Making an effort
We now have to take the initiative to maintain our relationships — with everyone, from friends to professors to love interests. While this lesson is especially clear in quarantine, this is also the case in life.
We now have to take the initiative to maintain our relationships — with everyone, from friends to professors to love interests. While this lesson is especially clear in quarantine, this is also the case in life.
I realized that my friend’s silence wasn’t about me. And, more importantly, that everyone “hurts,” i.e. responds to trauma, differently. My response to this situation was to reach out to friends. I didn’t realize that my friend’s coping mechanism was to stop reaching out altogether.
Three months before I planned on having these thoughts (i.e. at graduation), I am having them: will our friendships survive?
I can’t cure whatever it is that’s making me feel sick today. Awareness of that forces me to step back for a moment and wonder: if I can’t fix this, should I spend my time and energy getting upset about it?
Whether we are in our first or final years at Princeton, it’s worth challenging whatever it is that we believe in order to determine whether or not we actually believe it.
“Reminders of your close relationships are, in a way, just as important as the relationships themselves: in the person’s absence, a memento serves to remind you that they are there."
We have plenty of opportunities at Princeton to get to know our professors; we need only to take them.
While it’s incredibly frustrating to see seemingly everyone get job offers (and the security that comes along with it), it would be far more frustrating to be applying to jobs in fields that aren’t relevant to our interests or skill sets.
These first relationships are inescapable in the college experience: we all make friends by necessity and proximity. But we have to do ourselves (and them) a favor and wonder: do we maintain them because they mean something to us? Or because we just don’t know anything else?
Pay attention to your words. What do you call easy? And who are the people around you? Consider that they might not be as good at math, languages, or hiking as you — and that they might, in fact, consider these things very hard.