the ch!cktionary

    21 Apr 2011

    aaaquelinda asked: I, too, am unhappy in the ivy league. But my biggest fear is for people to know. No one knows. How do you do it?

    I was also scared to write about being at Harvard and being unhappy when I first started talking about these things on Sex And The Ivy. At the time, I was 19 and I felt like I owed it to my family and the financial aid department and myself to be content given that I was at Harvard, the epitome of everything my parents ever wanted for me. What was there to be sad about, right? I didn’t feel like I had a right to my emotions, and I was so worried that talking publicly about it would lead people to call me a spoiled Ivy Leaguer without real problems. And sure, some people did exactly that, but I was also surprised by how many others experienced the same thing and could understand perfectly the sadness and pain that I was going through.

    Whenever I wrote or write about mental health and how it impacts those in privileged spaces, like elite schools, I always get an influx of responses. It’s a topic about which people are desperate for discussion, and there’s so much stigma attached to it that we’ve created a culture of silence and shame. After I published yesterday’s post about depression among my friends at Harvard, I received about ten private emails and messages within the span of two hours from people who could relate all too well. And that doesn’t even take into account the public comments or the reblogs from folks on Tumblr. One commenter posted a link to this piece by a Yale senior who wrote:

    I first realized that mental health problems were more common than I had thought when I started talking to people about my own struggles. I have always been hesitant to tell people about my anxiety and depression—some part of me still believes people will judge me, see me as a burden, or worst of all, feel like they haven’t been getting to know the real me … Yet, as I speak more openly about my own struggles, I am finding that the people I talk to—be it students, professors, or family members—not only understand, but often respond with accounts of their own mental health problems. Some of the most well-known, successful people I have met here see therapists, are on medication, or seek other solutions to these challenges.

    When I blogged about my depression, I was moved by the outpouring of support that I received from fellow students and alums. It didn’t necessarily make me any less depressed, but I did feel less alone and more entitled to my emotions. I’m not a psychologist so I can’t tell you what’s going to make you less unhappy, but I think a good starting point is to become more comfortable with talking about your problems, whether that’s with a therapist or your parents or your roommates. Your depression does not mean that you’re a failure, which is what I used to think about myself. And then I realized that any definition of success requiring me to deny vulnerability to human frailty was not a definition that was healthy for me.

    More burning questions? Ask Lena.

    Related posts on depression and mental health:

    Then & Now, Once Again
    I’m Amazed At How Much This Still Bothers Me
    Addendum On Why I Transferred
    The Death Of Optimism

    20 Apr 2011

    “I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the summer before I was to begin at Yale as a member of the Class of 2005. My psychiatrist determined that I would begin treatment once I arrived there — across the country. Alone. 18 years old … I received poor care from the psychiatrist that I was assigned to at Mental Hygiene. That was what it was called: Mental Hygiene. Like my brain needed to be scrubbed clean, which it did. Some of my new friends knew that I was going to Mental Hygiene. One of them, a girl from an Asian American performance group I was a member of, told me in an elevator, “Don’t ever, ever tell them if you want to kill yourself.” “Yeah,” someone else chimed in. “Never. Unless you want to end up in the hospital.” I said I wouldn’t. (Think about this piece of advice: never tell anyone that YOU WANT TO KILL YOURSELF.) “They have a bad rap,” the girl said. “I know two people who’ve ended up in the hospital because of that.”
    — Meggy Wang, Why I Left Yale: Mental Illness & Higher Education - The Novelist’s Hubris

    This is exactly what happens at Harvard. If you’re honest, you get kicked out. Is it any wonder that so many people suffer in silence?

    20 Apr 2011

    On Harvard & (Un)Happiness

    I’ve recently begun to write at length about the depression and anxiety and occasional suicidal tendencies that I and many of my friends struggled against as students at Harvard. It’s been a year since graduation and nearly three years since I moved off campus. I think time has finally given me enough perspective to approach my undergraduate experience with less bitterness and more objectivity. And it’s made me wonder lately if Harvard were really responsible for the emotional malaise experienced by so many of us there or if we all came in with pre-existing psychological conditions and would have wound up going crazy* wherever we attended college. I tend to think that it’s the former, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the college admissions process favors girls like my 18-year-old self: full of insecurity and idealism, a combination ensuring swift disillusionment and the ensuing melancholy of my sophomore and junior years.

    I’ve been thinking about this because I’m constantly astonished by the number of people who leave school or who want to leave but can’t. And while many of my friends dealt with depression before they ever got to Cambridge, there are also plenty of folks who might’ve been categorized as “normal” freshman, only to find themselves unable to cope a year or two later. That was what happened to me. I thought I’d had some sort of undiagnosed mental illness. I quite literally found myself unable to do anything, and I thought that there was something incredibly wrong with me. In retrospect, the unremitting sadness and unease I experienced from 2006-8 were perfectly understandable given the circumstances under which I lived.  If I placed you in my shoes and forced you to sleep and eat and study among people who constantly mocked and judged you, you’d go nuts too. You’d also hate everyone and hate everything and never leave your room. But what I find particularly disturbing is that I presented a somewhat unique case. I wrote a public sex blog that made me a target for criticism and exacerbated existing feelings of isolation, but what about all those unhappy people who didn’t? Everyone goes through tough times, but at any other college, do this many students find themselves simply unable to cope? Do this many students feel alone or ashamed for not being able to continue on? And when the majority of students have experienced depression over the course of four years, then does the problem lie with us or with the institution?

    The consensus among my friends is that Harvard drives normal people crazy and drives crazy people to suicide. I wish I were making some sort of exaggerated statement here but I’m not**. At which point are suicidal students exceptions and at which point are they indicative of a systemic problem, perhaps across the Ivy League? Does the burn-out and depression so common among Harvard kids plague students at other elite institutions? Is our school not the only where people habitually overcommit to academic and extracurricular things but flake out on personal obligations? Is this is an inherent feature of colleges that emphasize achievement at all costs? Because if it is, in fact, systemic, then any steps taken to alleviate the problem (expanding mental health services, etc.) are only going to treat the symptoms. I hesitate to say that Harvard was built to create unhappy people, because it wasn’t. It’s built to create successful people. The problem is that “success” is defined by social notions of prestige, reputation, and wealth. And given how difficult it is to obtain those things and how frequently my peers and I were told that we must obtain them, is it any wonder that people feel fucked up for not being able to simply do what seems to come so easily to their classmates?

    For anything meaningful to change at Harvard, the institution would have to challenge the very idea of success. And that would mean that Harvard would have to cease being Harvard.

    I’m not holding my breath.

    * I use the term “crazy” because I’ve never viewed this word negatively, since many of my friends and I have self-identified as “crazy” over the years. It’s not a term I would use to describe another individual’s mental state. I’d also warn anyone going through my archives to be aware that we’ve frequently made jokes about psychological disorders and suicide, often as a means of coping with our own issues, but that these attempts at humor are potentially triggering for others.

    ** I don’t have any statistics that speak to the frequency of suicidal thoughts on campus, only personal experiences and the knowledge that several individuals close to me (both with and without a history of mental illness) have contemplated ending their lives while we were undergrads.

    31 Dec 2010

    Then & Now, Once Again

    I wanted to write an end-of-year round-up of my favorite posts, press mentions, published articles, but in the middle of going through my archives, I stopped seeing the point. Everything is on this website, if you want to read it. (My most interesting pieces, I found, were usually written in response to reader questions.) Anyhow, instead of reveling in the awesomeness that was my year, I took a little trip back in time to a less happy period of my life. I revisited a piece I posted to SexAndTheIvy.com in July 2007. That New York summer, I wrote the following:

    I’m incredibly scared of loss. And I know I shouldn’t feel like I lose something by sleeping with someone, but I do. I decided to stop having sex because I was sick of giving away all these pieces of myself and subsequently worrying about unintentional attachment, ill-advised yearning. It felt like I had no control.

    When I reread this in March 2009, I said:

    I feel so far away from this girl, and yet, I think I finally understand what people mean when they tell me that my blog entries make them wish that they could give me a hug … Now, when I read myself, I feel sad. I feel sad that I was so utterly broken that I was incapable of experiencing any sort of emotion toward men. I had made up my mind at this point that this blog meant more to me than social acceptance, that what I stood for was more important than the existence of a love life, and that there was no possibility of love in any case since no man would willingly sign up for this.

    I used to drink to the point of blacking out three or four times a week as a freshman, because I was so depressed. So nothing that happened the year afterward seemed particularly distressing in comparison. My sophomore year of college was fairly disastrous as far as my love life was concerned. Seemingly against all odds, I passed my classes. At that point, I still vaguely cared about school, but I was already well on my way toward sleeping the days away in a haze of depression and/or inebriation. Until at some point, I found myself incapable of leaving my dorm room. But even then, I managed to rally. I took out-of-town trips on a bimonthly basis. That spring, I decided I wanted a clean slate and obtained a transfer to a different house for the following fall. I applied to as many New York City internships as possible and got two offers for the summer. I wanted badly to escape. Given that I was counting down the last days of the semester, I wasn’t what I’d describe as happy. But I yearned for the future, and when you’re used to hopelessness, yearning is a good sign.

    New York was a lot of things for me. Emotional independence in the absence of my college confidantes. New friends and coworkers. A new kind of thinking, a living in the moment, a ceasing of worry and anxiety about the future. New drugs and games, same old fakery, but at that point, the glitter of the City hadn’t yet worn off. I never wanted it to end. I wasn’t necessarily what I’d describe as “happy”, but there was something freeing about the experience, because I later noted:

    As closed off as I was, I was undeniably happy that summer and happy to go back to school and happy to be alone. I was finally free of seemingly endless heartbreaks and disappointments, because I had ceased to hope. And in a strange, satisfying way, I was incredibly at peace for the first time in a long time. In the back of my mind, I thought, ‘I’m going to be alone forever, and this suits me just fine.’

    I dated an actor at the end of that summer for about a month. I slept next to him even though we were completely wrong for each other. I don’t know why I did it, because even then, I knew it didn’t work, that it was a waste of time, that it meant nothing. But maybe I needed to prove to myself that I could still go through the motions. I didn’t, in the end, learn to feel again, but he was the last person to see me when I left New York.

    I never admitted this publicly, but I wanted badly to take a gap year then. My summer internship led to a full-time job offer, one I didn’t take because my mother was unwilling to consent. (Despite the fact that, as an adult, I didn’t really need her consent, this was before I told her about my blog and rebelled against her authority by pulling shit like flying out of the continent without her knowledge.) I got my house transfer, alright, and the perpetrator of my sophomore year heartbreak had graduated, but I was not at all excited about the prospect of returning to school. I had never been happy at Harvard; I didn’t see how junior year would be different. I begged my mother to reconsider. I’d have a salary (a salary higher than anything I’ve since been offered and twice as much as any first-year editorial gig). And I already knew New York. She said no. She didn’t want me to take five years to graduate. As it would turn out, I’d take that long anyway.

    I don’t blame my mother. She’s not the reason my naked photos ended up on the Internet and not the reason people laughed at me and not the reason I failed school my junior spring. I did that all on my own, thankyouverymuch. But very occasionally, I do wonder how differently life would’ve turned out had I not come back to Harvard a year older and a tad more resentful, if I would’ve learned on my own in New York the independence and fearlessness that others assumed I’d already obtained.

    In any case, no regrets.

    At first, junior year really didn’t seem particularly special. I stopped pretending like I enjoyed the final club parties and recruiting events, but I was still hanging out with the same five people and still — as much as I loathe to admit it — sleeping with the same three completely off-limit dudes. There was astonishingly little progression in the arena of sex. But unlike sophomore year, something was different about me. I ceased to feel inadequate when I looked in the mirror. I spotted cracks in the arrogant facades of my classmates. I stopped waiting for boys to come around. I still dated. I still flirted. But there was this profound distrust, not because men were untrustworthy (though some of them certainly were), but because boys were unreliable. And most men were really just boys in grown-up clothes. That’s why, when I did meet Patrick, I didn’t write intimately about him:

    I never did put much of my relationship with Patrick down into words. In retrospect, it was because he meant more to me than anyone ever had, and transcribing my feelings to text suggested a permanence I wasn’t ready for. It’d be admitting that he meant something to me, and even if he didn’t know it and my readers didn’t know it, I would certainly know it.

    I met Patrick during what was probably the most emotionally tumultuous period of my life. I was so utterly terrified of loss, of losing Kennedy, of losing my family’s support (if they found out about this blog), of losing him, and honestly, of losing myself in him. I was so afraid of losing the ability to be alone and happy at the cusp of 20. And while I desperately wanted this to work out, I simply couldn’t envision a future with him. I couldn’t envision a future with anyone, because I had become so fully cynical in my views about love.

    In my head, I still think of Patrick as that thing that changed everything, not because our relationship is my most significant, but because he offered an escape from this place that I hated, from this place that made me hate myself. But really, if you look at my junior year of college and everything that happened and the things that preceded it, I’m not sure that Patrick’s presence made much of a difference either way. I hadn’t gotten kicked out yet, but I was mentally checked out, so ready to leave Harvard, to be anywhere but Cambridge, to be anyone but a sex blogger who lived among people who looked down on her for stating what they were too well-bred to admit out loud. So maybe, if it hadn’t been Patrick, it would’ve been something else.

    Sometimes, I think that I willed myself into getting out of there, but of course, that isn’t the truth either. Unlike the unhappy semesters before, junior spring was different because I was, for the first time, optimistic. And I remember thinking that I really ought to finish my papers and I remember that I really didn’t quite care. Perhaps because I could no longer fake it. As long as I believed in the allure of Harvard, then I’d have a reason to work toward my degree, but I was so fully disgusted with everything that had happened, so disappointed by how petty and cruel my classmates could be, that I literally could not muster up the simple desire to keep on going on. I got kicked out of school over a 20-page paper I was perfectly capable of writing. It’s easier to chalk it up to laziness, but I don’t think it could’ve been that. I had to deal with huge amounts of fall-out, not just from the administration, but from my parents. It’s what made me decide to tell them the truth about my blog. Was I really just not interested in writing that paper? Or was my desire to leave Harvard so strong that I opted for self-sabotage? How much of that did I choose? I still don’t know.

    In any case, it was that gap year and not Patrick, not any feminist awakening, that saved my sanity. SexAndTheIvy.com ended for a lot of reasons, but the one I don’t often mention (and didn’t quite admit to until March 2009) is the following:

    The unstated goal of blogging was always to figure out who I was and who I wanted to become. Now that I know … well, this blog will never be what it once was, because I’m not who I once was. To be honest, I hope I never feel compelled to write here again. It’s an artifact from a time when I was unsure about many things, most of all my worthiness of being loved.

    Yet as significant as that year was, most of it went unrecorded. I said then that I didn’t want to turn Patrick into a character, that this version of him will seem like such a distant representation of who he later becomes. This is how I feel about most of the characters on my blog today. This is how I feel even about my closest friends, who I wrote about and whose desire for privacy ultimately contributed to my decision to stop blogging.

    When I say “characters”, I do not mean that I purposely fictionalized anyone, but I do admit that it is extremely difficult for me today to differentiate between what I wrote and what I lived. In part, it’s because I don’t really remember a lot of early college. And it’s not because I was drunk for most of it (despite all the tongue-in-cheek references to drug/alcohol misuse).  The strange truth is that after I met Patrick, left school, and moved to Boston, I forgot a lot of what happened. Quite literally. I have worked on enough book proposals in the time since to realize that there are some serious gaps in my memory for which there are no explanations. I don’t recall significant experiences during which I was undoubtedly sober and for which the rest of my friends were present. Until I started rereading SexAndTheIvy.com for the purpose of completing this book proposal, I’d completely forgotten the fact that I flung a hard object (my Motorola RAZR, I believe) at my sophomore fall fling and punched my sophomore spring hook-up (albeit with his consent) after I found out he had a girlfriend. In the back of my head, I knew that these events had occurred. I must’ve, right? But if I never could’ve reconstructed them on my own, without the help of an online diary or an old friend’s hints, do they count as memories?

    Maybe I partied too hard in college after all and now I’ve permanently compromised my ability to recall the past. I think the more likely explanation is repression. There were a lot of things at the time that I never wanted to forget, because I knew, even then, that these would become formative lessons in my life. So I wrote them down. I wanted to remember the heartbreaks, the never-ending unhappiness, my sexual coming-of-age. And I knew, despite what anyone said about me, despite my purported hurt at criticism and slurs, that there was nothing wrong with being genuine, even if my honesty came at the price of my pride. Still, once I broke free of Harvard, not only did I never look back, but I apparently made an unconscious effort to forget what life was like.

    I never read SexAndTheIvy.com. Since I stopped the daily updates in 2008, the only time I browse backward is when I’m writing a book proposal or doing fact-checking. When I take the time to reread full entries, it makes me nostalgic, sometimes sad. Mostly, it makes me frightened, frightened that someone can simultaneously be so profoundly impacted by experiences of trauma and yet not even remember how they came to be who they are. The fact that I can’t remember without the help of an online chronicle bothers me more than the fact that I once felt hurt. The latter happens to everyone, doesn’t it? But the former … that only happens to those who aren’t quite at peace with the past, those who maybe still blame or hate themselves — even just a little bit — for what happened then, those who found that forgetting is easier than forgiving.

    Reblogged: lenachen

    31 Dec 2010

    “

    I also went to a low-performing public school and lived in a rather working class area … So, when I managed to get admission and a scholarship to the top university in my country (Australia), I felt as though my story meant that the complaints of my classmates, that they could expect too much, were ridiculous. They could have been in my position too if they just worked hard enough and had a bit of natural ability. I’ve since learned that people like me - exceptions - exist in order to serve some bigger narrative of how just our education system is, when clearly, it isn’t just at all … I feel like being an exception is also such a problematic part of my identity. And all this time, I had been valuing what I thought were ‘good’ traits, intellectualism, determination, etc., when really I’ve just been playing into this elitist and limited vision of what these things might entail.

    Another thing I find so strange and a little scary about US colleges is that they assess applications on well-roundedness, like a kind of hyper-meritocracy where, if you didn’t get in, it’s not just because you failed to meet whatever academic requirements they might be arbitrarily imposing on you, rather it’s because you supposedly have failed as a person. You aren’t charitable enough, you aren’t good enough of a leader, you haven’t played enough sport, etc. all of your experiences aren’t valuable. Which of course is absurd, not measurable and just as arbitrary as just having academic requirements.

    ”
    — Erin, in a comment on my post about college admissions

    29 Dec 2010

    A fat envelope is not what it's cracked up to be.

    A reader wrote:

    Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford…

    I think most people go through a phase during which they want to go to a school like that. They believe that they could go to a school like that. Up until recently, I wanted/believed that I could get into X. 

    “I’m different,” I told myself (in vain, I suppose). “I like this school for x, y, and z reasons. I have this visceral response whenever I think of it. I’m not like the kids who are just applying for the prestige. I’m smart! I could thrive here. I could do really, really well. They have to see that in my application. They have to know how much I love it/need it/want it. They have to know that so much is riding on this—my parents, my social life, freedom in a sense.”

    They didn’t see that, and now I’ve lost all that confidence. I worry about getting into any college, much less those colleges. 

    There are those who spend an adolescence aspiring and preparing for Ivy League admission, and there are those who get in as longshots. I count myself, a first-generation college graduate with imperfect grades, among the latter group. For me, getting in was not a confirmation of innate ability. It was the first of many tests. I spent five years trying to prove that I belonged here, among the ranks of the best and the brightest. Back then, I still believed in meritocracy, the idea that you work and ultimately obtain what you earned. When you feel as if you didn’t really quite deserve something, you become consumed with proving that you could’ve and would’ve, if only you had been given adequate notice.

    It was in part Harvard’s doing that I ultimately recognized meritocracy for what it was: complete bunk. It was at Harvard, after all, that I learned about inequality, through textbooks and observation and personal experience. College acceptance, like all other achievements in a class-stratified society, have nothing to do with just dessert. In retrospect, my acceptance fit in quite neatly with elite rhetoric on hard work and perseverance. I was the perfect beneficiary of a University diversity initiative, a one-woman All-American success story, an idealistic aspiring writer whose shoddy science grades were forgiven, because after all, her parents were immigrants and she went to an under-funded public school anyway. A fat envelope from Harvard was not proof positive that meritocracy works, but Harvard was responsible for rendering my particular story powerful to those who wanted to believe that they could earn entrance through Ivy gates. I cringed whenever The Crimson profiled someone like me, someone who didn’t come from the “right” background, but managed to make it nonetheless. The message was, of course, that you, too, could make it here. If only you worked hard enough, if only you yearned hard enough, if only you you you you you …

    Is it any wonder that when someone doesn’t get in, they wonder if they themselves are the only ones to blame?

    Maybe there are those who really believe that a Harvard acceptance has validated their intelligence, but even those classmates I’d always presumed to be arrogant, those who weren’t at all critical of the institution that “made” them, even they were not exempt from self-doubt when they were denied internships, fellowships, job offers, and honors conferred upon others. The problem with prestige (and the problem with money) is that even when obtained, it is never quite enough. One feels the continual need to maintain it, to prove it to ourselves long after we’ve proved it to others. And rather than questioning the standard by which we demonstrate our worthiness, we enslave ourselves to it. While I maintain that I am stronger and wiser for the experience, I’m not sure I would wish my undergraduate years on my worst enemy.

    (Source: rodham)

    Reblogged: rodham

    27 Dec 2010

    Gay is just the tip of the iceberg.

    Speaking of my friends, the fact that Jason is gay is really quite minor, considering that my social group contains individuals at varying levels of crazy. Legit crazy! In the medicated sense of the word. Just among my closest friends, I can count a bipolar, a narcoleptic*, and an obsessive-compulsive. Who have all, at one point or another, literally wanted to kill themselves. (All these conditions pre-dated Harvard, but our fine institution, I’m convinced, only exacerbated them.) Luckily, we’ve learned through the years that life can, in fact, be bearable, especially when one learns how to make light of mental illnesses and crack suicide jokes, in lieu of actually attempting suicide, which would just be tragic and not very funny at all. (I do feel bad for the people who overhear us discuss these morbid topics, but the comfort of strangers is just collateral damage in the quest to sustain meaning in life.)

    This is why I always inwardly chuckle when I hear someone proclaim that “so-and-so is fucking nuts”! Such hyperbole, really. I mean, have you ever lived with an anti-social bipolar person misdiagnosed as depressed and mistreated with anti-depressants? Because I have! And trust me, it’s all fun and games until someone’s neurons start misfiring.

    * Though narcolepsy is not, as a reader points out in the comments, a mental illness

    22 Dec 2010

    A Harvard Education

    I was once in a lecture where a student tried quite earnestly to explain the concept of Engrish to Gerald Gabrielse, the dude who passed me in “Reality Physics” but is better known for being among the first to trap anti-matter.

    To put this in perspective: this is kind of like explaining Ebonics to Einstein. While he’s teaching you the theory of relativity.

    Tags: Harvard.

    8 Dec 2010

    Our alma mater is a permanent liability.

    • Kennedy: Do you know any straight men who are competent at dating?
    • Me: Um, no. Hello, we went to Harvard.
    • (Though the whole socially awkward schtick can be awfully effective ...)
    Tags: quotables. Harvard.