I feel, and fear, I have reached a bit of a standstill in my Innernet Search, and in my ability to turn my personal goals that float in and out of focus inside my head into something REAL. I fear I’m hiding behind “I don’t know again” – telling myself I don’t know what I want, or how to find it and go after it. Part of me thinks this is an excuse, and yet part of me really thinks that this is the truth.
In all honesty, I feel like I’ve been running on autopilot for four years –going through the motions of college life. I arrived at Carnegie Mellon four years ago already having selected a major!! This sounds totally ludicrous to me in retrospect, but it is completely 100% normal at this school. I became a Civil Engineer, I think because other people suggested that I might be good at it, or that I might like it. My dad is a Civil Engineer, and some part of me probably wanted to gain his approval. All of the other reasons I mentioned in my first blog entry are true, but just not the whole truth. In four years, I never strayed. Not even once, to see if maybe I would prefer something else, and now in January of my senior year, I don’t feel like a Civil Engineer, and I don’t really feel like much of anything.
I get that this is a self-deprecating thing to say, and maybe it’s not entirely true and I am just being hormonal right now. But the funny thing is that I feel a bit like a broken record when a new acquaintance asks me what I study – is it really Civil Engineering? Or is that just the department in which I took the most classes because at 18, I had no f*ing clue what else to do? Last night at 1am, I was filling out a profile for myself for a Newsweek Women’s Leadership conference that I was nominated to attend in New York this weekend, and I was asked, in 250 words, to explain my vision of a better world 30 years from now. I feel like I have answered some version of this question eighty-two times: in my Truman and Udall Scholarship applications, in interviews, at other conferences I’ve attended. At this point, I hardly have to stop and think about the answer because I can so easily just write what I’ve been writing for the past few years. Write about the environment. Write about sustainable development. Write about water. These are things I care about, but I am starting to feel that at 21, I have already put myself into a BOX!!
I have always had long, flowing hair that everyone loved. People said, wow, Erica has such great hair. It was always about the hair, and in my freshman year of college, I was so SICK of being defined by my hair that I chopped it all off. That is what I feel like now. I feel like I’ve been packaged to fit nicely on a one-page resume, and sometimes (like right now) all I want to do is just say, screw it! I’m shaving my head. I’m starting over. I AM GOING TO UN-PACKAGE AND UN-EDUCATE AND DECONSTRUCT MYSELF, AND FIGURE OUT WHO I REALLY AM.
But for some reason it’s not that easy to undo 16 years of schooling in which I’ve followed a structure that has brought me to the place I am at right now. Is it reasonable or responsible for me to start questioning every single thing that I thought I cared about? I feel I’ve gotten so good at doing what other people suggested that I do: apply for this scholarship, apply for that summer program, send that extra email, don’t you really want it? Maybe I want it. Maybe I’m tired of applying for external approval and recognition for things I may or may not love, for things that may or may not be true to ME.
I’ve felt lost before. And in these times, I have friends and family who try to “get me back on track” and remind me of the things that I care about (or the things I’ve said I cared about). Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out… you always figure it out and you always do something great. Talk about pressure.
I guess what I’m saying is that I really want to stop asking people, and listening to people about what I should do. I want to stop reading self-help books about other people who have figured it out. I want to stop applying for things because the opportunity showed up in my Inbox, and it matches all the other things I’ve done before so why not.
Over break, I had many, many, many conversations with my sister Hillary (currently a freshman at Duke) about her path. She was afraid that she did not have a clear path, worried about not having picked (like a flower) a major, and she wanted to make sure that she selected a set of classes for her spring semester that were really representative of the things she is interested in. My initial reaction was to say that the classes one takes in his or her freshman year of college don’t really matter so much, and so there’s no need to stress about creating the perfect schedule. But I realize now that it’s not about classes. It’s about striking a balance between who one is as a person, and what is expected of members of a college community. Sometimes it’s so difficult (at least for me) to shut myself off from all of the voices that constantly surround me, and play over and over in my head about what I should do. I practice yoga so that I can learn to find my own voice amongst all the others, but I’m not quite at that point where the volume of my soul is loud enough for me to hear over all the noise.
I don’t necessarily want to “tie up” this entry with a nice little bow, because that is exactly what I am trying not to do with myself. So, I’m just going to leave you with those thoughts…
This is the problem with a society that has strayed so far from passion and emotion to intellect. The first two are probably more important than the latter. We discount emotion, when really it is the only thing preventing us from being robots.
ReplyDeleteI am sure you felt passionate and emotional on and about Bike and Build and felt at home, like it was the right thing to do, even though it really had no "intellectual" attraction.
I feel odd saying anything, since you are sick of listening to people talk, but I think you are right on track. Passion + Emotion.
Bravo Erica...you have reached the precipice of your "innernet" search.
ReplyDeleteJust keep going!!! xxym
"The physical sciences and mathematics are concerned exclusively with convergent problems. That is why they can progress cumulatively, and each new generation can begin just where their forbears left off. The price, however, is a heavy one. Dealing exclusively with convergent problems does not lead into life but away from it."
ReplyDelete"Divergent problems, as it were, force man to strain hiimself to a level above himself; they demand, and thus provoke the supply of, forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness, and truth into our lives."
"To grapple with divergent problems tends to be exhausting, worrying, and wearisome. Hence people try to avoid it and to run away from it. A busy executive who has been dealing with divergent problems all day long will read a detective story or solve a crossword puzzle on his journey home. He has been using his brain all day; why does he go on using it? The answer is that the detective story and the crossword puzzle present convergent problems, and that is the relaxation. They require a bit of brainwork, even difficult brainwork, but they do not call for his straining and stretching to a higher level which is the specific challenge of a divergent problem, a problem in which irreconcilable opposites have to be reconciled. It is only the latter that are the real stuff of life."
That was a smart dude- E.F. Schumacher, in 1971.
(If you want a great book- read his - Small is Beautiful) You have got some major divergent problems here, but you are living. This "strain" is natural, although you probably don't know many people facing up to it. But then again, how many people shave their head?
hey erica. passed by a link for your blog on facebook, figured i'd take a break from my other reading and see what you had to say. I enjoyed your post a lot, and can definitely relate to the feelings of doubt you expressed. Its tough, separating your own expectations from everyone else's. If civil engineer-ing doesn't work out, seems to me like you'd make a half decent writer. Anyway, whatever you choose, good luck, and thanks again for the good read.
ReplyDelete