Four years ago this week I arrived in New York. I'd come from San Francisco, and the time between the two places had been divided by a week-long road trip across the country. That time on the road, intensely solitary, was a makeshift air gap between those two chapters of my life.
I arrived in New York bewildered and brokenhearted and ready to start again. New York healed my broken heart over and over and over again. This is a city that has been mythologized as indifferent and sometimes hostile, but I don't think it's true. This weird and wonderful place and its people have loved me whole in a way I didn't know possible. I love this place and time for what it has been and what it is right now. Tonight, unlike many other nights, I'm not worried about whether this life can last forever, or whether it can at least be extended some reasonable distance into the future. It is bountiful and beautiful and I'm grateful and that's all.
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The new year is off to a strange start.
I met someone recently who took me by surprise in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever been taken by surprise. He had a presence and a gratitude toward life that radiated outward in a way that I wanted to reach out and grasp. There were moments where, when he spoke, it was like hearing my own subconscious refracted through the prism of another whole, complete, complicated human being. I felt a resonance whose enormity frankly scared the crap out of me. I wondered if we found some of our common traits in the same place: He, too, had experienced grief as a young person. Before we met, he sent me a blog post he’d written. In it, he mentioned a loss that he had experienced as a child. I don’t think he realized that the piece was so oriented around grief until after he sent it, and he apologized, but I was grateful that he shared it. And besides, who among us hasn’t blogged about our grief? When I said as much, he asked me to send him a link from my own blog. I wasn’t quite ready to open that part of myself to a person who was by all accounts still a stranger, but I did stay up late that night, combing through the Wayback Machine and revisiting my old posts which no longer appeared on the website. Years ago, I deleted them in a moment of terror after a coworker told me she’d found my blog and read the whole thing. (Four years on, she is a dear friend and is coming over to my house for dinner tonight. Go figure.) Somehow, I end up doing this trip through the Wayback Machine about once a year, and each time I contemplate reuploading the posts. I haven’t yet mustered up the courage. Reading back through them, I feel a tenderness for this earlier version of myself who is curious, confused, wrestling, searching, unspooling. I don’t mention the grief aspect in a “we are connected because similar bad things happened to us” sort of way. Let me try to explain what I mean: Often, when I explain my loss to others, I do so in a very matter-of-fact way. One that says, “Yes, it happened, but it’s in the past now.” On one level, this is true, but the whole truth is much more complicated. Grief transformed me in ways that I never could have expected. It disoriented me, scared me, it instilled both a loneliness in me and a sense of reverence for everything that is — how easily there could be nothing at all! — and it taught me the practice of non-certainty. Grief was a profound organizing force that arrived in my life at a time when a person is perhaps most susceptible to organizing forces. There is no separating my grief from me. This isn’t to relish it, but just to state a fact: The way it has turned me inside out is inseparable from how I’ve been reconstituted. It’s part of all of me — the good (gratitude that, on occasion, moves me to tears) and the bad (the nagging fear that everyone I love will die suddenly and tragically). It's not often you meet someone else who knows what it is to be remade by grief. Around the time we met, I had been thinking once again a lot about grief and loss. My paternal grandmother, whom I love and with whom I share a complicated relationship, seemed to be on the precipice of hospice care. I had been trying not to think about it too much, partially because I don’t feel quite ready to probe the complexities of that relationship, and partially because I resent how life has a way of inflicting itself on a person — announcing “Ready or not, here I come!” — at a moment when you are not and cannot bring yourself to be ready. My efforts not to think were not successful. For my troubles, I received a full-body eczema outbreak and an insatiable desire to listen to Sylvia by The Antlers on repeat for weeks. (Suddenly, I am a grieving teenager again.) After a few dates, things seemed to cool rapidly. I felt a sinking (sadness) and a rising (anxiety) and fished for the CBD tincture on top of the fridge. On Thursday, I schlepped an IKEA bag full of boxes to one of the three CubeSmarts on Atlantic Avenue. En route, I passed a stranger who was having a flat tire on his SmartCar fixed. We made eye contact and I gave a polite smile. I am pathologically Midwestern in this way, it’s my culture to acknowledge strangers, I cannot change. He asked whether I was an actress and said that I had a beautiful smile. I told him that I was not, but said thank you anyway. When he struck up a conversation, I obliged. Barring any obvious peril, I think it’s good and completely advisable to talk to strangers — historically, this practice has yielded great results. (The best one in San Francisco with a train-hopping anarchist in sooty overalls.) We chat for about thirty minutes, and over the course of the conversation he reveals himself to be an archconservative blogger (is that really all it takes to get a press license plate these days?) with two million readers (he is not enthused when I ask whether some of them are bots) and some extremely abrasive worldviews. I love a spirited debate, so I ask a few questions and it’s enough to unleash a scattershot series of opinions ranging from woke media manipulation, to women with piercings (“facial shrapnel”), to the fake pandemic. At one point, he tells me that while he’s against censorship, he’s also against porn and thinks it should be banned. I tell him that he and Andrea Dworkin share at least one thing in common. I think this joke is very funny, but it falls flat. Eventually, the conversation devolves into him trying to convince me to go on a date — You look very pale, are you iron deficient? (Yes. I take iron supplements.) There’s a steakhouse in Manhattan that serves incredible meats. Monday — I’ll take you there. (No, sorry.) — which is not very interesting or fun. The conversation has run its course. I tell him I need to go. He gives me his phone number and tells me that it has a 12-hour expiration — I must text him by 4:57 tomorrow morning. I think we both know that I will not. I take the elevator to the third floor of the CubeSmart, stash my shit, and race home to see if I can find his blog. Sadly, I’m unsuccessful. But man, turns out anyone can run a blog if they want to. On Friday around noon, I get a text (from the person I am very intrigued by) ending things. He is overwhelmed — feelings about an old relationship are surfacing and they won’t go away. I cry with a facility that is unexpected. It’s the sort of cry that I have found hard to come by in my adult life — one where everything feels close to the surface. It moves through my entire body and out and out and out. After that I sit for a bit and think. I think about what to say. Whether to say anything at all. I respond in a way that I hope is considerate but honest. I tell him that if this is a case of a good connection arriving at a bad time, I would be open to our paths crossing again someday. I wonder whether it’s a stupid thing to admit, but I say it anyway because it’s true. A few hours later, he says he’d also be open to reconnecting down the road after taking some time to look inwards. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. Maybe all of this is a total load of bullshit — it's impossible to discern someone's character in the amount of time we've known each other (do we even know each other?), but I think it's a good practice in general to take what other people say at face value rather than engaging in paranoid interpretation. I feel both grateful for this chance encounter and disappointed that it’s gone just as fast as it came. That night, I go for a bike ride around Prospect Park. Three-quarters of the way through, I get tired and give up and walk the rest of the way home. The B41 glides up and down Flatbush, its mechanical and pneumatic sounds puncturing the night air. I love this part of Brooklyn. The first time I came to New York, I wandered around this neighborhood and stumbled into an afternoon that felt warm and slow and serendipitous. So much has changed since I first came to this place, but in certain still and quiet moments, it feels eternal. On the way home, I pass the entrance of my favorite park (condemned to a future as a skate park) and my favorite ice cream spot (closed in December 2023) and I feel a heaviness somewhere between my heart and my stomach. On the corner, there is a new apartment building where a perpetually-closed bodega used to be. The neighborhood is changing a lot lately. I don’t begrudge it — everything changes. But I feel a deep sorrow about the transitoriness of it all. There’s a drawing that hangs on the wall near my bed. It’s a commission — one of my dearest possessions, something I would grab in the event of a fire. It’s buZ blurr’s Colossus of Roads moniker, complete with the caption “PRACTICE NON-CERTAINTY.” BuZ blurr died a little over a week ago. The news took me by surprise and felt a bit surreal, as I’d been thinking a lot about his work lately. Somehow, this convergence felt like it was not coincidental. Like the universe was trying to force some kind of deeper reflection. (A little heavy-handed, no?) “Practice non-certainty” is a phrase that has woven itself into me over the last few years, existing somewhere in the space between instruction, mantra, and paradigm. Crucially, non-certainty is distinct from uncertainty — I think there’s a positive/negative distinction at work here. (“Uncertainty” positing no certainty, committing to a deliberate confusion, “non-certainty” negating the existence of certainty, accepting that the world is transitory and often indeterminate.) Practicing non-certainty is, to borrow a phrase from my mom, accepting that life is “one part effort, one part mystery.” In the days after buZ blurr died, I re-read some of my favorite interviews of his. In one, he talks about his interpretation and practice of autostoricizzazione, or auto-historicizing. (That afternoon, I thought about my own relationship to documentation.) In another, he says: “Ultimately transitory nature cannot be counteracted.” I thought about this phrase as I opened the front door to my building. It is true. It feels a little unfair. I don’t say it in a way that’s meant to be morose, but all of life is a practice in letting go. Everything changes, and all a person can do is learn to float on top of life’s current, to move through its transformations with acceptance and curiosity. As one common buZ blurr caption reads, “SORROW FLOATS.” But sometimes that flavor of existentialism is a little heavy for me and I like to remember that, mercifully, everything else floats, too. This romantic connection was over before it even happened, and yet, I feel changed by it. I feel grateful for the deep strangeness the world has to offer. For its connections, its transformations, for the bizarre and for the wonderful. And I have a hunch that it’s time, after a long dormancy, to revive the blog and do a little autostoricizzazione of my own. Recommended Listening: Sylvia – The Antlers Heart Sutra – Susan Alcorn Strange Encounter – Father John Misty The first day of the full week of class is starting today. The air is getting colder and summer is on its way out. But before it goes entirely, let me tell you a little bit about how it was.
I spent a lot of time keeping busy and trying to find solutions to some of the problems I talked about in a previous post. I wrote a lot of music this summer, and it ended up taking on the form of a short album. When I first started on this project I planned to post it online, but by the time it was done it felt like something too close to me to let go. I'm surprised by how much it feels like a diary. Anyway, here is a scrap from my diary. You might want to listen to it as you read. Magical realism is one of my favorite literary genres. A common trope in magical realism is the non-linearity of time. Bits of storyline overlap, weave, collide. A literary light shines down the same hallway a little bit differently. We've been in this passage before. We'll be here again.
I can't remember how many Father's Days it's been without you. I could do some quick mental math and figure it out, but that's not really the important thing here. This time of year reminds me that grief is not linear. Pain is not inversely proportional to distance — temporal or physical. I drove by your house on Friday. Someone else lives there now, and it doesn't look like it used to. Still, when I'm home I feel like I have to check on it. I keep returning. I have a lot of memories in that house. One of them is sitting in the living room and pretending to play your acoustic guitar like a cello, dragging a salmon colored pencil across the strings. That guitar is mine now. I started playing after Thanksgiving break. I wonder what you would say if you knew. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I'm stressed I lay in bed and play. When the guitar is pressed against my ribs the low notes fill my entire body and there's no room left for the things that make me feel like I'm caught in the current of a river. I wonder if you felt the same thing when you held our guitar many years ago. I'm flying back to Providence later today. I thought about bringing your ashes with me, but had the foresight to google and see whether it was allowed. I don't think Sun Country wants me to do that without giving them lots of advance notice because people can mix all kinds of contraband into ashes. I think I would crumble into a million tiny pieces of dust too if you got confiscated by the TSA on Father's Day. Sorrow like this doesn't come often, but it does come. I am here now. I've been here before. I'll be here again. I can't say how long the circumference of the next loop will be — that's something I don't know. All I can tell you with any certainty is that grief is not linear. I've been struggling to write for a couple months now. A lot of my blog posts end with some kind of neatly wrapped takeaway. A life lesson or pithy comment about neoliberalism or how I'm learning to be patient.
Right now I have none of that to offer. I feel confused, directionless, and angsty. I also feel so annoyed about my inability to feel anything other than nonspecific agony about my stupid YA existential turmoil. I know almost everyone else on the planet has felt the same way but somehow that's not a comfort. Instead I feel like a big whiny idiot and every time I try to open my mouth to explain how I feel I just end up flopping my head back and letting out a big groan. Here's some of the junk floating around in my head: I'm moody about deciding not to be pre-med. Some part of me feels like this is a concession — that I've given up and am not smart enough or determined enough to actually be a doctor. I am trying to remind myself of what I know to be true: I need to sleep in order to be a functional, happy human person. Graduate medical education will not allow me to do that. Part of me is tempted to try and do it anyway, just to prove that I could. But that's colossally stupid. I'm not going to choose a career path for the same reason I ate glue on a dare in first grade. So then what do I want? To teach, I think. I like teaching. When I look at the kinds of volunteer and work opportunities that I've been drawn to in the past, that's the common thread that ties them all together. Let me submit the following into evidence: High School: Teen docent at the zoo, middle school debate coach College so far: High school debate coach, Breakthrough Twin Cities science teacher, tutoring for the Dean of the College, CHEM 330 TA, being the Brown version of an RA College next year: Meiklejohn Peer Advisor, head Biology tutor for Dean of the College, Independent Concentrations co-coordinator So it seems like everything I like is some kind of teaching or mentorship. But what does that actually mean for choosing a job? Do I want to be a professor? A high school teacher? Do I want to be at a public or private institution? Do I want to do a Khan Academy sort of thing? Will I ever be able to get rid of my stupid but deeply internalized anxieties about choosing some kind of job that other people will read as prestigious? Anyway, the takeaway here is that I have a lot more questions than answers. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels and wasting my time because I have no idea where to focus my energy. I'm uncertain and I'm not really sure how to un-uncertain myself right now. The usual reminders (this is normal, everyone feels this way sometimes, &c.) don't help. It doesn't matter that these feelings are par for the course. I'm tired of wading around in a big pool of directionless, self-indulgent angst. It really stinks. The more time I spend at Brown the less certain I am about all the things I thought I knew when I got here. I thought I wanted to be a doctor. Now I'm not so sure. The more time I spend in pre-med classes, the less it seems to appeal to me. Everyone at Brown who's pre-med seems really into being pre-med. Almost every waking moment is geared toward being a better applicant. Every action is assessed through the lens of increased marketability: Will this activity be a resume builder? How can I talk about this volunteer opportunity in a way that makes me sound earnest and dedicated to a career as a physician? How does this balance me out and make me a better applicant?
I was at an information session for pre-med sophomores recently. The presenter recommended that we find ways to incorporate the things we like to do into part of our pre-med activities to show that we're multifaceted applicants. Frankly, this sounds gross. I don't want to sacrifice my hobbies on the altar of productivity. I have no interest in making nearly every part of myself reducible to a resume bullet point. I want there to be parts of me that have no productive use — things that I do because I like them, not because I want to be a more dynamic applicant to something. To be fair, I don't think the problem is medicine or pre-meds. Neoliberal ideology (read more here if this idea is not in your wheelhouse) seeps down into the level of the individual. Neoliberalism tells us that we are tiny, fleshy sovereign states competing with each other. We strive constantly to be our most productive and most marketable — every action under the sun becomes a means to a "rational", "self-interested" end. Why is this so pronounced in the pre-med world? My guess is that nearly all pre-professional students are like this in some regard, but it seems like medicine as a culture is especially intense. Med school is notoriously hard and residency seems even worse. Work hours for residents are now capped at 80 a week. Thanks to the ACGME (the powers that be in the world of medical education), you don't work 24 hour shifts until your second year of residency. (...hooray, I guess?) But once you factor in eating, transportation to and from work, and any number of other small things, 24 hour shifts extend into 30 hour shifts. This is a crappy way to live and I don't want to do it. Nothing is worth staying up 30 hours straight. I am a human being and I can't live that way. I cannot make it through a 3-7 year long residency working 24 hour long shifts several times a week. I think it's painfully ironic that in light of all the existing and emerging research that shows how important sleep is, the medical field can't follow the advice that it's giving its patients. I don't want to become my vocation. I want to have a life outside whatever it is I end up doing. I want to be happy and be able to take care of my well-being as an adult. That said, I am terrified to think about getting off the pre-med train. It's scary to turn away from something that I felt was a certainty for so long. Being a doctor has been my plan for as long as I can remember, but the more I think about my limitations, the less appealing it sounds. This entire post has also bracketed and ignored the fact that I'm starting to realize that there are a lot of parts of being a practicing physician that sound wildly unappealing to me. After getting my Independent Concentration (IC) approved, I realized that there are things that I care about much more than practicing medicine one day. I spent an entire year reading, researching, and revising for my IC but it didn't feel like work at all. That whole process was a labor of love, and I am realizing now that maybe my calling isn't what I thought it was. I remember the eve of my tenth birthday much more clearly than you'd expect a person to remember the eve of their tenth birthday. I was sitting in my room and hungrily turning over the idea of ten years in my head.
Ten years. Ten whole years. Age in the double digits. People measure spans of time in decades, and here I was — on the verge of having a whole decade of life experiences all to myself! I thought about all the things I'd done in ten years. I wondered what it would be like to have not one, but two decades of life experiences. What kind of person would I be at twenty? What things would I have accomplished? What would I care about? Would I look like a grown-up? Here I am. Today's the day. I'm 20. Right now, at 20 years old, I think I'm on track to become the person that I want to be. My life is better than it was at this time last year. Last year, my life was better than it was the year before. I feel like I'm making progress toward some sort of elusive "finished" version of myself — the best "me" that I can be. My relationship with myself is better, kinder and more forgiving than it was five years ago, or even one year ago. My relationships with others are becoming happier and more constructive. I'm finding what I care about and pursuing it with my whole heart and my whole mind. I'm learning from my mistakes. I don't know if I feel wise yet, but I do feel wiser with each passing year. I'm excited to see who I'll be in another decade. Where will I be when I'm 30? What things will I care about? What will I be doing? How will my dreams now map onto my life ten years from now? How wise will I be when I'm 40? 50? 60? 70? 80? 90? ...100? I'm gathering up bits of life experience. I'm collecting thoughts, ideas, and memories that will shape who I become. The last twenty years have been packed — I'm excited to see what the road to my next decade looks like. Content Notice: Family Death
The other day I was talking to a friend who mentioned how arbitrary it is that we measure things in base ten. We just so happen to have ten fingers (eight fingers and two thumbs, if you're a pedantic dork), so we ended up counting everything using base ten. Personally, I think there is a compelling argument for counting in base five because we have two hands with five fingers each. One hand could count the number of ones we have, and the other could count the number of groups of five we have. That way we could count up to thirty (in base ten) with only ten (in base ten) fingers. I've noticed recently that I measure time in chunks of four years. Something that is certainly the product of being in a school system that divides high school (the thing I just did) and college (the thing I'm doing now) and medical school (the thing I want to do next) into chunks of four years. This way of dividing time has been at the forefront of my brain recently. Last Saturday marks four years since my dad died. A lot has happened in those four years. My dad never saw me graduate from high school. He never saw me when I was president of every club I was in during high school, or when I got a bid to the Tournament of Champions in policy debate, or when I got my IB diploma, or when I got into Brown. He didn't hear about all the things I learned last year, about the doubts I had about whether Brown was the right place for me, about my independent concentration, or about how my friends and I successfully negotiated the rent for our apartment next year to $300 below the asking price. He isn't seeing me become an adult. He won't see me graduate from Brown. I try not to think about what our relationship might be like if he was still alive. My dad was a complicated person, and so to speculate is to idealize. Still, that doesn't mean I don't do it. I remember my dad talking about Kant long before I cared about Philosophy or even knew what it was. I wonder how he would react if I told him that I took a class from one of the leading scholars on Kant. Is there some sort of heritable characteristic that makes people like Philosophy, or is it just a coincidence that we both gravitated toward it? He never mentioned to me that he was a Philosophy major — I only found out after he died, and at that point I'd already dipped a toe into philosophy and critical theory because of debate. Personally, I doubt it's a coincidence — the universe works in strange and mysterious ways. I remember the day before my dad's birthday when I found out that my first-year academic advisor was a Philosophy professor. It felt like that decision was governed by some force more profound than a computer sorting algorithm. If it is all coincidence, I'm not sure that it matters. Meaning-making allows each year to get a little easier. I learn some more lessons, make sense of it a little better, life goes on. This year is four. Next year will be 5. Or 11, depending on how you count it. I'm over a third of the way into my third semester, and it's high time for a new blog post.
If you're a friend from Brown and want to read this post but also have a zillion midterms to study for, let me give you the cliff notes version: Things are really good. I'm unbelievably busy but I'm so, so happy. I'm glad I didn't transfer. Am I 100% settled in and satisfied with every part of life? No, but that's not a very realistic expectation. Here's the longer, more detailed version of the post: So far the best part of this year is purpose. I have a lot on my plate, but this time the things I'm doing feel important to me. I like to do them. All of the things I do are growing me as a person and as a thinker. The material in my classes is intersecting in challenging and exciting ways. I am sleeping enough. I am eating good food. My notes are organized. I feel like I can tackle the things in front of me. One of the things I was worried about going into the year was overcommitting myself. Truthfully, I am overcommitted, but I feel like that's part of the Brown Experience™ (or at least a part of the Ruth Foster Experience™). I have four jobs. Seriously. What was I thinking? Who let me do that? Is this what adulthood is? You just get to take as many jobs as you want? Thankfully, 3/4 of them let me set my own hours for the most part. Two of them aren't even that much work, which is great. I like to think of two of the smaller jobs as one job. Job #1: Being a WPC (Women's Peer Counselor) For those who haven't been bombarded with the abbreviations of the Bruniverse (portmanteau: Brown + universe), a WPC is sort of like an RA. Except for I'm not really an RA because I don't do rounds or any of the other things that RAs at other schools do. Basically I'm just a marginally older and marginally wiser person who lives in a first-year dorm and gives advice and helps people figure out how to live with a bunch of other people their age at a school full of other people their age. In theory I am also a specialist in "women's and gender issues" but to be honest I'm not really sure what that means. The world is full of issues and how you experience them is dependent partially on your gender identity, but it's also dependent on a lot of other identities you have. To me it seems like a person's experience of gender/sexuality/sex are so deeply tied to their other identities that it doesn't really make sense to designate my role as specific to "women's and gender issues." Alas, I digress. Basically this job feels like a non-job because my residents are exceptionally chill, very clean in common spaces, and are very civil to each other. All of my fears about getting assigned a pack of hellions have gone unrealized, which is cool. When my residents come and chat with me I give them tea and chocolate chips and we talk about their lives. Sometimes I give advice about being premed at Brown. There are condoms on my door and I made cute paper envelopes to store them in. Job #2: Being a RIUDL Coordinator This is also exciting because I love the RIUDL. It was a lot of work in the beginning because new volunteers had to be interviewed and trained and folded into the RIUDL, but after that it settled down quite a bit. Things are picking up again now because the October tournament is coming up and we have to make sure everything is squared away. The Halloween tournament is next weekend and it's going to be a lot of fun. This feels more like a job because I have more professional tasks to do, but it's work I enjoy and it feels meaningful. I have a deep hatred of the phrase "do work u love and you'll never work a day in ur life!!!~" but that's kind of the way I feel about RIUDL. Sometimes the logistical components of the job can be kind of a nightmare and there's some wading through Brown University bureaucracy that's necessary, but I really love being more involved in the RIUDL. Jobs #3 and #4: Chemistry These jobs are mentally lumped together as one because they are for the same department and are on Thursday. Chemistry job number one is pretty laid back. I'm a grader for Chem 330, which is minimal work and I can set my own hours for the most part. We have a 30 minute grading meeting on Thursdays where we get the point assignments for the homework, but then after that it's up to us when we do the grading. Chemistry job number two is a little more structured. I tutor Chem 100 on Thursday nights for two hours (!) in back-to-back sessions. I like tutoring because it helps keep my basic inorganic chemistry knowledge up and because I really, really enjoy teaching. I still don't want to go into education as a career, but I like helping people learn things. A while ago one of my tutees emailed me and told me that her quiz on Lewis dot structures went really well. She said that the review we did in our session the week before really made a difference. This Thursday, another tutee thanked me for explaining electron configurations for transition metals and said that it helped her a lot on the midterm. Moments like that are great, and they make me feel like I'm doing something purposeful with my time. Tutoring is also great because it's also a pretty low time commitment and the hourly pay is pretty sweet. I am also a student. This means I am taking classes and not just taking jobs. Learning is great! My classes are, for the most part, wonderful. Two of my classes are tied for favorite: ANTH 1242: Bioethics and Culture and RELS 0045: Buddhism and Death. The best part about these classes is that they also overlap pretty frequently so I get to think between disciplines in a way that lines up perfectly with my interest in end-of-life Bioethics. This bodes well because right now I have both of those courses pegged as concentration requirements. I'm learning what I want to learn and thinking in new, exciting ways. I think I'm doing something right. PHIL 1640 is a tricky beast. It's metaethics and I'm learning to love it. Slowly. I struggle a lot with not feeling confident in my work in philosophy, even though my grades suggest this shouldn't be the case. I have a hard time feeling smart enough or good enough or like the things I have to say are worthwhile. I'm getting there. I lean a lot on the women in the department. I am beyond grateful for them. On Friday I went into my advisor's office to talk about my progress on my independent concentration (I'm submitting it on Tuesday) and my life. I cried because I was so frustrated that even I could identify the source of my lack of confidence, naming it didn't do a thing to make it better. She gave me the advice I needed: Confidence takes time. The professor knows whether you are engaged even if you don't speak in class. You are a promising Philosophy student. PHYS 0050 is okay. It's well taught and is a nice way to dust off my old physics and calculus knowledge from high school. My feelings about this class are pretty neutral. I think it's hard to be excited about a class that isn't interfacing with any of my other courses, especially when the other three are overlapping to become greater than the sum of their parts. Friendships are more complicated. This semester has been really, really, busy, and so by the time the weekend rolls around, more often than not I want to watch some TV then go to bed or catch up on some work. Normally the solution to this would be to grab a meal with someone during the day, but being off meal plan complicates that. Of course, this doesn't mean I'm hopeless and friendless. I am thrilled and immensely grateful that I'm building new friendships with wonderful people that I've met through my new classes, jobs, and routines. It's amazing how many brilliant, caring, insightful, and fun people are on this campus. Not to mention wildly stylish. How is it even possible? It's also cool to see how some of my friendships from last year have grown and changed. Watching everyone find new opportunities and explore the things they care about is incredible. This world can be a huge bummer sometimes (that's an understatement if I've ever written one), but it's really comforting to know that the great people I know now will eventually be great people out in the world doing great and meaningful things. That said, I am sad that between my nightmare schedule and several attempts at making amends that I've really bungled, I haven't repaired some of the friendships that I really wanted to. Sometimes people drift apart, but this isn't that. There are concrete things that I can point to and say "Yeah, what I did made things worse." and that feels bad. How do you explain your thoughts and feelings without making it seem like you're making excuses for the times you were a bad friend? I don't know. Is that even possible? Is it worth it to try? I'm figuring it out. I'm learning how to be patient with myself, even when it's hard and uncomfortable. One of the phrases I've often found myself repeating this year is "all good things take time." Adjusting to Brown took much more time than I was comfortable with. In truth, I'm still not adjusted all the way. The good news is that I don't want to transfer any more. The slightly-less-good-but-not-really-so-bad news is that I'm still figuring things out. Once I've conquered this set of challenges a new set will pop up, but that's life. Last year's mantra was "You have to struggle to grow." I struggled. I grew. It was worth it. I'm glad I came back. All good things take time. I'm sitting here in Dunn Brothers drinking an au lait and thinking about all the packing I have left to do. It's not that much, but it's still floating around in my head as a topic of concern.
I am mostly here because my backpack in Pokemon Go is full and I wanted to sit here and use up a lure module and some Pokeballs to try and empty it out a little. I keep catching Weedles and they keep breaking free and frankly I'm a little mad about it. It's fine, I'm not bitter. Really, it's fine. There's a guy on the other side of the coffee shop who is wearing an exceptionally pretentious and stupid-looking beret. Dude, it's mid-August in Minnesota—what are you doing? It's funny, though. Home is full of characters. I wonder how I would feel if I saw the same person in Rhode Island. I have a feeling I would do some internal grumbling about how the East Coast is full of pretentious, ~poseur~ scum. When I was talking with a friend about how I felt like the East Coast was so radically different from the Midwest, he mentioned that for him it was really easy to just write people off as pretentious or privileged or any number of unsavory things. It took him a while to realize that everyone had a lot of nuance. This resonated with me a lot. I am guilty of this. Like, really, really, guilty of this. I think my many, many fears and anxieties about being at school magnified the differences I saw between myself and "East Coasters", whatever that designation means. This year I am going to try harder to see the nuance. |