 1940, colorized by Cassowary Colorizations on Flickr.