Last week, a professor of mine handed our class section a inconspicuous sheet of lined paper on our final day of meeting for that class; to the shocked and embarrassingly giggly recollection of every student in the room, its contents entailed a letter penned to us by us by each of our past selves on the first day of the year (and thus our undergraduate experience). Usually I gag for this sort of gooey introspection and wisened guidance from the lessons I teach myself, but I ended up being unsurprised and, frankly, bored by how familiar the words that First-Day-Leah wrote to herself.
I wrote of the isolation I felt while walking into every new room in which I felt the forces of hypervisibility and invisibility converge, paired with the hesitant expectancy of a new place and completely new life. I was open, raw, petaled, waiting for the journey of freshman year with as few (okay, definitely a few) pretenses as possible. I was a different version of myself, as one always is entering a new season of life. Yet, I feel myself today writing from the same environment which confirmed all of my worries as well as many of my hopes.
I am done with the last of my finals. I have one final academic meeting looming over my week. I move out on Friday, and I am finished with my first year of college, which feels as surreal to say as it has been to experience. As HRH Gwyneth Paltrow famously once said, “I laughed, I cried a number of times, I sweat, I danced, I ate, and I had many epiphanies.”
I also just finished Severance. Because I need to find a way to make this about media and also need to talk about every morsel of media that goes through my cavernous post-finals brain canal, let’s make this about Severance. A one sentence primer for those who aren’t in the know: The show’s universe revolves around the concept of severance: a dystopian procedure and idealized state of being in which laborers memories are severed into their “in office” selves and “out of office” selves as exclusive personas that have no recollection or connection with one another by way of brain chip insertion and sensory technology. Got it? Got it. Highly recommended, by the way, it lived up to all hype and blew me away!
To be clear: I would never be Severed. I don’t think that future is for me. But looking back on the challenging year that myself and many others have had, it seems hard to believe that one person could withstand it without serious compartmentalization or complete shuttering of the mind’s eye on bad days.
My academic “innie” is diligent (mostly), involved, attentive. She has her hand in every pie on campus and remains dedicated to engaging with her academic department. To humble brag, she’s kind of the best. The same innie rarely sleeps before 2am, and hits academic walls out of frustration and stagnation. She really, really hates how white her environment is, and hates the amount of emotional exhaustion that hate seizes from her. As I began to examine the themes of agency and violence in relation to labor in Severance, I began to examine the workings of my own placement in a world and campus in which my innie is my full self, with no option to distance myself from the reality of the challenges of my life. That self deserves as much love and care as she dispenses hard work and exertion, and I created her by expecting as much of myself.
Since the beginning of this little pandemic thing that irreversibly changed the course of the lives of virtually everyone I know, I’ve become a bit of a pro at taking things in stride. Rolling with punches, accepting changes, and knowing when or when not to sweat things: all in my wheelhouse now. What I have irrevocably lost in the same process is the capacity to feel those events deeply, and evaluate their lasting impact on me. That is a luxury that I feel I don’t have time for most days, and thus often auto-pilot to avoid.
As I look back on my first year of college, I consider this: I got myself here, and I put myself here, by the gifts and guidance given to me. I made that decision a little over one calendar year ago. Since it just so happens to be Decision Day out there today, I suppose this is relevant. As much as I want to affirm and claim my (college) decision, I need to remind myself of both the precedented and unprecedented doubts and challenges that were bound to come with it. This is hard because life is hard, and I think I’m prepared and capable enough to face it.
Still, I don’t want to forget it or brush past it for the sake of moving on and surface level reflection. I’m going to ruminate on the hurt, and relish in the immense joy. To do so I’m using journal prompts handed down to me by my father, who received them from his mentor. Speaking of, I’m journaling for the first time since last April. I thought that given the professional and academic verbal output I’ve generated in the last year (probably around manuscript length) I would be sucked dry of words, but I care enough about listening to myself to take the time to find some more. That’s what I’ll be doing this week, as I pack up my dorm meditatively and also finally watch The Wilds before Season 2 drops. I love you, and I’ll see you next week!