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My name is Elizabeth and I am 24 years old.
Three years ago, after graduating from college and travelling to California, I decided to return to university. This may sound strange. Many of my previous, older classmates and co-workers had moved onto other jobs or universities, or were getting married. I did not fit into this mindset. My current status was working part-time at a photography-service business and spent much of my free time wandering the city with a point and shoot camera. However, I did wish to learn more about interaction design, philosophy, and linguistics. One year later, I enrolled as an undergraduate into Simon Fraser University.
I was worried about quitting my job and relying on student loans, on encountering a larger student population than my previous campus, and the dystopia sensation of separation from the little downtown city core. Instead, I met several wonderful people who shared a similar passion with literature and art history, spent many happy hours wandering the old-architecture buildings, studied away afternoons beside the ponds filled with dancing koi fishes, and built a lasting friendship with one of my TAs, a-now close confidant and friend.
Despite several hardships that I was struggling with on a relationship-friendship level, as I have mentioned in a previous post, these experiences were the foundation of what followed next. My second year of semesters began. And it is this past year that has also been a stressful series of events. It is a mistake to begin an intimate friendship with no notion of the other person’s principles, and many friendships that I had looked upon with a blind eye, were now a punishment to witness and endure.
I blamed myself. I blamed unreasonable expectations. I blamed a lack of patience, a less easygoing temper on my part, falling prey to those that observe a fault too easily chastise and less prone to remedy. My stressful headaches, and a series of morning nausea returned. Surely they were happy and unconscious of the lesser evils. Why could not I be equally happy in their folly? And that thought was the catalyst. I was not happy in our friendships. This thought shook me to the core.
What followed was a regular occurrence: falling into a gloom over a broken-hearted love affair, next throwing my mind into forgetfulness with the not-unwelcome Winter Olympics, exercising my displeasure at witnessing two friendships led astray by selfish-love, traveling independently, rekindling older friendships with those inhabiting distant cities, practicing self-restraint in several romantic relationships, and teaching myself about linguistics, cyborgs and film culture.
However, I erred in one mistaken judgement. A person, that claimed an old acquaintance from another none-friendship, sometimes professing a manner of speech, action and thought that were not in harmony of his principles. We shared a mutual understanding of literature, observations of human behaviour and patterns of interaction, not withstanding the maturity of experience from youth that is always sorely bought. And it was this relationship that is the cause, but one of the causes, of my descent into a sensibility of anxiety and depressed spirits. Once it was abruptly ended, I could not recall any happy moment we had shared or memory prior to meeting him without feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt and shame. Plied upon several other pressing duties of home, family, academics and health, it was no wonder that there was a loss of optimism towards everything that one said or did.
Time passed, and with six months of therapy behind me, I can now work with a zeal towards former ambitions and goals. My academic career will be completed in the following June of next year, and I am eager to renew acquaintance with older authors and literary figures, implementing philosophy, design and literature in completed projects. There have been many swimming notions in the turbulent mind of mine, and I wonder at to what will appear, rising as a new creation from these changes. And yet, I must leave many aspects of my old self behind in order to become a better and more authentic version of who I really am.
Despite my partiality for photography, there is an area that I can never seriously focus on. With gratitude towards everyone who has indulged this artistic flight of fancy, it is not a profession that I desire. There is still a something lacking towards the narrative of those photographs that is essential towards production, a brief yet completed history that still lives on outside of context, while special techniques and focus have been forgotten. It is this something that I wish to apply to my own livelihood, my raison d’etre and lifestyle. There is the subtle belief that once this secret has been discovered in one medium, it may be applied to in other aspects of living.
I hope you will forgive me for the length of this post, and remember that, “We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
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Tags: sfu, student, university