Rice and Cyberbullying

A/N: I should have written and posted this a long time ago.  I originally posted it on my Tumblr, but I figured it needs to be here too.

Slut.  Nympho.  Homewrecker.  Everyone either hates or pities you.  One day in October of last year I woke up to the first of many such messages.  At first, I was confused.  In my year and a half at Rice I’d never met anyone who hated me.  I had met many people who liked me (and who I liked) and many people who simply tolerated me with what I’m going to go ahead and call a friendly and aloof attitude.  But I’d never met anyone who seemed to hate me with such fervor.  I thought it must surely be a mistake, someone drank too much and sent the wrong person a message, but as they kept coming I realized that this person was purposefully trying to harm me.

At the time, said person was still attaching their name to the messages.  I tried to reason with them, to ask why they were doing such a thing to me, with no result.  So I finally blocked them.  This was, I believe, in January.

In March I started to get public posts attacking me by name on a page called Rice Confessions.  Such posts are filtered by an admin through a third-party website before they are posted on the Facebook page, which made the whole thing even weirder.  I had found RC, decided I’d found a good waste of time, and commented on posts I found interesting or relevant to my own life.  The post accused me of “squatting” and “whoring out my friendship.”  It begged me to shut up and get a life.

A few days later, another post appeared, expressing joy that another person hated me as much as they did.  And all this without a blink from the admin.  I wasn’t the only target of such unmitigated hatred, either; just the most obvious.  I find it incredible that the admin of a page not affiliated with the university but using its name and picture should post such vicious attacks considering the amount of bad press universities have gotten in the past for similar cyberbullying.

Anyway, RC closed for the summer, so of course whoever was stalking me would have to find a different venue for harassment.  It turns out I have a blog hosted on the rice.edu domain which, at the time, allowed comments.  I wrote a post about my struggle with PTSD and depression, both serious medical illnesses, and closed with the sentiment that I was glad to be receiving appropriate treatment and, for the first time in a long time, I felt like things were getting better.  Nowhere did I mention being bullied.  The closest I ever got to that topic was discussing triggering events caused by my friends, but this is the comment I got:

have you ever wondered why out of the 100s of individuals in every location, setting, and social environment, you’re always the victim of both social and cyberbullying. granted that those people might be wrong, you on your own part also need to reflect on why it is always specifically you who gets picked on. maybe if you adjust the way you behave or conduct yourself in social situations, people might just find you less annoying and leave you alone. (adjusting your behavior and conduct is by no means being someone you’re not. you can still be yourself without being socially annoying or irritating. its call learning social skills) p.s i recommend you review all your facebook statuses and ask someone who is truly honest with you to explain to you why 75% of them is socially irritating and annoying.

Leaving such a comment on a blog post where the author has publicly and specifically explained that she has moderate to severe depression and PTSD made me think that this person isn’t playing games.  S/he is really out to hurt me.  Or maybe s/he does not understand the consequences of her actions.  What if I hadn’t been receiving appropriate treatment?  What if I didn’t have the many, many friends and supporters, both fellow students and faculty, that I have at Rice?  What if I had ended up dead because of this and become both a tragedy and a punchline?

Rice is an elite university with an acceptance rate that has hovered right around 20%.  Its courses are rigorous and its labs and offices have hosted some of the greatest minds of the 20th and 21st century.  In my two years here, I have become a scientist and writer in my own right.  So you see, I am not a timid middle-schooler getting pushed around at lunch time.  I am extremely accomplished and intelligent (otherwise I wouldn’t be here) and unfortunately, the person(s) who have decided to target me are as well.  There is no stereotypical cyberbully or victim.  Such activity is everywhere, and it is serious.

One of the messages I received claimed, “It isn’t cyberbullying if it’s true.”  I want everyone reading this to know that cyberbullying is never okay and is never the victim’s fault.  My only crime was to put my name on my opinions and for that I became a target.  Unfortunately, since my harassers haven’t made explicit threats or made me afraid for my physical well-being, the authorities can’t do anything.  It’s up to me to handle this unexpected notoriety that I did not ask for or want, and I want to handle it with intelligence, grace, and self-confidence, since I know that despite claims to the contrary I am not the only person who has ever been harassed online, not even at Rice.

I will close with this.  The number of suicides related to online bullying is too high, especially when most suicides are those of bright young people who could have had a long and successful life.  One of the common criticisms of cyberbullying-related suicides is, “If you’re too stupid to log off the computer, you deserve to die.”  But the human mind isn’t designed to easily forget, and words online can be just as harmful as those said in person.  Words are powerful.  I hope you use them well.

Transition States

In chemistry, a transition state is a highly unstable intermediate in a reaction.  Because it is so unstable, it only exists for a fleeting moment (if at all) and cannot be observed by any traditional means.  The reaction will either “take”, and new products will be formed, or the transition state will devolve back to the reactants.  On an energy diagram, the transition state is located at the point of maximum energy:

(It’s been some months since I took orgo, so I may be a little rusty in my chemistry, but you get the general idea.)

Anyway, in more colloquial usage, transition simply means movement or passage from one state or position to another.  In many situations, though, I feel like transitioning from one position to another involves something much like a transition state, where you still have bonds to your old position but are forming new ones.  However, people are not chemical species, and this transition state can last a long time.

I recently lost a good friend of mine due to divergent morals and pathways.  The ways that we chose to take simply weren’t compatible.  And this has happened more and more as I have grown older.  Some of the people I was good friends with freshman year have since found different groups to hang out with.  Almost all of my middle and high school friends have stayed in Arizona, so it’s become more difficult to keep up with them.  But the worst thing of all, the very worst feeling, is when I meet someone that I really like, but due to various reasons, I have to let them go.

This is hard because feelings for someone don’t just end overnight.  Even though I understand that our friendship is now over, I can’t stop myself from hoping that some way, somehow, they’ll find their way back to me and everything will be just like it used to be.  I found a poem I wrote five years ago, about one of my very first such lost friendships:

Sitting frozen in time

Hands shaking, poised as

If for an awkward, eyes-

redly-rimmed picture…I wait:

The computer hums and my

breath betrays me

Refresh the e-mails one last time

And one more, one more:

Your words lost in eternity

my heart trapped behind such a screen

At such moments I’m in a state of high energy, since I am beginning to form new friendships and relationships at the same time as I still have feelings for my old friends, the friends that I no longer have.  It is stressful and confusing and, unfortunately, lasts for far too long.
However, I take comfort in remembering that the universe always tends towards states of lower energy, and even humans are not above basic laws of physics (although we like to think we are.)  I know that even though I may never forget those who are no longer a part of my life, that doesn’t mean my life has to end, and as I grow and change, so will my circle of friends and acquaintances.  Thank goodness minds and hearts are fluid.

The Way Out

I’ve been feeling really bitter lately.

I’ve been feeling this way ever since I visited Arizona and saw all the wonderful things my friends have been up to. I saw my boyfriend excelling in summer school, I saw one of my best friends on her way to the study-abroad program of her life, and of course, every single one of my friends had stellar GPAs.

Yes, it seems like everyone else is doing something great and worthwhile with their summer, except me. And I can’t tell you how sad and pathetic that makes me feel.

But there’s another emotion in there that I wasn’t expecting. Anger. I’m angry! I am actually angry at my circumstances, full of energy for the first time in years, and ready to go and do and learn. That’s how I know I’m getting better.

I will be completely frank with you. Sophomore year, for me, was a bust. My grades were dismal, my health even worse. Unfortunately I wasn’t sick with anything awe-inspiring and likely to garner sympathy and understanding. I was simply depressed.

Ah, depression. Something I have far too much experience with, both in myself and in others, and something that 90% of this blog is about. I’ve had to tell my boyfriend this, I’ve had to tell my parents, I even had to tell Dean Hutch and my major advisor, that depression is a real thing, and no, I’m not taking these pills for fun, and no, I am not doing this for attention, and no, I am not lazy, I literally, physically cannot get out of bed.

One time I screamed and dropped something when someone startled me, and when they started laughing, I burst into tears. Another time, when a friend of mine briefly lost his temper, I spent the next three hours huddled in my bed, shaking. I slept all day and took my meals upstairs so I wouldn’t have to socialize. And then, sometime around my twentieth birthday, I realized this isn’t normal. Or healthy. I guess I’d kind of just been waiting for things to get better, but my GPA was in danger and my life was on the line and nothing had gotten any better at all. So I went to the doctor, like I should have done last August.

It took a few weeks for the new drugs to kick in enough that I had the energy to pay attention in class. It took even longer for my mood to level out sufficiently enough for me to stop crying in public.

And tonight, a full two months after I began taking the new medicine, I was faced with a simply awful situation, one that would normally have made me sad for a week. But tonight I became angry instead. Angry at the unfairness of the situation. Angry at the person who caused it. I had stopped feeling helpless and started feeling righteous.

3-chloro-N-tert-butyl-β-ketoamphetamine (bupropion for short) is the fourth most commonly prescribed antidepressant in the United States. Opponents of antidepressants will say that they provide a “false happiness” or “chemical high” and don’t fix the underlying problem, to which I have two rebuttals:

  • Depression is a chemical illness. You wouldn’t say a person with Addison’s had “false hormones”. That makes about as much sense as calling someone with well-controlled depression “falsely happy”; i.e. none.
  • Why don’t you go tell someone who has no energy to move or even eat that “it’s all in your head! You just need some counseling!” and tell me how well that works out for you. Antidepressants get you out of bed. They make you able to eat, bathe, and work. They get you out of that dark scary place where even the basics of living are pointless and too difficult. Counseling is like the icing on a cupcake. It’s nice to have and all, but antidepressants make you able to go to counseling.

Having the capacity for anger and the ability to aspire to anything beyond simply surviving is new to me and quite frankly I don’t know what to do with this newfound energy. I’ve thrown myself into writing, crafting, learning biochem, and working online. I am learning to eat better and take care of my body and especially to be more understanding and polite towards my friends. You could describe me during my months-long illness with a lot of words and one of them would most definitely be needy.

Every day now, when I wake up, I tell myself that I am smart and good and getting stronger every day. I printed out a list of my accomplishments and put it on my nightstand so I can look at it when I’m feeling sad. I know that I had a bad year last year but I also know that things will get better, and they already are.

You know what I did this summer? I got my dreams back.

And I really don’t think that’s pathetic at all.

The Broken Flowerpot

It’s another vaguely inspirational post from your favorite amateur blogger!  Yay!

Anyway, last fall I went with a few members of the Social Concerns committee to Bo’s Place, a nonprofit located in the Greater Houston area dedicated to helping children who have just lost a loved one.  As I lost two of my grandparents before I was ten, I can tell you that children have a really, really hard time grasping the concept of death (heck, even a lot of older people do.)  They find it hard to comprehend that things will never be the same, because their sibling/parent/pet/etc. isn’t coming back.  And when they do realize that, they face quite a large existential crisis.  They don’t understand how things can be okay if they won’t be the same.

To the end of helping children cope with such a large change in their lives, the staff at Bo’s Place implement many different arts and crafts activities.  One of them is the broken flowerpot.  You start with a regular flowerpot …

(I wanted to put a visual in this post, but I figure most of you already know what a flowerpot looks like.  So, to make this picture interesting, I chose one with kittens, because Internet + kittens = happy.)

You can even paint the flowerpot in any design you wish.  I guess a lot of the kids at Bo’s painted their families the way they remembered them, dead person and all.

Then you drop the flowerpot.  Just smash it on the floor as hard as you can.  In fact, the mere act of destruction can often be therapeutic.  Dropping the flowerpot symbolizes a catastrophic event that triggers shock and grief.

And then (this is the hard part) you glue the pot back together.  Using an infinite amount of patience to pick every shard up off the floor, you have to carefully reconstruct the pot like a 3-D puzzle (personally, I never liked those things) and glue it together, waiting for the glue to dry in between adding pieces.

What you have left after all of this is … a thing.  It’s not the same, since there are bound to be pieces that were lost, and it is hard to glue everything perfectly back in place.  But it still functions as a flowerpot and the random cracks and holes add a certain abstract beauty.  If I were prone to pushing visualizations over the top, I would add that the cracks allow the ~light~ to shine through.

But leaving purple prose and religious metaphors aside for now, I really liked the idea of the broken flowerpot.  It stuck with me after we left Bo’s Place and all the way through winter break.  In fact, I tried halfheartedly to find a terra-cotta pot over winter break, but, oddly enough, December is not a good time to look for gardening supplies.

January was Tu B’Shvat and the Hillel kids painted flowerpots.  With one thing and another, one ended up in the floor common room and was left after school ended and most of the college went home.  I went out to the common room one night and scavenged around for leftover things that were going to be thrown out and came back with a red silk tie, a surge protector, some Christmas tree lights, and the flowerpot.

(I still have all of those things, in case they are yours.)

Gluing the flowerpot back together after I had smashed it was difficult.  I even went to Michael’s to pick up some special pottery glue.  During my first few attempts, the pieces kept falling apart until I was ready to cry with frustration, but I finally figured out that gluing the rim together first, then resting it on my desk so it provided a solid base to work up from, helped me work faster.  When I finished the reconstruction process, I was left with … a thing.  Okay, so some of the pieces didn’t fit perfectly together, and the glue was quite visible.  It wasn’t fine art by any means, but neither was the thing it was supposed to represent.

I’ve had my heart, my body, and my dreams broken a million and one times.  In that, I am no one special.  Each time, I felt like I’d been pushed all the way down to the bottom of Mt. Everest, and each time it grew harder to start the climb back up.  In more relevant terms, I felt like Humpty Dumpty after he got pushed off the wall.

(Random mindblowing fact: the rhyme never mentioned that Humpty Dumpty was an egg.)

What makes me, and you, and everyone else capable of going on after a huge catastrophe is glue, which can be family, friends, pets, career, volunteer work, or school.  The “glue” in this example is anything that holds your life together and gives your existence meaning while you go about trying to patch said existence up.  It fills in the empty parts that you thought would stay empty and makes you structurally sound.

The lowest point of healing has got to be when you realize that nothing will ever be the same and that the whole point of healing is to learn to cope with the new normal, with forever having that phantom pain, with carrying this burden of unfamiliarity.

It’s not the same thing.  But it’s a thing.  It works, and in the right light, it can even be beautiful.

Here’s to all my fellow broken flowerpots.  May you find the right glue to help yourself be strong.

Thanks to J.L. for leaving your flowerpot behind.  You can have it back if you want, but it might not be … the same.  O_O

The Holy and the Broken

On Easter Sunday, I went to church for the first time in years.  More importantly, I went of my own accord, which was quite unusual.  Now, over the years, I’ve called myself part of many different religions or creeds.  I started out Catholic and went through animism, agnosticism, Unity, Wicca, and a vast array of in-betweens.  These days, if someone asks me what religion I am, I just tell them, “Vaguely Christian with a huge helping of spirituality and some Mexican Catholic cultural practices on the side.”  So UU was a perfect fit for me.

But this isn’t a blog post about Easter.

Last Sunday, I went back to UU.  I almost didn’t, but I happened (by some miracle) to wake up in time for the 11:30 service, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.  What completely broadsided me was that the sermon this time was built around Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”.

Oh.

God.

Why.

I sat there, attempting valiantly to control my tears, as wave after wave of music poured over me.  It was something unlike anything I’d experienced before, because one of the main points of the talk was that life is hard.  It is.  “Some days,” I remember the pastor saying, “you just want to crawl into bed, pull the covers over your head, stay very still, and hope the day doesn’t notice you.”  I was like, “Oh, yes, totally.  I have totally been there for days and weeks at a time.”

But this isn’t a blog post about how pain is beautiful or some crap like that.

Sunday night, and Monday morning, several events occurred in rapid succession.  If I had to use figurative language to describe how they felt, I would say that a giant gust of freezing cold wind poured over me while I slept and neatly, without a fuss, removed my heart.  I felt like such a poser.  Here I had been spending so much time and money learning about philosophy and poetry and chemistry and biology, and then real life came along and rendered everything completely useless.  I had no resources to deal with heartbreak, and I felt stupid, because I’m 20, for God’s sake, and I’m not supposed to be breaking my heart anymore.

This is a post about living, I think.  About living and college and growing up.

At UU, we talked about finding your hallelujah, or your reason for living.  (Yes, I know it doesn’t really mean that, but bear with me.)  Turns out your reason for living changes over time.  If you asked a five-year-old, “What’s the meaning of life?” you would get a different answer than if you asked a 13-year-old, or a 20-year-old, or a 50-year-old.

Sometimes, you can’t find your reason for living.  Sometimes life just comes along and kicks you in the butt.  Hard.  Sometimes you lose your job, or your spouse files for divorce, or you find out you have a serious illness, or you find a gray hair.  And during these times – don’t you hate this – some idiot comes along and tells you that everything will be okay.  Tells you to look on the bright side.  And you’re just like, “What bright side?  I’m alone/old/ugly/sad/dying, and you’re telling me that ‘at least things can’t get worse’?”

Over the past few days, I’ve come to understand myself a lot more, and to realize what I’m capable of.  I wish I could tell you that I understand life better, or why God/fate/the universe chooses to make bad things happen, but I don’t.

Here’s what I do know:

  • Life is hard, and anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something.
  • Things might not get better, but your response to things will.
  • Music is a form of expression that transcends cultures, languages, and species.  You can play music to someone in a coma and they will hear it.  You can play music to a baby in the womb and they will hear it.  You can listen to music and it will explain things better than any amount of words ever could.

After the past few days, I have found a new level of faith.  Not faith in God, but faith in myself.

Baby, I’ve been here before
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.  May you find peace.

Ten Things I’d Say to Ten Different People, If I Had the Chance

  1. You take my breath away when I see you.  You were so sick, and now you look newly happy and at peace.  I missed that smile, the one that I trust.  Thank you for your counseling and your kindness.
  2. I’m sorry.
  3. I still don’t understand why you hate me, but I’ve learned to accept it and to move on. Your hatred is a part of me now.  It’s part of the proteins that make up my skin.  It glows in me and makes me stronger.  When I look at my eyes in the mirror I see new depths, of sadness and of wisdom.
  4. I’ve always admired you, you crazy, scary, uplifting, beautiful mess.  I wish we could have hung out more this year.  I wish I was better at metabolizing alcohol.  I wish a lot of things.
  5. I’m just really glad I don’t have to deal with you anymore.
  6. We could have been best friends if you’d given me the chance.  I tried, I did.  I gave you everything I had.  But I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.  So I release you, and I wish you all the happiness in the world, you beautiful, beautiful person.
  7. I’m so proud of you.  I know you don’t remember me – I was just your dull, quiet lab partner, just for one semester.  But I’ve heard about what you’ve done since, and I am really proud of you.  You’re destined for a stellar future – even if you weren’t always the nicest to me.
  8. I wish I knew who you were so I could give you a hug.
  9. You were right about college.  Right about love, and right about everything.  Sometimes I picture you in a gleaming office building in California.  Sometimes I picture you the way I remember you, the fluorescent lights casting a halo on your perfect hair.  Either way, I’ve never stopped thinking about you, even though I only knew you for ten days, five years ago.
  10. It will be okay.  It will absolutely, completely, perfectly be okay.  I promise.

Hair Pt.2

Yesterday, I got a haircut.  My hair was probably down to my middle back before the cut, and now it’s well above my shoulders.  I’ve noticed several things immediately:

  • I no longer feel like such a – pardon my expression – “dirty hippie.”
  • Either I get more double-takes, or I notice them more, because I no longer have this huge amount of hair blocking my view.
  • I feel different.  It’s very hard to explain.

It took a lot of courage to cut my hair, and if I’d had my way it would have been shorter still. (The stylist was reluctant to go all the way – “you’ve never had your hair that short, and you don’t know if you would like it,” she explained, to which I wanted to retaliate I am nineteen years old and I think I know what I want, thank you very much, but I didn’t because I am an overly nice person and I like to be kind to the people who take my personal appearance, quite literally, in their hands.)  The only thing I couldn’t figure out was why.  Why was it so hard for me to cut my hair?  What are the social implications of having long versus short hair?

Here are the things I came up with:

  • Long hair, on women, symbolizes health and sexual vitality on a subconscious level. In Houston, long, straight, sleek hair is an especial status symbol because it takes a lot of work to maintain in such a humid climate.
  • However, a woman absolutely cannot have visible hair anywhere else on her body if she is to conform to acceptable standards of beauty.  Women must shave their legs and armpits, wax their facial hair, and trim, shave, or wax “down below,” or risk being labeled “hippies,” “ugly,” or “weird.”

Let’s talk for a moment about pubic hair.  I know we are all adults and that it’s fairly common knowledge that virtually all post-pubescent adults have pubic hair, to one extent or another.  With that in mind – and this is entirely my opinion, of course – I find it just a little creepy that most of the men in my age group prefer women’s pubic hair to be scanty or nonexistent, mimicking the natural state of a prepubescent girl’s body.  “It’s cleaner,” they say.  “Pubic hair is gross.”  To which I remind them that shaving and waxing damages skin, even to the point of creating fertile breeding ground for bacteria.

It comes down to this.  Women endure the pain and inconvenience of waxing, plucking, and shaving their body hair, and conditioning, straightening, curling, dyeing, and styling the hair on their heads in accordance with the current fashion.  Having good-looking hair is so important that we will literally spend hours in front of the mirror working on it.

I realized all this a few months ago.  I stood looking at myself, puffy-eyed in the mirror from crying over yet another of my features that refused to behave.  Maybe it was the thick, wavy hair that never would flow as nicely as my white and Asian friends’.  Or someone teasing me about the “mustache” that I refuse to wax.  I took all of this in, stood for a moment wobbling as if I were knee-deep in the ocean, and then I thought:

What on earth am I doing?

Why do I care so much about what other people think of my appearance?  Why do I spend hours trying to please their sense of aesthetics?  I wouldn’t decorate my house to suit someone else, so why would I decorate my body in any other way than to please myself?

Dear ladies – I can only speak to you because I honestly know nothing about what men go through when they see themselves in the mirror – hair is keratin.  That’s it.  It is dead by the time it emerges from your scalp.  What you do with it is entirely up to you.  If a man is squeamish about your pubic hair, maybe he isn’t the best guy to be intimate with.  If someone teases you about your mustache, remind them that everyone has a mustache.

Hair is there for a reason.  Humans have been evolving for so, so long, hair and all, and every bit of hair, whether facial, scalp, arm, or leg, was once the difference between life and death for our ancestors.  Hair is an extension of the human body, and therefore beautiful in its own right, regardless of length, texture, or color.  I beg of you, if you do nothing else today, look at yourself in the mirror.  Change anything you don’t like about yourself and your hair, but that should be the only reason you change at all.  Easier said than done, of course, and it’s something many people have forgotten how to do.

I think my hair is staying short for a while.

Of Unrequited Love

Being nineteen and in possession of a functioning heart and hormones, I have been in unrequited love many, many times.  In fact, I might dare to say that I am constantly in unrequited love.  Or – let me rephrase that – I constantly care more about some person, whether that be romantically or platonically, than they care about me.  When I was in middle school, my parents assured me that it was just my body trying to get used to the new feelings and new capacities that come with puberty.  When I was in high school, I assumed that I was just being immature, or perhaps that I was too ugly for people to care much about me.

But now I’m in college.  My second year of college, and I still continuously grow attached to certain people and have to fight that attachment back with tooth and claw, because it couldn’t be more obvious that they don’t care at all about me.  I figure that this part of my personality, for better or worse, is here to stay.

Like almost every other little girl in America, I was raised on Disney movies.  The traditional Disney movies, where the girl was beautiful and white and thin, and where she always got her man.  As I grew older, romantic comedies worked the same way.  Every heartbreak, every convoluted love story, was always resolved in 120 minutes.  Heck, even the classic literature I loved so much – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre – always ended up with the happy couple together.  I wanted to tell someone Reader, I married him.  

I still feel like a whiny teenage girl, typing all this out.  It needs to come out, though.  It needs to come out, because I’ve finally realized what the upside to all this is, the upside to being completely and hopelessly in love with someone who has no idea you exist.  The upside is this: selflessness.

Selflessness.  Wow, that’s an important lesson to learn in today’s society.  I still feel like I’m an important person in the world … that if I want or need something badly enough, it will simply come to me.  Is that because I was raised an only child in a first-world country?  Maybe, but I think it’s more visceral than that.  I think everyone, on some level, thinks that they are important and that their fairytale ending is coming.  Even J. Alfred Prufrock, the whiniest teenage girl in recent literature, writes: “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be …” to which my English professor rightly counters: “Who compared you to Hamlet, if not yourself?”

There’s also a sort of magic about unrequited love.  I think people get too focused on the depressing parts of it – the pining away, the vales of tears, the broken hearts, etc. etc. ad infinitum.  There are good parts, too.  Loving someone, caring about them very much, can get you up on a difficult morning.  It makes your day a little brighter when you see them.  Especially when they are happy.  Even if it’s not with you.  This might sound a little creepy, but I never feel quite as alone on Saturday night (the most difficult night of the week) knowing that someone else is out there, someone breathing quietly as they sleep, someone being happy or sad, someone living.  

I think I was born, figuratively speaking, with my heart on the outside of my chest.  It’s been a difficult life in some ways, what with me always running after people who never really acknowledge my existence.  At the same time, however, I’ve always been grateful that I am capable of caring about someone else to such an extent, perhaps more than I care about myself.  In the course of my love for someone, I stop desperately running after them at the exact moment when I realize, “Requited love would be nice, but it isn’t necessary for me to be happy.  It isn’t necessary for them to be happy, either.”

Disney movies and the media led me astray from the day I was born, making me believe that unrequited love is pitiable (and that “unrequited love” only refers to romance.)  In reality, unrequited love is one of the best things you can have.  It’s painful and not for the faint of heart – but by its very nature, it is selfless.  It teaches courage and patience like nothing else I’ve ever encountered.  Please don’t be afraid to love someone who doesn’t love you back.  One should never be afraid to take part in something so beautiful.

Statistics

In which Amber celebrates approximately five years of poetry.

That night (and everything after it)
was a knife stabbed right through my heart,
and before you condemn me for using clichés,
know this:
one-third of stab wounds to the heart
are survivable.

Imagine: spindly muscle fibers stretching,
weaving a thin blanket of sorrow,
and skin reappearing over blank red lines.

Your scar wasn’t a pretty one.
It was itchy, white and raised,
right over my ribs, and every time
I wore a low-cut shirt I felt sure
that everyone could see the bloody scratches
on my pericardium.

I’m one of the lucky ones. The thirty percent.
Heartless, you said, but you were lying,
because when I lie on the floor, watching the shadows
of passing cars, I can hear
the far-off whisper of sweet ghosts in my arteries,
easing along at a steady 90 over 60.

Sometimes the dead don’t stay down.

Ten Things I Learned About College During Freshman Year (Part II)

In case you don’t remember or have willfully blocked the memory from your mind, last month I wrote about five important things I learned during my freshman year of college.  As it’s countdown time to Oweek 2012, I decided that now would be a good time to wrap up the list.  Please enjoy, or not.  Whichever.

6. Don’t Worry About the Amount of Stuff You Have.

Nothing can make you feel like a college noob than struggling into your dorm with six cardboard boxes, three suitcases and an under-the-bed box.  On move-in day last year, I wanted to shrivel up and disappear.  However, once it was tucked into my room along with my roommate’s things, suddenly it didn’t seem like all that much.  Yes, your things will be a lot to carry/ship/store, and yes, the ironing board, vacuum, and personal printer will come in handy, so don’t leave them out.  Follow your Oweek handbook’s guidelines, read this blog for more advice on what to pack and what to leave out, and – I’m very sorry to have to say this – listen to your parents’ and older siblings’ advice.

7. Don’t.  Skip.  Class.

… Ever.  Unless you are very sick, or have a conflicting university-scheduled event (as the professors call it.)  If Hutch’s 8 AM is too early for you, it’s your responsibility to switch to another section.  It is very tempting, especially with a class like math where you follow along in the textbook, to sleep in or do homework for another course, but you’ll miss a lot from the lectures (many times, professors will throw in extra information that won’t be covered in the book but will be covered on the test.)  Smaller, seminar-type classes may even take attendance, so be careful.

Conversely, if you are really sick, please, please do not go to class or a midterm.  This also goes for if you are emotionally upset, if you are sleep-deprived (beyond a reasonable limit) or if you are hung over.  I have seen people drag themselves to class when they really should have been home, and maybe in the hospital.  Use your judgement – if you go to class only to sit in a feverish haze, you won’t learn a thing, you’ll probably make yourself sicker, and people around you might get sick as well.

8. You Don’t Have to Do Anything to Fit In.

Pop culture often portrays college as a place where everyone gets wasted and has gratuitous sex, but it really isn’t – at least, Rice isn’t.  No matter your views on sex, alcohol, or anything else, you can easily find others who share your opinions.  Also, you do not have to dress or act a certain way in order “not to stand out.”  There are people of every ethnicity, gender, style, religion, and body habitus at Rice.  (More about body habitus later.)

Bottom line: it isn’t high school anymore, and if you don’t attend a 7:45 AM midterm wearing your pajamas and flip-flops before you graduate, then you haven’t really lived.

9. Eat Whatever You Want.

Fair warning: people will judge you for what you eat in the servery, albeit mostly unconsciously.  I’ve been teased for eating too many carbs, for drinking soda at lunch, for eating Yoplait for breakfast.  Because I was already extremely self-conscious about my weight, these innocent comments had me eating meals in my room (which attracted more snarky comments – you just can’t win.)

You don’t have to put up with anything that makes you uncomfortable, whether it’s about food or exercise or sex or school.  Particularly concerning food, it is your right to eat whatever you want wherever and whenever you want (you’re paying enough for it, after all) and people who criticize your eating habits (or exercise habits, or social life, or school performance) need to find something better to do with their time.

10. Have Fun.

Seriously.  These are going to be some of the best four or five years of your life.  What makes you happy?  Is it tennis, basketball, WoW, study groups, coffee?  Then get out there and do those things.

Now, what makes you uncomfortable?  Do you hate meeting new people?  Are you afraid of Houston?  Does Beer Bike not sound like that much fun to you?  (Traitor!)  Then, may I humbly suggest trying something that high-school you would never have dreamed of doing.  Try a new food, explore the light rail, learn all your college’s cheers and anti-cheers (particularly if you are in Lovett,) and most of all, always remember how happy you were when you opened your acceptance letter, and carry that joy and enthusiasm every single day.

You’ve earned yourself a place at Rice, one of the country’s great universities.  Now it’s time to leave your own mark here.  And on the world.  But that comes later.