Thus begins my recommitment to this blog: as part of my recovery plan, I've scheduled hours for journalling so that I can better work out my thoughts and feelings. Or, at the very least, be conscious of them. This will likely be more streams-of-consciousness and emotional than my usual analytical prose so bear with me, reader.
I rang in the New Year with a set of new friends. My friend's friends. I started borrowing them and entering into their circle of activities this past weekend - it was the greatest feeling having a group of robustly supportive people around me. I have a lot of difficulty articulating what it is exactly that is so sorely amiss in my relationships with NU grads. It's as if there's a fundamental frequency shift that keeps us from fully being on the same page, and I can't put my finger on it. It can't simply be a question of academic background, because I have many a close friend with whom I share next to no academic similarities with. So what is it exactly that makes spending time with NU grads so fraught with anxiety and feelings of maladroitness? I'd venture to say it's a class difference. We have very different core values which inform how we interpret things, the standards that we set for ourselves and for others, and the margins of tolerance and acceptance that we are accustomed to. I think those core values are set early on in life, and that they correspond to a particular class. They're learned so subconsciously that we are not aware of them, and they begin to dictate our personalities and priorities in spite of all the changes that we go through in our lives. I think that my core values correspond to those of people who were born into a similar class as me - white-collar, upper middle class, focused on getting and staying ahead of the economic curve, and rooted in traditional understandings of virtue such as hard work, efficiency, economy, perseverance, patience, organization, planning and structure. It's true that I've come to question all of these so-called virtues (mostly because I've taken them all so far that I've been diagnosed with severe depression and an eating disorder), but it's also true that they are fundamental to everything I experience. I have trouble eradicating the virtuous aura that surrounds any allusions to hard work and saving up money. I think I share this unshakable worldview with those who grew up in similar class conditions as me, and it's this worldview that makes me unable to easily communicate with those who grew up under different circumstances.
Communication is, for the most part, anticipation and intuition. In short, mind-reading is a crucial component in any conversation. If we did not already have a fairly good idea of what a person is about to say, it would take forever to actually have a conversation and get ideas across. The speed at which we communicate requires a large degree of intuitive knowledge. It's been pointed out to me many times that I often finish sentences of friends with whom I'm fairly close. I know what they're about to say, just as they know what I'm about to say. My friends have completely different habits, dreams, preferences and backgrounds from me, but we share core values that allow us a common platform of consensus upon which we can intuit and understand each other at a deeper level. In the case of most NU grads, I find that there is a fundamental difference between my core values and theirs.
I'm endlessly frustrated by the apathy and lack of energy in the graduate community. In general, the university fails to be self-critical and to strive to improve. It's funny because academically, it's striving to do a lot of really radical, new things and yet it hypocritically fails to do anything radical or even contemplate changing the way things are done within itself. Obvious and often harped upon failures are simply repeated year after year, students and faculty members having given up on changing anything for fear of political repercussions upon their academic careers. This is a school where people are frightened to test limits, their own personal limits when it comes to time and energy expended, as well as the limits of their responsibility when it comes to questions of community. People are downright unwilling to stretch themselves or to spend any extra time doing things that do not directly benefit their own academic credentials. Basic camaraderie does not exist. As much as GSD students were hypercompetitive, snobby divas, and downright cruel to one another at times, there was always a basic sense of unity and a need to display concern and vested interest in fellow students's progress. It might have been a superficial display of concern, and nothing more than an attempt to squeeze out some personal gratification from seeing a fellow student struggle with something, but we did check in on each other regularly (and perhaps too much). We knew that to some extent the downfall of one member would negatively impact all of us, so we selfishly committed selfless acts, donating our time, energy and expertise to others's direct benefit in order to indirectly better our own lot.
We got things done. We didn't dawdle, didn't put off anything, didn't just live with inconveniences that an incompetent administration put before us. We vehemently protested, we came up with solutions, we spent days, hours and months reworking the system ourselves or coming up with alternatives. We never shrugged and let the incoming students deal with it. We took it upon ourselves to do things that we were not obliged to do, and in fact should have expected as services provided to us given that we paid insane amounts of tuition. In many ways, we did it to prove that we were on top of things, that we were geniuses in our own right and that we could do our job as well as others's. It was a boasting point that we never slept and that our bodies gave out. But it was also an attitude of endless improvement and pro-activeness that is thoroughly middle-class. We saw the potential for endless expansion, for development, for getting ahead. I miss that a lot here.
Here, that kind of enthusiasm and initiative is viewed as overbearing, snobby, and flashy. It's seen as inflated self-importance, meddling in things that are beyond you and your responsibilities. It's seen as an attempt to show other students up, to make yourself stand out as virtuous and admirable. For people who are so vested in being proactive and radical in their academic studies, NU grads are hopelessly conservative and apathetic in practice. The words always come out right, but there are never any actions. It's frustrating because I want to be able to chastise people for their lax attitudes yet cannot do so because they've veiled them in such politically correct terms.
Anyways, this entry really wasn't supposed to be a rant. It was supposed to be a reflection upon how at ease and happy I've been feeling over the past few days in the company of new friends who share my core values. It's like being able to breathe again easily, to speak without second-guessing or getting anxious about whether somebody will find me offensive or dumb. We get each other's references almost all the time - we live within the same cultural milieu, from music to movies, actors, and games. I never knew that this was so crucial to my mental and emotional well-being, this sense of intuitive connection to other people. My sense of isolation over the past year was not just a symptom of depression, but the result of my inability to communicate to those around me. I couldn't get inside their heads and they couldn't get inside mine enough to really get a sense that others are on the same page as me. For all I knew, I was uttering words that held meaning only for me. There was an inability to verify with others the reality of what I felt or thought. I was living alone inside my head, and the world seemed indifferent and inaccessible to me.
Steph snoozed @ 1.1.13 |
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