October 22, 2014 - 23:29
Around 12:15pm, I walked into the rain and found myself reciting the phrase “love myself, love the process, love myself, love the process…” over and over; delighted that the repetition never failed to carry resonance each time I spoke it. As I walked, I was barely conscious that my feet had a mind and direction of their own. My attention was much more readily consumed in the act of reveling. I couldn’t help but look around and wonder if anyone could notice it; if it was possible for how radically different I felt inwardly to be written on the surface of my body.
And then suddenly I found myself standing under the library staircase, the most immediate refuge from the rain, writing this:
“I have spent so much of my life span trying to figure out why I continually fail to accomplish the standards that indicate student success as determined by educational systems; standards that seem to be the only means by which both intelligence and the depth of learning is measured- the grading of a product. The idea of college has always seemed goal oriented; you are working towards completion, and a diploma that represents having “successfully” transitioned from being a student into fuller, more developed adult who is worthy of achieving happiness. I have reached points where my guilt at not meeting these expectations was so overwhelmingly debilitating that it was impossible to do any work at all; and by extension, impossible to love myself, because my identity is so engulfed with being a “student” … how could possibly I find value in an identity- in myself- if I consistently fail to meet the requirements of that identity? And yet, all the while, I have been resistant to complacently accepting the rigidity of this formula, and the consequent assumption that I have failed to learn. And I vacillate between this tension on a day to day basis; how I can fail to submit a seemingly simple piece of writing, reflecting on something academic for a course, and yet spend hours actively and critically engaged in dialogue with a fellow student on a bench somewhere, learning more about life and academics by processing the inherently intertwined connection between the two, then I have ever learned in a classroom. And when I go to write these “simple” posts, or papers, or whatever it is- those more surface-level representations of achievement, I cannot convince myself that it is meaningful to return to a removal of the real and the experience from the academic “truths.” For me, it has always been the process that I am exceptionally good at- the brainstorming, the moments of profound perplexity, the pauses in between- the process which is ultimately expected to remain invisible on the surface of a “well-written,” finished piece of academic writing. I will sit and write pages and yet still never be willing to let go of this processing… because to abandon it is to refuse the reader or a professor access to what was so incredibly moving in the first place, the feelings that remain at the core of my sense of what it means to learn. How could anyone truly learn from me if they cannot access the full depth of what I have learned? This tension seems to be at the crux of being continually static in my inability to fully love myself; I cannot find a happy meeting place between knowing that I have knowledge to offer and having to prove that knowledge in the way that satisfies what it means to be a student. I find myself profoundly moved that, for the first time in my years at Bryn Mawr, I have finally today felt the unbelievably draining weight of this tension dissolve from my conscience; I am resolved, relieved, released, of the expectation that to be a failure as a student is to be unsuccessful at learning… and renewed in my understanding that the process itself can be the product. It is not, as I have been led to believe, the somehow less important means to an end, but an end in of itself. I am adopting a new mantra: Love yourself, love the process, love yourself, love the process… I am holding myself accountable to this labor of loving and offering to others my greatest intellectual strength. To respect the process is to at last feed the very desire which brought me to Bryn Mawr four years ago- an intense longing to make learning and feeling simultaneously hold resonance. I will never relinquish my identity as learner, even long after having relinquished my identity as a student. I refuse to be so conclusively dismissed as having reached my capacity to think and feel once I have reached the arbitrary edges that enclose an essay, and I will never stop discovering that it is possible to for me to love more deeply.”
I felt a jolt of shock when I realized that I was done; that this small piece of writing could feel distinctly concluded. I am so exceedingly unfamiliar with this kind of finality that I momentarily could not trace my source of shock. I noticed that a group of ants had become emboldened by my curiously still body entering their space of residence and had begun to explore my right shoe. That had to have only been ten, or maybe fifteen minutes, I thought, watching the ants get lost across the canvas of my sneaker. It seemed rather rude to disturb the discovery process by moving my feet forward.
My investment in the ants came immediately and abruptly to halt when I discovered the actual time: 2:23pm. Without a second thought, I gathered my things, light a cigarette and speed walked back to the English house for the meeting I was now very late in attending. Midway upon the journey there, it occurred to me how remarkably easy it was to be in motion. I thought about how, on so many other occasions, particularly when I am late to being somewhere, my most immediate reaction would not have been to simply move forward. More likely, I would have spent time thinking about how awful of a student I was and why couldn’t I simply be better, and I would find myself in a place where I was so consumed by hating myself for not being better, that I couldn’t possibly imagine how another person wouldn’t inevitably hate me as well. I would find myself frozen here, projecting the reactions of others according to my own reaction. I had skipped, somewhat uneventfully, the entire process of guilt that often leads me to be immobile. And it wasn’t just that I did not succumb to an instinct toward guilt and self-loathing, which is an exhausting effort to make in of itself; it was as though those emotions had been removed entirely from the equation.
And it occurred that this was the really unforeseen consequence in truly believing in my own worth- the sudden ability and urgent desire to move forward; to cross over that wall I had built between wanting love myself and actively loving myself; to actually do something because I believe I am capable of doing something.
love myself, love the process, love myself, love the process
I have been convinced.