When I was a kid, there were a few activities that I relished more than anything else: getting gold stars, correcting my classmates’ spelling and pronunciation, and, quite unaccountably, scaling to the top of what I believed to be great heights. Whether I was tripping over other children as we rushed to the top of a schoolyard snow bank, running along gravelled campground pathways to jump off a “gigantic” cliff into a murky body of water, or declaring myself queen of the proverbial castle, I always wanted to be taller, higher, more daring than everybody else. I always wanted to be “number one.” (This is probably why I abandoned track and field as soon it was no longer a requirement to pass Phys. Ed.)

My extreme jumping/climbing days ended around the time that a couple of friends and I decided it would be smart to jump off a bridge into the water holding hands (an arrangement which ended with me and another girl landing on top of instead of beside each other), but many of us don’t lose that summiting impulse with age. In fact, for some, the heights just seem to get higher, the dares more daring. We are at a point where multinational companies like Redbull are willing to sponsor the adrenaline junkies among us to jump 120,000 feet from the stratosphere just because they can. There is no other discernable reason for partaking in such an activity (well, okay, aside from the mercenary motives of the company itself): it is pure human achievement, an opportunity to revel in the swelling sense of immensity that comes from exerting mastery over the environment – a cliché that seems to remain a part of our collective consciousness from birth to death. We love our metaphors of overcoming and defeating, of controlling and taming. We can’t get enough of that autonomous human spirit.

But it seems to me that this ubiquitous habit of celebrating supremacy and transcendence is never without an accompanying anxiety over our ultimate smallness. Once the neurochemical euphoria of achievement has worn off, we are left with only ourselves, worrying the hems of our bedspreads as we listen to the muted, electric humming of late-night traffic, wondering how we might regain that sense of significance. When – if ever – will I feel ‘big’ again? At what point will I look out over my social landscape and feel like I have found my place in it? Will I ever feel really, truly accomplished? These are the questions that dog our steps as soon as we are given a jarring and indifferent shove to the brink of adulthood and dare ourselves to look down. At least, these are the questions that have dominated my waking hours ever since the morning of May 24^th, the day after I handed in the last exam of my undergraduate degree.

I had been dreaming of “the end” for months – on more than one occasion, the knowledge that it was almost over was the only thing that kept me on track. I must admit, though, of all the emotions I imagined I would experience upon the completion of my undergrad, profound isolation and fearfulness were not among them. Something achieved, large and tangible and shining, another great height successfully surmounted, were more what I’d had in mind: not a slow-burning recognition of my youthfulness and naiveté. Not a cowering sense of inadequacy. In the moment, and for several days after, I became once more the four-year-old girl who, the night before starting junior kindergarten, cried her eyes out because she didn’t know how to read. As my favourite musician Laura Marling once described it, I felt like I might as well be “a letter in a word on a page in book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe.” Whatever I had to offer the world, it was too meager and meaningless to count for much of anything. So I slept. And slept. And slept some more. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was working until obscene hours at my catering job so that I could be tired enough to sleep, and sleep, and sleep some more. Anything but face some variation of the existential crisis that has been playing out like a critically despised but nonetheless heavily syndicated television program since my early childhood. Anything but confront the creeping sense of deficiency that would not scuttle away no matter how often I attempted to shut it out through frequent dips into unconsciousness.

This is the Great Heights Paradox: the imagined sense of ‘bigness’ that, upon reaching some literal or metaphorical summit, is swiftly eclipsed by a sharp sensation of being, in fact, infinitesimally small and ill-equipped. Neither extreme is particularly useful when it comes to navigating this post-grad world that I’ve recently entered into, brimming as it is with reminders to “sell myself” but not to forget to “keep my career goals realistic.” But, like the unnerving phenomena of airborne stasis that I used to experience when taking a running plunge off a cliff, I continue to hang suspended within this paradox, between an awareness of my potential and a fear of failing to meet it; but also between being known and loved and cared for and being unknown and forgotten in a strange city.

At the end of August, I will be moving away to start graduate work at McMaster University. The city of Ottawa has been my home for the entire twenty-three years of my life. I can count on one finger the number of times I have moved houses, and even the distance between those two locations takes less than ten minutes to drive. I regularly come in contact with community members who have known me since before I was aware of my own being. And there’s a part of me that is increasingly annoyed by that fact, or, if not annoyed, at least dissatisfied: I want to know what it’s like to be the new girl nobody has met before. I want to choose the time and the place that I introduce myself to people. I want to be in control of my identity. And, most of all, I want to meet people who are just as new and just as determined to inhabit themselves and their lives in ways that they have been unable or unwilling to before. I want to begin again in the company of strangers.

At the same time, there is something so incredibly safe about being surrounded by the same faces and voices that I’ve known since I was a child. It feels like an almost unspeakable fault of my character: I’m in my early twenties. I’m not supposed to look upon safety as being a positive or productive state of being in the world. I’m supposed to seek out minimalist road trips to Laurel Canyon and freelance writing jobs in the hipster paradise of Brooklyn, where I light my industrial-chic shoebox of an apartment with mason jar candles and have late-night, wine-infused debates on vague and philosophical-sounding issues, like the nature of authenticity. In keeping with the Great Heights Paradox, I am supposed to find infinite possibility in my youthful indeterminacy. But, as I’ve started to contemplate packing up my belongings and gently unstitching myself from the varied and intricate network of interpersonal ties that I’ve built up against the backdrop of this perfectly familiar city, I’ve come to realize just how much of my sense of self has depended on the existence of these faces and voices that I now need leave. Right now, it feels as if to leave them is to leave myself behind, to start again, but without the reassurance that I will discover the greater purpose behind my pursuits or, at least, a set of arms that will be there regardless of what the answer to that question is. For the first time in my life, I am going to be on my own. And I can’t wait until I feel secure enough to take this risk, because it is going to scare me half-to-death until I do it. I have to be alone and I have to be uncertain and I have to carry on anyways.

Whether, like me, you’re starting grad school in September, or carrying on at a job that you’ve had throughout your undergrad; whether you’re moving home to begin your first post-grad job search or you’re moving to a new apartment in a new city; whether you’re absolutely certain of your career trajectory or are having a hard enough time picking a paint colour for your bedroom, let alone picking a vocation, every one of us is in the process of disengaging from a world that we’ve grown to know so intimately over the past four or five (or six or seven) years. Even during those terribly long summers away from campus, we knew we had a place in our little academic cosmos. We knew we belonged somewhere, had somewhere to return to. We had our brand of coffee (and beer), our hidden study spaces, our secret places where we went to cry when things got to be ‘too much’ (personally, I preferred the benches behind Dunton Tower). We discovered our favourite databases and felt an overwhelming rush of gratitude every time we received a long and detailed e-mail back from a research librarian. When we got lonely, we knew there was probably a professor on campus who would be ready and willing to chat about pretty much anything. We found unique ways of making ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ our own, of mastering its institutional and architectural idiosyncracies, or at least accepting them, like we would those of an eccentric family member. And, in doing so, we discovered a safety, a security, that we will be leaving behind as we walk across that stage at convocation and onto new and uncertain pursuits.

The thing with culturally prescribed milestones, though, is that they can often obscure the fact that the transition and development symbolized by fifteen-second transactions like the bestowing of a diploma occur entirely outside of ceremony and formal celebration. What is more, they break up our lives into meaningful but ultimately artificial timelines that belie the reality of personal ‘progress’: which is, in fact, far from linear or uniform. We repeat lifelong behavioural patterns and occasionally we break them, if they cease to be productive; we throw ourselves headlong into our professional and personal goals, but also stand paralyzed by fear or hurt, and sometimes we do both at the same time; we get the jobs, the scholarships, the reinforcement that we need to ‘get to the next level,’ and sometimes we stay in the same place, enduring isolation and a crippling sense of loneliness, until we figure out what it is, exactly, that we want: a process that can take weeks, or months, or years, or an entire lifetime. We can feel both bigger than we expected and smaller than we ever imagined. And while a university degree certainly places us in the privileged position of being able to capitalize on the academic and professional opportunities that matter most to us, the amount of emphasis placed on the formal act of obtaining a degree can make the “next step” into some imagined state of fully-formed ‘adulthood’ seem more drastic than any we’ve experienced before. As a result, instead of seeing ‘real life’ as something that we are constantly (re)negotiating, we end up perceiving it as something at which we either pass or fail: a game that we can only ever win or lose. It is no wonder, then, that so many of us are afraid of starting anything at all. It is no wonder that there are days when we would rather just sleep, and sleep, and sleep some more, in a perpetual state of postponement.

And, yet, this is precisely why the symbolism of convocation is so inescapably necessary. To be sure, after four-or-so years of hard work and late nights and personal crises and scholarly triumphs and many, many tears, we deserve to partake in the ceremonies and rituals that such an accomplishment affords. But, more importantly, I think, is the accompanying shove that such a celebration gives us: a kind and magnificent shove into a world that we will never be prepared for if we continue to stand along its edge, waiting to understand it, hoping we will eventually feel capable and competent enough to enter the fray. Because no matter how many credentials we accumulate over the course of our lives, they will never be anything more than valuable tools with which to navigate this Great Perhaps: a term which French Renaissance writer Francois Rabelais allegedly used to describe the ineffability of his impending death, but which I believe applies with equally forceful acuity to the post-graduation state-of-being, defined as it is by the fragile gifts of anonymity and inexperience.

Though my extreme sporting days may be over, right now, on the brink of what some people call ‘adulthood,’ I feel a curious desire to recapture the spirit of the eight-year-old me who stood atop those ‘gigantic’ cliffs and thought nothing of the potential dangers they presented. At twenty-three, I have become adept at locating nothing but pitfalls and shaky foundations and safety hazards. This is, in part, a result of becoming a functioning member of society who isn’t going to risk everything for the sake of indulging an impulse. But it also results in its own kind of risk: the risk of risking nothing, of living a life that is dictated by fear and prudence, instead of embracing the free-falling anxiety of personal ambition.

As I stand here, toes curled tentatively around the edge of my own Great Perhaps, the weight of every doubt that has managed to entangle itself in my ever-winding skein of anxiety is felt with a particular poignance. Every possible variant of the first-person negative is scrambling over the others to make itself heard with a stinging clarity: I shouldn’t, I didn’t, I can’t, I won’t. I feel singularly and spectacularly unprepared for everything that I know and don’t know is coming. But I have gained enough courage to dare a look downwards. Now, it is just a matter of stepping back, taking a running jump, and screaming all the way down.

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In his epic poem The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot famously wrote that “April is the cruellest month.”

Well, with all due respect to the memory of Mr. Eliot, I believe that he may have been wrong. In the lives of millions of university students, at least, that superlative tends to be spared for the nightmarish month of March. And, when I say nightmarish, I mean it quite literally. Because even in the depths of sleep, there is no reprieve from the intensely grinding task of essay writing. Introductory remarks, thesis statements, supporting evidence, and transitional sentences float around in your subconscious, reformulating themselves ad infinitum or else unravelling like a many-coloured spool of wool, as if Salvador Dali has taken over the editing process. (I’m not the only one who writes papers in her sleep, am I?). This is, I imagine, something like the academic world’s version of “method acting,” only you don’t get a million dollars and a golden, vaguely-gendered statue for putting on such a show. Instead, you end up developing a series of symptoms for which the internet has no doubt invented a pathology.

To spare you from the corrupt cesspool that is WebMD, I have developed an agreement scale with which to judge the severity of your end-of-term illness. In an attempt to be as representative as possible, I have included items that relate to my own experience, to the experiences of friends, and to the experiences of people whose conversations I’ve shamelessly eavesdropped on[1][2].

Signs That You Might Be Suffering From Finals-Induced Hysteria (Known in Fake Clinical Practices as Biblioencephalitis, Which Translates Roughly to “Book-Induced Brain Inflammation”)

**Rate on a scale from 1-5, where 1 = “I have no idea what you’re talking about” and 5 = “1000% ACCURATE.”

1. You experience fits of crying followed by fits of laughing, or you engage in cry-laughing, a thoroughly disorienting emotional hybrid that makes you want to take a nap, but you can’t because you have papers to write, so you cry again.
2. The walk from the Uni Centre to the O-Train station is the most fresh air you get all day.
3. Getting dressed in your street clothes just seems superfluous; also, you have no clean laundry anyways.
4. The concept of “living a balanced life” seems like a sham created by retailers to make you feel bad about yourself so that you’ll go out and buy stuff you can’t afford to make yourself feel better. And then you’ll feel bad about shopping when you should have been writing your papers. So you’ll buy a pint of ice cream and eat it in one sitting.
5. A menu of beer or wine sounds like a really good dinner plan.
6. Instead of focussing on editing content, you parse your essays for grammar and spelling mistakes because it makes you feel like you’re in command.
7. Your room looks like a library that has recently been raided.
8. Frozen pizzas are one of your only food groups.
9. Your optimistically purchased day planner is largely empty except for entries in the first week of January and the last two weeks of March.
10. Gym? What is a gym?
11. Taking off into the Canadian wilderness with a tent and trusty golden retriever named Atticus sounds pretty good right now.
12. You get inordinately excited about free baked goods, cold cans of soda, and pictures of cute inter-species friendships. (Have you seen that one of a pug cuddling with a duckling?)
13. You start re-watching episodes of your favourite TV show from your youth to remind yourself of “simpler times.”
14. Nothing is fair and everything hurts.
15. You want your mommy.

Now, tally up your points and compare with the chart below.

I guess the next step would be for me to tell you what you can do (within legal limits) to alleviate some of these symptoms. Oh, would that I could, dear reader, would that I could! Unfortunately, even after four-or-so years of first-hand experience, I am in no better a position to handle this seasonal illness than you are. And even if I knew what you should do, it wouldn’t matter, because none of us has the time to implement a cure anyways. Oh, the poetic paradox of it all.

I have, however, picked up some sage advice during my time here at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, whether it be from professors, novelists, poets, or friends who are way smarter than I am. Indeed, a few months ago, my friend Isuri and I were chatting over coffee about the moments in our lives when we’ve felt certain that we weren’t going to make it, that we were going to fall apart and never be able to put ourselves back together again. We weren’t talking about school in particular, but academics have certainly occasioned more than a couple of meltdowns in our lives.

Anyways, this friend of mine started talking about a piece of advice that Kurt Vonnegut gave to burgeoning short-story writers, which went something like this: “Make awful things happen to your characters in order that you might see what they’re made of.” Of course, being Vonnegut, he went on to suggest that great writers are writers who break the rules. But my friend took the advice and applied it to her own story. After a particularly challenging event in her life, she took a Post-It note, placed it on her mirror, and scribbled: “Remember that Kurt Vonnegut is just testing you to see what you’re made of.”

Okay, so maybe the end-of-term work rush isn’t ‘awful’ in the sense that Vonnegut meant, and the super ego inside of me certainly has no shortage of reproofs for such an outlook: “Don’t you know how privileged you are to be in this position?! Stop complaining! Your life is incredible! Engage yourself with the material! Isn’t this what you want to do for a living? Why are you so frustrated, then?! You’re a fraud!!” But this doesn’t change the fact that, by the end of the semester, it’s hard not to feel depleted and uninspired. At a certain point, you run out of opinions and your critical insights start feeling a bit stale. All you want is to be finished. For these reasons, the month does seem pretty cruel.

So, my advice to you is this: listen to the advice of my friend, who took her advice from Vonnegut. Every morning, or afternoon, or evening, besides reminding yourself of how much work you still have left to do, remember that you are merely another human being whose character is continually being tested. Whether you want to imagine your “author” as being Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, or [fill-in-the-blank], think about this cruellest of months as a plot device wrought by a (mostly) benevolent artist who desperately wants to see you succeed. On the surface, it seems like a pretty weird strategy, but, if you’re having a hard time believing in yourself, at least you can believe in the person who’s writing your life. (Unless it’s Stephen King. You can’t trust that man with anything.)

March might be the month of cry-laughing, binge-eating, shame-shopping, and sleep-writing. It might be 31 days full of exhaustion, anxiety, and writer’s block. But it is also the month to show people – to show yourself – what you’re made of. [3]

[1] Another benefit of being an English major: you can turn everyday nosiness into a “character study” any time you want. And people will think that you’re artsy and deep.

[2] Actually, that’s a lie. They’ll probably just think that you’re weird.

[3] Another helpful piece of advice: watch The Toast writer Mallory Ortberg recite her satirical advice column “How To Respond to Criticism”: . It is guaranteed to make you feel better.

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“Keep your head down. Study. Write. Work, work, work. Get used to being alone. And don’t ever say ‘yes’ to anything unless you are sure you can do it.”

I started university with a plan, you see.

Well, okay. Now that I look back on it, maybe ‘plan’ isn’t the right word. Because having a plan connotes intentionality, discipline, forethought, when, in fact, my strategy was mostly a reactionary response. It was what I was left with when I’d eliminated all the other possibilities: joining clubs, meeting new people, “taking chances” – all those extra-curriculars that university is typically associated with. I was having none of it. In my world of relentlessly predictable scheduling, trying new things – and possibly failing at them – didn’t really factor in.

There was an airtight logic to my basic premise: the less I got involved with, the less chance there was of falling on my face. A pretty irrefutable claim, backed up by centuries of folk wisdom and rudimentary statistical analysis. But what I failed to consider were the slightly less common-sense claims that were hidden behind the first: the fewer chances I took, the more secure I would feel; the fewer people I engaged with, the more I’d love the ones with whom I did engage; and the better I performed on something than everybody else, the more accepting of myself I would become.

Nonetheless, for the first two-or-so years of my degree, I continued to move along with my fail-proof scheme, no happier than I’d been at any other point in my life (and frequently unhappier), but unable to imagine any other kind of existence that I would be comfortable living. It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying my program: while I sat in the library transcribing Chaucer word-for-word, I was truly contented, in my own way. (No, really. I have a notebook that could probably be published as a really crappy modern English edition of Troilus and Criseyde. Do they do joke editions of books? Because there should be a market out there for them). But when it came time to share my thoughts with other classmates, I froze up in their presence, my words failing spectacularly to convey even a modicum of what I’d intended. And, in those weeks dedicated to preparing final essays, I felt as if there were a hailstorm blowing around inside my skull. My mind would hover over the same three sentences for hours on end, picking apart every detail until there was nothing left on the page but a blinking cursor. I had to ask for extensions on a couple of occasions simply because I couldn’t accept what I had written as being good enough. Nothing was ever good enough. I was a knotted mess of nerves. My “plan” wasn’t working.

As my anxiety got worse, I did what I always do when I’m looking for a little solace: I reached out to bookshelves. In tandem with recommendations from a therapist, I tracked down manuals, memoirs, and pop psychology books written about life with panic disorders. Some were marginally better than others, but they all seemed to amount to the same thing: I can’t trust my head, and I can sometimes laugh about it, but mostly I just cry and then move on, until the next apocalyptic fear enters my brain. And the beat goes on, et cetera. In the end, this is probably the most honest advice I could receive (if it can even be called advice). But it wasn’t what I was looking for. So, eventually, I just stopped looking. It wasn’t until the middle of 2014, after years of what seemed like a Sisyphian effort to keep my synapses from short-circuiting, that I was handed the very book that I needed, at precisely the right time.

Now, as you may have noticed from past blog posts, my mother is an exceptionally important figure in my life, and not just because she carried me around in her stomach for nine months. She is the one who introduced me to the joys of literature long before I was in school. She is the one who would read me fifteen bedtime stories in one sitting, who listened to me tell completely nonsensical stories about orphaned children and lost cats (I had a bit of a melancholic streak, clearly), and who taught me that a book could be there for me in ways that other people just couldn’t – not even her.

She’s also the one who introduced me to the work of Marina Keegan, a young woman whose collection of short stories and essays The Opposite of Loneliness was published last spring, nearly two years after she was killed in a tragic car accident. Keegan’s death came just days after she graduated magna cum laude from Yale University, and mere weeks before she was to start her job as an editing assistant in the fiction department at The New Yorker. The numerous pieces of writing that she left behind were compiled for publication by her English and Creative Writing professors, including the literary critic Harold Bloom.

When my mother placed the book in my hands, my first thought was that it was a not-so-subtle comment on my hermit lifestyle. “Darling,” it seemed to say, “You really do need to get out more.” (And that should have been the first sign that I had misjudged, because my mother’s speaking voice is decidedly unlike that of a character’s from Downton Abbey.) Nonetheless, deciding to give it the benefit of the doubt, I took the book home and began reading the title essay, which was the final article Keegan published in The Yale Daily News before her graduation. In it, she addressed the ineffable sense of togetherness – the opposite of loneliness – that she feared she and her fellow graduates would lose shortly after walking across the stage to accept their diplomas. But, more importantly, she set out to dismantle the image of convocation as the symbolic beginning of a life-long plateau:

“ We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective consciousness as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late [. . . .] That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating from college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

When I read those short paragraphs, I felt like a steel belt had been unhooked from around my rib cage. It was a revelation, for me, to hear someone say begin, to think that I have an almost interminable number of beginnings left inside me, and to know that all I have to do – all any of us lucky enough to be here, in this place, sitting in these classrooms, has to do – is say “yes”.

I say “all we have to do” in full recognition that agreeing to take on new opportunities and challenges is a deceptively simple concept. Whether we’re moving to another continent, going rock climbing for the first time, starting our post-grad careers, or submitting a poem to a writing competition, our self-preservational instincts are first in line to volley off all the reasons why it would be better if we just took a nap instead. And deciding to take a chance isn’t always going to make us happy. We’ll hit dead ends, find out we’re dating the wrong people, fail to find meaning in the work that we’re doing, and occasionally walk around in a “god is dead” state of mind, biting our nails over global warming and flagrant human rights abuses and wondering where we got into our heads that we were uniquely gifted to do something about it. But, in most cases, saying ‘yes’ isn’t a contract or a solemn vow. It is simply a step that offers up a slightly better view of the countless directions a life can take.

This isn’t meant to devolve into some empty platitude about living life to the fullest. I mean, let’s be honest: no matter what Dead Poets’ Society taught us about “living in the moment,” we won’t stop waiting in obscenely long line-ups to get a cheap cup of coffee. We won’t stop checking our phones when we’re feeling lonely or isolated. We will still often prefer catching up on a favourite TV show to trying out some new activity with a bunch of people we’ve never met. And we’ll still spend a few more minutes on our morning rituals than is strictly necessary (especially in the bottomless depths of a Canadian winter). But what I’ve only just started to grasp is that putting yourself out there and beginning is, in fact, no more uncomfortable and disconcerting than sitting at home and staring at that punitive blinking cursor.

As I write this, I am still feeling the sting of a rejection letter I received a few hours ago, from a literary conference I applied to in November. I’ve read over the attached comments several times now, and while I would love to say that my immediate reaction was something to the effect of “Oh, isn’t this a great learning experience, thank you very much,” the truth is, I shut myself in my little office space and cried. I was absolutely devastated. I had put myself out there, I had said yes, only to receive a diplomatic but firm “no.”

But that is the very worst of it. A contingent, ephemeral, “try-better-next-time” NO. And when you hear that, fellow members of this Endless Age of Anxiety, be proud and consider it a triumph: because you’re still alive. And, as Marina herself wrote, you are still so young.

The post To Fail, and Fail, and Fail…Spectacularly! appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

This past semester has come and gone with a speed that has developed into its own cliché. We can’t believe it, how did all that work get done, it’s all such a blur, et cetera, et cetera. The many-hued pronouncement is closely followed by a sigh of relief, a lifting of the shoulders, and a blissfully blank mind, punctuated only by the sacred student mantra: “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.” We step out of the Fieldhouse, bracing ourselves against the doorway draft, and, for the next twenty-or-so steps, the world (which, at this point, doesn’t extend far beyond the campus and the nearest wine and beer dispensary) seems completely and perfectly peaceful. There are no dues to be paid. There is no one who needs to be pleased. The future is there, but it isn’t urgent enough to be reckoned with. Everything is suspended.

For some of us, though, the momentary peace begins to crumble somewhere around the twenty-first step out of the final-exam room. A daddy-long-legged panic creeps its way along the spine and settles in the brain, spinning an obsessive web of “You-could-have-done-mores” and “You-really-have-no-idea-what-you’re-doings.” The sacred student mantra takes on a radically different connotation (“It’s over, it’s over, you’ve been found out, it’s all over for you”), and the celebratory drink that we’ve been looking forward to for two weeks becomes a pathetic tool for subduing those ceaseless, seemingly disembodied accusations.

If you’re thinking, “Wow, that’s a bit over-the-top. . .” you would be right. It is completely exaggerated and irrational and self-flagellating. That tends to be the nature of self-sabotage. And this past semester has been particularly bountiful with it: a symptom, I believe, of that very specific illness known as Acute Senioritis. The one that hits fourth-years as soon as they realize they are fourth-years, and that essentially amounts to taking on a terrifying Janus-eyed vision of the past and the future while attempting to remain rooted in the present. There’s no time for frivolous carpe diem-ing (is that even a ‘thing’ anymore?). In fact, “seizing the day” now seems like the kind of bad advice that that uncle we see once a year at Christmas gives with a free-flowing generosity that only gets more free-flowing as the night and the alcohol wear away. Every little thing, every inconsequential decision, every hour not spent studying or writing that paper hangs like an academic albatross around our necks, and we start wondering when we got it into our heads that we could, indeed, “do this.” (Probably from those multi-coloured ‘inspirational guidance’ posters that hung in every single one of our grade-school classrooms, and that started to seem insulting to our intelligence around grade six. . . ‘Shoot for the stars’? Really? Is that the best piece of advice you have?’).

If I were to pinpoint the time and place where I contracted this illness, I would say around the first week of September, before classes had officially started. On the cusp of a full-blown panic, I approached one of my professors and all but begged her to explain, please, explain what a girl has got to do to prepare a winning statement of intent for grad school and scholarship applications. I just wanted it laid out for me in intricate detail, point-by-point, no cut corners or vague truisms, but a foolproof formula. (My mother tells me to this day that I was not among those schoolchildren who dealt well with ambiguities. To which I say. . .yes, that sounds about accurate.)

“Well,” this professor said, crossing her legs and placing her hands in her lap in the universal sign of ‘this-is-not-going-to-be-the-answer-you-expected’, “the first thing you have to understand is that these statements could be seen as exercises in deception: tests of your ability to do with confidence something that you don’t yet feel confident doing. Do you understand?”

No. No, I did not. Of course, “Yeah, I think so. . .” was my verbal translation. That’s another thing I’ve never been good at: admitting when I feel like something has gone over my head.

Sensing my unspoken need for clarification, she continued: “If you want to be a competitive applicant, you have to show your readiness to jump into a game that is already being played and show the players that you, too, know how to play. There is an element of pretending here: you need to show that you are in control of a scholarly voice that you probably feel is not quite yours yet.”

At the time, her words seemed to border on the downright blasphemous. Not quite catching her point, I asked myself, Pretend? As in, act like I have a clue when I really don’t? As in, bald-facedly lie to a bunch of academics? Or, if not lie, at least paint a much more illustrious picture of myself than is technically accurate? Isn’t that some kind of subspecies of plagiarism?

It was only when I got home and sat at my desk in front of a blank Word document, armed with the debris of numerous half-travelled lines of inquiry, that I began to understand just how many facets of ‘deception’ could be employed in my situation. The operative form, however, had less to do with deceiving scholarship adjudicators or graduate administrators, and more to do with deceiving myself. Indeed, it took an astoundingly short period of time for my emotional pendulum to swing from “You can’t be better prepared than you are now” to “You are screwed,” and I began to fall back on all-too-familiar patterns of thought: “You really aren’t anything special, and neither is your project. Why are you even bothering with all of this, anyways? What do you think you’re going to achieve? Who the hell do you think you are?” This voice has the benefit of concentrating all of its energy on one relentlessly repetitive theme, and so never suffers a lack of energy.

In retrospect, over the three-or-so months that it took to construct my statement of research interest, I estimate that I came within a hair’s breadth of giving up on at least four separate occasions. There were mornings when I woke up and my cost-benefit analysis suggested to me that none of it was worth all of this hair-pulling and late-night existential crisis-having. But, after a couple of frantic-turned-calming chats with my mother (bless her heart!), I thought about the December 1st deadline coming and going without my filing a submission, and I knew that my cost-benefit analysis needed to be revisited. (Friendly tip: never trust the results of such analyses when you’re feeling emotionally unstable.)

That being said, it was never going to be sufficient enough for me believe the unadorned truth, which, in my case, was that I’d worked hard but that there were many other people who had also worked hard and who deserved a SSHRC grant just as much, if not more, than I did. That kind of level-headed reasoning couldn’t compete against the heavily fortified wall of self-doubt that had been building upwards at a steady pace since the first day of kindergarten, when I sobbed with anxiety over my illiterateness. (I wish that were a joke, but I was unusually precocious when it came to doubting my capacity to achieve even the most basic of human skills.) So I had to take it just a step beyond the factual and fight exaggeration with exaggeration: I was the best candidate in the running, I did have the most interesting project, and I could expect the result that I wanted.

The process itself was still exhausting, and I still threw my hands up in the air—with way more dramatic flair than was necessary—when I hit moments of writer’s block. I even had an embarrassing cry in front of a professor when I realized, on November 28^th, that my submission was two pages over a limit that I had not previously known existed. (Friendly tip # 2: Government documents are painfully inefficient and difficult to read, but, for your own sake, read every last word three times over). In the end, though, deceiving myself into believing a slightly more self-serving version of the truth is what allowed me to carry on and finish what I’d started: which is, in fact, the beginning of a new phase that my entire undergraduate career has been leading up to.

There is a small part of me, I think, that will always believe that I am a fraud, or a failure, or just some garden-variety screw-up. In an indie comedy, this characteristic would be the quirk that makes me seem neurotically lovable and delightfully off-kilter to the cute and discerning—and probably ukelele-playing—hero. (And, in an ideal world, the movie would be interesting enough for Greta Gerwig[1] to sign on to play me). But we are not in an indie comedy, and I would gladly exchange this ‘quirkiness’ for just about any other character flaw. Because there are some days when persevering and ‘learning something about myself’ seem like one bad joke made up by the same companies that printed those gaudy inspirational posters scotch-taped to our grade-school classroom walls.

I figure, though, that if this is my so-called ‘lot’ in life, I could do worse than having the audacity to combat my exaggerated flaws with an exaggerated sense of my virtues. As one professor has told me (the same one who inspired this prolonged examination of the nature of ‘deception’), “You cannot wait to start doing things until you stop feeling insecure, because that is never going to happen. The very best you can do is take a deep breath and start anyways.”

I’m not saying that self-deception is, on balance, a good thing. I’m not saying that there aren’t going to be times (many, many times) when taking a step back and saying “Wow, I really sucked at that” is necessary—even healthy. But I have come to believe that, just as there are times when deception convinces us that our mistakes are worse than they actually are, there are times when positive self-illusions are integral to getting the job done, to simply making it through the day.

So, maybe I will get that scholarship. Maybe I will have all my graduate-education fees paid for, with enough left over to live on. And maybe I won’t: the doubt is certainly there, and, realistically, it is far more likely that I will be rejected by SSHRC than accepted. (And by ‘I’, I mean my proposal, but, like any good over-achiever, I make little distinction between my self worth and my academic output). At this point, though, when all control has been resigned to an anonymous panel, and the holiday season is brimming with a practically prescribed optimism, it can’t hurt to hold out an audacious hope.

———————————————–

[1] If you ever want to see a painfully brilliant (with emphasis on the painful) depiction of post-graduation anxiety, watch Frances Ha. You will laugh, you will cry. . .and then you will cry some more. But you might laugh some more, too, so. . .it’s your risk to take, really. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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“The Truth will set you free.”

It’s an age-old aphorism that never gets less annoying, in large part because most of us would rather reach for a cigarette or a bottle of wine than engage with that intimidating capital T. But, as Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Lynn Coady revealed in her 2014 Munro Beattie Lecture, there is another kind of mood-altering substance out there that is far more capable of distorting and embellishing Truth (and far less likely to fall under government regulation): storytelling.

Don’t be misled: Coady’s talk, appropriately titled “On Storytelling and Discomfort,” was no post-modern exegesis on scepticism—though she did, incidentally, graduate from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ with a double major in English and Philosophy in 1993. Rather, it was a characteristically humorous, and occasionally irreverent, rumination on the various ways in which humans make use of narrative in their daily lives. Whether it’s settling into the sympathetic arms of a favourite sitcom (there’s something rather comforting in the knowledge that Coady, too, enjoys returning home after a miserable day and watching an episode of Nashville), or embracing the intellectual and emotional challenges of a proto-modernist text (like Chekhov’s maddeningly ambiguous stories, for instance), we cleave to stories like lifelines, demanding that they numb us, stimulate us, or generally just help us make sense of the chaos of our experiences.

Of course, the tricky thing about stories is that they don’t always tell us the truths that we want to hear: the painless, vindicating truths that fit in so very nicely with our conception of the world and our place in it. One minute, we might find ourselves getting covert pleasure out of recognizing the foibles of a relative or a co-worker within the covers of a Jane Austen novel. The next, the words become less like a window and more like a set of funhouse mirrors. And, according to Coady, it is when “we recognize versions of ourselves in the stories of others” that the real squirming sets in. “The Truth,” she says, “is innately uncomfortable.”

So, the question then becomes: what kind of cringe-inducing, hand-wringing, eye-contact-avoiding discomfort has Coady herself experienced in her years as a storyteller? Well, that’s a story in itself, and it’s one Coady continues to tell in the hopes that, the more she tells it, “the less uncomfortable (she) will be with it.” As it stands, she’s had no such luck.

It started with the publishing of Mean Boy (2006), a novel based on the life of. . .well, not of the Canadian poet and English professor John Thompson, but, in Coady’s words, “of someone like him.” The real story of Thompson’s life—a story marked by poetic brilliance wedded to depression, alcoholism, and stints in psychiatric-care facilities—was too despairing for the kind of story she wanted to write. And so she did exactly as her job description on Twitter suggests: she made stuff up. “Stuff” that quickly became fodder for scathing criticism at Mount Allison University in Sackville, Nova Scotia, where John Thompson taught before his tragic death at the age of 38.

It wasn’t until she arrived at Mount Allison to give a reading from Mean Boy that Coady became aware of just how much acrimony her novel had inspired in that community. There was a general feeling, it seemed, that she had appropriated Thompson’s life with little regard for Thompson the man, or for those who were close to him. And while Coady doesn’t deny the general selfishness of the authorial act, being welcomed to the university as a persona non grata took her off guard. Nonetheless, Coady soldiered on and came up with a plan, which included, among other things, choosing “the funniest portion of my novel to read, to get the audience on my side.” She’d fielded tough questions before. She could, in fact, handle it.

And, for the most part, she did. The reading itself went well; the subsequent questions were easy to answer. The real discomfort, the one that remains with Coady to this day, came afterwards, when a woman stood up and announced that her name was Sherrie – “the Sherrie who knew John Thompson.” And the Sherrie whose name, by sheer coincidence, had found its way into Coady’s novel.

At this point, the author realized she was trapped. “There was no way that I was going to be able to convince her that it was a coincidence,” Coady says. What is more, she instantly knew that neither a quick wit nor a long-winded apologia would have been particularly useful or appropriate at this moment. With few choices left to her, Coady remained silent as the Sherrie-who-knew-John-Thompson demanded to know just who Coady thought she was, exactly, to be taking someone else’s story and making it her own? What kind of person would do that?

Suddenly, the funhouse mirrors of Coady’s fiction were being turned towards her. And though every artist is aware of the inevitability of harsh criticism, the ire levelled against Coady by her Mount Allison audience felt shattering, for it questioned the very quality of her character. “I never expected to be accused of being a shitty person,” she admits. “It’s not often that someone speaks your secret fears to you.”

For her part, Coady tends to view the kind of deep-seated defensiveness that both she and her Sackville audience members displayed that night as symptomatic of a confrontation with the “terrifying depiction of something real,” but a depiction that is ‘off,’ or distorted, in some way. It inspires an irrepressible need to combat one “version of the truth” with another, more palatable one—the one that we want to believe in.

And that’s the thing about the truth, Coady seems to suggest: it can’t be explained or elucidated without losing the capital T and making it a plural. Because as soon as it is being spoken or written, it is being narrated, and a narrative, by virtue of having a narrator, is unavoidably subjective. Indeed, during readings from her Giller Prize-winning short story collection Hellgoing, Coady drew a comparison between two stories in which Truth, unmoored from characters’ narrations, and even from the author’s own control, is reduced to an onomatopoeic “Boom.” Pure, untainted experience, it would appear, is beyond the reach of words. So we alter, we distort, we “make stuff up” in order to create an emotional trajectory for ourselves that is intelligible.

But is there any way to reconcile these various “versions of the truth”? Is there some means by which we might stand face-to-face with (our and not our) Sherries without losing faith in the integrity of our narratives?

For Coady, the only solution has been to keep writing. Bruised but also inspired by the incident in Sackville, she began drafting The Antagonist, an epistolary novel about a young man named Rank who attempts to reclaim his life story from the pages of an old friend’s book, only to discover that telling the Truth is far more difficult than he had anticipated. According to Coady, the opening pages of the novel lost her a number of readers. But she was okay with that. “It is called The Antagonist, after all” she laughs. And, besides, where does the value of a story lie if not in its various capacities to hurt and comfort, heal and reveal?

In one of his more accessible poetic efforts, Wallace Stevens reflected on the violence of conflicting stories by arguing that “There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, like the clashed edges of two words that kill.” But the very practice of storytelling is predicated on the existence of more than one narrative. We will spend our whole lives engaging with them, fighting with them, letting go of them, and learning how to accept them for what they are. The one thing Coady seems sure of, though, is that whatever we do with these stories, and whatever discomfort they provoke, we must continue to tell them.

Author is a fourth-year student in ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University’s .  She also blogs for FASS.

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It’s midnight. I’ve just slunk into my seat on the 96 after a long shift at work. Dan Auerbach and his grungy guitar work are asking me for the fortieth time “Why you always wanna love the ones who hurt you?” and I’m thinking, Dan, get over yourself, I didn’t pay $1.25 just for you to ask me rhetorical questions. (Except, as it turns out, I have.) Meanwhile, I’m surrounded by fashionably dressed freshmen who undoubtedly expect to “YOLO” the night away. They’re taking selfies and sitting on each other’s laps and don’t seem to know exactly where they’re going, but, then, it doesn’t really matter, because in the downtown area you somehow always manage to find your way back to where you started. And, besides, they’re still young enough to think that getting lost and stumbling home at 4 a.m. is some kind of adventure.

I’m bitter. There’s been a painful and prolonged relational rift in my life, and I’m still reeling from the impact, quite convinced that this will be The Thing that Breaks Me. (And isn’t that how it always goes?) They say that the first stage of mourning is denial, but I’ve moved straight on to what-I-believe-to-be-righteous anger. Which really amounts to turning the object of my ire into the grand cause of all the irritating effects in my life. Somehow, I don’t know how, but somehow he is also the reason why my bus is late, why my coffee is weak, why I can’t seem to find an outfit in which I want to be seen in public, and why Overheard at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ just really isn’t that funny this time. His non-presence is everywhere, hovering over me like a week’s worth of lost sleep. And I despise him for it.

But then, as happens often in the life of a literature major (or anyone who reads, for that matter), I come across a little piece of dialogue that acts as a third – and slightly more rational – party to my particular conflict. This time, it’s from the character of Gwen in Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights On Air. In a feeble attempt to explain just why she is so attached to the story of an enduring friendship between two explorers, Gwen blurts out,

“I just mean sometimes people misunderstand each other after a while, and then they turn against each other. They don’t want to [. . .] but they can’t help it.”

There is nothing extraordinary about the sentence itself. It’s not poetic or complex. It begs no rigorous analysis. It is, plain and simple, a poorly concealed admission of personal grief. But, then, grief isn’t all that poetic in the first place. It’s stuttering and panicked and all over the place. And it’s usually pretty undignified. Like me, sitting on a bus and judging a bunch of teenagers for, you know, enjoying their lives.

At first Gwen’s call for re-evaluation makes me even angrier. There are days (like today) when I wish we could all be separated by the designations of villain or hero. It would make Fighting the Good Fight against The Common Enemy so much simpler. As much as I would love to be The Just One, though, I know this isn’t the case. I am kind and I am vindictive; I am selfless and I am self-absorbed; I am right and I am wrong; I am honest and I am deceptive; and, more often than not, I am somewhere in between those endless dichotomies. The thing is, that kind of ambiguity is hard to incorporate into my personal narrative: it doesn’t allow me the opportunity to say ‘I am this’ or ‘You are that’ with any sense of conviction. And so, for the sake of my story, I decide to trust my perspective. Just as everyone else tends to do. Because, in the end, a story is all we seem to have.

Yet, if we hope for any kind of meaningful relationship in this life, it is not enough simply to acknowledge that interpretive silences exist between our stories and the stories of those we love. We need to read into those silences, and unravel the tangled mess, even if what we find reveals something less-than-flattering about our character. Sometimes the best thing we can do in the moment is to acknowledge that there are truths other than our own, and that sometimes our versions of The Truth just won’t mesh with the truths of others, no matter how much we want them to. But, on balance, it seems that we’re better off for engaging with those kinds of narrative conflicts. Indeed, just as a comparative analysis of texts often gives us a richer understanding of the larger literary conversation taking place in each text individually, so too do active attempts to understand the narratives of others reveal the blind spots in our own.

Like those blissfully inebriated, selfie-obsessed freshmen, we might think that the only lens that is capable of documenting our lives accurately is the one we turn on ourselves. And there is a certain truth to that. But, every so often, it would behoove us to take a step back and compare our snapshots with those of others. Who knows? We might discover an angle that we weren’t even aware we’d been missing.

It’s just past 1 a.m. by the time my bus reaches the park-and-ride – right back where I started. I reach for my phone to check for new text messages, but there are none. I suppose I was expecting that my little epiphany had transferred itself to him telepathically. No such luck: untangling the threads of our misunderstanding will have to be done manually. But that’s okay. Because even if I don’t know when this will all be resolved (or if it will all be resolved), I know that this story of mine feels a little one-sided without him.

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Stepping foot on the ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ campus for my last “first time” of the year, I’m struck by how subtly (and yet, somehow, how drastically) my outlook has shifted since my first “first time”, back in September of 2010.

For one thing, I have ceased regarding campus as just another place of business, and have instead come to regard it as an extension of my home (convenient, since I spend more time on campus than I do at my actual home). For another, after three-or-so years of looking upon my professors as paragons of intellectual virtue (which, of course, they are), I’ve found myself increasingly drawn towards them as mentors and as free exchangers of ideas, rather than pushed away by a sense of my own inferiority.

However, I think the single greatest perceptual shift that has occurred is how I’ve come to view the process of learning itself.

Though it seems somewhat embarrassing to admit, I believe I was more confident in my knowledge at the beginning of first year. But I believe the knowledge that I have acquired now, however modest in the grand design of academia, is more genuine, and has been acquired more purposefully, more intentionally. I came in thinking that I had the world figured out (as only a naĂŻve, Plath-loving teenager would), and, as I sit here waiting for my first fourth-year seminar on post-colonial theory to begin, I feel invigorated by an awareness of all the things I have yet to learn, and all the perspectives I have yet to gain.

There is a stubborn fear that accompanies this realization, of course: a fear that I might never “figure it out,” with “it” being, in fact, the countless tiny threads that seem to hold us together, but threaten to snap under the pressure of too close an analysis. As literature majors (indeed, as university students, and as human beings), we are united in a quest for meaning; as citizens of what one might (rightly or wrongly) argue is a “post-modernist” world, we are reminded at every turn of the constructedness, the provisionality, of meaning. It is something we make and turn out in language; it does not simply exist.

The other day, I was talking with a friend, and we got onto the topic of the general misery that seems to haunt great writers like a shadow (in this case, high modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf). And he said something that stuck with me:

“Maybe the reason the great writers were depressed is because they were really just trying to capture the magnitude of what they really felt. . . that metaphor just out of reach.”

It’s certainly not a new sentiment, and it knowingly circumvents the complex socio-historical context of the modernist moment, but it’s a captivating one. And it made me wonder (again, not originally) if it isn’t exactly because all they have is metaphor that some of our great writers become depressed. The best thing they can do is describe what something is like, rather than what it really is. Moreover, I wonder if it is why we, in spite of our status as burgeoning critics, can come to feel bogged down the more we read. Just as soon as we feel that, yes, we know now, yes, we understand how, we come across a theory, a poem, a fragment that throws our carefully constructed sense of “it” into question.

Yet, the great writers continue to write, most of them right up until their deaths, and we continue to read their works and write papers on them. What is that if it isn’t an exercise in futility? I mean, really. Common sense would suggest that we wave a white flag and take up something more pragmatic, like engineering or business: something where there are formulae (and, well, jobs).

But true education, I’ve learned, is not so much meant to give us the “right” answers as it is meant to equip us with the tools we need to ask the right questions: how to think, rather than what to think, as Margaret Mead once put it.   And, as we spend the next year grappling with the nature of “truth” alongside some of our most culturally beloved characters (as well as many we have not previously been exposed to), the challenge I lay at our feet is that we might embrace and engage the discomfort that literature so often inspires, and discover that, in fact, there is no place we’d rather be.

Make yourselves at home, fellow students. Just don’t get too comfortable.

Addendum: If you want to read a great article on knowledge, as it relates to others and ourselves, you should check out Joshua Rothman’s piece “Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy,” which was published in The New Yorker in July.

In fact, you know what? Do yourself one better and just read Virginia Woolf. If you haven’t sipped her particular brand of Kool-Aid yet, trust me: you will feel as if you’ve gained a sixth sense.

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