A case for selfishness

My senior year has not been what I expected. For some reason, I entered the fall semester with grand visions of fun, friends and carefree days of savoring the treasures of Duke and Durham. I imagined living off campus to be a great new adventure that would offer me a new space of expression.

But honestly, in a lot of ways, my senior year has sucked. Beyond the violent torrent of sleepless nights and constant rejections that marked the fall career recruitment season, one of the more defining events of my year has been the drama of my living situation. Shortly after moving into our apartment, my roommate and I discovered that our neighbors were insanely unfriendly to the point of abusiveness. After a particularly nasty encounter with my neighbor, I reached my breaking point. I stopped pretending that living off campus was a liberating experience and instead began pouring out my heart to my friends and family.

I told anyone who would listen how awful the situation was and how hard each day was getting. Dissolving my typical façade of content was much easier than I thought it would be and the network of support pushing back against my despair felt really good. I would call my mom crying and feel validated about my sadness. Friends gladly let me sleep at their places so that I wouldn’t have to face going back to the apartment. My roommate became my mainstay and we used each other for strength as we engaged in countless frustrating meetings and phone calls to begin the move-out process. Throughout this period of obvious misery, I experienced intense surges of support for which I am forever grateful.

However, after we finally moved into a new apartment halfway through the semester and attempted a fresh start, things didn’t get better. Although the external threat of my nauseating neighbors was gone, I was still feeling generally upset. I think I had rationalized all of my dissatisfaction and gloom with senior year by ascribing it entirely to my living situation. I no longer knew what I was feeling sad about, and unfortunately neither did my friends and family. Now that I could no longer rely on my concrete, “justified” measure of suffering to reach out to my support network, I felt lost. My friends and family continued to try to help, but I don’t think they knew how. Eventually, I began to feel like my gloominess was a burden on others, and I started to push it aside for the sake of my social life. I depended regularly on therapy to provide a cathartic space of refuge that didn’t make me feel guilty.

Even though I always tell other people that their feelings are valid, I still struggle to practice what I preach and reconcile my own thoughts and emotions through my interactions with others. Clouding my spaces of friendship with my problems has always seemed somewhat selfish to me, especially if they are not even concrete and easily relatable. People have their own busy lives and problems to confront and work through; why should they feel compelled to waste time and energy on mine? This kind of perverted logic has traditionally consumed the way I interact with people and has contributed a great deal to my insecurity and hesitation about opening up to others.

Granted, therapy has offered me a completely safe space to process my pain and has helped me through a lot of moments in my life. But therapy can’t do it all. Sometimes you need someone to talk to without an appointment. Sometimes you just want someone to sit with you and assure you that you’re not alone. Sometimes you need to take up other people’s time without apologizing. As I go through the rest of my senior year, I want to come to accept the legitimacy of emotional selfishness. Trying to be more conscious about my deflections and fronts is a key step to that acceptance. Although my instinct is to avoid burdening people with my own emotional weight, I need to be more honest about myself. We all confront unique struggles and pain and we should not feel compelled to brush them aside because we deem them illegitimate.

Corinne May is a Trinity senior. This column is the seventh installment in a semester-long series of biweekly Thursday columns written by members of Peer for You. Message a peer responder anytime and receive a response within 24 hours.