Christensen: Unlearn your helplessness

As April rolls along and we hear back from potential summer employers, rejection hurts,… As April rolls along and we hear back from potential summer employers, rejection hurts, especially when it seems likely to halt our future plans. But there’s no need to feel helpless.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting around a house with some friends and we started talking about a song called “Helplessness Blues.”

“Helplessness blues,” my one friend said. “I know what that is.”

He was referring to the feeling he said starts at birth: Being put on a specific path in a system and spending one’s life trying to wiggle his way through.

Perhaps the conversation would make more sense if you had been there, but it got me thinking about happiness, and what we do in the name of pursuing it. More and more, I’ve realized that I’m a lot more content when I stop trying so hard.

I don’t mean that to sound nihilistic. No matter what the topic, I prefer to err on the side of existentialism. The thing is, it’s not as much of a letdown to fall short when you do things day-to-day to find peace with yourself. I mean this in the sense of going to class if you want to and sleeping through it if you’re tired. Stop worrying so much about a resumé and pursue what brings you pleasure. Happiness is too often confused with success in the traditional sense.

We’re told to apply to internships, get internships and use them as leverage for our career. We’re not told what to do when we lose out on an internship or when the career isn’t even there at all. We freak out, apply to jobs in retail and resign ourselves to a summer sans resumé boosters. Yes, I am talking about myself.

To make myself feel better, I want to start being a little more like Baudelaire, the 19th century French essayist who didn’t give a hoot about anything but still stuck around in the annals of history long enough for people to read about him. Of course, I’m only a little bit serious. Still, I think we might be a lot better off if we stopped doing what we are told we are supposed to do and started following our natural impulses. Because really, my impulse is to stop trying to prove myself — it’s just not in my nature, and it looks like I’m trying way too hard to be something that I’m not. That is, a go-getter, a self-starter, all those other key words on job applications. Frankly, I don’t even know what they mean.

Self-starter how? I got my first bad grade in sixth grade reading class because I didn’t want to do any of the assignments. Honestly, I thought they were stupid. In a humiliating incident, my reading teacher went across the hall to get my mother, who was unfortunately (for me) a teacher at my school. She pulled me into the hallway and proceeded to give me a good old tongue-lashing. I read a lot as a kid, and I was reading at home, just not the books that I was supposed to — I was a little farther along than my peers. I didn’t want to waste my time on “The Giver,” because I had read it two years before. Is that a self-starter? Obviously, this isn’t the kind of story to include in a cover letter to a potential employer. The problem is, I don’t know how to show how I am a self-starter if I’m just writing what they want to hear.  I’m told to cater to what specific internships or applications are looking for, but what if catering to them means that I’m not really the kind of person that they’re looking for? What if I get a job by pretending to be something that I’m not, and I’m miserable? Cue the helplessness blues.

But as a good friend advised me mid-panic attack, sometimes a seemingly hopeless and/or wasted time isn’t wasted at all. Sometimes it gives you space to do exactly the things you want to do. My reading teacher gave me lunch detention for not doing my homework three days in a row, and I loved it. For once I could sit alone, eat my smelly egg salad and not look like a freak. When you stop worrying so much about the consequences, it’s easier to find space to live. I go to class and I study, but it’s certainly not to get a Dean’s List certificate in the mail. Someday I’ll find a job or internship that likes me for me, and it will mean more to me than a line on my resumé signifying that I marked all the right boxes in my life.

Helplessness is a state of mind, I think, and a second choice can turn out to have its benefits too. Why not spend another summer on the porch? Maybe I’ll regret it in the long run — just like I’ll regret sleeping through class when exam time comes around — but for those 20 minutes, I’m going to enjoy my rest. And for these next three months, I’m going to enjoy my Plan Z, gadurnit. Who knows how many aimless summers I have left.

Write Caitlyn at cac141@pitt.edu.