Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-09-02 03:37 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2008-09-02 03:37 pm
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Oh god. I just went back and read some of my LJ entries from my sophomore year at Simon's Rock, and now I want to go back in time and give my seventeen-year-old self a hug. And tell hir "It's not you, it's them." God, I thought I was such a screwup for not being able to cope while I was living in the Hotel fucking California--who the fuck would be able to cope?
I had no sense back then of what you just have to put up with and what's absolutely unacceptable to have inflicted on you. Why should I have? I was sixteen and I'd just been tossed into a college environment with everybody whispering "responsibility" and "forbearance" in my ear, and nobody to tell me that no, it's not okay for an employer to demand 25-30 hours a week of a full-time student in conditions barely in compliance with labor laws, that "I'm not going to give you any guidelines on what or how to write, but I am going to grade you really hard" is not an acceptable grading policy for essays, that something's seriously wrong if your dorm is 50 degrees in winter and the R.D. tells you to deal with the mouse infestation yourself, that teachers should not be allowed to arbitrarily fail students amidst a cloud of complications, that it is not normal or healthy to live in a place where nothing ever goes on and nobody ever talks to each other and caring or being enthusiastic about anything just earns you indifference or faint derision.
And when I told my fucking useless academic adviser about the mountains of work piling up around me and my despair of ever catching up with it, he just said "Well, you'd better start working on that, shouldn't you?" And when I told my fucking useless shrink about my despair and helplessness and feelings of inadequacy for not fitting into a broken system, she just said, "Go get some exercise, it will make you feel better." Jesus, I'm surprised I didn't slit my wrists.
But reading over those old entries just makes me realize that all my mental problems--depression, ADD, various forms of social maladjustment--were situational. "It's not you, it's them." I refused to believe it back then because I didn't want to be a self-pitying fuck-up who refused to recognize her own flaws, but taking a step back, it's true. (It also means I got put on--and addicted to--Adderall for no reason, but I'm not terribly bitter about that because the drugs were the lifeline that let me finish my last semester there. I sure as fuck wasn't the one that needed fixing, but it was easier to take the temporary solution than to leave early or try to change the way things worked there. Also, speed is fun when you don't depend on it for normal functioning.)
Anyway, now that I'm in a good college environment I can see even more clearly how fucked-up Simon's Rock was. And the annoying thing is that, well, a college environment is a college environment, and I keep catching myself lapsing back into the old depressive emotional patterns. Usually when I've spent too much time in my room without social interaction, which is weird, because I am not used to needing social interaction. But I was so deprived of it at SRC that I keep feeling the howling void encroach when I go alone too long. Given this fact, I think I need some strategies to stave it off:
1. Friends! Real-life friends, even. Online friends are great, but cannot drag you out for coffee when you're feeling down and geek about Old English until you cheer up.
2. Strict motherfucking work-play separation. No more sitting in my room with a pile of homework, the internet to distract me, and an armload of despair. From now on all my homework and studying gets done in the library or the common room.
3. Something to pour my energy into. At SRC it was the annotated Brick that saved my sanity; in my year off it was going to see Les Mis on Broadway. Who knows what it will be now.
I had no sense back then of what you just have to put up with and what's absolutely unacceptable to have inflicted on you. Why should I have? I was sixteen and I'd just been tossed into a college environment with everybody whispering "responsibility" and "forbearance" in my ear, and nobody to tell me that no, it's not okay for an employer to demand 25-30 hours a week of a full-time student in conditions barely in compliance with labor laws, that "I'm not going to give you any guidelines on what or how to write, but I am going to grade you really hard" is not an acceptable grading policy for essays, that something's seriously wrong if your dorm is 50 degrees in winter and the R.D. tells you to deal with the mouse infestation yourself, that teachers should not be allowed to arbitrarily fail students amidst a cloud of complications, that it is not normal or healthy to live in a place where nothing ever goes on and nobody ever talks to each other and caring or being enthusiastic about anything just earns you indifference or faint derision.
And when I told my fucking useless academic adviser about the mountains of work piling up around me and my despair of ever catching up with it, he just said "Well, you'd better start working on that, shouldn't you?" And when I told my fucking useless shrink about my despair and helplessness and feelings of inadequacy for not fitting into a broken system, she just said, "Go get some exercise, it will make you feel better." Jesus, I'm surprised I didn't slit my wrists.
But reading over those old entries just makes me realize that all my mental problems--depression, ADD, various forms of social maladjustment--were situational. "It's not you, it's them." I refused to believe it back then because I didn't want to be a self-pitying fuck-up who refused to recognize her own flaws, but taking a step back, it's true. (It also means I got put on--and addicted to--Adderall for no reason, but I'm not terribly bitter about that because the drugs were the lifeline that let me finish my last semester there. I sure as fuck wasn't the one that needed fixing, but it was easier to take the temporary solution than to leave early or try to change the way things worked there. Also, speed is fun when you don't depend on it for normal functioning.)
Anyway, now that I'm in a good college environment I can see even more clearly how fucked-up Simon's Rock was. And the annoying thing is that, well, a college environment is a college environment, and I keep catching myself lapsing back into the old depressive emotional patterns. Usually when I've spent too much time in my room without social interaction, which is weird, because I am not used to needing social interaction. But I was so deprived of it at SRC that I keep feeling the howling void encroach when I go alone too long. Given this fact, I think I need some strategies to stave it off:
1. Friends! Real-life friends, even. Online friends are great, but cannot drag you out for coffee when you're feeling down and geek about Old English until you cheer up.
2. Strict motherfucking work-play separation. No more sitting in my room with a pile of homework, the internet to distract me, and an armload of despair. From now on all my homework and studying gets done in the library or the common room.
3. Something to pour my energy into. At SRC it was the annotated Brick that saved my sanity; in my year off it was going to see Les Mis on Broadway. Who knows what it will be now.