A Lamont Café barista prepares the last chai tea latte, the pop hit blaring from her laptop fades to a weak bass, and swarms of students—eyes weary but triumphant— trickle towards the bag inspection line.
It is 2:00 AM. Tomorrow’s p-sets have been solved. But though others’ nights have ended, mine is only halfway done.
I adjust my legs on a gray couch facing the window and try not to fixate on the suspicious stain that adorns its right arm. My forehead throbs, so I silence it with a long, bitter swig of dark roast. The moon, my lone faithful companion at this hour, sends slivers of light to pierce through the hazy shadows and it is under this meager radiance that I type away, fingers flying frantically, to complete yet another essay that is due frighteningly soon.
The above scene occurs more often than I’d care to admit. I’ve stayed late enough at Lamont to see the moon fade and sun rise, the vending machines restock, the guard-on-duty doze at his desk.
As a second semester freshman, I think I’ve become a Lamonster. My academic-extracurricular workload isn’t quite as balanced as I’d thought, I’ve lost the youthful naiveté that motivated me to finish all required and optional readings, and shouldn’t I be saving sleepless nights for thesis season senior year?
I used to think that beneath the evaporated piss on John Harvard’s left foot there’d still be a speck of gold. But now I fear that I’m doing it all wrong.
And with Spring Break nearly ending, I find this fear resurfacing. But I also find that I’ve gotten the necessary physical and metaphorical space to reflect on my confusion and exhaustion.
I’m Fine and other Fallacies
“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”—Kate Chopin, The Awakening
I hadn’t seen Paul in more than a month, even though he lived in my entryway. So when I was exiting Mower on an afternoon in November just as he was entering, I stopped to chat. The exchange was polite: lots of “You’re not dead!” on his part but, as I searched for words to assure him that I was very much alive, it became clear—to me and I’m sure him— that my exclamations of “How are you?” and “Let’s grab a meal soon!” were placeholders for conversation. With three office hour appointments to attend, four classes that required I be coherent enough to contribute in section, and five organizations to comp, people had become, well, extra.
Because of this mentality, I’ve accumulated a list of strained encounters. I’ve doled the rushed inquiry and responded with an equally rushed “I’m fine!” I’ve worn a strained smile and raised my hand in farewell to expedite the brisk walk to the next appointment, section, meeting.
I’ve forged a fictitious self. It’s mechanical, no doubt, but also functional, and sometimes I’m tempted to wrap the garment around more tightly because to unwrap risks vulnerability and I’m doing just fine as is. There are moments, however, when I get a bit audacious. A professor will compare the compactness of gumballs to poetry or a HUDS worker will cook me a chicken though the grill closed fifteen minutes before and I think—no I know—that it’d be more than fine for me to embrace the touch of bare authenticity. These moments appear in short bursts and disappear just as quickly. But they come, no less, and encourage me to pause from routine, reach out to acquaintances-who-could-be-friends like Paul, maybe eat un-plugged: emails and half-written responses left, if only briefly, to the side.
Disease of a (Crimson) Nation
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
I first understood the disease, I think, on the treadmill.
It was a Sunday morning, and the MAC was abuzz with clinks from lifted barbells, thuds from swinging punches, deep sighs from that petite, pixie-haired woman leg pressing three times her weight: a cacophony composed by those guilty from engaging in calorie-rich revelries the night before. My own feet pounded in furious repetition to a Beyoncé playlist.
I had one eye on the “Calories Burned” count—so damn close to 600!—and another on page 45 of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, which I delicately balanced in my right hand. In my left, I clutched a pink highlighter that I used, not so sparingly, to mark page 45 because I needed citations for a seven page paper due by midnight. Why didn’t I finish this on Saturday? I groaned in self-reproach and remembered, not too fondly, that Saturday was busy with comp socials that were dissatisfying to say the least and awkward at best, filled with paltry supplies of stale multigrain crackers and aging cheddar cheese. Wiping beads of sweat mixed with fresh tears, I determined that the paper needed to be done by 7:00 PM, realistically, because that’s when HPR would begin.
Perfect hurts. Or, more precisely, trying to be perfect does.
I should have left the MAC right then, showered, and napped: what better method was there to have maximized my happiness and minimized my pain? I had succumbed to an ill-formed urge, rather, to do everything and do everything perfectly and, in doing so, I was at once stationary and running: running after crackers and cheese because I thought they signified inclusion, running after a meticulously highlighted book, running after an arbitrary 600.
It’s hard but attainable and just-lofty-enough, I’ve come to believe, to instead aspire for less breadth in what I do, to accept that I will, inevitably, fuck up in what I do—and that’s alright. It’s actually quite good.
Eight Lives Short of Nine
“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Before he declared that the Vice Presidency was a bitch, Joe Biden quoted William Butler Yeats. “All’s changed, changed utterly,” he observed at the Kennedy School in early October. “A terrible beauty has been born.” Biden was referring to Russian coercion and the rise of China’s economy: in short, world affairs. I gasped, in awe and shock, at this application of poetry to politics and remembered, for a minute, what I’d been missing.
I love literature.
In other worlds, I find lessons that help me in this real, sometimes disappointing, one. The White Queen’s conviction in imagination inspires me to believe in six impossible things before breakfast; Elphaba’s past as an animal rights activist reminds me that the witch was not always wicked; Prufrock’s paralysis prods me to eat the peach.
Upon entering Harvard in the fall, I felt a painful distance from literature begin to form. Immediately, I had found large and conspicuous and relatively open groups that fulfilled my other passion—politics—and so I quickly became an IOPerson, a Dems aficionado, an IWRC board member. The people I came to associate with, naturally, were more inclined to discuss President Obama’s immigration policy or grassroots organizing than they were to discuss Haruki Murakami’s latest story in The New Yorker or narrative journalism. I ached for a community devoted to the arts. And, to be sure, these communities exist. But like all student-formed communities at Harvard, they have barriers to entry and there’s only so many comps a girl can do before she drops. Or so I consoled myself.
Though, I’ll admit: I was convinced, at first, that my estranged relationship with literature could be repaired if I lived a second simultaneous life—or better yet, eight more. Invigorated by newfound time and energy, I’d fill these lives comping The Advocate and The Lampoon and Tuesday Magazine—hell, maybe even The Crimson. Then, perhaps, I’d find the community—an officially branded one, too!—that I craved. But adding more dissatisfying and awkward comp socials to my to-do list, as the MAC incident demonstrated, would do more harm than good. And to interpret increased membership in branded communities as the solution was, well, emblematic of the actual problem at hand.
Every extracurricular in which I was involved, I’d mistakenly come to believe, reflected every facet of my identity. Lacking an activity explicitly associated with the arts, I perceived that a void had swallowed my former self, that I was now a fraud who needed a label—I’m on the blank board of blank publication—to validate my love of literature.
And since extracurricular activities and the people in them consumed so much of my free time, the delusion became a self-reinforcing one: I hadn’t considered that I could find fulfillment outside—to use that annoyingly vague term—“the establishment.”
This lack of consideration points to a larger trend, I now realize, that permeates Harvard: exhibitionism. If all the world’s a stage, then all lives are certainly on display. And there’s no greater stage—or audience to impress—than here. A self-induced pressure arose, for this reason, to institutionalize my passions and talents in order to acquire external validation: to remind classmates and entryway-mates that these passions and talents existed, but more so to remind myself. Because while acting on this stage, draped in ivy and filled with the best and brightest, I’d lost any sense of self.
Yet Biden’s allusion suggests all is not lost. I can find art anywhere if only I search hard enough and in the right places: individuals like the poetry professor extolling the virtues of gumdrops; conversations with that kid wearing a Vonnegut sweatshirt near the panini grill in Annenberg; even myself. After all, I don’t need to make every aspect of my being “official” to wholly exist.
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