Freshman Year

Earlier this week I told a colleague from work that the winter landscape was exacerbating my melancholia. The upshot of this was that he laughed his head off and I went back to photocopying my manuscript in silence. I realize that these statements are sort of on par with those high-drama moments that characterize the first (and, let’s face it, second, third and fourth) seasons of Felicity that I religiously watched in high school. But like Felicity, I meant it with ringing sincerity.

Working for the three editors I currently assist just hasn’t been going well for the past month. I’ve been riding through incredible shifts of emotion, panicking about small crises and having continual breakdowns in private at work and at home. One of the worst parts about this is that despite being a very vocal person, I tend to shut down on the communication lines if I’m really really upset and feeling challenged. The difficulties at work began to creep into every nook and cranny of my life, prompting me to consider the merits and weaknesses of my character and behavior. I began to complain in fits and starts, projecting the idea that I couldn’t stand work, when really, I do – I enjoy what I do, but I’m not doing the job for which I was hired. I guess one of the problems is that I’m so new to the professional world. I never feel quite certain of what my rights are, and I suspend my feelings too easily on things that aren’t even emotional to begin with.

Anyway, lately I haven’t felt much like talking to people who aren’t involved in my life. It always came out as a failed attempt – a long rant or, worse yet, a lament that provoked no response from the listener. And there’s nothing worse than indifference or dismissal from people you’re turning to. Because it’s actually rather serious since my work is the only reason I’m even here in the first place. I can’t think of my life without my job because that would entail me living with my parents, and I just cease to exist as a person in that context. Yesterday I realized, in a breakthrough fashion, that I was transferring all my frustration and unhappiness about work into more personal channels, perceiving relationships as being more troubled than they are.

The point of writing all this is really for myself. I think I’ve been trying too hard to phrase things in a way that courts other people’s attention, or letting myself down in an attempt to meet their needs. I’m giving up on that. I don’t know what’s going to happen at work. Next week I have a meeting with a few supervisors to discuss what we can do going forward. It’s the best news I’ve had in a long while at work. Because at least it means that they too realize that I’m horribly overstretched right now, that it’s not just me being incompetent or inefficient. There’s nothing worse than feeling that you’re ill-suited to the most basic of jobs; that you, by your very nature and mental framework, are incapable of succeeding.

Christoph and I had a good talk about it on Thursday. He has defined my attitude as one of ‘rational cynicism.’ Sometimes it’s good to have an optimist with you at dinner every night; it helps to put the day into perspective. Periodically I feel like a freshman again. Things are just so new, so bizarre; the smallest decisions seem so charged. Is there a freshman year to the rest of your life? Sometimes I feel like this is it; that I almost never existed as an independent being before I moved to Princeton. It’s funny to realize that whenever you change your location, you can bear all your history around with you, but it’s really only in small flashes that it remains relevant. I wonder whether the Princeton chapter has the same substance as my 1st year at Columbia, whether it will share that compound of being at once unremarkable but vital. I guess that's why I started this blog in the first place. Because I don't think your formative years - formative moments, really - should go unnoticed or inarticulated.