This afternoon I have experienced my first taste of rejection in this whole Let's Get Into College process. I wasn't rejected from the college; instead, from a very prestigious scholarship program within the college that would have taken care of all the costs the HOPE wouldn't have covered (the HOPE covers tuition only, not room/board/fees/books). I was offered a lesser scholarship that doesn't come with any of the prestige or nice travel offerings that are found in the prestigious one. Not much of a consolation prize, though, in comparison.
I was a little shocked, though, to be truthful; I have an academic average of over 100, I'm ranked 5th in my class of 365, and I have only one B on my otherwise all-A transcript--and it's an 89. (In a freshman drama class, for crying out loud!) My mom helped me write excellent essays and I asked a teacher and a friend who think very highly of me to write my recommendations. I have a huge list of summer activities, community service projects, and awards to my name. What more could they want??
I'm not going to waste time wondering about that, though. When I first read the letter about receiving the Charter Scholarship instead of the Foundation Fellows, I was shocked, but not quite appalled and not upset enough to cry or anything like that. I read that only 73 out of over 800 applicants could be offered the Ramsey, much less the Foundation Fellows! That makes me feel a little better, but all the same...
You might say that I've been used to high academic achievement and the receipt of accolades for this achievement my entire life. I've never been on anything but the Super Honor Roll, I always get the Legion of Scholars award at the end of the year, and I've been offered so many great things--including this nice position I'm in as a National Merit Semifinalist, soon Finalist hopefully--as a result of all my good grades, high test scores, and hard work. But for one of the first times of my life, something/someone decided I wasn't good enough. This is new, and different, for me. I'm going to use it as an opportunity for growth.
When something is a disappointment for you, there are feelings of shock, shame, confusion, and wondering. It is unhealthy, however, to dwell on what could possibly have gone wrong. I refuse to waste time wondering just what aspect of my application made me less qualified than someone else to be part of the Foundation Fellows. I have other things to do, and other scholarship invitations from other universities! Sometimes things in life just don't make sense, and while I'm all for expressing how you feel, eventually there's a point when you accept that rejection or that disappointment, and use it to help you get on with your life. I refuse to be troubled for more than a day about this, and will be marching on again very soon. (And on the lighter side, I hadn't really wanted to go to UGA anyway, so now I have all the more of a reason NOT to, and to go somewhere out of state instead! Happy day! ^_^)
Monday, January 29, 2007
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Let the feeling overtake you...
It has recently occurred to me that culture and society seem to place too much emphasis on delicacy and restraint of one's emotions, especially in public. Our entire lives we face a dichotomy of attitudes with regards to how we feel--"Let it out," "It's a shame to have a tantrum," "Tell me how you feel," "That's too much information," and of course, the ever-popular "Express yourself!"
Why do we support the full expression of one's emotions, but never in a way that might make someone else uncomfortable? Is it because we are all too self-obsessed to want to see deeply into someone else's heart if we don't know them? --Or even if we do know them? All my life I've been in situations where someone who is crying or vehemently angry or upset is sent away, told to wash their face, put out of sight and mind until they have restored their emotional balance. Only then can they be re-admitted to our supposedly polite society. Is this practice really necessary? Are we all so disturbed by someone who is crying that we cannot accept their presence without trying to make them stop crying? Why is so much effort placed on trying to stop negative expressions like crying or shouting? You know that the alternative is to keep things bottled up, stifled, locked away in some secret storm-chamber of the heart until it will all burst at some point. Everyone does this, and we all KNOW it's unhealthy! Why do we continue to support it?
There is nothing inherently permanently emotionally damaging about crying after a major disappointment or injury (physical or mental). Retaining all your disappointment and sorrow is what is damaging. I know what it's like to cram as much unhappiness as humanly possible into the abandoned back corners of your mind. It isn't pretty. It festers and grows, taking over other parts of your life, until everything around you can swirl with negativity. I honestly think that this over-emphasis on total restraint and calmness, especially among others, is at least partly responsible for all these people with depression. I can only imagine how much worse things must have been in the even more repressed Victorian era. No wonder they drank those "cordials" all the time.
Calmness is an illusion. Restraint is a figment of the collective imagination of society. We are truly emotional beings; why should we spend so much time denying that? I challenge every person who is reading this to go a day wearing your heart on your sleeve. Don't deny your impulse to tell the person you love that you love them! If your heart is aching because something bad has happened, let yourself be troubled for once. It's very possible to let your feelings out without it interfering with your productivity or whatever else you might be concerned with. There are logical limits to things, but the restraint shoved on us by the people around us is artificial and less than your logical limit. Hug your child. Cry when your heart tells you to cry. Let someone KNOW when you're upset. It'll do everyone a lot more good than keeping it all stifled inside.
Oh, and sorry, but I figured that to increase the number of people getting my messages, I need to increase the traffic on my site, so I'm succumbing to the need to link to something that will get me more traffic. http://bestestblogofalltime.blogspot.com
I'm sorry, but it was the only way I could think of. I'll try not to do this too often.
Why do we support the full expression of one's emotions, but never in a way that might make someone else uncomfortable? Is it because we are all too self-obsessed to want to see deeply into someone else's heart if we don't know them? --Or even if we do know them? All my life I've been in situations where someone who is crying or vehemently angry or upset is sent away, told to wash their face, put out of sight and mind until they have restored their emotional balance. Only then can they be re-admitted to our supposedly polite society. Is this practice really necessary? Are we all so disturbed by someone who is crying that we cannot accept their presence without trying to make them stop crying? Why is so much effort placed on trying to stop negative expressions like crying or shouting? You know that the alternative is to keep things bottled up, stifled, locked away in some secret storm-chamber of the heart until it will all burst at some point. Everyone does this, and we all KNOW it's unhealthy! Why do we continue to support it?
There is nothing inherently permanently emotionally damaging about crying after a major disappointment or injury (physical or mental). Retaining all your disappointment and sorrow is what is damaging. I know what it's like to cram as much unhappiness as humanly possible into the abandoned back corners of your mind. It isn't pretty. It festers and grows, taking over other parts of your life, until everything around you can swirl with negativity. I honestly think that this over-emphasis on total restraint and calmness, especially among others, is at least partly responsible for all these people with depression. I can only imagine how much worse things must have been in the even more repressed Victorian era. No wonder they drank those "cordials" all the time.
Calmness is an illusion. Restraint is a figment of the collective imagination of society. We are truly emotional beings; why should we spend so much time denying that? I challenge every person who is reading this to go a day wearing your heart on your sleeve. Don't deny your impulse to tell the person you love that you love them! If your heart is aching because something bad has happened, let yourself be troubled for once. It's very possible to let your feelings out without it interfering with your productivity or whatever else you might be concerned with. There are logical limits to things, but the restraint shoved on us by the people around us is artificial and less than your logical limit. Hug your child. Cry when your heart tells you to cry. Let someone KNOW when you're upset. It'll do everyone a lot more good than keeping it all stifled inside.
Oh, and sorry, but I figured that to increase the number of people getting my messages, I need to increase the traffic on my site, so I'm succumbing to the need to link to something that will get me more traffic. http://bestestblogofalltime.blogspot.com
I'm sorry, but it was the only way I could think of. I'll try not to do this too often.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Achievements and Regrets
Let me first establish that my mother is a very strong and brilliant person, and I love her dearly (though I have never been able to vocalize that fact without crying). She certainly has her flaws, mainly with impatience, anger, and unwillingness to put up with temporary emotional indulgence. However, she is still my mother, and regardless of what she says or does, I will never want her to be anything other than that, and bear her no ill-will.
That said, she recently put me in a position which I am not sure any child deserves to be in...namely, the unspeaking audience of a confession which can be nothing but awkward and upsetting for me.
My mother has gone to great lengths to do things for me, and I am unbelievably grateful for how much she has done to raise me well and get me what I needed. She holds 3 degrees--a bachelor's, master's, AND Ph.D., all in English. However, her student teaching was very brief, because as far as I know, she never wanted to teach. She married my father as a graduate student and for 12 years they established a life together before they ever had my sister, and then I was born 4 years later. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for a good deal of my life, and only in the past several years has she taken up substitute teaching and then work as a tax specialist at H&R Block. I've never complained through any of this, as I think it has been nice to have a very accessible parent who was available when I needed her and not ever stressed about some kind of office deal or whatnot.
But... the other day as she drove me home from where the bus drops me off, she just kind of stopped talking and was silent for a while. Then she burst out about how she has three advanced degrees, and all this intellectual potential, and she has been spending her time raising daughters, fixing up houses, and finding the best prices for things like carrots and cat food. She talked about how there was so much that she gave up because of me and my sister, and how tired she gets of all the little things. ....So what am I to do with all this? There was nothing I could say--what could I have said?
"Sorry I ruined your life, Mom. It's a little hard to stop existing at this point."
"What did I have to do with any of that? "
"Why are you telling me? What do you want me to DO about it?"
Exactly. There is nothing I can do about the dreams my mother abandoned to become a stay-at-home mom. I see this kind of regret from people every day--from my bus drivers who are mind-numbingly bored with life, to my teachers who see their hopes dying a little more each day that they have to deal with irritating teenagers, to my own mother. And all I have to say is.....WAKE UP! This is my message to the world...
Find something in your dreams that you can achieve, and then actually DO it! How much time can you waste doing something you hate? FIND A WAY. Write the novel. Find the time and money to make the trip to Rome, or Finland, or China, and then GO. Sing your heart out to someone, somewhere. Just stop letting all your little dreams fester and die in your own heart and regretting everything you've never done! Life is tenuous, at best....at any moment, you could die. Everyone knows this, but how many of them actually practice it in their lives? If you know that you'd regret not doing something if you died in a year's time, find a way and DO it, and grow and live and prosper from it. Sometime in the next few months, I'm going to find a way to tell my boyfriend that I love him and also confess my love to a classmate whom I've secretly loved almost since the day I met him, but in a very platonic way. (Yes, you can love two people at once; don't knock it until it has happened to you.) If you don't feel like you're really living....DEFINE what you think is "living" and then LIVE it! Achieve the things you want and can achieve! Don't let yourself get sucked into the cycle of "if only I could have done this" and "I've always wanted to do that". That's almost all that the old people in nursing homes talk about, what they didn't achieve. Don't be one of them. My mother already is. But you don't have to be.
That said, she recently put me in a position which I am not sure any child deserves to be in...namely, the unspeaking audience of a confession which can be nothing but awkward and upsetting for me.
My mother has gone to great lengths to do things for me, and I am unbelievably grateful for how much she has done to raise me well and get me what I needed. She holds 3 degrees--a bachelor's, master's, AND Ph.D., all in English. However, her student teaching was very brief, because as far as I know, she never wanted to teach. She married my father as a graduate student and for 12 years they established a life together before they ever had my sister, and then I was born 4 years later. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for a good deal of my life, and only in the past several years has she taken up substitute teaching and then work as a tax specialist at H&R Block. I've never complained through any of this, as I think it has been nice to have a very accessible parent who was available when I needed her and not ever stressed about some kind of office deal or whatnot.
But... the other day as she drove me home from where the bus drops me off, she just kind of stopped talking and was silent for a while. Then she burst out about how she has three advanced degrees, and all this intellectual potential, and she has been spending her time raising daughters, fixing up houses, and finding the best prices for things like carrots and cat food. She talked about how there was so much that she gave up because of me and my sister, and how tired she gets of all the little things. ....So what am I to do with all this? There was nothing I could say--what could I have said?
"Sorry I ruined your life, Mom. It's a little hard to stop existing at this point."
"What did I have to do with any of that? "
"Why are you telling me? What do you want me to DO about it?"
Exactly. There is nothing I can do about the dreams my mother abandoned to become a stay-at-home mom. I see this kind of regret from people every day--from my bus drivers who are mind-numbingly bored with life, to my teachers who see their hopes dying a little more each day that they have to deal with irritating teenagers, to my own mother. And all I have to say is.....WAKE UP! This is my message to the world...
Find something in your dreams that you can achieve, and then actually DO it! How much time can you waste doing something you hate? FIND A WAY. Write the novel. Find the time and money to make the trip to Rome, or Finland, or China, and then GO. Sing your heart out to someone, somewhere. Just stop letting all your little dreams fester and die in your own heart and regretting everything you've never done! Life is tenuous, at best....at any moment, you could die. Everyone knows this, but how many of them actually practice it in their lives? If you know that you'd regret not doing something if you died in a year's time, find a way and DO it, and grow and live and prosper from it. Sometime in the next few months, I'm going to find a way to tell my boyfriend that I love him and also confess my love to a classmate whom I've secretly loved almost since the day I met him, but in a very platonic way. (Yes, you can love two people at once; don't knock it until it has happened to you.) If you don't feel like you're really living....DEFINE what you think is "living" and then LIVE it! Achieve the things you want and can achieve! Don't let yourself get sucked into the cycle of "if only I could have done this" and "I've always wanted to do that". That's almost all that the old people in nursing homes talk about, what they didn't achieve. Don't be one of them. My mother already is. But you don't have to be.
Does the world need yet another blog?
Apparently, it does.
Hi, I'm another 17-year-old who suffers delusions of adequacy in this unfathomably large universe. You probably were one once, and if you weren't....well, you will be. Maybe not the 17 years old part. But there's no denying that hopefully every intelligent person on this Earth will enter a period where it feels as though the walls of their mind have been pushed beyond the cramped box of everyday life and they truly realize that this universe is big. Really, really big. Bigger than the biggest thing you could ever possibly imagine. And here I am, 5 feet 8 inches and about 140-something pounds, thinking I'm significant?
I might add that I am going to particularly avoid sounding like an emo idiot in my blog, but that in certain circumstances it is going to be difficult to avoid. My life is far from conventional and has for some time resembled one of those peculiar suspense-fantasy films where hardly anything makes sense and the meaning of events is only clear long after they have occurred. Nevertheless, I am still a teenager, a senior in high school, with friends, a boyfriend, parents, and a life in suburban America. And it may be thus concluded that I will, on occasion, blog about them. But I shall make every attempt to spare the details of my life from exposure that will make me sound like some normal, non-thinking American teenager.
So why do I need to open another blog, and waste your valuable time? For some time I have wanted to find a place to share my feelings of unreality in a world hopelessly caught up with simple things, where I see people perfectly happy to think whatever they are told to think, and where other people are monstrously unhappy because of the circumstances life threw them into. I hope to present myself as someone who has always had feelings of needing something more than a life that deals with the existing world--more than college, graduate school, a job, a house, working life, marriage, kids, retirement, and death. I need more. Everyone probably does, but who truly achieves it? I don't mean more in the sense of being famous, or becoming some kind of wandering hermit. I need more, in the sense that I need to smell the air when the evening light suffuses it with meaning, and I need to dance between the raindrops, and sit and commune with the spirit of the mountain stream while the air sparkles around me. As Blanche DuBois might say, "I don't want realism, I want magic!" Except without all the delusional-sex-maniac overtones and implications of ignorance that Tennessee Williams intended.
So yes, expect me to occasionally sound like I'm insane or some kind of freak. Expect both the mundane and the strange from me...you'd be a fool to expect anything less. I expect I'll occasionally hit on some interesting truths, occasionally bore people, and occasionally confuse them, and many other things. I'm looking forward to at least finally having a place to put my thoughts when I'm avoiding doing schoolwork (as I am now).
Above all, welcome to my blog!
Hi, I'm another 17-year-old who suffers delusions of adequacy in this unfathomably large universe. You probably were one once, and if you weren't....well, you will be. Maybe not the 17 years old part. But there's no denying that hopefully every intelligent person on this Earth will enter a period where it feels as though the walls of their mind have been pushed beyond the cramped box of everyday life and they truly realize that this universe is big. Really, really big. Bigger than the biggest thing you could ever possibly imagine. And here I am, 5 feet 8 inches and about 140-something pounds, thinking I'm significant?
I might add that I am going to particularly avoid sounding like an emo idiot in my blog, but that in certain circumstances it is going to be difficult to avoid. My life is far from conventional and has for some time resembled one of those peculiar suspense-fantasy films where hardly anything makes sense and the meaning of events is only clear long after they have occurred. Nevertheless, I am still a teenager, a senior in high school, with friends, a boyfriend, parents, and a life in suburban America. And it may be thus concluded that I will, on occasion, blog about them. But I shall make every attempt to spare the details of my life from exposure that will make me sound like some normal, non-thinking American teenager.
So why do I need to open another blog, and waste your valuable time? For some time I have wanted to find a place to share my feelings of unreality in a world hopelessly caught up with simple things, where I see people perfectly happy to think whatever they are told to think, and where other people are monstrously unhappy because of the circumstances life threw them into. I hope to present myself as someone who has always had feelings of needing something more than a life that deals with the existing world--more than college, graduate school, a job, a house, working life, marriage, kids, retirement, and death. I need more. Everyone probably does, but who truly achieves it? I don't mean more in the sense of being famous, or becoming some kind of wandering hermit. I need more, in the sense that I need to smell the air when the evening light suffuses it with meaning, and I need to dance between the raindrops, and sit and commune with the spirit of the mountain stream while the air sparkles around me. As Blanche DuBois might say, "I don't want realism, I want magic!" Except without all the delusional-sex-maniac overtones and implications of ignorance that Tennessee Williams intended.
So yes, expect me to occasionally sound like I'm insane or some kind of freak. Expect both the mundane and the strange from me...you'd be a fool to expect anything less. I expect I'll occasionally hit on some interesting truths, occasionally bore people, and occasionally confuse them, and many other things. I'm looking forward to at least finally having a place to put my thoughts when I'm avoiding doing schoolwork (as I am now).
Above all, welcome to my blog!
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