“The act of writing is more powerful than people think.”

In NPR’s article, “The Writing Assignment That Changes Lives,” a researcher co-authored a paper that demonstrates a startling effect of writing on organizing thoughts and emotions.

“Why do you do what you do? What is the engine that keeps you up late at night or gets you going in the morning? Where is your happy place? What stands between you and your ultimate dream?”

“Goal-setting theory” holds that writing down concrete, specific goals and strategies can help people overcome obstacles and achieve.

Super intriguing read.

Mending Broken Narratives

I’ve been struggling with topics to write about as of late. I spend a lot of time thinking about articles, essays, and op-eds to pitch to editors, but end up discarding the vast majority of them because they’re not what I want to read and not what I want to write.

I know from experience that everyone likes to watch a trainwreck, most people like to read about tragedies, and a lot of readers love a good redemption arc. I have plenty of those stories. I’ve crashed and burned more times than I can count in struggles with relationships, trauma, mental illness, death, etc. But I don’t want to write about those things. Or at least, I don’t want to put the worst parts of myself on display on a regular basis.

I don’t think I should have to be broken in order to have a worthy story to tell. Sometimes people need to hear narratives of people who are doing okay. People who wake up in the morning, go to their jobs, come home, feed the cat, and go about their day.

Maybe the answer then is to tell a story about how everything will be okay because you, too, can make it to the other side.

What do you think? What kinds of stories grip you?

A Happiness Project

“Happiness can be found in even the darkest of times, if only one remembers to turn on the light.” – Steve Kloves (screenwriter for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)

I’ve been reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, and it’s been making me think more about the nature of happiness. Probably not a surprise, given that I deliberately sought out a tome on how a woman went on an active pursuit of happiness, but I often wonder if I’m happy. It sounds strange because I don’t generally think of myself as an unhappy person, however, upon reflection, I’ve realized that I’ve pretty always had this nagging feeling of something being missing.

As a child (and if we’re being completely honest, sometimes I still do this), I used to close my eyes and think to myself, “I want to go home.” What makes this remarkable is that this behavior happened while I was in my own home. I’d be laying on the couch, sitting in my bedroom, walking into the door, and I’d have this deep-seated ache that something wasn’t right and that wherever I was, it wasn’t home. I’d spend hours listening to the same CD over and over again (Youngstown’s “Down For The Get Down,” if you’re at all curious) while reading escapist fiction (Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series, for those counting at home), dreaming of being somewhere different, doing something different, being someone different. I felt, and sometimes still do feel, as if there’s something I’m supposed to be doing, someone I’m supposed to be, and I’m just not there yet.

Let me be the first to say that this wasn’t the kind of situation where my parents were neglectful; by anyone’s standards, I was a fairly privileged kid, and I recognize that there are struggles out there way worse than not knowing who you’re supposed to be or having feelings of displacement, but it is very strange to feel like a stranger in not just your own home, but also in your body.

As an adult, I now know that at least some of these feelings were inklings of nascent depression and anxiety diagnoses to come, but underneath that, I have the feeling that I’ve never really sat down and thought about what I want from life. That isn’t to say that I’m directionless or unambitious – just that I’ve probably spent more time worrying about what my parents, friends, and family will think of me than what I think of myself.

So, to combat this sense of burned-outed-ness and to align my life with my heretofore relatively undisclosed desires, I’ll be starting a happiness project of my own. Obviously, I want to finish this book first, but after that, I’ll see what I can do to finally come home to myself.

Here’s a question for you: When do you feel your happiest? What makes you feel most like yourself?

Perfection is the enemy of the good.

I’m a perfectionist. And a procrastinator. This combination means that it’s pretty rare that I finish personal projects in a timely manner. For me, if it’s not going to be done perfectly, then it’s not worth doing…right away. Since nothing can ever really be completed to perfection, I don’t really get much done. It’s a horrible feedback loop I’ve been stuck in for quite some time, and it’s about time that I break that habit. The goal of this blog is to do things that scare me and force me to live a more mindful life. Of course, the things that scare me are usually things that are impossible to perfect. I originally thought to create a blog called “One Hundred Habits”  with the leading idea that I would work on a specific habit for 100 consecutive days and declare victory. My first mission was to go to the gym every single day for 100 days because:

1. I’m overweight.
2. I’m getting married next year.
3. I have a host of health issues tangentially related to #1, but mostly related to stress, which can be well managed by regular exercise.

I started last three months ago. Guess how many days I actually went to the gym? Three. But then I read this article: ‘Don’t Let Perfect Be The Enemy Of Good’ – Tips To Help Tame Perfectionism The TL;DR version is: Don’t let the pursuit of perfection blind you to the small accomplishments that you build up along the way. (If you have the time, I’d highly recommend reading the whole thing.) So I guess that my new goal is to just try to find some sort of exercise to do as often as possible. And my goal for this blog is to stop trying to be perfect and start trying to be good. I suppose that I might need a new blog name. Feel free to leave suggestions on a new title or tips to defeat perfectionism paralysis in the comments!

Dating while black and orange – a response to Patton’s advice

When I read Susan A. Patton’s letter to the Daily Princetonian, I can’t say I was all that surprised. As a recent Princeton graduate, I’ve heard variations on her “advice” to female Princetonians ever since I got my admissions letter in 2005.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For those of you who haven’t borne witness to the “letter read ’round the world,” here is a quick summation. Patton, an alumna of Princeton University’s class of 1977, wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s student-run newspaper that was published on Friday, March 29, 2013. The contents of this letter have been so widely distributed that the incoming traffic crashed the server. The Daily Princetonian website has been down since Friday afternoon. (If you would like to read this letter in its entirety, it’s been Google cached here.) This letter, entitled, “Advice for the young women of Princeton: the daughters I never had,” offered to female Princeton undergraduates the admonishment that they should marry their male classmates, and quickly, lest they find themselves successful, intelligent, accomplished, and very much alone.

Patton offered such choice nuggets of wisdom as:

For most of you, the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

Here’s what nobody is telling you: Find a husband on campus before you graduate. Yes, I went there.

and

Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It’s amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman’s lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty. Smart women can’t (shouldn’t) marry men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.

Being the proud mother of two (male) Princetonians, one who graduated in 2006 and “had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, [but] could have married anyone,” and another who is currently enrolled and whose marriage prospects, according to his mother, are “limitless” (though I doubt the same can be said for his dating prospects on campus for the next few months), Patton appears to believe that the young men that she has raised are quintessentially Princetonian and deserve quintessentially Princetonian wives, but failing that, any pretty, dumb female will do.

Her views on the young women that attend Princeton are just plain ignorant. While I do agree that for enterprising women who choose to someday marry and raise a family, choosing a compatible partner with whom to share a life is important, I don’t, and let me emphasize this, don’t believe that a Princeton man is the end-all, be-all for potential spouses of future Princeton alumnae. I especially don’t believe that a female Princeton undergraduate is responsible for snagging and bagging her future husband before she matriculates.

In an interview on CNN, Patton clarified that what she meant was that in the pursuit of a high-powered career, young women shouldn’t forget about their personal lives, and that they should take the time to see the caliber of men with which they are surrounded on campus. That, I also don’t necessarily disagree with.

However, as an African-American woman, I found myself in a very small minority at an institution like Princeton. In my experience, and I am going to ask you, dear reader, to remember that this is entirely anecdotal, trying to get a date as a black woman at Princeton was harder than getting an A on an organic chemistry exam after doing a Prospect 10 (I think it’s a Prospect 11 these days. Campus Club was closed back in my day, but I digress).

I remember sitting in the student center my freshman year with a group of friends, discussing our dating prospects. Having been told that our “stock” had never been higher, since we were freshmen girls, we lamented our lack of dating options. We broke it down to a rough estimate of how many men were available as potential husbands in just our class year alone in a very crude “flowchart” of how dismal our prospects were as minority women.

It’s been 7 years since we came up with that flowchart and that dingy piece of paper has long been lost, but according to our calculations (all of us were humanities majors, so our math was probably definitely off…cue sexist “ladies and their maths” jokes), out of that class of 1,200, there were approximately 5.67 men available. For approximately 600 women. This chart, which clearly was an exaggeration of our “dire” straits, accounted for the already taken men, the fact that we never saw our male engineering friends unless they took a break from studying (ditto for the student-athletes), discounting the young men we knew weren’t interested in monogamy or, y’know, consent (Statistic alert: 1 in 4 of us college girls will be sexually assaulted! More than likely by someone we know!), recognizing the ones who weren’t interested in women at all, and acknowledging that the majority aren’t at all interested in black girls.

Yup, I went there.

Finding a date that is interested in you as a person and not a phenotypical representation of their Africanist fetishes? Really difficult. I can count on one hand the number of non-minority men that approached me and I only need one finger to let you know how that went overall. (Spoiler alert: That finger ain’t for countin’.)

Then there was the quagmire of dating “in the race”. The ratio of black women to black men when I was at Princeton was approximately 3:1. Not exactly inspiring odds if you want a monogamous relationship that will eventually lead down an aisle.

There were quite a few of us who “beat the odds” and met their future husbands in the “orange bubble.” I wasn’t one of them. And I’m so much happier for it.

I’ve only seriously contemplated getting married twice. The first time, I was 19 and dating a guy in the year below me at Princeton. It was a disaster and I have the passive-aggressive, teenage-angsty Facebook statuses from 2006-2007 to prove it. We thought we were going to get married after we graduated from our respective graduate schools (law for him, medicine for me, though it was expected that I would become a stay-at-home mom after giving birth).  What. A. Joke.

He dumped me two weeks shy of our 10 month anniversary (the fact that we even celebrated “month-aversaries” was one of many signs we had no business even thinking about marriage at all, let alone marrying each other). Ironically enough, losing out on that potential Princeton husband was a blessing. Without feeling the need to define myself by the plans made to accommodate his future, I was able to fully focus on my own future. I took a break from dating, made some new friends, joined an eating club, took trips abroad. I switched majors from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology to Comparative Literature, graduated, spent a summer in South Korea, came back, couldn’t get a job and became semi-famous for being underemployed, wrecked my car, got into grad school, and fell in love. With a non-Princetonian.

Which brings me to the second time I’ve seriously contemplated getting married. I guess it’s not fair to say that I’m “seriously contemplating” getting married when I’m actively planning to tie the knot after my boyfriend finishes his bachelor’s degree. We’re the same age, but as a result of paperwork lost in U.S. immigration’s bureaucratic processes, he was unable to enroll as a permanent resident of the US (and applying as an international student is prohibitively expensive) until a few years ago. So he’s going to a school that I’m sure most Ivy Leaguers have never heard of, getting his bachelor’s degree approximately 5 years after I got mine, and guess what? It doesn’t matter because he’s everything I could have ever wanted in a spouse. He’s intelligent, kind, charming, caring, supportive, and most importantly, is not intimidated by or dismissive of my Princeton heritage.

Admittedly, after the kerfluffle with the Patton letter, he informed me that for the first six months of our relationship, he wanted to muzzle me because most of my stories began with “This one time at Princeton…,” but unlike Patton’s non-Princetonian ex-husband, he thoroughly embraces the orange and black. We’ve gone to Reunions together and he’s currently pressuring me to vote for the “Oktoberfifth” theme for my 5th Reunion next year because he really wants to wear liederhosen for reasons I can’t possibly begin to fathom (I insist that I will not look good in the matching dirndl). He respects the large influence that Princeton has had on my life and accepts that I will probably always be a little bit elitist (I may or may not have sternly told him that “Good girlfriends don’t let their boyfriends apply to Harvard Business School”), and we ultimately know that what’s important is not our schooling, but our character.

My point is (and it’s been a long time in coming – congratulations to those of you who have made it this far) that I didn’t know myself at 19. I know myself marginally better now at 25, but that margin makes a significant difference. I could have let Princeton define me, my relationship, my entire life, but instead, I incorporated Princeton as only a small chapter in my life. It took time and distance to come to the conclusion that I am more than my Princeton pedigree and I wish Susan Patton had realized that maybe it wasn’t her husband’s degree, but their incompatibility and probably her rather obvious elitism that  doomed her marriage.

In addition to that, I hope that her “advice” to the “daughters she never had” is a parallel speech to the one that she gave to the sons she did have. Because if she’s going to be a classist, elitist, borderline microaggressive racist (come on, do you really think she was speaking to minority women at Princeton, too?), heterosexist (um, some ladies want wives), retrogressive throwback to the 1950s, she should at least try to dodge the sexism charge by telling her boys that “you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of women who are worthy of you.”

Because we’re more than worthy. We went to Princeton, bitch.