Rainy Day Lament
One of the worst feelings you can feel when you’re in college is total loss of control. To feel stuck; to feel static; to feel that, while in this big world of academia, things are moving around you glacially, nondescript and out of your orbit. What feels the worst when you’re trying to discover yourself is when you realize that the world doesn’t really need you.
This isn’t an alarmingly depressive notion. This is not something we should be afraid to admit. This isn’t a call for social intervention or anything.
But it’s just something that needs to be said. It’s really easy to feel trapped sometimes. Last year, it was all a novelty. That campus was so closed and inclusive was kind of comforting. It was a little Utopia, fenced off by grassy quads and big gothic architecture and iconic streetcar lines. Now, though, it’s a little claustrophobic. Maybe this is why people study abroad junior year – you get tired of the same song and dance and scene.
t’s feeling you get when it rains in New Orleans. Like today, for example, during the mini “Hey, it’s Monday and in case your day wasn’t terrible enough” hurricane. It’s the feeling you get when you’re standing a mile from your room without a raincoat and can see nothing through the fogged up windows but shards of broken glass rain storming down; the feeling you get when you’re absolutely saturated with cold rain water, relentless bullets of the clouds that have betrayed your clothes, hood, jeans, socks; the feeling you have when there’s no way you’re going to win.
Today I was in the doctor for two hours and came home with the exact same diagnosis from the exact same doctor as a year and a half ago: an infected lung. I’m armed with the same steroids, the same inhalers, the same nebulizer tubes and coils. The feeling of helplessness that you get with rain – it’s also the sensation you get when you’re breathing into tubes of albuterol for thirty minutes; it’s a feeling you get when your airways are closed and you don’t have an emergency inhaler; a feeling of gasping futilely.
It’s not a good feeling.
But the good thing is that it’s a temporary feeling.
There are times when helplessness is more appealing than control. It’s called ego depletion, and it’s that sticky feeling of helplessness. Ego depletion is the temporary reduction in the self’s willingness to engage in volitional action. We become (for a while) helpless, not hopeless.
As humans, we grow tired of always controlling ourselves, our environment, making choices and initiating action. And in college, it seems, it is this pursuit for total, unattainable control we’re being charged with. Find yourself, make your world somewhere you want to live in, meet people, do big things.
There are a lot of studies that show, however, that there is a psychic cost to this kind of self-regulation. And that supports the fact that maybe those moments of defeat, of being sick and miserable, of being without a rain coat during a particularly crazy New Orleans storm– that these moments are good for us. One particularly interesting one involved participants, unsolvable number puzzles and delicious chocolate and disgusting radishes. Basically what happened was that participants had to refrain from eating the chocolate (even though they really wanted to), and thereby acted with a lot of control and regulation. They later, having exhausted their ability to act in control, performed much poorer with much greater impatience on the number puzzle test. Resisting temptation with the food left the participant more likely to give up quickly on the math test. We’re only carried on by inertia for so long. And then, and then it just gets too tiring to be in control.
Call it burn out, learned helplessness or any other of the similar patterns of pathological passivity. But the bottom line is that have a limited resource of control and volition. And while ostensibly, it’s terribly uncomfortable to relinquish control, it’s important to embrace the momentarily passivity, realizing that during the moments you’re unable to be in control, you’re self in replenishing itself. Relinquishing control should not be considered a failure. Since we have a limited capacity of volition, being helpless needs to be seen as an adaptive tool towards managing ourselves.
Road trips with weakly defined itineraries, bike rides, following the leader, blind dates: all satisfying forms of control relinquishment.
