I used to think a lot.
Not about anything in particular, really. I just…thought. Sometimes, before bed, I figured I’d finally discovered what life meant, or how love worked, or who I was. I’d frantically write it all down in my journal, phrases traveling from brain to paper much faster than I could scribble. Usually, I’d wake up and laugh at my late-night angst. Sometimes, I’d feel like I’d actually gone somewhere important.
I don’t do that anymore.
It’s not because I’ve grown up and no longer feel the need to reflect—in fact, I probably need it more. It’s not because I’ve lost my teenage self-importance—I don’t think anyone, regardless of age, believes their thoughts are entirely without worth. It’s because I don’t find myself alone very often.
The Chronicle has seen a lot of pieces of late on meaningful relationships, the perks and problems of being busy and finding self-value in chaos. I’ve authored one of them. But what myself and my colleagues have missed, I think, is our focus on prioritizing activities rather than redacting them. In October, I wrote a piece on being too busy for the people in my life, and I promised myself, “I will stop putting my friends secondary to my work.” But that promise created an unwitting dichotomy: if I’m not working (or extracurricular-ing), I’m fostering my friendships. A tight binary.
But that binary lacks something pretty important: me.
Since I have been away from Duke, many of my friends and a good deal of extracurricular activities this semester, I’ve had a lot of time to be alone. And for the first time in my two years here, I’ve experienced a very strange feeling: boredom. I don’t mean the kind you get in a long lecture class, but the kind you get when it’s 10 p.m., you’ve finished your work and it’s too early to sleep but too late to leave your dorm. You’re alone.
A mentor from home used to tell me that boredom was at the heart of all creative ideas. Your brain drifts, begins to explore and finds ways to keep itself occupied…out of all of this wandering comes the newness of ideas, images and plans. I nodded my head when I first heard this, thinking of all the times I’d sat on my bed late at night and journaled, the times I’d been suddenly struck with ideas that hummed in my head until they made their way to paper. But boredom has lost its magic. Here, when I have the chance to be alone, I don’t write or read or sit and think. Here, I find distractions.
College-dom is a lot of feeling and doing and seeing, a lot of watching and touching and breathing, a lot of dancing and sweating and laughing and crying and very little… stopping. But I’ve had a little bit of stopping these past few months. And I wonder, in all my distraction, if I’m afraid to be alone.
What would I find if I was really alone in a coffee shop, with no computer in lap or phone in hand? Maybe I haven’t called my parents enough. Maybe I haven’t been taking advantage of Duke like I could. Maybe I’ve been so hyper-focused on creating a successful person that I don’t actually understand her; that, in many ways, I know the people around me better than I know my own self. That makes sense. If we never spend time alone, how do we know what we want, why we’re here at Duke or what really matters to us?
If we stopped to be alone, we might find that these questions aren’t easy to answer. That maybe we’ve been answering them disingenuously—or that maybe we’ve been using our brimming schedules to avoid answering them altogether. Maybe we’re afraid to ask.
So I decided to amend my October promise, “spending more time with the people in my life.” This time, I’m including myself: “Be alone more.” It’s not about creativity or new ideas, or even about journaling again. It’s about thinking, reflecting and figuring out what’s real to me. It’s about putting together the pieces of myself before I take that person out into the world. It’s about being honest, first and foremost, to myself.
Cameron Beach is a Trinity sophomore. Her column usually runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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Cameron Beach is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs on alternate Mondays.