Just listen

Talk of the Quad: What I did for love

A fun fact about me is that I spent my middle school and high school summers at musical theater camp. I wasn’t very good—directors and teachers and my mom liked to tell me that I had “a really great stage presence!” which means that I could fake it pretty well, even though my voice was closer to the bottom end of average.
My tenure as a thespian left me with a dusty box of stage makeup, a rather awful pirouette and an only-slightly-secret love for musicals. My favorite parts of musicals are their finales. I like the way that they’re joyous, even when they’re sad. Finales feel like endings—solid, with-a-bang, close-up-the-story endings. I like endings. I read the last five pages of a book when I’m only halfway through. I like end-of-the-year banquets. I liked the view out the back of the car driving up the road on the way home from camp. Endings are romantic and solid, simple and comforting.
It’s May of senior year, and I’ve been thinking about endings a lot. I picture the way the Quad will look at graduation, my cap and gown and white dress on the museum steps. I’ve thought about the places that I will want to go on campus and the things that I will want to say to people before I drive across the bridge out of Maine. I want those moments to feel a certain way. Take a bow, curtain falls, resolution.
I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago about what the end of Bowdoin will be like. It will be frenetic, he said. You graduate, and then you’re torn between parents and friends on the Quad, and you can’t find all the people you want to see, and there’s lunch and dinner and last-minute packing, and then you just sort of leave. Bowdoin fades off—an ellipsis, not an exclamation point.
That’s weird and scary. Four years of snow and exams and College House parties and housing lotteries should not just fizzle out and fade to gray; they must deserve more. But to deserve a romantic ending, Bowdoin would need to be finished. The plotlines would be tied up and the questions would be answered and the reprise would be swelling in the background. And that’s not the case.
It’s easy to forget in the midst of the nostalgia induced by impending graduation, but I was really unhappy for my first two years here. It wasn’t Bowdoin, not really—my unhappiness was temporal, not spatial. But panic attacks in the back row of chemistry aren’t fun, regardless of why they happened.
I took my first antidepressant in the back corner of Smith Union in April of my sophomore year. It was one of the scarier things I’ve ever done—suddenly, the messed up stuff in my brain materialized as a real thing that I couldn’t get rid of on my own. Meds were not going to fix me, but they could clear the fog enough to pinpoint what I needed to wrestle with. It’s been two years of that. I was going to stop my prescription this month. I was going to be done by the time I got my diploma. But I’m not ready, not yet. I’m not quite done.
Here are other things I left undone after four years: I never quite got back in shape after a knee injury; I didn’t master statistics. I’ve told a lot of stories in the Orient, but I didn’t tell them all, and I didn’t tell some as well as I should have. There are a few first drafts of essays on my computer that needed second drafts. There are people I should yell at; there are people I should thank.
There are a few weeks left until graduation, and there’s no way that I’m going to tie up all of those loose ends. I can see them flapping behind me, a strange checklist of consequences and failures and unanswered emails. They feel comfortable, though, like old friends. That’s what I’ve learned best in four years—to let things go unfinished.
Here is what Bowdoin has taught me: I can be happy without being okay, and I can be proud of something without it being perfect. Maybe it wasn’t Bowdoin that taught me those things; maybe it was just four years away and four years of getting older. Regardless, those are the lessons I’m leaving with, and I think they’re the ones I needed. Even without a final trumpet blast, I feel good about walking away.
Nicole Wetsman is a member of the Class of 2016.

Talk of the Quad: Small and beautiful things

I would love to go birding with all of you. I’ve developed this obsession, and I’m finding that I now need some friends to enable me. I can promise, first, that it really won’t take much work to start. Even binoculars, although helpful, are not required. All through the year we can find birds on campus or a short walk away, or take an easy drive to the coast for more excitement. When we arrive to school late in the summer, the marshes are full of herons and travelling hawks. Tiny shorebirds crowd beach edges, nervously out-stepping waves and falcons. As the heat fades, puffins and razorbills dissolve into the deeper Atlantic. Soon after, boldly colored winter ducks gather their breeding forces in the snow—a casual and apathetic audience to our holiday travel.
As the inland lakes freeze and the non-coastal ducks scatter south, remnant bands of black-capped chickadees (singing cheese-bur-ger, my cellphone text alert) and nuthatches (which I call meeps) supply more consistent comfort. Lonely brown creepers offer the occasional errant song (trees, beautiful trees!). After several weeks of frozen breath, it’s a relief when early spring birds trickle back towards our campus. Vireos and black-throated green warblers (zee-zee-zee-zoo-zee) begin their hopping in the Commons. By May, the Pines are heavy with singing warblers. Some ovenbirds (teacher-Teacher-TEAcher) and black-throated blue warblers (I am laz-ee-eey) stick around to commiserate with students during finals. The summer begins again.It’s now been a year—perhaps a little less—since I really started birding. I’ve forgotten about twice as many songs as I remember and misidentified more shorebirds than I’m willing to count. Each time I go looking, I’m accompanied by a fear born of 20—plus years slogging through precisely marketed hobbies, each of which promised about 10 minutes of entertainment and supplied five. I mean to say that I have a millennial nervousness that the whole thing (the activity? The birds? The soil and the trees?) will sort of deconstruct like all my other products. About ten minutes ago I saw a fish crow (UH-uh, like an American crow with a cold and some sass). It remained solid and almost inexplicably realized.
And so there’s this other part to the whole birding thing. The objects of birds develop a form in and of themselves. We can step away from two near—equal transgressions. In the first crime, we capture an avian aesthetic as lifeless color and shape. They cover our hats, decorate our hair, fill our coats. We allow them status only as an image. In the other, more well-meaning offense, we regard them as patterned objects worth conserving.
“The role of avian fauna cannot be overstated in regards to seed dispersal, pest control and ecosystem management,” spoke one beleaguered scientist. But to gaze at them shifts something in the head. Their eyes become really like eyes. Beyond aesthetic, we allow them substance and sentience and will—as though they ever needed our permission. Conservation takes its rightful place as the protection of existence, of feeling, rather than the maintenance of equilibria.How nice, Liam, how quaint. But the craziest part of all of this affection is how naturally it arrives. It takes the smallest gap and the whole thing breaks wide open. In some ways, I’m asking you to trust me. To trust that a glance away from the five-minute lights and noises that attend our lives will not fundamentally shatter our millennial philosophies. To trust that it really, really won’t feel silly to stand there and stare at a robin. It will be such an easy love. So come birding!
Liam Taylor is a member of the Class of 2017.
If you’re interested in joining the Huntington Bird Club or are interested in birds/birding in general, please contact Liam at ltaylor2@bowdoin.edu or Isaac Merson at imerson@bowdoin.edu.

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

May 6, 2016

Throughout my childhood, he was a “functioning alcoholic.” Sometimes he held a job in music, and sometimes he was available as a father. I saw his addiction as a thing of the past; my father used to be an addict, but now he’s better. Whenever addiction was brought up in grade school, I felt proud to say my dad used to be an alcoholic, but don’t worry because it happened before I was born. I was the kid who had addiction “in the family.”

It is so incredibly draining to be let down time and time again. I believed every excuse he told me. I trusted him and helped him keep it up. First alcohol, then pills. I now understand why he shuttled me around to various doctors for his back problems. I was a moving piece in his game, an innocent target. Now I know addiction does not end—it is a daily battle.

Today, my father is homeless. He lives in a warehouse where his failed motorcycle business used to be. He sits in an office chair fixing guitars from the Internet that he hopes to sell for “big bucks.” His companion is a pit bull. They sleep on the couch together and eat the same foods—I am thankful he has company.

I do not know what his day looks like or whom he interacts with in the real world. I pray he is not drinking or playing poker with his friends or spending time with his old mistress. He turned 54 a few weeks ago, marking the 11th month since I have seen him.

Parents are expected to be there for you, love you and teach you. They brought you into this world and are responsible for helping you navigate it. For me, it’s different. At Bowdoin, I put on the façade of a normal student, one who worries about her next paper or dinner plans. Yet I carry this unbearable weight on my shoulders. And I know others do the same. We try to hide our anxieties, our fears, our past, our present, but it’s important to be open about them and to speak about them, because this façade is not healthy. It is not real.

Last semester, I read an article titled, “9 Signs You Have a Toxic Parent.” Number five hit me hard. “They refuse to let you grow up.” It is impossible for me to be a woman in my dad’s mind because that means I have become an adult worthy and willing to fight back. Saying this feels right but neglects to take into account his sickness. I can scream and yell at the top of my lungs how sad I am, how depressed I am mourning the loss of my parent to addiction, but it won’t make a difference until he decides to change the course of his life. I constantly ask myself, “Why am I or why is my brother not a good enough reason for him to get healthy?” I cannot apply reason to these questions because he is incapable of being rational. I think back to the time he called me from jail when I was at a Baxter affiliate night during my first year or the time I got a text in the Pub when he told me he was thinking about killing the pit bull puppy. Every time I would tell my friends and laugh it off. I was oblivious to the unhealthy extent at which he confided in me as a teenager and then young adult. No kid knows the protocol when a parent wants to kill a pet or be picked up from jail.

Another element is the constant struggle of sharing or not sharing. I often wonder, “Do I want this person to know this part of my life?” “How will their perception of me change?” “Am I scaring them by sharing my father’s story?” I thought about these questions for a long time before writing this article. I ultimately decided that knowing such an intimate part of my life is essential to knowing me.

We do not know a person’s journey prior to Bowdoin or what they are currently experiencing. I believe that many are often quick to judge and categorize others based on appearance and secondhand stories. We see the girl with the Canada Goose jacket and may think, “That’s an expensive jacket. I bet she also has a beach house.” We see the boy not going to Cabo for Spring Break and wonder, “Why? Isn’t he rich? He hangs out with all the other kids who are going.” We do not always have the whole picture, only bits and pieces. Why make the rest up?

I strongly believe we do not deserve to know just because we ask. Our stories are ours, and we get to decide what to do with them. I am sharing my story with all of you because without it, you cannot fully grasp my identity and my perspective. My reality is that I have a toxic parent, and silence won’t change that—being open is my preferred mode of coping. As Bowdoin students, we are encouraged to share our opinions, but it is also important to just listen.

No matter what age, gender, sexuality or class you identify with, it is our duty as kind peers to be there. I urge whoever is reading this to just sit and listen to your friends. Personally, having someone simply sit with me and physically be present is more than enough if I can’t quite sort my emotions yet. I hope they will do their best to be there for you too. Life is full of surprises, and it’s a missed opportunity if you write someone off based on superficiality or something you heard over brunch.

Abby Motycka is a member of the Class of 2017.

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