Bouncing back
Do I have a right to talk about failure when I’m only 20 years old?
Some would say no. Actually I think most would say no. When you’re young, everything is awesome; at least, everyone else seems to think so. You’ve neither hit your highest peak nor your lowest low, so nothing you do at this age matters. Most people think of youth as the rosy daze of parties, sometimes-good-sometimes-shitty relationships, friends, and carefree abandon.
Personally, I have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
My university career has been very little about my academic work, and even less so about my social life. I have less than five friends that I actively rely on at university, and my schoolwork is more of a hum in the background than my active passion. I’ve never sat excitedly in the office of a university professor while we exchange a heated scholarly debate, like college brochures told me I would; I have had my professor roll his eyes at my essay while very generously deciding to bump my grade an additional 2%. (Generous indeed for U of T.)
No, my university life has more or less been about preparing for my life after university. College has never felt like anything more than a series of preparations for something after; and because “luck favours the prepared”, I’ve tried to become very prepared.
If someone were to pay me for the hours that I’ve devoted to extracurricular work at U of T, I feel confident I could afford a house in this city, which has most recently become the city with the fastest rising housing prices in the world #yikes.
I’ve been involved in over a dozen clubs, but I only list about 5 or 6 on any public forum or resume. The subject matter of each club has ranged from consulting to non-profits to health to Model UN. Each club usually requires a weekly or biweekly meeting, as well as adhoc meetings on the side, plus fairly regular communication on a social media group and a group chat. You usually have the numbers of several club executives on hand at any given time, and typically the first message I get in the morning isn’t from my friends, but from a club member. Each role you take on involves some kind of work; I’ve done everything from designing front-to-back delegate handbooks to researching disarmament policy to calling Staples to negotiate a lower business card price to walking in frigid winter air to carry pizza and coffee to events. During peak seasons, when club events are plentiful and responsibilities pile up, it’s rare for me to get home before 10pm.
In the hours in between, I squeeze schoolwork. Professors often justify their large homework loads by claiming that an average workweek is 40 hours, and that therefore their one class (out of a standard five) should be 8 hours. This always makes me scoff a little bit, because it presumes we don’t do anything outside of schoolwork. Everyone knows in this day and age you won’t get any job without some kind of extracurricular, so in reality what you’re doing is working a full-time 40-hour-a-week job that is unpaid, alongside several hours of additional work in extracurriculars that are also unpaid. This does not count part-time jobs you may take on, which are a necessity for many students to offset student debt, and general housework. Unfortunately, being a poor student means you don’t get to eat healthy takeout every night, so you’re bound to be spending a few hours cooking or eating Tim Horton’s for the nth time. And if you’re like me, you also spend a few hours yelling at your landlord to clear the mice out of your house.
My university life has been, more or less, something like this.
It sounds tiring because it is tiring. Naturally a lot of people ask me why I do it; why don’t I just enjoy the moment, why do I spend so much time being anxious about the future etc. For me, the work isn’t tiring in and of itself; it’s tiring because I have no present ‘moment’ to enjoy.
I’ve spoken to close friends about how unhappy I’ve been in university, but I’ve struggled with how to say it in my blog. Storytelling is my strength, but strangely it’s my own story that I find the hardest to tell. Perhaps, then, it is best to say it straightforwardly. My time in university has been the hardest in my life. I have cried more nights than I care to admit and considered suicide more often than I ever thought I would. I’ve wept silently in a church hoping someone would answer my prayer. I have sat, waiting in the dark, for my friends hundreds of miles away, to respond to my sad late night texts; because somehow, in a city of a few million, I felt I had no one else. With all the glittering lights in Toronto, not one of those lights felt like my home, and of all the faces that pass me on the street, not one feels like a friend.
I came to Toronto with so much hope, thinking that all my dreams would come true here. I thought living in a big city would validate me and my dreams. I thought I was going to make the best friends of my life and ‘get my shit together’. I remember how excited I was to join the debate club in my first year, because it was my passion in high school and one of my primary reasons for coming. I also remember how ostracized I felt at that club, because I was not a member of a certain college, and how despite bidding for every tournament, I was never invited to one.
I remember reaching out to the president of that club one time, and asking if she realized inclusivity was a problem at this club. I told her that the atmosphere was toxic and uninviting, and that the club risked turning away potential members like this. She agreed with me, only to later say that there was nothing she was either willing to do about it, or that anyone else was willing to do about it. Then she unfriended me.
More or less, university life has felt like that. It’s felt like a lot of trying and a lot of rejection. I try my best to conceal my disappointment on the daily, but it’s hard, because disappointments pile up, and you begin to think it’s something wrong with you.
It was hard for me, to go from being a social butterfly back home in Calgary, where my circle of friends extended wide, to a nobody in Toronto. I was just one face in a sea of a thousand in Con Hall, and my class sizes never seemed to shrink as the semesters passed. I would try to say hi and be friendly to people in class, but I would never see them again. I’d try to join clubs to make friends, but I either found myself not fitting in (as in debate) or unable to make meetings and events regularly. And frankly, it was hard to deal with: because in all the free time I had to myself, who was I going to hang out with? In the hours in between class, who would I walk home with, go to dinner with, attend club events with?
The answer was nobody. Being alone is a skill I’ve built up very painfully throughout my time here, and it hurts me even now to say it, sitting alone in the student centre writing this blog. When I started to realize I was going to be alone, and the whole thing about ‘making the best friends of my life’ wasn’t going to happen, I decided to focus on the second half of my goal: building my career.
I threw myself into it; extracurriculars, networking, competitions. People often ask me how I manage my time, to do so much. The answer, more or less, is that when you have nothing else to turn to, work will be there for you. It’s boring, shitty, undervalued work, for sure; you’ll never get a thank you from your club president, and recruiters will never take the work you do seriously; but it was work, nonetheless. I usually hesitate to praise myself, but I don’t hesitate to say I worked harder than anybody else I knew. I worked longer and harder hours. I took on work in more fields than I had to, sometimes juggling leadership positions in 3 or 4 clubs at a time. I would run from meeting to event to class to meeting to event to class, until eventually, I would be home, skipping dinner and waking up at 6 to restart the cycle.
And I was alone. Fuck, it was so hard. It’s still so hard. Sometimes I just want someone to tell me I’m doing okay. I don’t give a shit if a recruiter tells me I’m smart, or if people say, wow, you’re so accomplished. I want someone to tell me they like me at the end of the day. I want someone who will care about me, regardless of how good I am at case comps or what round interview I was invited back to.
I’ve done this for three years now, trying to conceal the fact that I am mostly friendless and overworked as shit. I’ve told myself that I am sacrificing now, so I can have something better in the future. ‘It’s okay that you don’t have friends now, and it’s okay that work is so hard, because all the work you’re doing now will pay off someday!’
I’m waiting for a dream job, a home that’s not infested with mice, friends that I can rely on, and a life where the hours I invest feel meaningful and appreciated. I’ve tried to appear peppy and happy in public, because no one wants to hire you if you’re depressed and anxious. There is nothing for me in school, so I am waiting for what comes after.
Recently, I was rejected from a job that I wanted very badly. It wasn’t the only job I applied to; I’ve applied to somewhere near 60. It was crushing, because it took me two months and 4 rounds of interviews to hear that ‘no’; but it was even more crushing because I had no other offers coming my way. It is likely I will be unemployed for the summer.
Unemployment for the summer shouldn’t be a big deal for a college student, because your youth is a rosy daze and nothing matters. But it does matter for me. Because when you’ve been alone and unhappy and tired as shit for three years, and devoting yourself to unappreciated and shitty work as hard as I have, you feel you are owed something. (ROI dammit)
I’ve had to jump through some stupid hurdles, from overcoming my rejection in the debate community because I wasn’t from a specific college, to being denied entry into events because I’m not a commerce student, to being passed up for interviews because my school doesn’t have as strong of alumni relations as another. Mentally, it’s been a challenge too; since childhood I was ‘groomed’ for the Ivy League, and after not making it in to the ones I applied to, I showed up to U of T more of as a last resort and feeling like I had something to prove from Day 1. I’ve had to find creative ways, often alone, to surpass these difficulties, squeezing in researching and networking for my future, alongside recovering a bruised confidence, alongside my 40-hour-a-week unpaid job and my 10+ hour-a-week extracurricular work. I don’t know how else I can prove myself.
A month or two ago, I made an anonymous survey asking people to submit stories of their failures to me. I said I would publish them in this blog post, because I was gonna write something feel-good or something; I lied. I only read them because I wanted to know if anyone felt the same way as me; to see, if, in fact, anyone understands what it’s like to be utterly alone, and to devote yourself to work in pursuit of a happier future, and then to realize maybe that future doesn’t want you anyway.
What is the point of this blog post? I don’t know. It’s so disorganized and I hate editing. Maybe I just want to protest, even a little bit, at how much this sucks. It would be okay for me to face rejection if I had people to turn to, but I don’t. It would be okay for me to continue devoting myself to work if it paid back, but it doesn’t. Instead it just feels like I’ve lost on all fronts. I’ve killed myself for something that didn’t payout, and it feels like there’s no one to pick me up.
I call this blog post ‘Bouncing back’ because I wanted to put a piece of advice here on how to bounce back from failure. This, my university life, has been my biggest failure to date. I’ve never been more unhappy with my life and with myself than I have in these last three years. I was hoping to have a solution by now, but I don’t. In a way, that’s why I call it ‘Bouncing back’ and not ‘Bounced back’; because I’m still in the process of doing it.
Recently, while I don’t think I’ve fully bounced back, I’ve started to worry less about the Kristen in the future, and more about the Kristen today. I’ve devoted myself more to this blog, to my photography, and to a few kind people I’ve met at school; none of these things will matter in the future, but they make me, today, feel good about myself. Writing this feels easy, and good, even though there are more productive ways I could be working, like networking, writing my 97th cover letter, or pruning my LinkedIn, again. I’m trying to rediscover the 20-year-old I know I am, even though I feel 40 and jaded inside.
I’ve been running a hard race, with myself, for a long time, and after being knocked down so many times I don’t know how to run again. It feels like it would be easier to lie down and give up. Slowly though, I feel like I might be able to walk again; just not yet.
