It’s not you, Spec. It’s both of us.

I don’t know the single worst decision I’ve made at Columbia, but I do know the single best. It was quitting Spectator.

Two-thirds of the way into my yearlong tenure as head copy editor, I suddenly remembered that I was a volunteer. I agonized for a week about my decision not to finish the job I started, but on a September night, I finally called the copy staff into the office and told them I was resigning. My reasons for going, I explained, were not a reflection on the section or its members. I felt increasingly isolated and impotent in the office, I wanted to spend more time with friends before my upcoming semester abroad, I was fighting off a debilitating bout of depression, my grades were slipping, and I was getting nothing out of the job. The reasons all blurred together and probably didn’t make sense to anyone but me. But a week later, I was gone. I took two steps out of the office on my last night, and—I shit you not—kicked up my heels and punched my fist in the air on the way to the elevator. It was my first spontaneous gesture of joy since I began the job that January.

A year and a half later, I mostly remember the extremes. The long, mundane nights in the office were excruciating—waiting for the next set of printouts and preparing to squint to see the tiny typos it was my job to catch and resting bleary-eyed on the couch, finally immune to the stimuli of coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol. There were other nights when journalism’s beating heart came alive—when we scrapped half a day’s news at 10 p.m. to cover the Minutemen stage-storming of fall 2006, or when, against all better judgment, I was put in charge of copy-editing the paper the day that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to Columbia.

Either way, I never imagined I’d end up head copy editor. The section just seemed like a natural place to start. It was somewhere I could submit others’ writing to my scalpel instead of mine to theirs, learn how newspapers work, and then move on to something more glamorous. But inertia took hold, as it often does. Even as I grew tremendously fond of the people in the section, the work became less interesting and the hours, more demanding. I assumed these were necessary sacrifices for the sake of stability and advancement. Around the copydesk, many of us even reveled in our status as the so-called bastard children of Spectator. When I decided to run for head copy editor, I was motivated mainly by the fact that it just seemed like the natural thing to do.

If an unpaid 40-hour work week fixing commas and syntax on top of a full load of classes at Columbia does not strike most people as “the natural thing to do,” well, most people also don’t have a particular emotional attachment to the Oxford comma and the em dash. But, on a deeper level, Spectator also operates on a different and fundamentally perverse set of rules—rules that make it easy and even normal to submit to the dictum that your health and happiness will have to wait for one more year.

Part of the problem, as many of my friends from Spectator have noted in their own defense, is the culture of Columbia itself. The school’s cutthroat academics, intensely bright and ambitious people, and serene administrative indifference all contribute to a culture in which stress, misery, and sleeplessness turn into badges of honor. But Spectator’s culture, by unapologetically forcing staffers to sacrifice their mental and physical health to a newspaper, sharpens and glorifies these feelings of martyrdom and self-denial. They became unbearable for me, and they remain so for many others. Some choose to grin and bear it. I chose not to, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

I promised myself I wouldn’t be too prescriptive since the preachy senior column has become something of a Spectator joke. So I’ll be brief: Whether you’re at Spectator or Columbia or anywhere else doesn’t really matter. Take care of yourself. Use Dostoevsky, Joni Mitchell, and the Smiths as companions, but don’t try to be them. Stress and ennui are not signs of merit—they’re signs that you should, at the very least, think deeply and seriously about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Walk away if you have to. And at the risk of spouting out one more cliche (which won’t be nearly cliched enough until more people listen), get help wherever and however you need it.

Space constraints keep me from writing more, but respect is due to the entire copy section because it doesn’t get nearly as much as it deserves and because it was the only thing at Spectator that kept me somewhat sane for eight months. BA, PB, VDB, BG, MG, TT—the pleasure has been all mine. EW, ICB, and DD, for bringing me in, making me stay, and letting me leave. LC, JR, and HV for kvetching and sympathy. I’ve likely forgotten several people and made several points rather poorly. But we at copy always held a special hatred for those writers who missed deadlines, and I don’t plan to suddenly become one of them.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and concentrating in Hispanic studies. He was head copy editor on the 132nd managing board and associate copy editor on the 131st associate board.