{"id":36860,"date":"2021-04-08T17:49:20","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T17:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=36860"},"modified":"2026-03-26T09:58:28","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:58:28","slug":"jaclyns-blog-so-long-carleton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2021\/jaclyns-blog-so-long-carleton\/","title":{"rendered":"Jaclyn’s Blog – So Long Carleton!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Jaclyn’s Blog – So Long Carleton!\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Dear fellow students,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014one final essay season\u2014and then I will be graduating from Carleton with a BA in English<\/a>. But before I do all that, I have to say goodbye to this blog. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past two years, this blog has been a lifeline connecting me to my program\u2014first, when I was too busy to spend time on campus, and then, when we didn\u2019t have the choice to meet there anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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 <\/em>in a community: of students, of lifelong learners, of sleep-deprived coffee addicts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond these labels, we don\u2019t have much in common. This is not to say I didn\u2019t 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\u2019s Anatomy <\/em>three times, who own several reptiles, who put maple syrup in their coffee, who handle stress in a way that stresses you <\/em>out. Inside the classroom and out, you can feel the horizons of your brain expand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s all of these things in one day, or in one class. “We contain multitudes”. (Achievement unlocked: cheesy Whitman\/Dylan quote. I\u2019ve held off for this long, I couldn\u2019t resist, forgive me.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Jaclyn
Jaclyn and Goji<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This desire to speak to and for all of us oddballs culminated in twin blog posts where I interviewed students<\/a> and professors<\/a> in the English department<\/a> about the trials and triumphs of online learning. This is my proudest accomplishment as this department\u2019s 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\u2019m gone, when you\u2019re back in classrooms and office hours again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And after I\u2019m gone, well, who knows where I will be? I sure don\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n

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All the digs about English degrees or Arts degrees being useless don\u2019t mean a thing to me because I know what I got out of mine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I don\u2019t 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\u2019t actually enjoy things that are happening right now<\/em>. 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\u2019re lukewarm. I keep working and working so I can take a big <\/em>break later and when later rolls around, there\u2019s more work to do. Or my body stops doing work at an inconvenient time because it has taken a break for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to leave you with a story about how I learned to work with my body by living in the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you\u2019re behind on sleep, your body takes longer rests whenever it can to make up for it. I always get enough sleep, but without waking <\/em>rest, my body steps in and rests for<\/em> me. I didn\u2019t realize it until recently, but my body has always <\/em>been trying to rest for me. I can\u2019t start working for hours after I wake up and I need a few more hours to unwind before I can fall asleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was my schedule, up until recently: wake up at 11 am, grumbling and swearing I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/em>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. <\/em>I had to do the things I wanted to do so I could do the things my body didn\u2019t want to do. I had to work with my body instead of against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I wake up around 9 am, unless it\u2019s raining, in which case my body goes rogue and sleeps eleven uninterrupted hours. I won\u2019t 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\u2019ll do it again. I like being awake in the morning, I love having evenings to myself, and I don\u2019t know how I ever lived another way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Here are my takeaways from this story:<\/p>\n\n\n\n