The Beginning of the Rest of My Life

The process of applying for colleges has proved to be an enlightening experience. As I am suspended now in a bubble of anticipation and self-doubt, my emotional state is difficult to describe. Not nervous, and yet not hopeful, I feel I am waiting at the most important departure point in my life, headed off for a journey that will carry me for two years to my bachelor's degree and further into academia and the rest of my life. This feeling I struggle to describe reverberates in the core of my body, present when I am alone on Twitter or idling before drifting off to sleep. It is a feeling I remember from when I was in school, and quite frankly, it frightens me. This fright is not imbued in the essence of this feeling, but in the implications it has for me. For I know this feeling has both the capacity to send my ideas and questions through labyrinths, emerging with truths. But it also has the capacity to make me buckle at me knees, fixated in one spot as thoughts swirl around in a murky haze.

How does any of this relate to the process of college applications and admissions? A great deal, given my personal history with college and success (or lack thereof, depending on the benchmarks you use to determine success).

I began my college experience earlier than most, leaving high school with my diploma after my sophomore year to attend Bard College at Simon's Rock, the only college that offers B.A. degrees almost solely for those who skip 1 or 2 years of high school. I began in the summer of 2006 when I was 17 years old, filled with boundless ambition and hope for a future. How could I not be? I had been accepted on a two year, full-tuition merit based scholarship and was getting a chance to make the academic experience that I wanted for the first time in my life. If I was anything other than naive, how would I have transformed myself (and been transformed, for this was both an external and internal process) so completely?

This first moment of transformation came as I took my first gender studies class. My initial interest was in neuroscience, a bold and gutsy path that I knew would take at least 12 years of schooling, but in taking that first gender studies class, I found an intellectual freedom and mystery that I could not find in the sciences. It was in that class that I completed a qualitative research project on formations of gay identity, interviewing four gay men of various ages on experiences coming out and other ideas regarding sexuality. It was an intellectual awakening, demonstrating for me the depth of curiosity that carries my body forward and upright, even as I live in a painful, marginal place. But it was also the first opportunity that I had to academically reflect on my own sexual experiences. I was liberated by that project in a way I hadn't been before, but I was also forever bound to an academic discipline and path I wouldn't realize for another year.

The next semester proved to good smoothly enough as I excelled academically and socially. It was a point of calm and contentment in my life. But the summer of 2007 proved the beginning of an evolution in thought and spurned a series of revelations that sit with my today. Staying on campus with only 20 other people in a town of 10,000 allowed for a lot of time to let thoughts ferment. The first of which was the fact that I had to transfer after the end of the 2007-2008 school year. I would be done with my scholarship. The school, only 40 years old, offered little financial aid. And anyway, I wanted to transfer: the isolation of this place was growing more noticeable as each day came and passed. As I poured everything I had into trying to change the campus climate, few other people responded. This pronounced apathy for a student body population so bright was disconcerting. By the second semester of my sophomore year, I had isolated myself from social activism, and all but a few friends, drifting between phenomenal creative bursts of energy and intellectual detachment.

I thought that Tulane University would be a reawakened, centered in a city that was going through a dramatic rebirth itself. But my expectations were shattered by profound apathy of the student body population and inequities so unreasonable that I didn't know where to begin to change them. While I befriended an active group of feminists, this small group did not justify an overwhelming feeling of alienation and disappointment in seeing a city so magical suffer so much. And so I ended up where I am in rural Louisiana, contemplating my future and applying to a new batch of schools.

Which has gotten me to thinking about the following:

If the schools I am applying to value only my grades as a measure of academic success, then I am not interested in attending those universities. I may not have a distinguished GPA, but if you ask for a letter of recommendation from any professor, they would be willing to provide it. Learning, for me, is so much more than a qualitative measure. It is a life-long process. What I gain from texts and conversations does not end in the classroom; every bit of knowledge becomes a stitch in a larger intellectual tapestry.

My imperfect academic record doesn't reflect my inability to understand materials presented or a lack of effort. Instead it represents the weight that this knowledge holds on my shoulders, along with the the above situations that I described specific to the climate of each university. I would never lose this knowledge and yet I cannot deny its burdens. Fringe knowledge does more than just chip facades off houses. They collapse whole structures, deconstructing the most fundamental conceptions of society. In this annihilation, you want nothing more than to resurrect civilization with your knowledges, queering it (imagine an inversion of the margins to the center).

How can you not struggle when you invest yourself in this mission but never see results?

How can you not struggle when you feel alone and empty, with nothing else but your ideas to cherish?

How can you not struggle when you possess terrible truths while you watch others dance blindly around you?

I have learned that the knowledge I gained is powerful and treasured, but if it is all I have and if it fails to be utilized, then I ultimately have nothing else, save an empty field for me to ruminate in. Which is not to say I should avoid alienation all together: for in these moments of disconnect I have discovered the most about myself. The fury, the abjection, the confusion, that little light of the future-- naked emotions have awoken my Muse unlike any other time in my life. But to linger for long periods exposed causes me to falter, as qualitative methods and personal anecdotes demonstrate.

I do believe that I now know what I want better than I have known before. And yet I wonder if these new schools are just like the old ones: the isolation, the administrative frustration, unfettered apathy. IF they are, how can I temper the alienation and move forward? There are no more do-overs in this college "game." I cannot afford to go to any other schools.

I wonder if perhaps this alienation will be a permanent fixture for the rest of my life, given the knowledges and truths I have gained and treasure. The only way to escape this, it seems, is to look forward. To look forward and see academia and universities as sites of renewed political, social and spiritual transformation. Yes, to contribute to apathy's atrophy is a most difficult task. Culture has evolved in such a way that the material carries more weight in daily lives than the immaterial. But maybe I just need to change my own mindset. This change I seek isn't about me at all, at least not in the long-term. It is about everyone else, the countless mass of marginalized populations long ignored and subjugated to the horrors of human savagery. If I sacrifice my chance at contentment, everyone can benefit from unbridled passion and a firm, steady voice.

Exactly what this change encompasses, or if I will ever end up doing anything worthwhile, remains to be seen. But for now at least, I can only wait, hoping that the colleges and universities I have applied to have seen beyond narrow-minded qualitative methods of college admissions and viewed my personal narrative and recommendations are central to my ability to contribute to the academic and social community. If they have, perhaps this social change I yearn for is already taking shape.

Oh, how I hope so.
Oh, how I hope so.