Making peace with the pressure to make the most of abroad

Katherine gives advice: On battling disillusionment

Hello precious readers! Last week, I received this question (one of 112, in fact) in my google form:
“Dear Katherine
I am very ‘over’ college. Tips for drinking the Kool-Aid once again?
Sincerely,
SWUW (Senior Washed Up Woman) in Searles”
Dear SWUW in Searles, Collegiate disillusionment is a burden that affects all of us at one point or another. Well actually, I have no idea whether it affects all of us. Who knows what you guys do. But it has certainly affected me.
My own disenchantment struck junior fall. “Woe is me!” I thought, “I am so disillusioned.” I spent four months holed up in Chambo, writing about myself on the Internet and getting Snapea Crisp dust on my sheets. I began to identify with vitriolic Huffington Post commenters and trolls who hide under bridges and attack goats.
When Chambo felt claustrophobic (which is to say, almost always), I would escape to Portland to sit in coffee shops. There, I would eavesdrop on presumably equally disillusioned middle-aged people as they talked to friends or random passers-by about their STDs. I had become a little feral. I was having A Hard Time.
Disillusionment can be paralyzing. And while I may belittle my own angst, it was a symptom of real anxiety produced by a series of personal heartbreaks. All this goes to say that I understand long-term disengagement to be a poor attempt at self-care—that by not investing yourself in anything, you are somehow being self-protective.Turns out, this is stupid.
Often when I think about self-care, I think of it as an excuse to watch five consecutive episodes of “Sex in the City” with my housemates while eating several pounds of Sour Patch Kids from the deli down the street. Shockingly, that is actually not what self-care is. Self-care is identifying better ways to live in order to be healthier and happier—and sometimes, unfortunately, means discipline instead of indulgence.
If you are disillusioned, self-care is probably not marathons of ’90s TV in your bed. Here are my two suggestions to you:
1. Stop referring to enjoying college as “drinking the Kool-Aid.” That’s like, maybe an exaggeration. Also, we don’t even have Kool-Aid in the dining hall. Also, I wish we did, because Kool-Aid is fucking delicious.2. Get dressed. “But I am dressed!” you may say, as you look down at the sweatpants that you don’t even like, which you have been wearing for three days. To which I respond: that is not dressed.
Get dressed with intention. Don’t just wear the sweater you slept in last night. Stop bending down to grab those stained cords off the floor. When you make meaningful choices about the clothes you make at the beginning of the day, you’re setting yourself up for a day rooted in other meaningful choices (which is to say, un-disillusionment).
Wear clothes that allow you to engage with other people. For example, for me this year, that meant overcoming my oppressive laziness to wear a toga to Epicuria so that I could partake in the ritual toga-making process.
Wear clothes that make you feel fucking fabulous. Choose to be visible because you deserve to be visible.* If you don’t own clothes like that, go get some from Freeport or the Internet or Salvo or your best friend’s closet or sew/knit/crochet them with your own hands.
Wear a Big bird suit around campus, sport Google Glass at graduation, dye your hair chartreuse. Getting dressed means different things for everyone—a favorite pair of running shorts, the sunglasses that you found abroad, a suit for your Deloitte interview**, your hoverboard, because who cares what the haters say on Yik Yak. Live your weird little truth. But do it with intention, without laziness, with care.
Also, please submit a comment card about the Kool-Aid. Out,Katherine *this line may or may not have been plagiarized from a fortune cookie.**which you will inevitably wear for much longer than necessary.

Katherine gives advice: How to make it through a Maine winter

Hello, precious readers! Take a look at this week’s column. “Dear Katherine, Do you have any advice on how to keep your spirits up during a long winter in Maine? Sincerely, Chilly in Chambo” Chilly, it’s coming for all of us. The first warning sign was on November 1 when daylight savings time ended and all of our lives got a little bit sadder. The next sign came last week, when I walked home in the dark at 4 p.m., entered my living room and found my housemate Jamie purposefully searching Amazon.
“What if we buy a house sun lamp?” he said. “Or, I don’t know, a tanning booth.”The tanning booth idea sounded to me—well—a little bit insane. What, I wondered as Jamie perused a user review of an in-home tanning booth, do other people do to keep their spirits up in the winter? Do they deal with it like reasonable humans? I decided, Chilly, to ask around for you while I was in Smith Union yesterday.
First, I ran into Hannah. “How do you cope with the winter?” I asked her as she sat opening a package.
“I wake up and I cry,” Hannah said. “Once it started snowing and I cried in the middle of class.” As she spoke, she waved around a half a mounted taxidermy squirrel she’d received in the mail.
When I asked how Skye would get through the winter, she got a frenetic look in her eye. “I’ve planned it all out. I’m never leaving the tower. I can eat there, I can shower there, I can exercise there—stairs!” she said.
Chilly—these anecdotes evidence that winter is coming and that, one way or another, it’s going to be ugly. And while the coping mechanisms described by the people I talked to are perfectly legitimate, I, your dear advice columnist, am going to recommend what I hope will be some slightly less desperate tactics:
1. Do not cry. If you do, your tears will freeze to your cheeks or perhaps even in your eyeballs.
2. Have a friendly snowball fight.
3. Learn some variety of winter sport. The outing club has Nordic skis, telemark skis and snowshoes. Go forth and get endorphin-high on exercise.
4. Remember that if we didn’t have winter, we wouldn’t have babies in snowsuits, and babies in snowsuits are the cutest thing on the entire planet.
5. Put on your vodka jacket. And your mulled wine jacket. Also put on your regular jacket, the one that is made of actual fabric and not just your impaired sensory capacities.
6. Eat foods with astronomical levels of carbs and fats in order to develop winter blubber. When in doubt, do as the artic mammals.
7. Look to the dead polar bear in that weird little hallway behind the gym for inspiration.8. Then visit the artic museum. Stare at the portraits of Donald B. MacMillan, another artic mammal. Think, “how can I become more like this famed polar bear murder?”
10. Layer. Wear every sweater you have when you leave the house. Steal your roommates’ sweaters and wear them as well. Collect sweaters from the gym and put them on too. Try to acquire all the sweaters. Soon, you will be the most powerful—soon you will rule them all.
11. Take stock of yourself. Wonder if you have perhaps started to go a little bit insane.
12. Count down the days until Ivies.
Happy winter!
Out,Katherine

Katherine gives advice

Making peace with the pressure to make the most of abroad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Katherine Churchill

Columnist

November 5, 2015

Hello, precious readers! Today I will be answering a question about abroad (which has been slightly edited).

“I am currently studying abroad and I can't help feeling that pressure to make the most of it (whatever the hell that means). I see posts on social media of my friends traveling and making friends. Do you have any advice for a Polar Bear away from home? How do I shake this sensation that I'm not doing enough?

Sincerely,
Anxious Abroad”

Dear Anxious,

There are few things that ruin abroad more thoroughly than the feeling that the entire world is taking you by the shoulders, getting really close to your face, and shaking you while it screams, “MAKE THE MOST OF THIS.” I’m not sure where this pressure comes from, or why it exists at all.

And yet you are not, due to this unspoken social pressure, supposed to say that abroad is hard. You are supposed to be a traveling, binge-drinking, foreigner-kissing machine. God forbid you should feel lonely or wonder why everyone you love is thousands of miles away, you ungrateful, inadaptable cretin!

I’m going to tell you a secret: abroad is really hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. There is nothing natural or authentic about leaving your entire life and friends and family behind to gallivant around the planet willy-nilly for five months. But that’s also why it’s worth doing. If going abroad is ever easy, the world has become homogenous and boring and probably covered in K-Marts.

You might not make Czech or Australian or Cameroonian friends. You might not like the haggis. You might not travel, you might travel every weekend. You might, like me, never adjust from coffee to espresso (honestly though, why would you).

I’m going to tell you another secret: none of this means you are doing abroad wrong. The only way that you can do abroad wrong is if you let the expectations your or others set for your experience make you unhappy. The happier and more fulfilled you are by your own experience, the less you will worry about what your friends are doing.

Here are two tangible things I’d suggest doing to increase your daily happiness:

1. Find a place that you love, make it a part of your routine, and cultivate it as a familiar space.
There is a café on Drury Street in Dublin called Kaph where I squatted almost every day in between classes. Many of you may know it from my incessant, Wifi-grubbing check-ins. Aside from the fact that Kaph makes you sell your social media soul in order to access the Internet, it is a great place, and it’s a place I love. The baristas knew me because I would never leave them alone. Once, while I fastidiously perused Buzzfeed, one of the baristas brought me a free latte, “for my writing.” Find your Kaph and mark it with your personhood. Being non-anonymous for a few hours a day can do wonders for your psyche.

2. Do what you need to do to be comfortable, even though it’s just five months.
The worst thing about Ireland was my mattress, which was actually just a pile of metal springs. I should have just sucked it up and bought a mattress pad or put soft clothes between the mattress and the sheet or something. Instead, I bitterly envied the girl had bought one. I hated her for it. Do not hate people over mattress pads. Take the time and energy to make yourself comfortable.

If you look back at your abroad experience and say “it was worth it,” if you take from it some fond memories and good stories and a stronger sense of self, then it doesn’t matter how many new stamps you have on your passport or how many of your Instas got over 100 likes. For the record, I’ve never had an Insta that got over 100 likes, and I’m doing just fine.

Out,
Katherine

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