College. The ideal time and place to reinvent myself. More accurately, it is the time to continue inventing myself without the shadow of my past. Without the history of how others have perceived me and the weight of living up to that perception. For the first time in my life, I get to actually forge who I want to be. The real question is whether I’m deciding who I am, or discovering it.
Leaving my past behind was not easy though. In the words of Satrapi, “Nothing is worse than saying goodbye. It’s a little like dying”(Persepolis). Previously a house of six, now a house of five. Five people who, honestly, deserved better. My brother, a college dropout. My sister, trying to figure out her ambition while sharing a room with her boyfriend. My parents, disabled and trying to provide for my family. In a lot of ways I felt like I didn’t deserve to be the one to leave. The youngest, the baby of the family, the brat.
And yet I did. Leave, I mean. And as Chappel Roan’s “Love Me Anyway” played, I drove away in the car I helped my parents buy (with my dad in the passenger seat and my mom in the back because she isn’t allowed to sit in the front when I’m driving because she starts freaking out), and I left my siblings in the rear-view mirror. I tried to leave the guilt behind too. It didn’t work.
So, there I ended up. In college. A scholarship baby with nothing but forced ambition and dread. A computer science major with a lot to prove. Thus beginning my journey as a female computer science major surrounded by men. My relationship with myself in regards to men has fluctuated so much this quarter. My biggest issue was my constant urge to act a certain way in front of men. I felt like I needed a certain level of male validation. It was so strange to me because I felt like I had gotten so far in high school with my self worth and my relationship with men. I felt like I had “served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf) and then all of a sudden I was taken back in time to the very beginning. In other words, I felt like all the progress I had made was suddenly deleted. I was fighting between who I wanted to be (and generally thought I was) and who I felt like the world wanted me to be.
Reading ‘A Room of One’s Own’ gave me a lot of perspective. Importantly, it gave me inspiration. A reminder of the things I believed in. As much as I left my past in the dust as I drove away from my home, it was still helpful to look through that rearview mirror into the past and remember who I used to be, because in a lot of ways that girl is still me. So I remembered the things I feel strongly about. Feminism. Writing. Those two things combined in a genre mix of creative and intellectual genius. I could only dream of creating something similar. And while I didn’t always agree with the things she said, I agreed with who she was. What she represented. A strong woman who can write what she believes in. That’s who I want to be. And thus, my identity developed a little further.
Still I didn’t know who I was. Still I couldn’t figure out who I wanted to be. In a lot of ways, I felt like my identity was based on what I told people about myself. I say I’m a writer so I’m a writer. But I would still be a writer if I didn’t tell people I was. So am I what I think about myself? Because I definitely think a lot of pretty insane things about myself that I at least hope aren’t true. Am I my feelings? In that case I’m melodramatic and that’s about it. This all goes to say that I still had a long way to go in the identity department.
I try to understand who I am through writing and it only confuses me further. I pull everything I have and I put it on the page. I might as well slit my wrist and let it drip onto the paper. “This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed” (La Frontera, Anzaldua). Anzaldua’s work was confounding. She spoke of a culture that I wish I could connect to but never grew up with. She spoke of the magic and the power within women, within queer people, within those who had been othered. I wanted to believe her but I was so afraid. Afraid that connection with my spirituality meant I was crazy. It was almost like I couldn’t shake that feeling – the feeling that I only was who I told people I was. So if I am spiritual, am I really that if I don’t tell people I am? If I tell people, what would they think? This struggle begins a contradiction in the belief that I held. I can’t only be what I tell people I am. Which means I’m more than that. A comforting thought, really.
Writing. Identity through writing. But what is my identity? What am I ‘allowed’ to write about? I’m brought back to a moment in class; we’re talking about intersectionality in the media. ‘Intersectionality Wars’. The intersection of identities, and the things that apply to only those intersections, the place where roads cross. We don’t want empty representation of minorities, there needs to be something behind them. More specifically, a minority behind them, behind the camera, telling that story. So then, am I only to tell stories about my identity? What is my identity? Is every character supposed to be me? How am I supposed to write what I know when I don’t know anything?
So I write struggle. Art imitates life and life imitates art. I write about insane situations and then accidentally find myself in them. I write to find myself and I build myself from my writings. Unfortunately, I can’t do that all the time. I’m still in college.
In college, it feels like the weight of the world is on my shoulders. I have this crazy full ride scholarship from a man who died and left a will for poor kids with high merit to go to college. So basically, this man’s spirit is watching me and waiting for me to do something with his life. And more tangibly, this man’s family has met me, knows my name, and is waiting for me to do something with my life. And here I am, crumbling under the weight of my learning disability and my ‘gifted kid burnout’. While what? While people suffer under much greater debts? While my past self goes through trauma after trauma? She could survive, why can’t I? And then I read ‘A Man’s Search for Meaning’ by Victor Frankl. “Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little”. And so I learn something once again. This book isn’t just about how finding light in the dark is possible even in the worst of situations. It’s about how suffering is meaningful even when it is small. It’s about how saving yourself from drowning in five feet of water is sometimes just as hard as saving yourself from drowning in twelve feet of water.
So I take a deep breath. I remind myself what I believe in. I’m passionate about politics, I’m passionate about learning. I’m trying my best to be hard working. Sure, I have something to prove. Sure, I have a complex that my life is maybe more important than it really is. But I have something. I have a dream. I am confused all the time. But at the end of the day, I can describe myself in one word. Writer. A writer of stories, of poetry, of journal entries, of my life. “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say” (A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf).
Or, to quote Anne Lamott quoting someone in Bird by Bird, "It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do -- you can either write or kill yourself."
Love,
Cat
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