The thaw between winter and spring comes at an opportune time. We get that sweet glimpse of the warmth of summer just as the weather begins to beat us down. There might be a snowstorm after that one 70 degree February day, but it doesn’t stop us from hanging up hammocks, barbecuing and wearing Birkenstocks while we’ve got the warmth. I’m writing this on a Tuesday, a really particularly rainy and windy Tuesday. A Tuesday on which if I stayed inside drinking some tea and reading a good book, or maybe that book on immigration that I was supposed to read for class a week ago, I would be perfectly content.
It’s that truly terrible time between winter and spring in Massachusetts when it can be 60 degrees and sunny one day and 35 and raining the next. I’m not going to spend this entire column talking about the weather, but I urge you to bear with me for the metaphor. I enjoy the spring at Tufts because it starts out cold and dreary outside and gradually becomes lovelier. I like to think that it’s the universe cheering me on and saying that the end of the school year is almost here, and my reward is nice weather and summer. Despite all the papers, projects and exams looming over me in the final month of the academic year, I know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
I feel like I’ve become really good at pushing through gigantic bursts of work in these past two years. Perhaps my frantic list-making looks obsessive to the average person without an anxious brain, but for me, it helps to make sense of and organize the seemingly unmanageable mountain of work that looms in front of me as the year draws to a close. The sophomore slump has appeared for me in the form of an existential crisis about the trajectory of my life and whether I really am passionate about the subjects that I have devoted a lot of my time to. Sometimes, though, I have to turn off the anxiety brain and not question every detail of every decision that I have ever made. I’ve been thinking of the fact that while I’m abroad next fall, I’ll definitely have FOMO (fear of missing out) from the happenings at Tufts, but I will also be away probably having the greatest adventures of my life.
I’ve noticed that my mood tends to correspond pretty closely with the weather outside. Maybe it’s Seasonal Affective Disorder (the acronym for which is SAD, which I find very ironic), or maybe it’s because I’m not getting as much vitamin D as I would on a sunny day. I don’t exactly know what the overarching message of this column is this week, but I suppose that the whole point of me doing this is for me to muse and ramble about topics that have been on my mind. Here are some suggestions of what to take out of this:
- Optimism
- Maybe are all going through a sophomore slump
- Follow your dreams
- Don’t question yourself
- Make lists -- maybe it’ll help
