On New Semesters
and links for thought
The semester started this week.
It’s strange how the beginning of something that resembles another thing evokes the other thing, or things. Evoke, meaning to call or summon forth, (from 1600s French évoquer).
The beginning of the semester, for me, always evokes a specific memory from what I consider to be my first college semester. I’d gone to community college previously, taken part-time classes, but at 32 years-old I began my first full-time semester at Syracuse University. I was taking a full credit load of classes, many of them requirements, like astronomy, and working part-time as a tutor at a local elementary school.
At 32, I was a naif then, or considered myself to be one (without knowing what the word meant). The referenced memory is this: I am standing on the sidewalk outside of a restaurant called Alto Cinco, chatting with a friend from my summer job as a composer of smoothies. As I am speaking, I can feel the weight of all my class and work expectations above me, pressing down upon me. I can see it, too, even now. I’ve always been a visual person. Picture me, standing there, and all the books, syllabus, and professors as well as the children from the elementary school above my head, all fit into a shape resembling an umbrella without a handle. Threatening to drop at any moment, threatening to separate and fall apart and scatter around me.
That’s what it felt like.
And I remember that, and remember also that a little over a year ago I was finally correctly diagnosed with ADHD. Having not been diagnosed then, or at any point throughout my undergraduate and graduate years, I am amazed that I succeeded. I graduated summa cum laude, with honors, and served as a Remembrance Scholar at Syracuse, representing Karen Lee Hunt, one of the many Syracuse students who died in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. I wrote a novel for my Capstone, which won the overall Capstone Award. For my time as an undergraduate I have a long list of awards and accomplishments…
And yet, I worked so hard for that. I remember at one point a roommate saying, “I don’t remember having to work that hard in college.” The words stabbed me like little knives, because I knew I was working so much harder than so many others. I woke at 530am. I studied Hindi and worked 30 hours a week outside of school. The thing was, it was all or nothing. And my systems for organization were so precarious, my attention so delicate, that I barely had a personal life for the three years of my undergraduate career.
Nothing ever felt solid.
So, as that feeling, that sensation of overhanging responsibilities threatening to come undone and spill over, arises, I remind myself that things are different now.
They must be different.
Because, for the whole time, I was sick with bulimia and barely surviving.
And now? Now I am 42, and I am medicated for my ADHD, and I am committed to my ongoing eating disorder recovery. And I will not sacrifice my well being for a grade.
Why are we asked, I wonder, to do so?
My book is due March 1, and I am working on this (last, big) revision while also taking three graduate courses and teaching two writing composition classes.
And that’s okay. Because, unlike my younger self, I have a hierarchy of importance. This hierarchy is like a sturdy shelf, each shelf holding a certain amount of work. The tope shelf contains sleep, exercise, and self-care, along with a little social interaction and joy. That’s the top of my hierarchy. Next is my book. Then, my classes. Last, my teaching.
This is the way it has to be in order for it to work. If I need more energy for one of the top shelves, one of the bottom shelves may weaken. And that’s fine. It has to be.
So this is how I am doing the work and holding it all.
If you had to divide things like that, into a kind of hierarchy of importance, what would it look like as it currently stands? And would you want to reshape it or reorder it?
What I remember is: if I don’t take care of what’s on the top shelf (my personal well being), all succeeding shelves will not hold.
Tell me your thoughts in the comments:
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So many links for thought:
I’m enamored with The Birdsong Project, which collaborates with musicians, artists, etc. for the sake of ornithological protections and awareness.
This piece in Texas Highways, written by Kameron Dunn, is magic: An Okie makes peace with his rural roots on the dance floor of Austin’s Broken Spoke.
As this fucked-up, oppressive world gives way to a world where more voices are heard, we also sift through history to revive the important forgotten narratives. Read (and admire) this piece by Alexandra Schwartz detailing Lucy Lippard’s overlooked feminist art exhibition from 1971.
I am currently obsessed with video artist Lindsay McIntyre, who asks many questions of her viewers with her subtle and moving short video creations.
Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist whose primary work is on cellular memories in nature, aka morphic resonance. Reading this was mindblowing.
Yesterday in one of my classes we read a section of “Iliad” and paired it with The Shield of Achilles by WH Auden. Auden’s poem is a kind of translation of the remaking of Achilles’s shield for modern times— specifically, the time when a totalitarian regime was closing in on Europe and the world. If you have “Iliad,” I invite you to reread the construction of Achilles’s shield and pair it with this poem, read here by Auden himself.