weaknesses and messes

Over the course of an overload of conversations, feelings and observations, I've seen that the judgments we make about what's fair and honest become complicated when applied to romantic relationships. "Complicated" is a copout for a concept that's really too complicated for me to explain. I don't mean that the guidelines have changed, only that I seem to be much more forgiving when they're not followed, now that I've broken them too. We hurt people we care about, unintentionally but also when we know what we're doing even if hurting someone else isn't the purpose of our action. At first this seemed to be an excuse for what I've done--saying that it's an inherent weakness, and in some ways it probably still is an excuse. Yet, I also do believe that this is a part of how people are, and this recognition doesn't mean I'm giving in and will stop trying to be stronger than this weakness.

Growing up I was my brother Stephen's confidante. By the time I was in high school, just 14 which seems so young now, he would tell me about his girlfriends, who he pined for, how he saw love. For years since then I would listen and offer my idealistic views of how things should be: that if this girl was the one, she would love him too; that if that girl cared about him, she wouldn't be so self-centered; that if someone was in a relationship you shouldn't interfere; that if feelings were unrequited it's not meant to be; that if you truly care for someone you can be selfless without losing independence because love is good that way. Easy, unqualified comfort. And if you didn't follow these concepts, you must either not really love a person or you were being too selfish for it to work--something was wrong, in any case.

Now, having gone through certain things and seeing people close to me go through the same and more, I'm less able to harshly judge people's vulnerablities and weaknesses. I have the same sense of what's right, but can understand why people go the other way and I no longer think of them as too weak to do the better thing. Even without feeling all of the same exact things or without having been in the same exact situations, I can understand why a person would stay with someone who's unsure about their love and commitment, why a person wants to let go of something and still half-hang-on, why a person stays because of uncertainty or fear, why we hurt people when we want to be selfless. Feelings like these make you strong and weak in different areas.

I've spent a long time coming to terms with the guilt I felt over being weak about these different things. Part of why it's taken so long is because despite everything, I still have those clean, ideal visions of how things should be; I never expected it to be so messy and fragile. Over time I've become more forgiving to myself and to others. People hurt each other, sometimes because they don't know any better, other times because they thought what the other person might lose wouldn't be as great as what one person or both people gain. All of this is more complex than I could ever fully grasp, it's all such a mess--but the fact is even if we don't completely understand or anticipate, it's still our responsibility to deal with it.

What I really want to say and declare for myself is that even though I'm accepting my weakness, I'm no longer willing to just keep being that way. I can see and imagine the ways in which people hurt one another, and it makes me incredibly grateful for how he has treated me and I absolutely know that he deserves better. It has never been about putting myself down, because though I've learned much about my flaws, what I take away most is knowing what I can give and knowing what I don't know yet. I think I'm more ready now to try and overcome this weakness that seems to plague all of us when we feel. I don't know yet how capable I'll be, but I really want to give it an honest effort. I get scared and guilt returns when I remember that I'm not any better than anyone else, and that selfish desires are not so easily suppressed. But I want to stop dwelling in the middle because of my own needs, because of a need to control things, a need to sustain a closeness, a need to remedy the problem I started. I have to let go of these things, because deep down I still believe in all those things I told Stephen when I was a teenager. It's like I've told people in conversations about these things...when you care about someone there comes a point where you care about them outside of yourself, outside of how they are connected to you.

I still believe that love, in all its forms, can be selfless, and I'm going to try and stop looking to the world to prove it to me, to instead take it into my own hands. I think it'll be okay, and probably less melodramatic than this is making it seem.

what i learned in college

Since leaving college I've thought a lot about the places (Cambridge, Adams, Boston) and the people (blockmates, acquaintances, Adams residents). Everyone knows that's where the "real" education happens. I rarely actively think about the classes. But I came across some of my old essays this past weekend and I started to think about what I learned academically. Specifically, I read over an essay on the Attica Prison Revolt that I wrote for Social Protest, which I took for our Moral Reasoning core (why can't we call it philosophy like everyone else?). That class was hard because while I can be logical, I find it hard to be so rigid and theoretical. I remember being frustrated while writing the essays because we had to refer to so-and-so's framework and you can't make statements like, say, "Even though his life was shorter, it was fuller" the way you can in English. And even harder was the pressure to be original when it feels like every theory's been taken; the objective is so much more limited than the subjective. But as I was reading over the reasoning in the paper, I found myself appreciative of strict reasoning, and I was glad to be forced into taking a stand instead of relying on only instinctual feelings of right and wrong. Because even if I just reasoned my way back to what I initially felt instinctually, it made me better understand how I see things, and pushed me to defend my perspective.

All that made me think of John Parker's last Shakespeare lecture where he told us that he wasn't teaching us his interpretations but instead a way of thinking and reading. I can't even remember the phrase he used, but I recall the basic premise--that after we forget our scribbled notes and essay theses, he hopes we'll remember how to approach literature, how to study it and how to enjoy it. And to be honest, for all the classes I took, I would not for the life of me be able to describe to you every literary era or tell you the major themes of all the classics. I can't quote poetry off the top of my head and I can't remember all the names behind the pseudonyms. But English at college made language a real, living thing for me. I settled into loving a sentence like it was written for me, finding that the color green could make me inwardly ache because it described something both groteseque and heartbreaking, carrying a character around with me. And having the privilege of being around writers made me so aware of stories being imagined and observed and relayed--to hear Helen Vendler talk about why poetry is important, why James Wood simply liked a passage, Jamaica Kincaid introduce a grad whose thesis became a book, Stephen Greenblatt act out Othello, Zadie Smith give the stage to Dave Eggers, Nick Hornby. Swoon.

And then there's the science. A lot of it was awful but chemistry compensated for me. I hated chemistry in high school and it was hard to adjust in the beginning because I knew nothing when I took chem in college. But freshman chemistry is still one of my favorite classes. The problem sets were painful for their reliance on us manipulating otherwise straightforward calculations, but I liked the concepts of equilibrium and kinetics. After I accepted being bad at organic chemistry, I just let myself enjoy it, and it was easy to do that with Jacobsen, speed-chalk-writer and notorious Mr. Serious who despite the intimidation convinced me this was beautiful. Again, I wouldn't remember how to synthesize anything now and I barely remember the names of the groups but I still recall the premise of making bonds, seeking stability. I remember being fascinated by how on the smallest level, we just want to be stable, to be compatible with things around us, how we will always react a certain way in a certain situation. None of this appreciation helped me do particularly well in these classes but they made me think about science much differently, and I could see how one might equate this kind of structure with the existence of a higher form. And in the idea that maybe we make up this structure, I found myself back in literature--and I felt that everything's a story.

So I'm incredibly grateful to college for giving me so many forms of thought. There's more of course, the bits of art, history, math, sociology that I picked up along the way--none of it enough to think I know anything about any of it, especially since I remember very little, but it's nice to have peeks into how people who really know, might form their thoughts. On top of that, I'm grateful for the outside lectures, the diverse tutors in our houses, the clubs who brought the outside world into our campus.

I remember hearing Samantha Power talk about Darfur, and distinctly feeling that this was a privilege because I wasn't just learning about the issue, I was hearing about it from this amazing journalist/activist who I probably wouldn't have even heard of otherwise. And yet I'm probably still not as informed as I should/easily could be. And I thought of Henry and him always pushing us to ask what are the implications of our privilege, and what're we going to do with it. Understanding it has taken some time, but I do hope I'll have it in me to take the next step of using it. It's so very cliche and often for pomp more than substance but I do think of that Harvard Yard inscription--the one that tells you to "enter and grow in wisdom" as you come in and to "depart to better serve thy country and thy kind" as you leave.

I'm still somewhere in between grow and depart.