Sophia S.
Photography by John Tropeano
If you’re reading this, the cold water does not get warmer if you jump late.
“If you do not learn to meet your needs directly, you will learn to meet them neurotically. You will develop routines and relationships and rituals that are designed to help you get just enough of what you want without having to ask for it directly. But never enough to feel fulfilled. To be fulfilled, we must go straight to the source. We must extract whatever it is that is fueling our anxieties and ego trips and neurotic compulsions and fears and we must face that. Otherwise, we can face a whole lifetime trying to understand what the soul – at its core – already knows.”
–Heidi Priere
Genuine fulfillment has always sounded like something of a myth. Growing up, I was always familiar with choosing between binaries: money or happiness, others or myself, grad school or a job. For a long time, less was not more. Each accomplishment was a means to an end and thus did not warrant a celebration or a moment of pride because I did not reach my final destination: success. The term, like most abstruse subjects, lingers in the subconscious. Success. Success. I still am not exactly sure what that means, but perhaps that’s because words lose their meanings if you repeat them too much. As a senior, I’m in a constant rush toward the future… or rather the future is in a constant rush towards me? Maybe both. But either way, success resides there somewhere. It’s the final product, or so I’ve been told. I’m not writing this because I understand it yet or have an answer to give, but because I’m still working to find one, which I’m still learning is ok too. I don’t exactly know how to talk about this, so I’ll do what I do best: tell a story and recommend some authors.
I was in the city while home for spring break. I had just turned 22, but I felt far from how put-together my parents told me I should be at this point – everything felt like it was moving a mile a minute and I just wasn’t keeping up. I was in desperate need of a change of scenery, and a visit to my best friend. I felt it was fitting to go to a place where everything is moving, since I was in a place in my own mind where my progress towards my goals felt totally stagnant. I took the LIRR early in the morning because I needed to work on the last of my grad school and summer job applications, so naturally I was mid-crisis. The ‘not knowing’ part was killing me faster than actually working. Forget a fork in the road, the road I was on had 16 different possible routes and I hated not knowing the ones I would be able to take. After an aggravating subway commute and the usual New York bedlam, I had just about had it. I called everyone I could think of to complain, realizing how cliche it must look to be an angry New Yorker on the subway.
If you couldn’t already tell, I can be pretty impatient, which doesn't exactly blend well with anxiety (which I often mislabeled as ambition). Need more proof? I got my first tattoo in freshman year partly because of its sentimental value and partly because I was anxious that one day I’d wake up and it would be too late and I would regret not getting it to begin with. Time (or rather my hyper-awareness of it) is my greatest trepidation. Like most people, I feel like I will never have enough of it, and unfortunately this shaped me (for the better and the worse). I am outgoing because I can never get enough of learning from the people I meet. I work full weekends (and have for my latter three years of college) because I needed the “real-world experience.” I immersed myself in a little of everything because they say you’ll “find yourself” that way. You get the gist. The doing-a-little-of-everything thing, though, was the stickiest residue from my fear of time but, like I said, it shaped me for the better and the worse. I switched my major to follow my longest lasting passions, I built my resume and picked up some leadership positions, I made amazing friends, I found love for new things while doing the things I love already. I kept making art and (most importantly) I kept reading and writing. In the words of Elizabeth Gilbert, these things mended my soul. Freshman year me couldn’t have picked me out of a police lineup (Elizabeth Gilbert). In fact, in the beginning I was such a stranger to myself that I hardly existed (Mary Oliver). Over my four years, these things shaped me, they taught me a lot about myself and other people, and I will carry them with me… but there was always something missing. Many things interested [me], and nothing satisfied [me] entirely (Ivan Turgeney). On paper, I was successful but upon analysis I didn’t feel that way. So I kept doing more.
On this day in Manhattan, I found myself at the dreaded but inevitable crossroad between where I’m at right now and where I hope to be after graduation. Every single hour of work for extra curriculars and essays and exams would lead up to my ultimate success. Once I made that choice I’d be successful. But wait… I was beginning to realize that I’ll no longer have the luxury of being able to choose Choice D: All of the above. I was not ready for the definition of success in my life to be one thing. What would happen when I got there? What would happen after that? Historically, I would turn to writing to grapple with things like this but not only did I feel crunched for time, I felt completely and utterly uninspired in a way I had never felt before but I didn’t understand why. The 275 books in my ever-growing booklist began to taunt me, as did my only half-done grad school applications. In trying to find fulfillment, I continued to find anxiety. Sometimes I [could] hear my bones straining under the weight of the lives I [was] not living (Johnathan Safran Foer). Time continued to pass before me – my vision for success was more daunting than it was exciting. It was clear that I had begun grieving my college experience before it had come to a close, and I was trying to cope with feelings of absence in advance. Where did the time go? All along, I had been only microdosing success in what was external, and did not take time to celebrate my wins as something important when they happened. I had not been genuinely present for them or the progress I made internally because, at the time, they were a mere stepping stone. In hindsight, they suddenly all felt very far away and surreal, these things I build my college identity and sense of success around. It felt like holding water in the palms of my hands; the leftover water is proof that it was there, these things did happen, but I won’t ever have the same water in my hands again, the same way I won’t ever get the time I did not genuinely appreciate back. Where there was something and suddenly isn’t / an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space… only the things I didn’t do / crackle after the blazing dies (Naomi Shihab Nye). Even though I know I put the work in, the only proof I had to bear was my resume. This is great and all, but it doesn’t reflect who I am, whatever that means. Who would I be when I reached the point I had been working toward this whole time? If I don’t have the time to be “truly successful” in everything I have been doing up until now, was college my personal peak? This was the first time of many where I felt guilty for my impatience to reach success. It had now morphed into pure anxiety.
This same day though, I had a moment of reconnecting with the city I was born in in ways that were certainly needed but not at all expected. As I walked through the streets abounding with people scrambling to get to their final destinations as I had been, I made an effort to be present. I was observant, I was pensive, and at some points I was critical. While I’ve always been aware of it to a certain degree, I began to truly notice glimmers of an old city, one where grand pianos were apparently commonly relocated and technology was limited to rotary phones and the occasional clonky desktop. These ads on the sides of buildings were like tattoos, the kinds that people get in transitional phases of life that they might forget they have, but don’t hate enough to want to get rid of. The marks just fade, but remain nevertheless. Like holding water. I looked down at the tattoos on my fingers that I got in December of freshman year. I took the time to stop and stare at them for a while, the fading ads and the fading marks on my skin. At the moment, they weren’t so different; both the city and I are the same as they’d always been, just reinvented. It finally clicked with me what they mean when they say the world is coming from within you, not at you. In a few months, when I would eventually commit to grad school, I would still have my tattoos but I would be someone totally new. Like the people I have yet to meet there, I have versions of myself that I have yet to meet in each and every day preceding that time. I realized that being in a constant state of panic and impatience to get to my destination would only hinder me from truly becoming successful. In all the bustle of the Newest York I was standing in, I realized that I was my newest self too. And I always would be. That was my greatest success – becoming new again and again, despite the “now” being a little harder to endure sometimes. Being aware of the present and what that holds is a success. Getting this far in a longer journey is a success. Being almost there is a success. There is nothing more that we have in this life than this present moment, and that is a gift.
Alan Watts gave voice to the idea that we are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will there be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. As creatures of habit human beings rely on the past to build a future, choice by choice. We turn to past relationships, or the interviews of jobs we didn’t get, or the only barely passing grade in a class from freshman year. We turn to the months where we were doing so much better than where we are now with the hope of learning something, improving ourselves, finding our ways. This is cyclic, almost innate. This is what we are indirectly and nonverbally taught from youth, that life is measured by how we learn from our choices. This isn’t wrong, necessarily, but it is not the whole truth. If we aren’t careful, it creates a cycle many of us, including me, have difficulty breaking: the overlooking of our personal evolutions, the worldbuilding and learning, the trials and tribulations that created us, the forever changing and forever enduring being we continue to evolve and evolve and evolve into. We have lost love for the process of becoming.
While the mark of my old selves and the people that shaped them will always be a part of that, I need to learn to choose to continue forward knowing that they, and I, are where we’re meant to be. One lesson I’ve taken from my undergraduate experience is to accept people as they are, but to know which are deserving of energy and time. Im realizing the same holds true with the different versions of myself that I am constantly encountering. Hoping to “find yourself” in something external is a losing battle. I sympathize with Emily Dickinson, on her journey out with lanterns looking for [her]self, but the idea of a “finding” implies an answer to a perpetually impending question: who am I? Theoretically, if you found out who you were tomorrow, what would you do then? If you knew there was a definition of who you are out there somewhere, what would you do if you found it? Personally, I’d be pretty bored and I never wish to be easily defined (Franz Kafka). This being said, I’m learning to find solace in knowing that tomorrow I'll be different, sure, but I’ll always have impressions, or tattoos if you will, of my old self within me, the one who changed so irrevocably that the former felt like a peak. Tomorrow, while I might not exactly “find myself,” I will be a clean slate, with [my] own face on (Sylvia Plath).
I still have my tattoos, but I am a different person than who I was the year I got them. In fact, I am a different person than who I was last year. My hair is longer, I am free, and I am stronger. I am a different person than who I was six months ago. I have grown to learn to embrace change. I am a different person than who I was a month ago. I’m learning patience, learning to be calmer, and to not let things linger longer than they need to so I can enjoy the moment I’ve ended up in. I am a different person than who I was last week. I’ve become inspired to write this letter. I am a different person than who I was yesterday. I’ve decided to share this, hoping that maybe you, reader, who might feel rushed or confused can appreciate the beholding of the moment at the immediate close of this letter and every single one after that too despite where you might be on your journey to success, whatever that might be.
I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even in places you hate (Jeff Buckley). The truth is, you can’t find yourself in 4 years. Even 22 years. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is something only you can offer this world and it’s never too late to start searching within yourself for it. Though it’s uncomfortable, perhaps to be terrified and to be inspired should become synonymous. The cold water does not get warmer if you jump late.
Sophia S., Villanova University
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