Balance
Not a week has passed since I wrote my last article about my elation at being back on the Tufts campus surrounded by social and intellectual stimulants. And yet. Today I have not left my dorm building and have spent most of my time in the kitchen eating out of containers and reading the same sentence over and over again.
I am already rocking between exhilaration and exhaustion, sociability and solitude.
There are times when I am frantically planning my day down to the last minute (5:54PMeatdinner6:17PMcallmom). On those days, I run around trying to fit everything I need to do into 24 hours, tired but energized by movement and busyness. Those are the days I have no problem with. They make me appreciate every moment that I am spending productively in college, where each minute not only counts, but probably costs some percentage of my tuition. I love being busy, getting things done, and interacting with people.
Then there are times when I just can’t bring myself to be with people or do anything remotely productive. I was invited to a social event last night which involved walking outside in the cold and existing in a loud environment with tons of people. If I had known a little earlier that this event was going on, I probably would have been able to mentally prepare myself for it, but I was notified only two hours before the event started, and I was so ready to just get in bed and watch a TV show. So I declined. I thought nothing of it at the time, but it preluded an entire next day of staying indoors and hiding from society. I’m not a natural extrovert, and when I begin to shell myself inwards, I spiral out of control and have a hard time getting out again. It began to happen. And so I have ended up where this article began: leftover-eating and doing what professors would call ‘inactive reading’.
It’s easy to pass that image off as the sad antisocial college student, but as many actual college students will admit, it’s actually a very real and familiar self portrait. I think a lot of college students fluctuate between being very social and then taking a few days of take-out-food-induced laziness. Society often sees the reclusive side of the cycle as negative and unproductive. I just need to remember how nice it is to have time to consider things: time out from the busily turning wheel of assignments, quizzes, and readings: fast moments in sequence, over and over and over. I’ve been thinking lately about balance. The need to balance both sides of us. For me, I always have this tendency to get way too intense about a single thing. When I’m in my social/productive phase, I go all out for like a month and then completely tire myself out and withdraw into my room for days on end. Neither feels very good, and I am trying to balance the two sides of my personality.
On a different note, balance is also pertinent in terms of freedom and belonging. Although it may not seem so at first, the two things are quite opposite. Sometimes I think of what my life would be like if I was completely free of commitment – no clubs, no extracurriculars, no classes: how freeing that would be. But then I remember that true detachment from all types of organizations can leave a person feeling quite anxious and untethered. There is always a need to evaluate the choices you have made, the commitments you have agreed to. Are they worth my time? Are they making me feel like I belong to the organization, while still providing me with the autonomy to feel free? Balance. Today, I feel like I’m on a railroad track, balancing my way through my college career, trying not to fall to one side.