Welcome to Jaclyn’s Blog

Jaclyn Legge is a 3^rd or 4^th-year student returning to full-time student life after completing Co-op. She spends her free time calling to the muses for inspiration in her writing, drawing, and shower-dancing routines. Her poetry has been published in Bywords.ca. No, she doesn’t want to be a teacher; she considers herself a student in every aspect of life.

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Dear fellow students,

My time is almost up in this little nucleus of syllabus weeks that turn into essay seasons, of small talk that turns into class banter. I have one final battle to endure—one final essay season—and then I will be graduating from Carleton with a BA in English. But before I do all that, I have to say goodbye to this blog.

For the past two years, this blog has been a lifeline connecting me to my program—first, when I was too busy to spend time on campus, and then, when we didn’t have the choice to meet there anymore.

I am one of those fortunate introverts who thrives in my nest, but there are a few things I have slowly come to miss: pulling out my laptop to work in a cafe, the 613 Flea Market, nerd conventions, and being on campus. It’s not that I miss the UC, or the tunnels, or Dunton Tower, or even the library, or anywhere specific at all. I just miss being in a community: of students, of lifelong learners, of sleep-deprived coffee addicts.

Beyond these labels, we don’t have much in common. This is not to say I didn’t find my people; I made lifelong friends in this program. But a wonderful thing about university is that you come into contact with people who live vastly different lives: people who never take the elevators, who have watched all of Grey’s Anatomy three times, who own several reptiles, who put maple syrup in their coffee, who handle stress in a way that stresses you out. Inside the classroom and out, you can feel the horizons of your brain expand.

This blog and this final post especially are dedicated to all of those students I have met who are so profoundly different from me. I never wanted this blog to be about one student, or one type of student, so I tried to tap into the universal student experience as much as I could while acknowledging there is no true universal experience. Being a student is rewarding, engaging, fun, and fulfilling, and it is challenging, alienating, boring, and frustrating. Sometimes it’s all of these things in one day, or in one class. “We contain multitudes”. (Achievement unlocked: cheesy Whitman/Dylan quote. I’ve held off for this long, I couldn’t resist, forgive me.)

This desire to speak to and for all of us oddballs culminated in twin blog posts where I interviewed students and professors in the English department about the trials and triumphs of online learning. This is my proudest accomplishment as this department’s student blogger. With the generosity of many busy people, we made a quilt of our unique struggles during this panopticon (this pandemi moore, this panini) that will exist on this blog long after I’m gone, when you’re back in classrooms and office hours again.

And after I’m gone, well, who knows where I will be? I sure don’t.

All the digs about English degrees or Arts degrees being useless don’t mean a thing to me because I know what I got out of mine.

I don’t live in the present by nature, but I have been trying to. My tendency is to focus so much on the future that I don’t actually enjoy things that are happening right now. Delayed gratification is my natural inclination. I try to make a crate of mangoes last until they start going bad and I save the best bites until they’re lukewarm. I keep working and working so I can take a big break later and when later rolls around, there’s more work to do. Or my body stops doing work at an inconvenient time because it has taken a break for me.

I want to leave you with a story about how I learned to work with my body by living in the present.

When you’re behind on sleep, your body takes longer rests whenever it can to make up for it. I always get enough sleep, but without waking rest, my body steps in and rests for me. I didn’t realize it until recently, but my body has always been trying to rest for me. I can’t start working for hours after I wake up and I need a few more hours to unwind before I can fall asleep.

This was my schedule, up until recently: wake up at 11 am, grumbling and swearing I’ll wake up earlier tomorrow. Mess around until 2 pm. Start working. Stop working at 9 or 10 pm. Fall asleep at 1 or 2 am. Wake up at 8 am. Tell myself I need to get to work. Snooze my alarm. Wake up at 11 am, grumbling.

I broke out of this cycle by doing the opposite of what comes naturally to me. I stopped working before dinner, no matter how much work I felt like I could do, because my brain needed time to unwind so I could sleep earlier. And when I woke up in the morning and wanted to fall back asleep, I started playing Animal Crossing. I had to do the things I wanted to do so I could do the things my body didn’t want to do. I had to work with my body instead of against it.

Now I wake up around 9 am, unless it’s raining, in which case my body goes rogue and sleeps eleven uninterrupted hours. I won’t be surprised if and when I lose this finely tuned circadian rhythm. In fact, I already lost it once with daylight savings and had to start all over again, but I did it. And I’ll do it again. I like being awake in the morning, I love having evenings to myself, and I don’t know how I ever lived another way.

Here are my takeaways from this story:

• My ability to be useful, to myself and others, hinges on me treating self-care as a discipline, not a reward.
• The work ethic I took into university made me a successful student but it wasn’t sustainable. It got me this far, but I can’t take it with me.
• A vital component of my postsecondary education has been learning about myself and committing to my personal growth.

All the digs about English degrees or Arts degrees being useless don’t mean a thing to me because I know what I got out of mine.

Work ethic aside, the world needs good readers, writers, researchers, analysts, and—I add tenderly—hearts. I believe an English degree—at least, the one I have gotten here, with the help of all the professors who have guided me—can help you become all those things. (Grammatically, you can’t become a good heart, but sometimes the sentiment is more important than the grammar. Yeah, I said it.)

As I write this, I know that not everybody has the same warm feelings about their university experience as I do. Some people leave university feeling lost, uncertain about their choice in program, regretful about the experience as a whole, and some people realize it’s not for them and drop out before they finish. These stories are familiar to me, close to my heart, and valid. I know that my rainbow is someone else’s storm, and I hope everybody finds their rainbow.

Now that I’ve acknowledged that university isn’t for everybody, I just want to say with my chest: oh my goodness, is it for me. I wrote a whole blog post about the struggles of essay season but at the end of the day, I love writing essays. I can’t wait to write a research paper or thesis for my MA one day.

But first: I need a break. Badly.

There’s this narrative that circulates among well-intentioned parents like mine that if you take a year off after your undergrad, you’ll never look back. I don’t think this is such a bad thing. There are other ways to build a life, and you shouldn’t force yourself into a cookie cutter because you chose what cookie you wanted to be when you were seventeen. But I’ve known what kind of cookie I wanted to be since I knew what an oven was. And I like this oven. Carleton, I mean. I’ll end this metaphor now before it gets overdone. (Sorry, I lied.)

See you, Carleton. You haven’t seen the last of me. (By which I mean, I am going to come back to campus one day when it’s safe and sob through Dunton Tower saying hello and thank you to all my profs. And this would be a good place to do an MA.)

Sincerely, your student blogger and her furry mascot,
Jaclyn and Goji

[Puppy’s note: sniff sniff, boof boof boof, huff puff, snore]

Dear fellow students,

Does anyone remember the episode of the children’s show Arthur where the roof of Mr. Ratburn’s home caves in and he needs to live at Arthur’s house for the week? Arthur is mortified at first, but he learns that his third-grade teacher is capable of liking cool things like cartoons, cake, and magic tricks. Meanwhile, his sister D.W. learns that teachers don’t live at school. Her response? “The world seemed so simple before this moment.”

Last summer, I received an amazing opportunity to lead a writing workshop for children, but I backed out when it became apparent that it would have to migrate online (along with the rest of our lives). Teaching kids through Zoom? Fighting for their attention when they’re surrounded by an endless number of distractions? I was already nervous, and this seemed like too much for me to handle.

And then classes started up again, and I realized that the thing I was too scared to do is exactly what our professors are doing for us.

In a blog post from last semester, I asked students to share their feelings about remote learning. I wanted students to feel connected to one another through our shared struggles. Then something happened I didn’t expect: a number of professors came forward to tell me this blog post allowed them to feel connected to what their students were going through.

Then I thought: what about remote teaching? Surely, that must come with its own equal, opposite hardships. I was curious, and I thought some of you would be, too.

So allow me to step out of the way and present you with my scholarly sources (ha!): professors in the English Department who have shared with me their experiences with remote teaching thus far.

I hope that as you read you will be reminded, in the words of Arthur, that “teachers can be sort of almost normal.”

What do you miss about in-person classes?

“The obvious, I guess: I miss seeing people and putting names to faces. I also miss in-person office hours and students stopping by for some help and a chat. I would be curious, though, to talk to other introverts who need to pretend to be more extroverted when they enter a classroom about what the Zoom experience has highlighted about the virtual and physical spaces.”

“I miss seeing the faces of students, getting a feeling from them that what I’m saying makes sense, and hearing their insightful comments during discussion times, which always make me think about the texts in new ways.”

“I miss face-to-face interactions, class discussions, and non-verbal and emotional responses to lectures and to students’ comments.”

“It’s almost impossible for anything spontaneous or funny to happen in an online class.  I miss the feeling of shared experience that makes such things possible.”

“The sort of spontaneous conversations that just emerge out of nowhere and go in unexpected but exciting directions. The serendipitous encounters. Real office hours where I sit with a student at a desk with a real pen and we look at the student’s paper together, marking it up as we go. The smell, sound, and feel of the classroom, the anticipation before class, the sounds of boredom during class and, equally, the sound when that boredom eases and you can hear students paying attention. I guess it must be their collective body language but it’s a lovely part of teaching and hard to replicate online.”

“I really miss the sense of community that happens so much more organically when we’re f2f. It’s much harder to judge how students are responding to information and requests online where the distance is greater, and the image is flattened. It’s harder to see facial expressions and body language, so gauging the feel of the ‘room’ is more challenging. When we’re f2f I tend to move about the room a lot, and of course I can’t do that rooted to a chair in front of my computer.”

“I actually really enjoy writing and delivering lectures and devising activities for class discussion. It’s fun and exciting to deliver that material and see how it goes – even if it seems to fall flat (which is rare, because our students are so great), you learn something. I miss that back and forth. I miss talking about something that I think is really important, and getting that look from students that tells me that they agree it’s important! And I miss their questions, miss the gaps in my knowledge being opened up.”

“I miss spontaneity—the question or comment that comes out of nowhere; the student who brings Grandma Lamarre’s lacy tuile cookies to class; the chats about Anne Carson (what is she on about?) that happen after class or on the way to Rooster’s during a break.”

“The fact that a classroom is already set up so technology is not such an effort to manage when one wants to vary the types of evidence one is presenting (video clips, audio clips, images of text on doc camera, images from the web) and so the switching between tech equipment does not take up as much time as it does from home; being in a space devoted to learning in community (the classroom).”

“I miss all the non-verbal sounds of a classroom—students’ throats clearing, shuffling, binder snapping, yawning, their phones going off, small talk with each other, laughter at my dumb jokes. It is so weird to teach to a soundless void.”

“I miss the energy of the classroom and the sense of community that grows in a course over the 12 weeks of the term.”

“A fuller sense of engaging the students in the class as a community, being able to get to know students more fully, and really celebrate the culmination of the learning journey with a potluck or treats at the end of term.”

What’s going well right now?

“As a time of existential crisis, it’s a great opportunity to get in tune with what’s important.”

“Some students have already started sending in their responses to my ‘Welcome to my Class’ sheet and I love reading them. Every student is a special, wonderful, fabulous person with a life and dreams and interests beyond the classroom. So… what’s going well is that I’m reminded how much I love teaching and working with students.”

“The tech side of teaching seems to be going well.”

“So far, all my tech is working. I have lived in mortal fear of technology (even though I use it all the time), but I’m learning to relax about that. I find the students are pretty forgiving on that front.”

“I have found that the breakout rooms were much better than I expected for facilitating group work and discussion.”

“I was amazed that students seemed eager to discuss and engage as much as they did in the Zoom room. Also, I was a bit happily surprised that I seemed to find ways to adapt to using tech because I thought I was a luddite (success due in no small part to stellar support from the teaching and learning support folks!).”

“I’ve been teaching asynchronously and using a discussion board format to facilitate discussion. I’ve also been offering alternative assignment structures so that people don’t have to write essays unless they want to. I think these have been good. The discussion boards have been fascinating to read through, I really feel the conversation has been rich. I like that everyone is automatically included and people can overcome any reservations they might have in person or even on video. And with the essays, I feel like the people who feel they can write essays well are usually correct, and those who self-select out of the option are also right! So the quality of work I have received has been great.”

“It’s great not to struggle to get to campus, damp clothes steaming, elevators over-taxed, juggling books and papers and gloves and winter layers. Zoom is a million times better than I imagined. And the new format forces me to rethink how I teach which is also a good thing.”

“Having my students show up on my screen at the scheduled class times still amazes me every time it happens. My students, in my home study, ready to listen and learn—magic! I love the solidarity and the sense of mission that these times have fostered between me and my students. One student offered to monitor the chat function; another offered to remind me to record my lectures; another offered to take over the ‘admitting’ of students as they tune in. It’s been a truly collaborative effort in running my online courses and my students simply stepped up to the plate and made it smoother, less onerous for me. This ‘online’ year has also given me a window into my students’ lives that I never had before. I see them in front of their unmade beds; I get to see their parents making themselves coffee in the margins of their screen; we all get to see pets demanding a caress while their owner struggles to formulate a complex argument.”

“More students, on submitting their final exams, than I ever expected said how much they enjoyed and appreciated the course. Should I believe them under the circumstances? What else would they say on submitting the final exam? Well, nothing was also an option. Professors are often the last to know that anything good has come from their efforts, and largely by innuendo. So it might have been OK after all?”

“I heard a radio show this fall—an interview with a mental-health expert. She implied that I’m doing well—’succeeding,’ she said—if I get out of bed each day and make my bed. By that standard, I’m positively thriving.”

What are you struggling with?

“Keeping up! There’s more of everything somehow. And the timesaving aspect of not commuting is eaten up in myriad other ways. This is the first year of my many years of teaching in which I really haven’t been able to keep up. I’m sure it’s psychological too.”

“I must say that the summer months brought panic at the prospects of going on-line simply because I was technologically so far behind. With chagrin, I admit that I was, then, a professor not only without laptop, i-phone, or tablet (I grew up fixing Harley Davidsons, working on printing presses, and once made a rug-weaving loom for myself out of scrap wood behind the barn), but also without microphone, webcam, or adequate lighting at a commercial moment when store access was limited and an emerging world of fanatic zoomers was snapping up every specimen available for weeks into the future. Thank the skies for my well-connected offspring, who can neither weave, nor fix presses or motorcycles, but who know how to procure techno-stuff through underground trade routes measureless to man.”

“Zoom fatigue from doing every single meeting, as well as teaching, on Zoom.”

“I am struggling with feeling like I’m doing enough actual teaching. I mean, should I be chiming in more? Should I produce more video content? I have a year-long first-year seminar and it is hard to know if I am giving them the right amount of material to engage with. It’s also just hard not to really know the students, at least a bit. I feel like they are getting to know each other though – I know they have an Instagram chat group! – and that is more important to me ultimately.”

“Uncertainty. Interruption. Crappy attention span. Loss. Capitalism.”

“Isolation. Some days are more difficult than others, and I’m hearing from students and colleagues that the sense of isolation hits us all at different times and in different ways, but the feeling of being bereft of community (whether this is accurate or not) weighs me down some days. I imagine this feeling is similar to what the character of Oskar describes as ‘heavy boots’ in the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”

“Not seeing friends, colleagues, and students is very difficult. Also, not seeing unmasked human faces when going about my day. And I really miss my work sessions in coffee shops, surrounded by other people.”

“I am struggling with the isolation and lack of feedback from students. It seems that I am broadcasting a radio show from the dark side of the moon.”

“The idea, which I encounter almost everywhere I go, that things must get back to ‘normal,’ that a vaccine will make things ‘normal.’ I struggle with the idea that the experience of this pandemic will not fundamentally alter the way humans live on this earth.”

“All the extra work/hours/time marking takes online; the extra time of managing CULearn; the deluge of student e-mails; supporting students (feel like I can’t do enough and people are falling through cracks); managing student behaviour in breakout rooms; a sick child with a learning disability trying to do online school during a lockdown on top of my higher workload because this year is virtual; lack of quiet space to teach/think (I wish I had a home office with a door!); lack of energy to do my research (it invigorates me intellectually and makes me a better teacher); frustration with government school closures and lack of preparation for second wave; frustration with government inability to get vaccines rolling; separation from extended family and childcare assistance.”

“Putting any limits on the number of hours I work in a day / week.”

“Assuming that I can be perfectly frank, I would say that I am struggling with the fact that my kids (who are, of course, in online classes) spend most of their time threatening / attempting to kill each other.”

What is something not related to school that has brought you some joy?

“I have enjoyed the fact that teaching online (and thereby doing away with commute time to the university) clears up part of the day for other pursuits: walks, reading, workouts, cooking, etc.”

“Being locked down means less time spent in the car and in airplanes, which for me has somehow translated into greater joy in the small details of everyday life, which I’m finding in the books I’m reading, new recipes I’m trying, jigsaw puzzles I’m doing, board games I’m playing, birds I’m watching, walks I’m taking in my neighbourhood. I also LOVE giving stuff away on my Facebook Buy Nothing group and getting to know more of my neighbours that way.”

“As always, music is a great source of joy. I’m particularly taking solace in David Dean Burkhart’s playlist on YouTube (shout out).”

“I’m taking time to think each day about one thing I noticed that was interesting, unusual, striking, beautiful, ugly, and I try to write this thing down.”

“Spending more time with my child at home, to be honest. We always spent a lot of time together and are very close, but with everything closing down we have been made to find new patterns for daily life and in each other’s company, and it has been lovely to realize that even in these close quarters we get along very well, and take care of each other more often than we get on each other’s nerves (though we do that too!).”

“The news that one of my sons and his wife are having a second baby in June.”

“I’ve been devouring the archived theatre productions that companies like Complicité, Stratford, and the National Theatre (UK) have shared for free. The NAC has worked with companies across this country to develop short performances called Grand Acts of Theatre and these are available on the NAC website. I love seeing the creative responses to the issues of performance and distance in the pandemic. People are so indefatigable!”

“I haven’t managed to get out with the camera since October, but on the weekend after classes ended in December, I went back through photos from previous years and found images to create three new photo cards. (The Carleton Print Shop does a great job of printing greeting cards, by the way.) Going out with the camera calms me down; photo-editing lets me play with colours and textures; seeing the prints—in this case on the cards—just makes me happy.”

“Walking in nature —I try to break up my day by getting out for walks.”

“Finding a green space in walking distance of my house that I did not know existed before Covid; cross-country skiing from my house.”

“I love going for walks and imagining how the world might be different—better—after the pandemic is over: more justice, less pollution, more contact with our neighbors.”

“Two diametrically opposed things: walks outside when I am alone; and weekly Zoom ‘meetings’ (this is the wrong word—I need something else) with friends and family. A group of about 20 or so friends in diverse geographical locations meet for a Happy Hour twice a week. We didn’t do this before the pandemic and now we do and it’s great. And I have family dinner once a week with my extended family across Canada—another thing that I didn’t do before the pandemic. Plus: whiskey sours, red wine, hot apple cider, black tea.”

“Watching English premier league football. Go Spurs.”

In one word, can you describe how this semester feels?

“In the fall term, I might have said unsteady. This term feels more manageable / navigable.”

“Screen.”

“Surprising.”

“Different.”

“Peculiar.”

“Disconnected.”

“Muted.”

“Fine.”

“Exhausting.”

“Exhausting.”

“Little triumphs.”

“Like skating. (I paused when I came to this question wondering what word would capture it. From where I’m sitting I can hear people skating, blades on ice. I also hear pucks hitting the wood of hockey sticks. And I thought that’s it: I love the sound of skates on ice. But the ice is also precarious and one can fall and there are holes and cracks—lots of them!—that you can’t see. Sometimes goals are possible but more often the puck goes flying into the bushes or skids across the ice to hit someone in the shins. So there’s that! But it’s also beautiful and collective and full of promise. That’s not one word! But that’s my extended explanation :) I might fall—I will fall!—but hopefully there will also be some moments when the semester will be like skating on a bright winter day with the wind at one’s back. Okay, I’ll stop with this metaphor for now!)”

“Tiring (but hopeful). I know we’ve just started the term, and many things are better now than they were last term when online teaching was new to many of us, and I’m happy for that. At the same time, I feel like I haven’t not been tired for a long time, and it’s a bit wearing. That’s more than one word, but I’m an academic!”

And there you have it. While we miss seeing our friends in class, our profs miss our lively chatter. We want to feel connected to our program, and our profs want to feel connected to us. We’re tired; they’re tired. We’re making the best of what we’ve got, and so are they.

I hope this leaves you feeling a little more connected than you were.

Pandemically, your student blogger,
Jaclyn

February 5, 2021: New Year, Same Four Walls

Happy new year, everybody!

Now all of last year’s struggles go away, right? 2020 was the problem, right? It’s not like the sociopolitical problems which came to a head last year existed long before then and remain our unfortunate, ever-evolving inheritance to contend with, right?

Hm. Let me start over.

It is certainly a new year.

And yet here I am, writing to you from the same place where I’ve been writing since March of last year. And there you are, probably reading this from the same place you’ve been reading things since March.

New year, same four walls.

This school year is off to a strange start for me, probably because the holidays were more of a blur than usual. I slept a lot, yet I don’t know if I feel refreshed. I had more than enough things to do, but I didn’t get very much done.

I know, I know, the holidays are not about getting things done, but these were fun things for me and they still largely didn’t happen.

For example: I planned to deliver some Christmas baking to the doorsteps of my close friends, but it never happened. I bought all the ingredients and dessert boxes with Christmas patterns. They taunt me from the pantry. I am also haunted by my lovingly organized Excel spreadsheet. Friends in rows, treats in columns. A column for allergies and diets; recipes marked “vegan” or “nuts.” I may as well put the spreadsheet in the graveyard of a folder I call “story ideas.”

I also still haven’t watched the Pride and Prejudice TV series or movie. I know. What kind of English major am I?

As we get back into the swing of things, my brain is fuzzier than usual. I am finding myself winded after reading three pages of academic writing. I’m making spelling mistakes I usually wouldn’t and my rough drafts are rougher than usual. I’ve been going back to my favourite “struggle meals”: omelettes and instant noodles. When I finish working for the day, I usually crawl into bed with my Nintendo Switch until I fall asleep.

The most obvious clue into my frazzled mental state is that I am offering you this “New Year” blog in…February.

Assuming that you, dear reader, are feeling as frazzled as I do, I’m going to do us both a favour and keep this one short. (If you read my last blog post, you’ll know that this is a challenge for me.) I need to save some energy for weekly assignments and stockpile some more for essay season, hibernation-style.

To save my brain and yours time and energy, I am going to leave you with some of my scattered thoughts as we go into this semester, and then we will go our separate ways and actually do this semester. Okay? Okay.

I really hope this will be the last semester of online learning. It seems like it might be. I don’t want to jinx anything, so I’ll leave it there.

I miss campus. I miss lying in the green grasses in the quad at the beginning of the Fall semester and at the end of the Winter semester. I miss hunting ottomans in the library. (My policy: any ottoman is up for grabs, even if you have to awkwardly maneuver past thirty students to roll it to your spot.) I miss the books, too, of course. I miss office hours with my profs. I miss standing in coffee lines with my friends. I miss my clothes, though I’m so used to sweatpants now that I shudder to think about the cold, stiff embrace of denim.

I do not miss the bus, though.

I don’t know where I would be without Animal Crossing. During the school year, I feel too guilty for passive activities like watching TV and movies, so I opt for active activities (redundant, but you know what I mean) like baking, drawing, and designing my Animal Crossing island. Unlike my assignments, my island doesn’t have a due date. It will never be complete. It can never be a burden.

I hope you, dear reader, have something in your life that makes you feel as free as Animal Crossing makes me feel.

By the time we are able to safely go out and be in crowds again, I think all of my social “muscles” will have withered and died.

I was just getting over some personal stomachache-inducing feelings around social situations when the pandemic began, and now I feel like I have to start all over. Crowds? Suffocating. People? Ugh. Speaking in front of people again? Scary. Someone accidentally brushing up against my shoulder? Ew. Nearly bumping into someone and doing that awkward I-go-left-you-go-right shuffle until you can awkwardly pass each other? I want to eject myself into space.

As much as I want to spend time with my friends again, I don’t want us to go anywhere. Just come over so we can make some food, watch TV, and maybe take a nap together.

I am never going to stop wearing masks.

I owned masks before the pandemic hit. I appreciate anonymity and I hate the cold. I also think that in ordinary circumstances, wearing a mask is the polite thing to do if you’re sick and you have to go out in public.

I now own four masks with pretty patterns on them so I can pair them with my outfits. I will accumulate more over time.

I hope to see more masks during flu season from here forward.

I think that’s about all I have in me this week. Insert humorously-cynical-but-ultimately-hopeful ending here.

Pandemically bemasked, your student blogger,

Jaclyn

Dear fellow students,

Can you believe it’s December already? I can’t decide whether this year has felt dreadfully long or freakishly short. Time just feels…fake. But we are humans bound to linear perceptions of time, so we are forced to reckon with the fact that time is alarmingly real. Time drags us along with it whether we’re ready or not: from the eruption of a global pandemic, to a summer we collectively hallucinated, to syllabus week, all the way to the most wonderful time of the year…essay season.

Usually, I’d be grumbling about cold classrooms, slushy tunnel floors, long coffee lines, and late busses. This year, I get the pleasure of directing all my frustrations towards essays.

At the risk of being very unrelatable, I want to tell you about a major, recurring problem I have when it comes to essays. I write way too much.

Case-study: Winter 2020. Lockdown began. I was mentally done with classes and didn’t understand how long all this would last, so I was blissfully excited to stay home for the last few weeks of the semester. I was even more excited about the two essays I was working on. It felt like I had so much time. I did so much research. There was nothing else to do. I kept doing research, probably to delay the part where I had to actually write the essays. My outlines were too long, my first drafts were too wordy, and my final drafts were still five pages over the maximum length.

I feel like most students have the opposite problem, so let it be known: I am the reason there are maximum-page lengths.

When it comes to essays, I’m what we’d call “Extra” and what a professor might generously call ambitious. On the bright side, I’ve never been called out for submitting an essay that was over the page length (which I have done… often). On the dark side, maybe a bunch of professors secretly dread grading my papers.

I have found this problem to be inescapable. I’m just a thorough person. I read through all the tutorials when I’m playing video games, I read and re-read instructions when I’m baking, and I read every single line of every single reading with intellectual care and consideration (one of these is a lie). On the bright side, I am forced to make such drastic cuts that I end up with dense essays where every word is more-or-less earned. On the dark side, those cuts signify hours of research and writing that will never see the light of my professors’ screens.

And maybe this is my way back into convincing you that I’m still relatable. I think we all know how it feels when our best efforts, our most earnest intentions, our honest work, go unacknowledged. If you tried really hard but nobody was there to see it, does that work even exist? Does it even matter?

I had this question answered for me, and I want to share it with you. This is an interaction between me and a professor who had to give me an extension after I confessed that I was working with a 53-page outline for a 20-page essay. I was in despair about how much work I had to cut away. As it turns out, this professor was going through the same thing with her own research, so she knew just what to say:

Me: Knowing that the cuts make the essay better is the only consolation in this process of cutting out the process. Everything else about it is hard and sad. It feels like by cutting out the parts that are unnecessary, I’m admitting they were also not important, even if they were crucial in shaping the essay and took up so many hours of my time. Cutting out all the hard work means the hard work does not get recognized, just the final result. I’m thinking of ballerinas who train for years, who learn choreography, who hurt their feet, only to show the results of all that labour for a few hours a night, to people who will only see the beauty in the final result.

Professor: Yes, it is painful, but we are both old enough to know that what is most painful is also most rewarding. As to the ballerina analogy: you forget that a ballerina’s training goes beyond the nightly performances to rapt audiences. Ballerinas also have an ideal posture that the rest of the world can only yearn for and never attain. So your analogy is actually even more fitting than you thought: the amputated words, like a ballerina’s relentless and painful training, do have benefits beyond the performance itself. A ballerina will hold herself with beautiful poise and grace all the time (she will never slouch!); so those thrown-out bits will make you a better scholar and writer. They’re not truly lost.

I really needed to hear that, and maybe you do, too, for whatever it is you’re going through this essay season.

(And in case you’re wondering whether students and profs really talk like this, consider the following: All the ornamentation that gets cut out of our academic work has to go somewhere.)

Treat this advice given to me like a horoscope: squint really hard and figure out how it may apply meaningfully to your life. Maybe you struggle to meet all your word counts and you wish your professors knew how much work you put in to just barely get there. Maybe you tend to change your essay topic entirely when you’re half done. Maybe you have the superpower of realizing exactly what you meant to say right when you finish your essay, which makes things worse because it’s probably due tomorrow.

I don’t know your struggle; I only know mine. But maybe I can speak for all of us when I say that the steady march of incoming deadlines feels like watching zombies break into the building from the top floor. You don’t know how long you have before they catch up to you, but they’re coming.

Well, I guess we know when our deadlines are coming due. But remember what I said about time feeling fake? That applies especially to essay season.

In an earlier draft of this blog, I bounced back and forth between the “bright sides” and “dark sides” of my life right now, and even though I decided it was self-serving and uninteresting, I recommend finding some time to do this. Sometimes we need self-serving. Sometimes we need to write some things down that aren’t worth anything to anyone but ourselves.

And if everything feels shrouded in darkness right now and the only bright side is that this semester and this year are almost over, hold on to it as tight as you can. We’re almost there. I hope you’re doing okay, whatever that means for you. I won’t say “great” because maybe that’s too much to ask.

By the time you read this, I’ll likely be one with my research: writing with too much ambition, wrestling with syntax and run-ons, and wondering how many commas in a sentence are just too many. I’ll almost definitely be asking for extensions. Knowing me, I’ll also be making online purchases in my spare time and lighting scented candles at all hours to soothe myself. I’ll probably need another tea. And maybe a shower.

That’s it from me this year. It’s been a long one. Or short? Still undecided on my end. Either way, we deserve some rest more than ever, and I hope we find some.

Pandemically, your student blogger,
Jaclyn

P.S. English Majors! Do you have a story about learning in and learning through this pandemic? Perhaps a disaster story? A comedy of errors? A tale of triumph? A heartfelt slice-of-life? Or do you just want to tell someone about your day? I’m collecting stories about pandemic learning for an undisclosed (read: super-secret and thus very cool) project for the English Department. I want you to bring your pain, your shame, your triumphs, and your moments of pride to my inbox: jaclyn.legge@carleton.ca. Email me for more information, or dive right in with a story of 300-500 words. (But I won’t be upset if you go under or over the word length.)

P.P.S. Surprising no one, this blog post is longer than I intended it to be. If you made it this far, congratulations! And I’m sorry. And thank you.

My dearest fellow students,

I hope this blog post finds you well. Is this blog post finding you well? Or is it finding you under the covers at 2 p.m.? Having your first meal at 5 p.m.? Having your third coffee at 8 p.m.? Wrapping up that discussion-board post at 11:55 p.m. that’s due at 12 a.m.?

Don’t worry, I don’t expect much from any of us right now. I hope this blog finds you pandemically well, whatever that means for you.

Is this blog post finding me well? Let’s see. It finds me very busy, yet somehow with a rather high daily screen-time average. (Do you track your screen time on your phone? I recommend it, if facing your own shame is productive for you.) It finds me a bit overwhelmed, but with enough time to spontaneously take evenings off to make scones and watch streams of Among Us with my sister. It finds me tired, but with enough energy to take my puppy on her daily walks. It finds me anxious – and these days, telling you what I’m not anxious about would make a shorter list than everything I am anxious about – but with enough chutzpah to write down some words…

But not many. This blogging space is not about me. I’m just one student trying to speak for us all. Right now, when our lives as students are so deeply intertwined with our home lives, I doubt there’s much of a “universal student experience” for me to tap into.

So I have decided to step aside a bit for this blog post and let you speak for yourselves. I asked some of you – friends, peers, Zoom rectangles – how it’s going this semester. What follows are the words that you, fellow students, have shared with me, as well as a few of my own words hidden among them.

I hope that even if you’re not doing well, you will find solace in seeing yourself here.

What Do You Miss About In-person Classes?

“Being able to see my profs in class and talk to them without having to schedule a meeting, and having a perfectly good, guilt-free excuse to grab Starbucks on my way to class instead of having to drink the same old Keurig coffee every morning.”

“I miss office hours. I never thought I’d say that, but I do.”

“I miss meeting people in class. By the end of term, there’s always somebody I’m happy I got to know unintentionally – even if it’s just someone I can knowingly lock eyes with. It’s nice to have that confirmation of a shared experience.”

“I miss my dear classmates. I miss being stressed about not understanding a reading, only to chat with my classmates in the hallway while we sip our coffee and discover that in fact, none of us understood the reading. There is an overwhelming pressure in university where you feel like you always have to be so smart, so academic, but when you have in-person classes and you bond with your classmates, that pressure melts away. I can say something as small as ‘This one scene in the book was so weird it made me cringe’ to a classmate and we’ll chat about the book as regular people. Once I step foot in that classroom, though, I have to be an actual student so I might say something like ‘this one scene had an air of mystery to it and I think the author described it in this way to make their readers feel uncomfortable’ and then go on for a minute or so to back up my point. With the online learning environment, I feel like I am always a student and never just a regular person. Every one of my conversations has to sound smart and formal.”

“I miss literally everything about in-person classes. I miss being on campus and having to walk from class to class because I feel like I live on my couch now. I miss meeting new people and having discussions. I miss feeling like I have a connection with professors because I see them twice a week. I thought I would like being able to choose when to do my classes, but it’s so much worse. Having a structured schedule is much better.”

“The interaction within the classroom, hearing each other’s off-the-cuff remarks, having people laugh and get engaged in conversations.”

“One thing I find is that in-person classes have more interesting and candid discussions, whereas online discussions are more structured, formal, and uninteresting. I think there’s a fear of disagreement in online classes…for some reason.”

“Food. There’s this communal thing about eating together between classes. I’m very food-motivated so that’s how I’ve created friendships. You get closer when you dish over coffee. I also miss just meeting people through weird circumstances. I met someone in a writing circle and we just hung out and kicked a pop can between each other like 5-year olds. You can show people you’re weird when you’re together. You don’t have that community building when you’re by yourself in your room.”

“Nothing. I hate it when people make small talk with me.”

What’s Going Well Right Now?

“For the first time since I started school, I wake up feeling more or less ready to get to work. Before, if I didn’t have class that day, I would wake up, soak up all the time in my bed, eat a big meal, and not get to work until late afternoon. I mean, sometimes I still do that. But there are more days where I wake up feeling motivated. Maybe it’s partly because I’m getting more sleep.”

“I have more flexibility to work full time.”

“I am able to keep up with my studies even though I am overwhelmed.”

“I’m a little ahead on essays and things right now. It’s a miracle!”

“Surprisingly, I am well ahead of my work. I think this is because I am not as physically tired from walking around campus every day… I seem to have more ‘usable’ hours in a day.”

“I’ve been setting 25-minute timers to focus on a task – I heard that this was the ideal period of time to concentrate. It adds some urgency to the work when I have a lot of things due. I’m not perfect; sometimes I hear the timer going off and I’m already on my phone. But it’s a tactic.”

“Um. I have food. I have shelter.”

“Getting there on time! It’s much easier when you just have to drag yourself from bed to the computer.”

“Getting to read and discuss amazing novels, and learn about really interesting topics in some of my other classes (e.g. Indigenous history and terrorism/human rights).”

“I haven’t had to talk to anyone I don’t explicitly choose to talk to in months! :D”

“No one has asked me this question yet and I’m sad to say that I don’t think anything is going well. There are some benefits to online learning, but I don’t think I’ve experienced any yet… Does not having to bus for an hour to get to campus count?”

What Are You Struggling With?

“Self-motivation.”

“Having the self-discipline to force myself to do work when I’m at home amongst my unlimited distractions, and not having the ability to fully separate between school work and home to have downtime with separate locations.”

“I’m struggling to keep up with all of the small assignments. As you progress through the English program, essays get longer and longer. This year, the essays are still longer but there are so many more small assignments than what I’m used to. I have at least two assignments to complete every single week, making it very difficult to find time for my final essays.”

“It feels pretty lonely sometimes. I miss all the people that I used to see just about every day but am not close-enough friends with to reach out to individually now. It’s harder keeping in sustained contact with friends than I expected.”

“Keeping in touch with friends who have moved away.”

“In general, I’m struggling to figure out what to do with my life. I’m applying for my Master’s and trying to find my way and there are so many uncertainties. Will I move to Toronto? Will it be online and I won’t have to? Will I keep living here and find a job? Will I be able to travel during my MA like I planned? Some things don’t seem possible now… I’m trying to live day by day without feeling like I’m only living day by day.”

“I think late bedtimes and distractions are my #1 struggles.”

“Well, I think I’m definitely struggling with motivation. I used to really enjoy school and it was pretty much my favourite thing, but the online environment has turned school into something I dread doing. Since it’s my last year, I was looking forward to lots of in-class discussions, because that’s my favourite thing about school and my program. But with everything online, I feel like I’m missing out on the classes I should have enjoyed the most. I also find it really draining to spend so much time on my computer and feeling like the expectations for our work is the same even though the quality of the education we are receiving is significantly lower.”

“Fighting anxiety and depression. Going back to school was supposed to be a fun time and I took an extra year to reduce my stress – who knew!”

“I’m struggling with focus. Today’s a workday for me and even though I have a lot of work to do on top of my schoolwork, for some reason I feel such a gravitational pull towards my phone. I say my time is all spent on school but realistically there is a lot of procrastinating. It’s not even fun, I just need time to not be working. I know the work’s important and needs to be done, and I’m stressed, but it’s almost at a distance – meanwhile, I’m sitting dead-eyed watching compilations of One Direction on James Corden, and it’s not even bringing me joy, just something close to it. I don’t know how to take proper breaks, and the unintentional breaks take up so much unintentional time.”

What is Something Not Related to School that Has Brought You Some Joy?

“In general, taking walks outside, and more specifically to me, I’m getting married next year and planning the wedding has provided a nice distraction from everything!”

“There was a beautiful sunset the other day and I went for a walk. It was very peaceful, and I was able to enjoy creation and the beautiful warm weather. I have also been playing some family games lately which has brought a lot of laughter.”

“I’ve been enjoying fall. Being home with my sister has brought me joy in itself, but we made a list of things we wanted to do in October because it so often passes us by, and having a fun agenda has been really nice. I’ve been rewatching The Haunting of Hill House before The Haunting of Bly Manor comes out and it’s so good – it’s almost literary. It brings me so much joy knowing there’s a set time when I’m done with school and I get to watch Hill House.”

“Baking and cooking, running, walking, spending time with my dog.”

“My son and daughter-in-law presented us with a new ‘furbaby–grandbaby’ this summer – Zola. She is a collie, husky, shepherd, lab mix and an absolute delight.”

“I love being home with my doggos so much. It’ll be hard when we have to be away from them again, but I’m enjoying all the extra time while I have it.”

“Upgrading my PC, playing video games, staying home with my family and pets.”

“Planning our wedding with my fiancée for the new year ”

“My partner’s grandmother recently told me I would always be loved by their family. She told me this while we were all wine drunk, and I had to try so hard not to cry on the spot.”

“Extra-curriculars are really helping me to keep feeling purposeful and connected. Also, I am looking forward to the snow! I love snow!”

“I got a milk crate the other day from someone’s trash, the kind that you put milk bags in. I’ve always wanted one, so that’s kind of nice. I’m not using it yet. But it sparked joy. I get excited over a lot of silly things; I’ll get excited over a cute, small peanut butter jar. I get excited over things that are dumb, spontaneous, and get you in a lighter energy, things that make no sense. Not setting things on fire – just climbing a tree or going on the jungle gym. Dumb, harmless things that make you think ‘that was fun.’ Those things are important at this time.”

In One Word, Can You Describe How this Semester Feels?

“Busy.”

“Transitional.”

“Dreary.”

“Full.”

“Interesting.”

“Messy.”

“Long.”

“Hectic.”

“Nope!”

So there you have it. Every single one of us is struggling in our own way, and yet, there’s still joy: there are weddings to plan, dogs to pet, and walks to take. And of course, we’ll always have milk crates.

If I could just say a few words about what’s going on down south: let’s find time to celebrate, without losing sight of how much work is still ahead of us. We face our own version of the same persistent and insidious problems up here, even if we don’t like to admit to it. We can’t do the work and we can’t heal without truth-telling, and that starts within ourselves.

Before I go, let me make a toast, in the spirit of Orpheus the poet from the musical Hadestown: “To the world we dream about – and the one we live in now.”

Pandemically, your student blogger,
Jaclyn

Wednesday, September 16, 2020: Welcome back to the struggle

Here’s the thing – do I even have the right to say “welcome back” to a place where we are not?

Ah, but academia is not so much a place as it is the opportunity to store precious knowledge into that squishy pink information processor inside our skulls, and we’re still doing that, right? So I can still say “Welcome back”…to education.

If your summer was anything like mine, I may be welcoming you back to the screen you do your work on: a laptop or desktop screen, as opposed to the screen of your phone or TV. (If your summer was even more like mine, you are probably migrating back from your Animal Crossing Device – I mean, your Nintendo Switch.)

And who is welcoming you back, you may ask? It is I, Jaclyn, your English Department student blogger for one more year! I’m entering my fourth (well, fifth, with Co-op, but who’s counting? Me, definitely me) and final year, and it is even more bitter and more sweet than I imagined.

It was always going to be bittersweet. Bitter because I love being a student as opposed to an adult, and sweet because I get to flee from the two energy vampires that take up residence in my throat: Essays and Exams. The extra bitter taste comes from missing out on the things I never thought I’d have to miss for longer than a summer: the library, the quad, in-person lectures, classrooms with students who share my interests (even if that interest is just a passing grade), bonding time with the friends I’ve made on campus, and office hours. Who knew one could miss office hours? At the same time, I get the extra sweetness of no hour-long bus rides in the morning or at rush hour, no two-hour bus rides during the hectic winter months, and more time with my puppy.

And yet, more bitter things. I will most likely not have a graduation ceremony, or wear a cap and gown. I will not have serendipitous breaks between classes with the friends I have made these past few years. I will not get to give my professors a proper thank you and goodbye…which is only half-true – I plan to be a very active alumna once campus opens up again. They haven’t seen the last of me! I suspect I will want some closure, and I intend to get it. But hey, like I said, graduating was always going to be bittersweet.

While I will be missing campus very much, I’m still excited to be “back.” I am a student who, every September, gets pre-emptively proud of how much better I’m going to be this semester, how ahead of the readings I will get, how many extracurriculars I will do…and as you can imagine, every November I am begging simultaneously for more time and for all of it to be over. So, as I write this, I am at my most optimistic. I know how it goes, year after year, and I still can’t wait to be a part of it.

After all, we all have to pick our struggles. And I pick essays; I pick mornings so early the sun is still asleep; I pick Roosters breakfasts all week; I pick throwing my money at Starbucks and Booster Juice; I pick raising my hand (turning on my mic?) in front of a group of students I fear are smarter than me and know it; I pick formulating messy thoughts into coherent sentences with lots of “likes” and “ums”; I pick trudging into office hours (Big Blue Button rooms and one-on-one Zoom calls?) with professors I respect and trying to say anything except “please help me, please.” If you’re reading this, you have picked this struggle, too.

So welcome back to the struggle.

Psychotherapist and author Esther Perel once said, in regards to relationships: “Every couple is either going to see the cracks in their relationship or the light that shines through the cracks.” I’m going to suggest that we all have a relationship with education, each of us with a unique history of cyclical hardships. Your cracks may be the procrastination you just can’t shake, the morning classes you just can’t make it to, the essays you just can’t submit without needing an extension.

The cracks are inevitable. I mean, look around. Some days in this world, this era, “these difficult times,” it feels like the cracks are everywhere: across the world, in grocery stores, on empty streets, beneath our feet. The cracks come to meet us. The light, we have to find.

I won’t pretend I’m great at finding the light. But as we enter a strange new semester, I invite you to grab a flashlight and join me in considering what we still have, despite all that we don’t. I’ll get us started:

– (Despite the fact that this is my second laptop since I started university), I have a laptop that will serve me until the end of my degree.

– (Despite the fact that I can’t see them, and many have graduated already), I have friends in my program.

– (Despite all the classes I couldn’t take during my final year), I am satisfied with all the courses I did manage to squeeze in.

– (Despite all the professors I admire whose classes I couldn’t take), I have professors this year who are friendly and familiar faces.

– (Despite my sadness that I won’t be able to meet with my dear colleagues in the Creative Writing Concentration in person), I get to take a writing workshop, which is always a welcome break from essay writing, in my final semester.

– (Despite how much time she took up this summer, preventing me from getting ahead in my readings, which I absolutely, definitely would have done), I have a puppy who brings me joy.

– (Despite my fear of feeling disconnected from school this semester) I get to do this: write this blog, as a student, to my fellow students.

As your student blogger, my goal is to speak to the universal experience of being a student in our lovely English department. However, now more than ever, I feel like there is no universal experience. I can’t pretend to speak to all of our feelings right now. Maybe you’re ecstatic that school is online because you live far from campus and you work best in your bed; maybe you’re really worried because your attention span is shaky as it is and your living situation doesn’t lend itself to productivity. Maybe this isn’t bittersweet at all because it’s just great! Maybe it’s a nightmare you’re not sure you’re prepared to handle.

These past few months, we have all been impacted so differently by this invisible threat to our health. I can’t promise anything except for this: however you’re feeling, someone else is feeling it, too. We humans are unique, but not THAT unique.

My hope is that you connect with someone this year – someone you already know, or perhaps a Zoom rectangle you click with – who feels the way you do, and can provide you a bit of relief in knowing that we are all (brace yourself for the quickest growing paradox-turned-cliché of the year) “alone together.

I can’t possibly end on that note. So let me tell you about my aforementioned puppy. Her name is Goji; she’s an Old English Bulldog; she’s three months old, and everybody who meets her announces quite valiantly that they would die for her. She loves car rides, napping on laps, and recently learned the command “gimme kiss,” so now I truly don’t feel like she needs to learn anything else.

Anyway.

Welcome back, English kids. Let’s just… *awkwardly tries to do a handshake that neither of us were ready for* do this.

Your student blogger,

Jaclyn

For me, the winter semester always starts slow and hopeful. The holidays melt off in little bits and the glow of new year’s resolutions waft through the air. I can never keep track of exactly when the semester hits me with the contempt of a banana peel on a wet, yellow floor, but I tend to go from “motivated and doing just fine” to “I don’t even know what I don’t know” pretty quick. I’m not there yet, but I’m waiting for it to take me by surprise like it always does. This is to say, my semester’s going great so far, how about you?

Ever since I started university, I have taken lecture notes on my laptop. Class begins; I start typing, organizing themes and thoughts accordingly and copying the instructor’s colourful turns of phrase (excerpt from my religion class notes: “worms don’t get enlightened”); class ends, I stop. I never met anyone who took as thorough notes as me, and, yes, I used to be incredibly proud of this.

And yet this semester, without really deciding to, I switched to a notebook. Syllabus week passed, the lectures began in full force, and I wasn’t falling behind at all, like I worried would happen. I was absorbing information in a different way and writing notes efficiently. I used to think that power-typing every detail made me pay better attention, but it turns out that doodling in the margins while I pay attention for key thoughts helps me listen just as well.

My aversion to handwritten notetaking had nothing to do with memory recall or the allure of the internet. It’s just easier to make mistakes on a laptop, where you can backspace and rearrange text as you please. With handwritten notes, you risk messing something up, scratching it out, taking time to rewrite it properly, and losing the thread of the discussion.

If I had the power to reverse time by one second at the cost of one hour of my life, I would undo every erroneous pen stroke I’ve scratched out from my notes and die glamorously young under mysterious circumstances.

I don’t like being faced with my own mistakes. Pen blackouts, eraser marks, and white-out are all reminders that my cursive is still wonky, I’m terrible at spelling French names, and my first thoughts aren’t always good enough.

No one ever really, really taught me it was okay to be wrong. Or perhaps no one taught me how to be okay with being wrong. I did learn that it was wrong to feel bad about being wrong so maybe I should stop being a crybaby about it. Maybe harbor my feelings of failure deep inside myself and let them steep. This won’t come back to bite me at all.

My sob story, to the tune of the world’s tiniest violin: around late elementary school I was deemed a “gifted learner” which at the time I think meant that I received good grades and didn’t require any help to do it. I probably used to be praised for getting good grades, but good becomes normal, normal becomes expected; I stop telling my parents about my grades, they assume I’m fine, and I assume I’m fine, too. I assume I will always be fine.

But nobody is good at everything, right all the time, or fine all the time. I wish I could tell myself these things with forgiveness. But I am not the flower which blooms in adversity. Take away my sun and rain, and I will wilt and blame myself for being dry.

I’m hard on myself because I don’t want to believe anything is too hard for me. I want my first try to be my best, and for my best to always be enough. This is a terrible philosophy for a writer. It doesn’t help me as a student either.

How can we, the students, tell if school is getting harder or if we’re just falling behind? There are many factors to consider here:

• We’re taking higher-level courses
• The work is actually getting harder
• We are growing in microscopic ways we may not notice for years
• We have more ambitious personal goals, which take up time
• The older we get, the more pressure we feel to make something of ourselves
• Managing free time is hard when our study time is also our work/social/personal time
• Time does nothing but move forward and every moment we spend idle could technically be spent doing something more productive
• Twitter time moves at an alarming speed (Think it’s been 20 minutes? Nope, it’s tomorrow)
• Self-care time is not only important but necessary
• Some days we require more rest than others
• Everybody else seems to be keeping up with the work
• Everybody else is struggling in ways we can’t see
• We’re only present for our own lowest moments
• The moments we’re proudest of ourselves never last long enough
• We tend to look at how far we have to go instead of how far we’ve come
• The things we struggle to do feel heavier than the things we can
• We’re never going to have an objective view of ourselves or all the things that we’ve accomplished

To the best of my knowledge right now, there is no definitive answer: we just do the work, complain about how hard it is and how little time we have, and we keep going. We hope we did enough. If all we can do is get through it, we should be allowed to think that our efforts were enough, because that’s probably what we’ll think later on.

What do I know, though? I don’t think I’ve ever believed a single person who told me I was working hard enough.

I am quieter in class than I used to be, even as I free up space to speak by not typing non-stop. You see, I now have a voice in my head that tells me someone else will say it better.

It’s hard to feel like you have the authority to share your thoughts in class when you’re sitting there with the entirety of your thoughts: you were up late last night, you did the reading past midnight, you skipped breakfast again, you almost missed the bus this morning and had to catch your breath for an embarrassing amount of time, you’re not sure if you filled in both your eyebrows, you hope nobody can see how tired you are, how did anyone let you in this class?

It’s not hard to overthink myself into silence. Do I risk exposing my loosely formed, uncertain thoughts to the class and hope that I make it to the end of the sentence without experiencing the all-powerful brain silence that wipes away my super-smart thought the second I get to it, Men-in-Black style?

Or do I take a long sip of water and stare meaningfully at my book while my Professor tries to meet someone’s eye?

Here’s how it used to work: 1. Prof asks a question. 2. I think of an answer that’s good enough. 3. I raise my hand, and I answer.

Here’s how it works now: 1. Prof asks a question. 2. My brain goes into a high but empty alert like a deer in headlights before I can start formulating an answer that makes enough sense to bring forward. 3. Someone says something really smart that I never would have thought of. 4. By the time I think I have something to say, I’m sweaty and nervous about not being smart enough. 5. The lecture moves on.

But here’s the thing. No one has ever raised their hand and said exactly what I was thinking in a better way because nobody thinks like me. Nobody thinks like you, either.

It’s not a perfect system, but this is how I try to be brave, fellow students: I come to class and tell myself that you’re all behind on the readings, all overwhelmed by the research essay, all wearing your shirt backwards and inside out, that you’ve all had instant noodles for dinner, been napping at the worst times, been having caffeine for breakfast. I tell myself that you’re all picking up your back leg and throwing it in front of you, over and over again. I tell myself you’re more like me than not, and you show up and put your hands up anyway.

Good luck this semester, everyone. Let us be brave together. In solidarity,

Jaclyn

Today, I had nothing to do but to get things done. No class, no plans, just me against my To-Do list.

I make a To-Do list every day that I have entirely to myself. A very ambitious one. I don’t like to stop adding things to the list. Somehow it’s scarier to have two big things to do than it is to have nine items of varying difficulties, especially when 1 through 3 are “shower,” “eat,” and “water plants.” And maybe I already watered the plants.

I try to be kind to myself when it comes to lists, I guess. Make it easier to cross a few things off, get those reward juices flowing in my brain.

And predictably, I never finish the list. They usually end up a bit like this:

– shower (completed: 8pm)

– eat (completed: 11am; 3pm; 7pm; 9pm; 1:30am)

– water plants (completed: last night)

– write in journal (completed: 12pm)

– do that one reading you’re really excited about (completed: 5pm)

– do that other reading (postponed)

– rearrange your entire room (half-completed: 2pm)

– write essay rough draft (postponed but all the appropriate tabs are open)

– write fiction not related to any class/deadline (completed: 10pm)

Fill in the extra time with farting around on the internet.

I write the lists long because I’m prepared to let a few things fall to the wayside; “unsubscribe from Tidal” has been on the list for months. But there are things that need to be done, and things that I like to do (like writing, allegedly), and I swear I want to get them done but I don’t.

I am very good at leaving the hardest thing on the list until the sun goes down and I can convince myself I should just have a fresh start tomorrow, until there are a startling lack of tomorrows between me and the deadline.

My lists have been like this for a long time, but now instead of tricking myself into feeling accomplished (shower! eat! plants! eat!) I feel pretty poorly about avoiding the things I’m scared to do.

Yes, scared. It’s taken me a while to understand that it’s not (all) laziness; it’s fear. Fear of writing an essay I’m not proud of. Fear of writing something so bad the muses will swoop in and tell me I should listen to my mom and use my English degree to pivot into law somehow. There is nothing that I love to do more than write, but there’s something about devoting time to the activity I have staked my identity upon for as long as I can remember that’s a little scary. So I avoid it. Often. And the whole time I’m avoiding writing, I am thinking about it constantly.

I went to counselling about this, actually. If you’ve been by Health Services at Carleton recently, you’ll know that the wait time for a mental-health counselling appointment is around 3 weeks as of late (or at least it was for me, with a request for a female counselor). Many of us are in and out of those offices for all sorts of reasons, and I’d like to take a quick second to say: good for us.

I recently discovered a Netflix series called The Mind: Explained. If your brain loves learning about brains, this is the show for you! And if you, like me, are just starting to explore the way anxiety functions in your life, I recommend the episode called “Anxiety.” According to the pleasant voice of Emma Stone, who narrates The Mind: Explained, our generation is a lot more likely to view seeking help as a sign of strength than any previous generation, but there is “no evidence that prevalence rates of anxiety disorders have changed.” We are not more anxious than our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but we are perhaps allowed to be anxious more than they ever were. With the stigma around seeking help deflating all around us, more of us who need help will feel comfortable seeking it. And the resources are out there.

(I’m not too happy I have to cite research in this blog, but this is how much I want you to view this episode if you haven’t. I want you to be able to find my sources!)

It never occurred to me to be frustrated that the wait list for mental-health counselling was so long because, well, I’m happy for us.

We the students are in the midst of a vulnerable, transitionary, and monumentally confusing time of our lives. We are putting ourselves out there, chin up or head down. We are learning empathy, forgiveness, generosity, and other things we didn’t realize we had to learn. We are reflecting on the things we didn’t know would hurt us, and learning to live with that hurt. We are meeting our demons and talking back to them. We are grappling with how embarrassed we are about who we’ve become. We are growing, only to find we have even more room to grow, wondering if it’ll always be like this and how we’ll manage. In the meantime, we have three essays due next week, a pile of readings to catch up with, and a job in retail to grin and bear.

We are carrying a lot of weight. I’m grateful we have counselling.

I’m still working on the whole “fear of writing” thing. That’s going to be a work-in-progress for a while, probably after I graduate, too, and I’m trying to be comfortable with that. In the meanwhile, all I can do is get things done the best I can.

It was at my counselling appointment that I learned about the Done List. It’s the opposite of the To-Do List: at the end of the day, you make a list of what you did get done to get a sense of what you accomplished and remove your focus from the things you didn’t do.

In other words, you bury your guilt, and you try again tomorrow.

Of course, now I’m going to show you my first Done List.

Jaclyn’s Done list

– Ate breakfast

– Introduced my mom to Brandi Carlile

– Skillfully lured a wasp out of my house by closing the front door while it buzzed around the garland, shutting myself outside in the process, and ran down the driveway without shoes and waited until the wasp flew away, all of which I think entertained my mom who was watching from her car

– Started a book for class over a week before it needs to be read

– Finally beat a room escape game by Neutral, whose (free!) games I have been playing and cheating at for a decade, all on my own

– Went to the pharmacy

– Almost bought candy at the pharmacy but resisted

– Went to the grocery store for avocados, became disappointed by the dubious quality of avocados, maturely left empty-handed instead of splurging on fancy avocados I could not afford

– Almost bought fresh pasta and cheese at the store but resisted

– Almost bought candy at the store but resisted

– Walked home from the grocery store, which made up 3000 of my 3500 steps today (could have been worse!)

– Reached out to a friend and made plans first (something that has been hard for me this past year)

– Realized the benefits of saving pasta water for your mac and cheese sauce and thus had a yummy dinner (I know, I still had pasta and cheese)

– Tried French onion soup, a food I was vehemently opposed to in my picky childhood, and found it enjoyable

– Made a playlist of 237 songs I love by female musicians, entitled “The Gorls”

– Did a reading (about coffee tables, very exhilarating) at 10pm because I spent 3 hours creating a playlist entitled “The Gorls”

– Took a shower

– Cracked the code for how to brush my teeth perfectly (one of those shower revelations that makes so much sense at the time)

– Wrote the heck out of this blog post!

Not included in this list are the anxiety and guilt I carried with me during so many moments today. Because my breakfast wasn’t healthy. Because I only read two chapters of that book. Because it took me like two hours to finish that escape room. Because I took the bus to the store since I didn’t want to walk there and back. Because my To-Do list was a lot more than these things, and the hard stuff is just going to be on the list again tomorrow.

But I had kind of a great day, and writing it out like this has convinced me of it.

Of course, the “today” I’ve been writing about is no longer the today I’m living in now because I’ve been editing this piece for a few days. Even though I didn’t consider that day to be productive at the time, looking back now, I don’t think I’d change a single thing about it. I have no regrets about the escape-room victory or the playlist, both of which took up a lot of my time and had nothing to do with school. But I had fun. I haven’t beat a room escape since, which is humbling and honestly annoying, but that also makes the memory feel more precious. And I’ve been listening to “The Gorls” non-stop.

I’m burying my guilt. I’m ready to try again tomorrow. I encourage you to try writing your own Done List and see if it changes the way you feel about your day.

I’ll see you next time.

Jaclyn

Wednesday, October 9, 2019: Jaclyn’s September Aphorisms.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that September slaps us all across the face and stings like pumpkin spice and the fear of accidental plagiarism.

How was your September? Or rather: where did your September go? When you’re a student, September always goes somewhere. You spend the last days of August anticipating its arrival, with excitement or nerves or both, and then it’s over. Time gets warped at the beginning of the school year: classes pass fast, and then they go slow; you want extra shifts at work, and then you can’t take any of them; you have all the time in the world to read, and then you have none at all.

September is the one that got away, gets away, and will get away from us again. The Road Runner of months, if you will.

Where did my September go? Into the halls and tunnels and classrooms of this school. To the bed I laid in at all hours of the day. To books for school and books for myself (read: sanity). To my head and its astounding ability to convince me that I always have more time than I do.

This is my way of apologizing for introducing myself to you so late.

I’m Jaclyn, the student blogger for the English Department at Carleton this year. I’m somewhere between my third and fourth years, which you may have heard me say during an icebreaker the first week of classes. I’ve been away from full-time studies for the past two years pursuing Co-op, which was enriching, fascinating, genuinely life-altering, and I can’t recommend it more. Co-op also unveiled some love I had for this school of ours and made me miss Carleton in a way I didn’t know I could. It means a lot to me that I get to come back to school and write to you, fellow students.

And yet it’s already October, and this is the first time I’m making your acquaintance. All I can say is that Septembers are harder than they used to be, and a month into the semester, I can tell you for sure that I’m not the student I used to be. And it’s scary.

Fresh out of high school, I was a focused student with good grades, a burning desire for recognition, and a no-fail attitude. There was no such thing as “too hard” — I hadn’t encountered that yet. If there was a time crunch, it came from my need for perfection. I was proud of everything I submitted.

Rinse and repeat for second year, except this time I had friends. I’m being dramatic, but I really did find a community of lovely, writerly nerds at this school through the Creative Writing workshops, and many of them would become very dear friends. There’s nothing that will bond you like shared struggle.

In April 2017, I finished what would be my last standard year of classes until now. I completed three Co-op placements and took a sprinkling of classes in 2018. I didn’t feel like a student, but I wasn’t quite in the workforce either. Now that I’m back, it’s clear that I will never be the student I used to be.

A lot happened, after all. I changed. My brain changed. I developed different feelings about myself and newly budding thoughts about the world. Everything felt bigger. The space where thoughts happen in my brain was suddenly bigger, and faster, and more full, and less kind. I was coming out of a bubble I didn’t know I was in. I worked in offices where I was the youngest. I was more tuned into the news than I’d ever been. I quit retail (for now). The world felt so busy and full of things I didn’t know, and there was no time to learn any of it. I felt small, like I had drunk from the vial that said Do Not Drink and shrunk all the way down, but I was the only one who noticed. I took summer classes. I filled my schedule up for the fall. I felt small. I struggled to keep up.

For the first time in my life, I dropped a course. I went to sleep wondering how I would do everything I needed to do, and I woke up knowing I couldn’t. I was taking a full course load, and it was too much. It was too hard now. I had changed. I cried, a lot.

I dropped a course this semester, too. I missed a class early on and walked in late to the next one (in full shame, Tim Hortons in hand) and felt totally lost. I sipped on my French Vanilla while my brain calculated what we needed to do to fix this, to catch up and stay ahead in my other classes, and instead of a ding! it did more of a long, wet raspberry. In a move that would have appalled first-year Jaclyn, for whom nothing was “too hard,” I dropped the class later that day.

And not a tear was shed. I was not in crisis. But the syllabi don’t lie; I had just put my life for the next four months into a calendar the week before, and it was a lot. It was probably too much. Maybe I could have done it, but could I have done it well? I wasn’t sure anymore.

It is very scary to feel yourself change. To feel like there’s a previous version of you who only exists in other people’s minds and in your own expectations for yourself. To wonder if you can keep up with yourself at all.

I’m not the student I used to be and some things are a lot harder than they were, but I think — I think — I’m keeping up. I spent all summer terrified of what September would bring, but I made it out the other end mostly unharmed. And in the midst of my fear, there’s something more. You know when a cat dozes off in a sun spot all nuzzled up on the carpet? I think being back in school feels something like that. Not that I’m sleeping in class — it’s just there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here. Keeping up. Sinking my teeth into student life again, feeling brand new in a familiar place.

I leave you with a list of things I didn’t know when I started school that I (more or less) know now and wish I’d known sooner; I could use the reminder, and maybe you could too:

• Dropping a class because you feel overwhelmed doesn’t make you a failure.
• Dropping a class because you’re worried it will be overwhelming later is also okay.
• Everybody is having a hard time, somehow. You’re allowed to admit you’re having a hard time.
• Take the stairs at the UC. It’s the only exercise you’ll make time for.
• You can’t rely on a spark of inspiration to get your work done. You just have to sit and do it while there’s still time to fix it later. (I know I should have taken this advice for this blog, but…)
• … Just because you know something doesn’t mean you took it to heart.
• It is so much harder to learn something you think you know than it is to learn something new.
• It’s okay not to know after all. You’re a student, your job is to learn.
• You should limit jokes about how often you cry to TV, movies, and books; otherwise you will learn to take the real crying lightly, and maybe you shouldn’t.
• You are not above counselling. Thinking so will make it harder to go when you may need it.
• Letting looming deadlines light a fire under your butt is not a replacement for self-discipline.
• Without discipline, you will never have the time to do the things you love.
• You will find the time anyway and have fun all the same.
• You will always be a student, in some way, at every point in your life. This is a privilege. There is freedom in reminding yourself you always have room to grow.

Even if all we can do is keep up, I hope that you, too, find your sun spot.

I’ll see you at the end of October.

Jaclyn