An individual discovery
They warned me about third year.
I remember visiting a friend of a friend in first year. I barely knew the guy, an upper year in the sciences, but there I sat in his cluttered bedroom in his grimy townhouse, wondering whether filthy laundry and scattered lecture notes constituted “décor” and noting that the smell of the dirty dishes strewn across the kitchen counter permeated the entire house. I sat there with this complete stranger and, since he constituted, by my standards, a veteran in the trenches of academia, I asked him about university. I asked him whether it was difficult. He replied that, no, it wasn’t, on the whole. It wasn’t too hard.
Except for third year.
As I say, they warned me about third year.
They warned me and I ignored them. For years I forgot those words of caution entirely. So, while I should have seen third year coming, I didn’t. While I should have expected that the wave upon which I coasted through first year and second year would soon hit the rocks, I didn’t. While I should have known that the world would ask more of me and prepared myself to supply it, I didn’t. And third year hit me like a sack of bricks.
My marks never plummeted. In fact, they hardly dipped. My workload remained about as heavy as it had ever been. I even took on more extracurricular responsibilities, which I fulfilled adequately. I could discern no radical shift to differentiate third year from the years that preceded it, except for the overwhelming fact that third year hurt. It hurt a lot.
Remembering now how it felt requires some effort. With hindsight, the problems and pains appear miniscule and manageable, their solutions and salves simple and intuitive. But at the time, I felt constantly exhausted. I ate and slept poorly, irregularly, and insufficiently. I neglected to wash my body, my clothes, and my home. I isolated myself even as I ached with loneliness. I condemned myself for my stupidity and laziness. I stayed up late, glaring owl-eyed at my computer screen and procrastinating like a fiend. I tried to talk myself out of assignments and considered dropping courses or dropping out. I wondered about the point of it all. I felt like a rat writhing fruitlessly in a trap.
Naturally, some of this, perhaps most of it, must be hyperbole, the fantastic magnifying lens of memory transforming a few bad weeks into one bad year. But third year challenged a lot of people. Several of my friends opted to take a break, dropped out temporarily or permanently, transferred schools, or underwent periods of severe self-doubt. I suspect those individuals, like me, look back at those trials with a mix of reverential awe and breezy dismissal. But I think it dangerous to disregard the difficult times, as tempting as it is. We risk losing everything we learned. And so I try to summon up that pain once more and ask myself, “How did I survive?” One answer is: I did the dishes.
Everything was falling apart around me. I had no idea how to be a good student or a good person. But I could do the dishes. I was thankful for a task so simple and yet so absolutely and universally virtuous. During the toughest weeks of the winter semester, I diligently washed a load of dishes every night. Cleaning the dishes became my anchoring ritual, as if by scrubbing plates I scrubbed away my own failures and shortcomings. No matter how poorly I performed the rest of the day, the dishes gleamed.
I think it behooves us to conceive of success as more like doing the dishes and less like, say, winning a battle or a duel. Battles, duels, and their attendant pleasures end all too quickly. Dishes, on the other hand, are forever. One cannot win at dishes, just as one cannot win at life. In such a contest, one can only hope to develop a sustainable and disciplined practice, disciplined because dishes need doing whether one is elated or deflated, glad or sad, wired or tired. A clean load of dishes may represent a humble and fleeting triumph. But such minor victories may give us not only the courage to achieve great ones, but the courage to endure great defeats.
After the rush of first year and the acclimatization of second year, you may lose sight of why you pursued a degree in the first place just as you begin to wonder what you will do after graduation. You may learn that just as you will never vanquish or eliminate the dishes, you will never vanquish or eliminate the tests and trials of life. And you may wonder, as I did and continue to do, “What is the point?”
Unfortunately, you must answer that question yourself. Some may find that there is no point in a degree at the University of Guelph. Some will go into the workforce, or into other programs at other universities, or into college programs or apprenticeships. A university degree is not a thing of absolute and universal virtue. Neither is doing the dishes, as I discovered when my roommates informed me that they preferred I refrain from doing their dishes as well as my own. Resenting their failure to appreciate my self-evident generosity, I continued to wash their dishes with less and less magnanimity and more and more spite. (Curiously, I also discovered my inability to enter into the slightest confrontation with my roommates without speaking very softly in a silly Mexican accent.) And eventually I fell into my old habits and the dishes piled up. I still struggle, because I, like you, am human. Nevertheless, I hope some of this may be of use someday when you find yourself, weary and downtrodden, looking back and thinking:
They warned me about third year.