In my various opinion pieces with The Weather Vane, I’ve been very candid about my collegiate experience, my ethics, and the dispositions I have to expectations. Much of this is rooted in the formative first years of college that left me feeling broken, lost, and like a failure to myself, the world, and the people around me, and which continue to leave me with a tentativeness towards myself and my capability.
Since then, I’ve realized that my struggle was and still is linked to a massive amount of expectations from the various roles I fill– student, worker, family member, friend, etc.– and my seeming inability to be successful in either without neglecting the other. My most recent opinion piece delved specifically into the problematic nature of these expectations.
Since that piece, I’ve also come to realize what’s more important to me than anything– my humanity and my relationships, that is, the roles that allow me to be myself rather than be shaped to extraneous expectations. Anything outside of this, to me– school and work included– have forced me to neglect the latter things in favor of fitting an archetype, an archetype imbued with parasitic understandings of success and what we must do to achieve success.
For school, for work, this relationship means submitting everything I have to them, giving my all without either one acknowledging that they are not the only thing in my life, and that they’re actually the least important thing to me from a wellbeing standpoint. And yet, they are the most apparently impactful in being able to achieve what I want to achieve, at least on a social and cultural level wherein a college education and a resume are the definitive equation of our ability, our value, and our humanity.
That’s not to say I don’t value these things, as they’ve certainly enabled me and gave me meaning, purpose, and a space to explore and exert myself, but that exploration and growth itself is not enough. College and work, they want every ounce of us, and that’s because success to them is not self-actualization, it’s abject submission to their structures of giving until you can’t anymore, and then coming back after a day-long mental health break, rejuvenated from doing work at home instead of in their provided spaces. These things, they’re not about personal embodiment and connection with one another, they’re about upholding a system that exploits and manipulates people with a perceptual reality established by arbitrary expectations.
You want to be a student? Well forget about that project you’re proud of, it’s time to move on to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, and if you can’t handle all of it then each of your individual and personal achievements along the way is invalidated. Our success as students is predicated on our ability to achieve through an abundance of classes, stress, and unseen struggles related to that model, and during that period we are seen first and most importantly as students rather than as human beings.
This structure of roles and complete submission to the expectations of said roles is evident throughout all of society and human history– we have roles, some earned and some imposed, that we are expected to stick to and be emboldened in. Class, race, age, relative social and cultural values– these all come to define us and our ability to belong or not so.
In response to this struggle– which anyone balancing any type of role has encountered– a pervasive sentiment is leveled at us: we must learn how to balance our time, our roles, and our expectations. Subjectively, that’s cheap talk intended to save face for being egocentric and toxic. That sounds pretentious, but look at it this way: We are expected to balance our time and distribute our priorities accordingly, and yet every role we have expects everything from us and punishes us– mentally, emotionally, physically– and sanctions us– reduced grades, write ups for taking time off without having earned points, time, hours to do so, withholding important social capital like degrees, raises, praise etc.– when we don’t give everything we have.
All sets of identities seem contingent on 100%. So how are we supposed to be successful in any of our roles if all of them require all of us, and when that isn’t given because it tangibly cannot be, we’re a failure? Exhaustion, like muscle soreness after a workout, is seen as the tangible and desired outcome of success. Feeling overwhelmed, then, is a marquee of success.
The systematic deconstruction of the human mind and spirit, of our very humanity, starts with the assumption that we are the sum of expectations, nothing more than an extension of roles and relative social and cultural values. How are we supposed to be ourselves– to be human beings– when our identities are inseparable from what we are expected to be?
My response to this question is not yet defined– as I too am a participant in the society and culture which enforce these roles and expectations– but I’ve started answering it by prioritizing my self, my emotional health, and the individual things in each of my roles that fulfills my goals, ideologies, and happiness.
As a student, I’ve focused heavily on my art, especially as a way to process, understand, and cope with all of the above struggles and the existential identity crises I seem to always be in. As a worker, I’ve shifted to focusing on the field I want to be in– libraries– and in that field predicating the human interaction and compassion that underlines it. In any of my other roles, I’ve focused on basic human empathy, relationship, and the inherent human connection we all need.
I’ve distanced myself from the idea that my success, persona, and humanity are simply the whole of one role, rather they are the aggregation of the best of every role. That is balance– prioritizing the part of each role which makes you the best, most enabled you, not choosing which role to give everything you have to. Consider this lyric by Jay-Z on Kanye West’s song, “Jail”: “You are not in control of my thesis… Don’t try to jail my thoughts and think precincts/
I can’t be controlled with program and presets.”
If you’d like to see more about my response to the pervasive expectations and related challenges surrounding us, and how I’ve coped with and healed from mental health struggles related to these things, please visit my senior exhibition, “Thoughts,” which will be showing in the Black Box Theater from April 29 to May 5 at times to be decided.