The Metaphorical Cliff Dive
October 5, 2017
I am tired. I just got back from a walk which was supposed to last an hour so I could fully clear my head, except I realized that I just didn’t have enough time today to schedule in that much self-care, so twenty minutes it was. It was beautiful outside. Sunny and cloudless, shadows just beginning to lengthen. Ideal jeans-and-t-shirt weather, summery. I was reminded again of how much I miss the leaves changing and the fall. Right now, we are suspended in June. Later, the winter and grey skies and the rain will set in, never snowy nor satisfyingly stormy, just drizzling and soggy and gross.
The days are passing both slowly and incredibly fast, each hour stretched across the grass, each week jostling by, almost overlapping in their haste to move along. I commented to my friends recently that I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in a very long time. I think about those rare mornings when you wake up totally on your own—no alarm, no class, no responsibilities—wrapped so perfectly in your warm soft blankets, completely and utterly well-rested. It’s been a while since I had that. I’m not complaining. I’m not dying. I’m just tired.
I wonder how I did it in high school. Six classes a day, sports practice, dinner, homework, sleep, repeat—again and again and again, and always with the motivation to keep going. I’m honestly searching for where I found that drive, because I’ve hit that impossibly low point now where I’m so fiercely procrastinating on my first CS assignment that I’m doing all my other homework a week in advance and extensively answering emails and literally starting job applications because I am that afraid of my CS assignment. Like most students here, I thrive on a bit of stress. I like to be busy. I like to get my shit done. But I’m so bad at being productive when I’m responsible for every hour of my life.
I remember how, on particularly efficient high school days, I could finish my homework before lunch, schedule a couple of meetings or newspaper interviews for the next day’s free periods, make at least three insightful comments during class, run a kickass track workout, sit down to a nice dinner with my family, and be in bed by eleven-thirty. That Veronica was kind of insane. Nowadays, it takes all my willpower not to just park myself next to the dessert station for the night and shove brownies down my throat faster than I can chew.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how my life might look to an outsider. I kind of want to write a memoir, even though I talked on the phone with a pretty famous author this summer and she told me that I want to write a book isn’t a good enough reason to actually write a book. I also talked to my academic advisor earlier this week and she told me that I should maybe hold off until I have more experience, educational and otherwise. Being the person I am, I immediately thought fuck that, because honestly if there’s one way to get me to want to do something, it’s to tell me that you don’t think I can do it.
Within reason, of course. If you pointed to the edge of a cliff and said you won’t, I probably wouldn’t.
Probably.
But I don’t want to be a nineteen-year-old burnout, I want to be a nineteen-year-old on the beginning of something, on the edge of that cliff maybe, except now the cliff is a contrived metaphor for risk-taking and the unknown and the beyond and the Future. I want to work in a big city and meet lots of people and run in the mornings and eat eggs and oatmeal for breakfast and buy a dog. I want to have a story to tell, and I want to tell it right. I want to write a book. All of those things, I want, but at the same time, I am so so so tired and it’s only the second week of school and the Skinny Pop on the top shelf of our snack cabinet is really calling my name.
(I just heard, like some spiritual awakening, my mother’s voice in my head, telling me that I’m probably so cranky because I need to eat. And I realized I had breakfast at ten-thirty and it’s now nearly five p.m. And I am now consuming Skinny Pop at an unholy rate. And I’m much happier. Thanks, Mom.)
When I was really little, just a bald squishy egg-shaped baby, do you think anyone could have known that I’d be here someday? Sitting at the kitchen table of a Stanford sorority house, writing this post for a blog I started because I love words more than anything, old Taylor Swift songs playing through my headphones? Was it destined from the first time I picked up a pencil? The first time I finished a book? The first time I realized that all of these thoughts clattering around in my head made much more sense when I put them down on paper?
Maybe the one useful piece of advice I did receive from my advisor was that there needs to be something at stake, in any book, not just mine. There needs to be a reason I tell a story, and there needs to be a reason others will want to hear it. I am nineteen and I am tired and I am one hundred thousand percent supposed to be finishing my polisci readings, but I am writing this instead. Why I must ask myself for each moment I spend stringing these meaningless symbols into phrases and sentences and stories why do I do that and why do I care and why does it matter why do I carry these words so close to my heart why do I in every step hear them spinning the details of my world into focus why why why and I walk, and I walk, and I breathe.
Twenty minutes in the sunlight. Twenty minutes of pure time alone. In the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing. But I have these words now. Eleven hundred more words than I had before.
A puzzle piece. A slice of myself. A small uphill battle that mattered enough for me to fight, to get this down, to make it real.
Tell me: is there stake enough in that?
