Entry Six: A Newfound Interest In My Own Existence

For a long time, I was under the impression that everyone around me understood themselves on a much deeper level than I did. I wished I could say that I was strong, brave, agreeable, funny, hopeless; I didn’t care what, I just wanted to be able to say something about myself with the confidence that it was true. Underneath it, I ignored the gnawing truth that no one understands themselves so clearly and succinctly, and with time I’ve realized that there are no certain understandings of anything, especially not ourselves. But at the time I think it was easier for me to believe that I was simply lacking, instead of believing that the world is full of insecure people who lie.

Being back on campus for the first time since last May, I’ve reluctantly plunged into a pool of nostalgia and reminiscence. Everywhere I go is a reintroduction to the people and places I used to be entwined with, benign memories are reawakened and replayed in my head during a simple trip to the dining hall. The period that comes to mind the most is when I was writing my freshman thesis. I started writing it around this time last year, and I feel strangely close to the anxious feeling that pervaded the whole process. When I lie in bed in the mornings before class, the feeling of being so stressed each day that I woke up dreading opening my laptop to those same twenty pages of what felt like nonsense–or worse, another email from my professor harassing me about them–starts to creep up on me. It seems that these opening months of the year are permanently tainted by the pervasive anxiety of writing something ultimately meaningless that I was desperate to make meaningful.

As I was packing to move back in I went through my school bag and found a hard-copy draft of my essay crumpled at the bottom of my bag. It was maybe the third or fourth iteration of it, somewhat close to the end but still very unfinished. It felt like what I imagine holding a premature baby feels like; small, delicate, and packed with hope. The writing process of that paper felt oddly similar to the way writing these journal entries does, it was a search and rescue mission. There was an outline of course, with sources and plenty of research, but the heart of the essay, the purpose, or better yet, the meaning, was something I found along the way. My thesis statement wasn’t complete until I typed my final word, and I spent every moment writing trying to get closer and closer to that feeling where everything clicked into place and it all made sense. Every draft I was walking through a forest, turning right this time, and left the next time, looking for the light of the clearing.

This year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to say to start staying “No” more. I constantly find myself agreeing to do things I don’t want to do and consistently being miserable. It doesn’t come from an insecure people-pleasing need. It’s more so a delusion that at some point before the thing I’ve agreed to do is meant to happen I’ll either A, come up with some long-winded excuse to say never mind and bail, or B, the thing will simply not happen or get canceled. Very rarely is that ever the case and I frequently find myself doing things I have no interest in because I’m too lazy to say no and pretend to be sad that I can’t be a part of whatever it is I’ve been asked to do. You may be thinking, that doesn’t make any sense, because in my laziness I’m only creating more work for myself. To that, I say, there are just some things in life you'll never get logical explanations for and this is one of them. Surprisingly, in just the first few weeks of the year, I’ve had to exercise this rule quite a few times to varying degrees of severity. In doing so, I’ve discovered an undercover itch that was being scratched by my lazy habit of saying yes to everyone, an underlying insecurity that I couldn’t quite name or place until I was brought back to something that happened to me around his time last year.

I had a class with the same professor who advised my thesis, and one day we were discussing a collection of poetry that we were assigned to read. This professor tended to get extremely passionate during discussions, and sometimes wouldn’t accept any point of view that he didn’t agree with. (I would love to go into detail about why I think this is, but there is a very large chance I will have to work with him again in the future. Instead, I’ll invite you, the reader, to make your own inferences based on his characteristics; he was an older white man with promising writing talent in his youth who ended up teaching introductory classes at Emerson College.) The conversation became slightly heated, and somehow ended up being me and this professor going back and forth with each other. Again, we were discussing poetry. There was no definite meaning, there was no “right answer,” he was simply wanting me to adhere to his way of thinking. I had no problem with hearing him out and I was very open to the conversation, but I was naively under the impression that while heated, the playing field was level. We had worked as equals before, and he recognized my level of talent and intelligence in private, so why would it be any different now? We continued to go back and forth, as he only got more and more passionate. Other students jumped in now and then to try and quell him, but what started as a discussion soon turned into something reminiscent of an argument. Even still, I kept my cool. I wasn’t worried or offended, I knew he respected me so I felt there was no reason to feel threatened. It wasn’t until he shouted something along the lines of “What, can you not read? Can you not understand the words on the page?” that I realized I was wrong.

We took a break after that because everyone went silent and no one wanted to spar with him. I wandered the halls alone, trying to figure out if I should be upset or not. I concluded that as much as I didn’t want to be, I was extremely upset, and as soon as I did an awful feeling slowly creeping up from my stomach began to pester me. I immediately tried to calm myself down as my chest panged with hurt and my hands sweat with anger, I wanted nothing more than to be calm. I thought if I reduced the moment to something much smaller than my heart wanted it to be, if I forgot the details of what he said, and erased the looks on my classmate’s faces when he said it, I would be fine. I desperately wanted to take a deep breath and go back to class like nothing happened. Eventually, I paced myself down into the dining hall where I found some friends having lunch. I sat with them and casually began to tell them about the whole ordeal, and as I spoke of what happened I broke down into tears. As I cried, I apologized to them for being so dramatic, I didn’t understand why I felt this way. I told them it really wasn’t that big a deal, that it was just a mean comment, that maybe I didn’t understand what he was saying. Quickly, and thankfully, they grounded me, “Your white male professor just asked one of few black students in the class if you’re illiterate in front of a class full of white people.” Once they put it like that, I was livid.

I returned to class late from break with red eyes and a runny nose. I sat silent for the rest of the time as anger boiled in the pit of my stomach, bubbling up through my esophagus and making my face sear through the end of the lesson. When class ended I packed up with haste, trying to leave before he could corner me. But he stood by the door like some kind of creep, making it inevitable that I’d pass him on my way out. He pulled me to the side gave me a weak apology, and at the end of it he asked me two questions; “Are you ok,” and “Do you want me to continue advising on your thesis?” I stood there with firecrackers popping under my skin, my legs growing too weak to support my weight, and said yes to both. Neither was the truth.

I tell myself that there are no right or wrong answers in situations like these and that you can never know if you did the right thing in the long run. If I consider anything else I’ll be in perpetual rage at my countless past decisions to sideline my comfortability and worth in favor of being agreeable. A huge part of me wishes I said no. An even bigger part of me wishes that I didn’t wait until course evaluations to tell him and his supervisors how rude and absurd he could be, and that I made it clear to him how hurt I was and how unbelievably out of line his actions were. But at that moment, in some desperate attempt at saving face, I chose the easier, more passive option over what I actually wanted. I was not ok, I didn’t want to work with him anymore. Any good he could’ve done for me was overshadowed by his unrelenting disrespect for my intelligence, and I still choose to continue to work with him. 

In the weeks following I was tortured by a pervasive worthlessness. It was the kind of feeling that’s there as you fall asleep at night and when you wake up in the morning, and even in your dreams rocking you out of your sleep. There’s not a moment of refuge, it takes hold of everything you hold dear and wedges itself between you and it. It makes you question every single thing in your life a thousand times over, and ask yourself if you deserve it. This terrorizing feeling only heightened my anxiety and dread over my work, making the process of searching for meaning more dire, more necessary. If I wasn’t proud of what I produced at the end of the semester, what did I put myself through all of that for? 

Black girls are taught from a young age to be passive first and prideful second. We’re taught not to make ourselves small, but to make ourselves easy. If we’re agreeable, If we’re “good”, we’ll get by, if we’re anything else we’re too much trouble. But what has being “good” gotten me? What has being good gotten you? I mean, other than hurt, disrespected, and misused, I can’t think of one thing it’s afforded me. By being easy I’ve only left behind pieces of myself in favor of material gain. But if my worth, my well-being, and my heart are compromised in my work, in the end, it’ll be nothing but a reminder of the pride I lost along the way.

And so in these past few weeks of saying no, I’ve discovered not a people-pleasing need but a lack of value invested in my wellbeing. And now that I have a taste of the relief that’s putting myself first, I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t care who it inconveniences, who it makes mad, who it troubles. I’m going to make sure my identity, my values, and my well-being are upheld in any and all decisions I make moving forward. I can’t let the wants and needs of others, or what society has told me I should want and need take precedence over me. I don’t want to be brave so that I can say to you that I am, I want to be brave so I can live in the way that’s truest to myself. This year, and every year moving forward that is my priority, and it starts with saying no.

In simpler words: Don’t bother asking me about shit, the answer is no.