The biggest present is presence!
Finally understanding Amy March on a deeply personal level (ouch)
Welcome to Bug’s Eye! Weekly essays, poems, things I am currently grateful for or recommend to readers, and of course, a different bug every week. I deeply believe in paying artists for their work, no matter how weird and quirky that work may be. If you love my writing, consider being a paid subscriber
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**I will preface this by saying it is a quite long essay, and I kind of just ramble until the last few paragraphs, so skip to those if you’d like to hear what I went into this with the intention of saying before the brain dump began!
Right now, I’m in bed with a sleeping kitten on my chest and it is very hard to focus, but I am going to try my best. It is 10:04 pm on a Saturday. I just watched episode 3 of the Golden Bachelor because I really want to catch up (mostly) this weekend, and things are getting a little bit crazy. I was hoping they wouldn’t turn against each other but the tension is rising and I just want everyone to be friendly and get along again! The saddest part is when people go home, because they’re all such good friends and they all cry when their friends leave and it makes my heart hurt. I hope they all stay friends after the show but I feel like that would be hard and maybe not too realistic. Anyways, I'm going to try to be a little less invested in this show. But female friendship is just so beautiful and I cannot help but well with tears witnessing these women love each other so hard!
This week, I had therapy. I see my therapist once a month now, and I’ve only been seeing her for about a year, but she is so good at validating my emotions and putting things into perspective. I think the beautiful thing about therapy is learning more about yourself through the eyes of someone who knows you so intimately, yet is only in your life when you visit their office. Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, but only just vocalized and was able to put into words (with the help of a professional) is academic anxiety. As a kid, I was obsessed with my grades. I never knew where it came from, because my parents didn’t put any pressure on me (partly because I did it all myself). Looking back, I think I was worried that I wasn’t the best at anything. I danced, but I never exceeded, and there were always people in my studio who I wanted to become and never did. I wrote and I drew and I created, but when I began to compare everything I created to everything the people around me produced, I felt inadequate and average, if not below. So, I gave everything I had to school, into getting the perfect grades. I did, all through elementary and middle school (except for one fucking PE class in eighth grade… that B+ still pisses me off). I continued to put a fair amount of pressure on myself throughout all of high school, but COVID and senioritis took a little bit of that away. Turns out, it’s near impossible to be motivated when you’re attending class on a computer in bed for months and months. Who knew! Anything other than an A was still a little bit jarring, and I tried not to externalize my fear, but I definitely felt it. I graduated and let all of it go pretty immediately, because I knew where I was going to college and that felt more important.
College was the first time I felt like the least intelligent person in the classroom. I felt like everyone already knew so much more than me, and was worried that I had not worked hard enough in high school, or that I missed something. I worked really hard my freshman year, and part of it was fear-motivated, but the rest was because I actually really enjoyed most of my classes. I had forgotten how much I genuinely love learning, as well as how much school can suck that love right out of you. It’s an evil and beautiful and decaying system, and I could write for hours about it, but I won’t (for now). My freshman year was probably one of the hardest years of my life, and I also have never felt more authentic to myself and surrounded by love. In a weird way, I felt closer to people from home once I was gone, because I felt confident that our relationships would surpass the test of time (which they did, and which they will). I was drained a lot of the time though, and I skipped a fair amount of class and went into some exams blind. It all turned out okay, which I was a little surprised about. I was not above average though, and that was one of the most terrifying things to know. If I was not excelling at school, what was I excelling at? I couldn’t think of anything. In everything I participated in or anything I ever had, I felt mediocre. It was one of the worst feelings, not feeling great. I thought back to Little Women, one of my favorite films of all time, and the beautiful Amy March. One of her most iconic lines is– “I want to be great or nothing.” For the first time, I understood what she meant. It is exhausting to give everything you have, and still feel like you’re falling behind. I think it’s natural to question why you’re doing something, or if you should be doing it, when you aren’t reaching your own version of success.
I’ve written a page and a half of reflection so I think it’s time to bring it back to the present! I’ve been really struggling academically lately, like worrying about failing classes for the first time. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I do know that it’s likely I won’t end this semester with one A. Last weekend, that caused me to have a full crying panic attack breakdown in the backseat of my parents’ rental car and in a bathroom that I proceeded to take mirror selfies in post-breakdown? The mind is a mysterious thing. If I fail the one thing I felt like I was above average in, do I have to find something else to excel at? Is there anything I’m doing that I could put more into, or am I at capacity? Why do I feel like I spend so much time on everything, yet at the end of the day, it feels like time has dwindled away without me doing anything to stop it? Lately, I have been wondering what it would feel like to just read for school without worrying how much I’ll have to say about it, or if I’ll remember enough. I’ve been wondering what it would feel like to write an essay about something I actually care about, even if it’s riskier or might not earn as high a grade. I think I owe it to my 13 year old self to breathe, to dance with my friends between paragraphs, to put sleep over study whenever I can. To submit something imperfect, to leave it be. None of this is intuitive, and it’s everything we are told to resist. But, it brings us back to the present, which in a way, is more valuable than anything else. It’s all part of what will probably be a lifelong mission of taking back some of my time.
This is probably the most long winded approach I could have taken to end up at my final point, but alas, I write like I speak (a lot) and we have finally made it! Worrying about the future and reminiscing on the past are things I spend most of my brain power on without even realizing it. There aren’t many moments where I’m doing something and not thinking about how it will affect the future, whether it’s an hour or a year ahead. The rest of the time, when I’m left alone with my thoughts and a journal, I’m thinking about the past and angry or sad or nostalgic for a feeling that comes and goes, but that can never be forced. The only way to be happy with how you are doing and what you are doing is by focusing the vast majority of your energy on the present. It is completely natural for the mind to drift to the past and the future, and we shouldn’t scold our minds for floating. However, there’s something relieving about summoning your mind back to the present moment. If you do so, you will almost always be able to find joy in something. The laughter of my friends, the wind in my hair, the changing leaves and the sound of stepping on them, the wonderful book I am reading, and the sound of my kitten dreaming are a few things I have noticed when leading my drifting head back to the present today.
I know that this concept is talked about all of the time, and it is by no means a new concept to “stay present.” Lately, I have been realizing how often I take advantage of a moment that I will soon lose forever, a feeling that will never be replicated and deserves attention. A moment in time deserves careful observation and slowing down, resisting the urge to rush, actively denying society’s want for us to be defined by our work, our productivity.
There should not be an ounce of guilt in letting yourself lay down and listen and feel. There is no shame in taking a break, in sleeping during the day, in pausing your work to write or read or or stretch or stroll or stretch. For all of our lives, every single day, all we will have is the present moment. The least we can do is give ourselves the time to feel everything that the present has to offer us, which more often than not, is so much more than we realize. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than in the moments I choose to search for the goodness in the tiny blip of time I am in.
I haven’t written any poetry lately that isn’t for class, which is a shame. Too many things to do in a day! I was digging through old poetry and found this. It was named “Poetry from the car” and I wrote it on May 5. I don’t remember writing it at all but I assume by the date I wrote it on the nine hour drive from school back to my hometown. I wanted to change some things before publishing it, but I thinking reading poetry in it’s rawest form is kind of even better. So…
Poetry from the car
I’m green as the trees with envy, love is a blackened heart without a bow
I’m learning how to make a house a home and I still don’t know which way to go
I lie and say I’m happy, and I laugh when I want to cry
Here, we can keep the tree up long after ornaments fall, leaves die
Souvenirs are spilling out the back of my moms van
Teardrops sprinkle the windshield, we push them away when we can
Flip a coin, toss the dice, roll the windows down
Ring a bell when you’re feeling lonely, do you want someone around
I tried to untie the tangles before our room looked like the catalog
There’s still things I don’t know, though, are we still friends, has it been real all along?
My ring feels tighter on the ring than when you gave it to me
And I wonder if I grew sometime last week, when I had an unreliable epiphany
Broke my nail trying to open a green metal tin
I’d do it again because I know the amount of pain you’re already in
And all at once, everything here becomes symbolic of the very thing I’m leaving
Mountain silhouettes just like the one out our window who I’m grieving
They will outlive me and they’ll forget me if I come back any later
They will scold me for not believing in the prestige of their creator
The houses do not try to blend to their neighbors or their town
Neither did the ones on the streets we spent two hours walking up, then back down
Faces firmer, stricter, stronger than they were last time the sun sank late in August
There’s been days we weren’t sure we’d live to the next, but we keep our exteriors modest
No point in bragging about way we’re still around
The red robins and bullfrogs did that for us, with their charisma and their sound
Making myself meals- definitely a form of self care and it feels so good to make food for yourself and then feast on it! Headphones on listening to music or a podcast while the water boils
Communal kitchen energy The yellow leaves everywhere on campus, the trees changing so quickly and the leaves clinging on through the cold
My walk to the dining hall this morning?? Insane Apple farms even though I don’t like apples! They’re so sweet and apple cider and happy kids running around without a care in the world
I’m growing! And I have apple cider 1989 Taylor’s Version (specifically the vault tracks)– there’s only 5 but there’s not a single miss. Every single one of them has been on repeat and I’m so glad she released them to bless our ears. Some of the lyrics feel like a stab but in a nice friendly empathetic way! I love Taylor Swift btw
My fidget spinner– I don’t go anywhere without it and Spoon loves it too. Bring fidgets back
So I can’t remember which bugs I’ve done but I’ll start keeping track of that! Bug of the week is whatever you want it to be
Thank you all for reading and I hope your week is wonderful. Even if you can just make time for one break tomorrow, whatever that means to you, and be as in tune as you can with your being, I promise your body will thank you. You deserve grace, you deserve rest, you deserve time. xoxo
With love,
“Which they did, and which they will.” ❤️