{"id":24232,"date":"2015-09-28T10:27:41","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T14:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=15819"},"modified":"2026-03-26T09:59:32","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:59:32","slug":"erins-blog-freefall-and-a-bio-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2015\/erins-blog-freefall-and-a-bio-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Erin's Blog – Freefall (and a Bio)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\n\n
\n
\n
\n

\n Erin's Blog – Freefall (and a Bio)\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n
\"Erin<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think one can ever be fully mentally or emotionally prepared to throw oneself out of a plane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For most of the week prior, I had repressed the reality of the upcoming jump; even when I began to, in spite of myself, imagine the moment of egress\u2014ground, then not ground; solid, then air<\/em>\u2014nothing in my imaginings could have compared to the actual moment. And so, it felt very sudden: the wait on the ground lasted three hours, the climb to 10,000 feet in the tiny, rickety plane took eight minutes, the shuffle into position seemed to take an age, and yet, in the end, it is the smallest, tiniest fraction of a second that makes all the difference. In plane; not in plane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then: 30 seconds\u201430 of the longest seconds imaginable. Freefall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me be clear: I am not the kind of person who jumps out of planes (even with a tandem jump instructor attached to my back, in charge of pulling the chute and generally getting me to the ground alive.) I am, by all accounts, a rather timid person, plagued by anxiety and fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, ruminating upon my skydiving experience once the dust had settled and my heart started beating properly again, I also realized that the feeling of it\u2014the jump\u2014was not as unfamiliar as one would think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I arrived at Carleton, I thought I was going to major in Political Science. Officially I was \u201cundeclared,\u201d but I took all of the intro classes, poured over the list of required courses, planned the upcoming four years down to each elective. I did all of my readings, attended (most) of my lectures, and found a lot of the material very interesting. But in these classes I discovered a great evil, fated, I believed, to bring my doom, the ruination of my university career: tutorials, and the 10% of my grade devoted to my participation there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I couldn\u2019t do it. Once, my very sweet and incredibly compassionate TA actually asked me to talk about what kind of coffee I was drinking, in an effort to get me to just say something<\/em>, and even then I could barely stutter out two words with an apologetic smile (as if to rub it in, my one little utterance led the group into a lively debate on chain-versus-local and branding; shame on me for drinking Starbucks.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amidst my various PoliSci intro courses, I had signed up for an English First Year Seminar. I\u2019ve been a voracious reader all my life, and so it had only made sense. The reading list appealed to me, Rate My Professor approved my choice, and so it was done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was in this English class that I first offered an opinion in class. Revving up to raising my hand was much like the eight minute plane ride up to 10,000 feet\u2014my heart leapt to my throat, my stomach dropped, I actually, I am embarrassed to say, started shaking. And then my professor called upon me, and suddenly: not speaking\u2026 and then speaking.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freefall is glorious. When I let myself think about the jump in the days, hours leading up to it, when I allowed myself to think about deriving any kind of enjoyment out of the experience, I thought I would like parachuting: gliding through the air, nothing but the gentle flap of the chute like a sail on a boat, surveying the world from 5,000 feet up, flying<\/em>. But in actuality, freefall\u2014that was the best part. It was thrilling, it was exhilarating. It stole the air out of my lungs and filled me with elation. It was monumental; it felt like freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking in class that first time was a lot like freefall. It was exhilarating, I found, to discover that I could actually string intelligent words together in a sentence. From there it was all parachute\u2014I had gotten myself out of the plane and now it was time to leisurely enjoy the scenery. After class, I walked from the classroom to the nearest available table and changed my major to English, high on 16th<\/sup> century poetry. I have never regretted the decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an Arts major, I feel like we hear a lot about what an Arts degree can do for you<\/em>; we feel the need to prove our practicality, prove that what we are doing is worthwhile. The determination we hear in these defences makes us feel like the opposition to this view must be fierce, even if we have never really had it delivered to us in explicit terms. And our defences are gorgeous. Olivia Polk, from whom I am inheriting this blog, quoted Margaret Mead in her opening piece last year, asserting that an Arts degree teaches you how to think, instead of what to think; I couldn\u2019t agree more. There are so many amazing things I have learned in the course of my degree\u2014university has been a whirlwind of new ideas, and studying literature in particular has been a constant and demanding exercise in perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than anything else, literature, and this degree, has pushed me out of planes. It has pushed me into professor\u2019s office hours, into conversations with intimidatingly intelligent people, into entering my own creative writing into a short story competition, into applying for a prestigious undergraduate fellowship I never dreamed I\u2019d actually get; thanks to that last, I\u2019m writing this in my room at Smith College, Massachusetts, across from the house where Sylvia Plath lived when she attended the college herself in the fifties (sometime next week, I plan to go look at original copies of her letters; they have a collection, as well as a collection of Virginia Woolf\u2019s letters, in the library\u2019s rare book room.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I found at Carleton, in the English Department, was something that I loved enough to challenge the limits I had, in fear, placed upon myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, if I can offer a piece of advice, from whatever wisdom I may have gleaned from my small collection of life experiences thus far: take your leap, whatever form it may take. If there is something I hope everyone can experience during this period of our lives, it is the thrill of learning that you are capable of more than you thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Although, a brief PSA: parachutes, real and figurative, are advised.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Erin Shields: A Quick Biography<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Erin Shields is a 4th year English student, currently studying at Smith College on a Killam Fellowship. She is especially interested in language and the way ideas about narrative can be applied to everyday experience; however, she is really just incredibly passionate about whatever she happens to be learning about on a given day, and is now in the process of trying to shape her interests into some kind of identifiable life path (if anyone has any good ideas, feel free to contact her.) Erin enjoys reading (obviously), tea (because she is a proud clich\u00e9), travel (which she would always like to do more of), music (which she studied seriously for a number of years), and peanut butter (all-natural, salted, creamy.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t think one can ever be fully mentally or emotionally prepared to throw oneself out of a plane. For most of the week prior, I had repressed the reality of the upcoming jump; even when I began to, in spite of myself, imagine the moment of egress\u2014ground, then not ground; solid, then air\u2014nothing in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[26,117,25,849],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-erin-blog","category-student-blogs","category-student-voices"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24232"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53682,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24232\/revisions\/53682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}