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(04/27/20 10:00pm)
The last time I walked in Toronto — and I mean real walks, not those trips around the block you take on school breaks — it was summer. I didn’t look around much then. Now, wandering neighborhoods in a self-isolated, distraction-starved state, I absorb it all; my gaze is practically greedy as it settles on pastel awnings and construction scaffolding, on small dogs wearing leopard-print booties and middle-schoolers tripping over razor scooters. I read every street sign, relishing place names that aren’t “upstairs” or “the kitchen”.
I’m not the first to find catharsis putting one foot in front of the other. In her recently published memoir, Rebecca Solnit invests even aimless wandering with a sense of purpose (“it felt,” writes Solnit of strolls taken in her twenties, “like I was getting somewhere”). And Virginia Woolf’s 1930 essay “Street Haunting” builds on an expansive tradition of literary flâneurs, exploring the figurative escapes offered by city streets. In leaving our house, writes Woolf, we “shed the self our friends know us by... When the door shuts on us, [the limits of our identity] vanish. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken…”. Out walking, Woolf claims, “we are no longer quite ourselves.”
I’ve struggled with mental health for years; it takes a lot less than a pandemic for my personal shell-like covering to prove suffocating. Six weeks of sheltering-in-place haven’t helped. By this point, I’m pretty desperate to be anything but quite myself — and so I take Woolf at her word, and begin to walk.
It works. Tracing the tall, dense streets of Toronto’s Annex, I seek out an escape which Woolf hailed the “greatest of pleasures”. Unlike Woolf, though, I don’t swap the “straight lines of [my] personality” for new, imagined identities. Because I don’t want to “put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others” — not really. When I street-haunt, I shed the current version of myself for former, freer ones.
I find them, too, on sidewalks and outside stores they used to frequent. Here’s an old me, for instance, on a street I canvassed last summer in anticipation of Canada’s federal election. Over the course of those humid nights, my gloveless knuckles knocked on hundreds of doors. Most people were out of town, so even a sneezing or coughing stranger formed cause for excitement; any anxiety stemmed from trying to remember political talking points, not calculate the probability of airborne Covid-particles. Two metres’ distance was the last thing on my mind (unless, of course, whoever answered the door was voting Conservative).
And there: another old self by the Dupont Food Depot, on the doors of which now clings a precarious cardboard sign. 11a.m.–10p.m., reads the ballpoint scratch. 12 ppl max.
Normally, the Depot is open 24 hours. I know because it was well past midnight when I’d stop last August, en route home from my hostessing shift. These days, the older man behind the cash looks stressed. Last summer, he’d smile when I set my signature purchase — a half-pint of Kawartha Dairy Moose Tracks ice cream — down by the register. He didn’t flinch, either, if I fumbled around in my backpack for spare loonies and toonies, opting to pay in grimy, potentially virus-carrying coins rather than tap my card.
Now, I marvel at that germ-ignorant irreverence. I’d come straight out of the subway, slick with sweat and grease from bussing empty pizza plates — and not once did I wait the five-minute home trip home to wash my hands. Instead, I pulled the lid off my Moose Tracks as I walked, licking freezer burn from the ice-cream’s surface and rooting out peanut butter cups with a plastic spoon.
I meet yet another summer self on the Rosedale railway tracks. That version of me was driven up here by a different isolation, the kind which follows breaking off a four-year relationship.
That sounds sad — I didn’t come to the tracks to wallow. I came to sit cross-legged on the warm asphalt and work through the remaining pages of my watercolor sketchbook; to listen to Supertramp and the sound of car horns on nearby Avenue Road. Back before an uncompromised respiratory system became my most prized possession, I’d even enjoyed the rare cigarette. Watching Joan Mitchell-esque scribbles of smoke rise up from the orange tip, I wondered, lazily, what senior year at Middlebury would be like. I imagined how good it would feel to take muddy runs along the TAM, to drink endless, watery mugfuls of Vermont Coffee Company Medium Roast alongside friends in Atwater dining hall. I looked forward to lectures, to late nights in Davis library writing my thesis on “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse.”
A kid skipping virtual high school streaks by on his bike, much too close for Covid-age comfort. When he looks back, I give him the finger. And then I feel bad. It isn’t his fault I’m finishing my undergrad over Zoom. I can’t blame him for being up here, either. By now, the remote workday has ended and the sidewalks surge with runners, making effective social distancing impossible. It’s time to head back.
I dread going home. Still, street-haunting helps. If nothing else, it reminds me that I’m not “tethered to the single self” who, minutes from now, will resume her station on the living-room couch — at least, not forever. Life post-Covid will come, and, when it does, a future version of me will enjoy all of the same vivid colors and textures which marked old experiences. New ones, too.
With that in mind, I mount the steps of my father’s front porch. And — am I imagining it? Or is my heel-dragging punctuated by a kind of gratitude? Because I’m lucky, really, to find “the usual door… the chair turned as I left it”. Lucky to have a kind, comfortable home to self-isolate in, to have a family who can work from the safety of their dining room tables. Lucky, even, that the pain returning to my chest is only anxiety (rather than a sign I’ve contracted Covid).
I’m grateful, too, for the essay underpinning my new survival strategy. Nine decades before I’d heard the term “coronavirus,” Woolf anticipated not only the necessity of escaping, but the literal and figurative refuge found by returning. Because as I “approach [my] own doorstep again”, I take undeniable (albeit grudging) comfort in feeling “the old possessions fold me round…” — in feeling the “self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many [suddenly, temporarily] inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed.”
Ellie Eberlee ’20 is The Campus’s senior Opinions editor.
(03/19/20 10:26am)
(10/10/19 9:59am)
It’s week five of term and I can’t name a single movie in theaters. I check the date not once, but multiple times a day. I was in Wilson Café last Friday and I heard a student ask, “So wait, what happens if they impeach him?”
Her friend shrugged and sipped his iced coffee. A moment passed, and then:
“Hang on — they’re actually trying to impeach him?”
New students, I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that this place has a unique ability to block out the rest of the world. The space between BiHall and the Athletic Center is like our own Odyssean land of the Lotus-eaters, with footpaths unfurling in every direction like tributaries of the river Lethe. Really, it’s as though the minute we arrive in September we drudge up all knowledge of the outside world and put it in a Harry Potter-style Pensieve … which our parents promptly pack up and drive back to Boston in the family Escalade. Sure, there are exceptions, the kinds of people who turn heads in seminars by name-dropping every new White House hire. I suspect that for a lot of us, though, our best news-reading practices fall by the wayside during term-time.
To be clear, I sympathize. In many ways, simply being at Middlebury complicates any attempt to stay in the news loop. This campus isn’t exactly conducive to podcast listening (it’s tiny, and in the short walk from Forest to Davis you’ll run into at least four people who force you to pull out your AirPods and say hello). Print media is hard to come by; even when there were still free copies of The New York Times outside dining halls, these were picked to pieces by avid crossword do-ers (now, cruciverbalists have to get the app). And while articles appear from time to time in our News Feeds, we all know the only point of Facebook at college is to figure out whether the Alex you hooked up with in Munford last night is the same one in your friend’s GSFS lecture.
That said, the problem with these excuses became a lot clearer to me a few weeks ago. As a Toronto native, I was surprised to overhear the Canadian Prime Minister’s name while waiting in line for a Proctor panini press. A quick phone-check confirmed the worst: photos of the Liberal leader in brownface and blackface had surfaced and, in doing so, unleashed an understandable media storm.
Trudeau’s past abuses of privilege aside, I was shocked. The photos were released on Wednesday. At this point, it was Saturday. How had I missed that? Not to mention — what did it say about my literal and figurative living situation that I was able to miss that?
That afternoon, I FaceTimed my dad. When we talked about Trudeau, I struggled to keep up my side of the conversation. Proper noun-phrases like “Liberal Party” and “University—Rosedale Electoral District” (for which and in which I’d worked all summer) felt foreign on my tongue.
“Will it change the way you vote?” he asked. I wasn’t sure, so we switched to talking about things on the other side of the Pacific. My dad asked if I’d kept up with the protests in Hong Kong. I blushed. I hadn’t.
“What are they teaching you up there, Elle-Belle?” he asked.
Not everyone finds ignorance embarrassing. I’ve had conversations where the phrase “oh, I don’t read the news” is tossed around with relished irreverence, where obliviousness is worn as a blank badge of honor. Here, a lot of students seem to “Add/Drop” news-reading like it’s a fifth, eminently dispensable elective. If I were an advisor asked to sign off on that particular course switch, I’d remind my advisee that willful ignorance is a pretty profound privilege. At Middlebury, most of us can leave the outside world alone because we’re safe in the knowledge that, if we want, it’ll leave us alone too. But that isn’t true for everyone on campus, and it certainly isn’t true for the rest of the country.
Above all else, I’d remind my advisee that there’s a difference between getting an “education” and becoming world-aware. Many professors do their best to bridge that gap. Still, it’s one thing to study impeachment procedures in an Axinn lecture hall, and another entirely to appreciate that those procedures are happening right now, re-molding the socio-political landscape well beyond the next row of Green Mountains. I’d suggest that this second kind of awareness holds more value than any “A.”
And so it’s up to us to keep the outside world close, to search out headlines and perspectives and bring them into imaginative being on College Street. I realize it takes enormous effort. But it’s also enormously important — and, I’d argue, part of our duty as students at one of the best schools in the country. When I graduate in May, I’d like to re-enter a world I not only recognize, but might one day make an informed, meaningful contribution to.
(02/28/18 11:51pm)
Last Tuesday I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d woken up, as I do too often these days, under the suffocating and very real pressure of a panic attack. I stayed there, the back of my head fixed against my pillow, for the better part of three hours. For those who haven’t experienced it, panic is all-consuming. When it sets in, I can’t think straight. I can’t breathe. I want out of my body, and badly. I want my head to turn off, my thoughts to stop — never have I wanted to shoot up a school.
Yet according to Donald Trump and Second Amendment advocates across the country, as someone who grapples with mental health, I am an enormous threat — greater even, than guns. In order to stop school shootings, Trump contends, America must prevent “savage sickos” like Nikolas Cruz from purchasing weapons at all costs. He sees tragedies like that of Parkland not as a symptom of a society as highly-armed as it is divided, but as a failure on the part of the mental health system, and has promised to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”
As someone who grew up in Toronto, I admit to little experience in navigating the American mental healthcare system. It may very well be, as Trump asserts time and inopportune time again, a broken one. But staging that discussion about mental healthcare in tandem with — attempting, really, to make it the core of — the conversation about mass shootings does infinitely more harm than good.
Why? First, as per usual, Trump’s comments contradict the facts. A mere four percent of gun violence can be attributed to mental illness. I have known far too many people in my life who grapple on a daily basis with conditions like severe depression, anxiety, bipolar and panic disorders. When they lose control, they don’t perpetrate mass violence. They curl up in their beds, alone and afraid.
Yet Trump and his cronies persist, shifting the focus of debates in response to tragedies like that of Parkland, Florida away from gun laws — where the facts have proven without doubt that it belongs — and onto the undeserving, not to mention already exhausted, shoulders of the mentally unhealthy.
“It’s hard to say the system failed this young man,” says Amy Barnhorst, vice chairwoman of community psychiatry at UC Davis, “because this young man is not who the system was set up to help … we don’t have medication for anger, resentment or hatred at the world.”
Barnhorst is right: You can’t equate mental illness with the sort of hatred that ends in horrors like Newtown, or Vegas or Parkland. I can’t speak for everyone who struggles, but I’m not angry, or resentful or hateful at the world (more than anything, I want desperately to be a part of it). That isn’t to say that the onslaught of hateful (primarily white and male) shooters are mentally healthy, only to underscore the distinction between that particular violent brand of enmity and diagnosed, treatable conditions which fall under the heading “mental illness.” That also isn’t to claim that those in the former state don’t need help — far from it. But their condition is a manifestation of a broken society, not a broken mental healthcare system.
Isn’t this merely a question of semantics? Can recent rhetoric about “nut jobs” actually have an impact? For people like me, the consequences of Donald Trump’s misdirected mental illness diatribe are enormous. Trying to navigate acute depression and anxiety at an institution is already an excruciatingly isolating experience. Whether it be because of pride, headache or inability to breathe, walking into a dining hall filled with hundreds of bodies — and not just any bodies, but Middlebury bodies, expected to be as together and controlled as the nautical stripes on their shirts — poses a significant challenge, and previously existing stereotypes make confiding in friends difficult enough. Whenever I contemplate telling someone I’m grappling with things like depression or panic disorder, my greatest worry is inspiring labels like “crazy” or “pathetic” or “suicidal.” If phrases like “dangerously violent” or “likely to commit a school shooting” are inserted into that list, any hope of me reaching out is virtually nonexistent.
What happens then? Retreat. Back to the dorm room for lack of a better option. An unwillingness to seek adequate care or medication. A greater loss of any progress made in the last few years about normalizing dialogue around mental health. And further isolation for those who are already handling enough on their own. For many, this has mortal consequences. Only when we start to perceive those who are mentally ill as dangerous do they become so — yet not in the way the White House would have you believe.
And so it becomes imperative that we, students of Middlebury College, resist Donald Trump’s latest fear-mongering project. Responses like that of the President’s are not only characteristically uneducated and offensive, but have far-reaching consequences. By pointing fingers at those diagnosed as mentally ill, Trump further alienates a subset of the population which needs human connection more than any other. The mental healthcare system might be broken, but so too is the system around the purchase of firearms. And so just as the debate in the wake of school shootings must remain centered on guns, the dialogue around mental health must remain open and free of inaccurate hate-speech. For those of us who struggle, often, simply to rise up and out of our beds, the very last thing we need are comments like those made by Donald Trump, driving us back into our dorm rooms.
(02/15/18 1:45am)
On entering the office, I am surprised by the scale, or lack thereof. A name like The New England Review evokes multitudes of desks, each manned by its own grey-haired reader or editor; rooms lined with large, industrial-grey bookshelves filled with manila envelopes; secretaries (one, at the very least) picking up phones to the complaints of rejected authors determined that somebody recognize the genius of their latest 40,000 word, stream-of-consciousness account of a sophomore-year sexual awakening.
What I didn’t expect: Carolyn, Marcy and Eli, three wonderful, local women, middle-aged and trying desperately to make Microsoft Word work on obsolete desktop computers. Two minutes into the staff meeting – a weekly event which consists of these three women, me and the other winter-term intern Hannah sitting around a banged-up kitchen table and drinking co-op coffee – it becomes apparent that this sort of small-scale literary operation is not unique to The New England Review. From what I catch of Marcy’s mug-stifled muttering (witty, witty Marcy the Managing Editor, who has a personal vendetta against every publication out of California and left early Thursday to attend a cat funeral), the entire literary industry is struggling, particularly those magazines who put publication before profit. And while the New England Review remains fairly lucky – Middlebury College funds it like any other academic department – there is desperate competition between journals for each and every subscriber. (“Should we send them all pencils this month?” wonders Eli, whose primary responsibilities include managing the office and negotiating with a dying desk chair Facilities refuses to replace, “can we afford that?”) I am shocked to learn that a magazine like The New England Review has something like a mere thousand regular subscribers – and that number is larger than many of its peer publications. When I get over my initial anxiety at statistics that surely signal the imminent death of literature, I can’t help but wonder who these wonderful people are. I’m as guilty as the rest; if I find an hour or two in a regular school week to read for pleasure, I almost always reach for the Fiction section of the New Yorker – and only then so that everyone else in the library might noticed how Extraordinarily Cultured I am.
Still, the New Yorker is a business, and therefore a different beast entirely. As I continue to learn, running a non-profit operation like The New England Review has perks and downsides. On one hand, the Editor-in-Chief Carolyn remains free to place quality over quantity (“Do things slowly,” I was told in my first hour, “people these days underestimate the value of care and attention.”). This translates into reading each and every cover letter from “Dear Editors” down to “I hope you enjoy the attached story,” and sorting these and the accompanying pieces into personalized categories. It also translates into hours spent agonizing over each webpage, negotiating to little avail with WordPress html code in an attempt to replicate the poet’s original, artistically-indented formatting. More than anything though, it means granting each submission the individualized attention it deserves. During the prose editorial meeting yesterday, Carolyn admitted to reading a thirty-six-page story four times through, only to conclude (as she had after her very first read) that, in spite of “breathtaking prose”, a plot centered around “moon locusts” might be too far out there for the NER’s readership. Nothing could be clearer from Carolyn’s facial expressions than that she cares profoundly about giving new authors a platform for publication. She assumes an expression of great pain (usually accompanied by flurried hand gestures) whenever forced to cross a story from her publication list. She’s picturing the author, I’m sure, sitting at their computer and reading yet another rejection email.
“It’s awful,” she says, as I can’t help but laugh at her distress during the final, decisive moments of the editorial meeting, “caring is awful.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but it’s also kind of awesome.”
On the other hand, a focus on quality rather than content makes it difficult to attract readers already overwhelmed by the formidable masses of content available online. How can The New England Review, a slim volume of carefully selected poetry and prose distributed out of boxes to libraries and coffee shops, possibly hope to compete—especially so long as it keeps its head down and conducts itself decorously? The fact of the matter is that they can’t, a sad reality which isn’t lost on anyone working there.
Still, the publication is anything but undignified, and Carolyn anything but despairing; she and a team of readers pay attention to every submission that shows up in their feed (or even—and this I couldn’t believe in 2018—by post, stamped and hand-addressed despite clear regulations on the website asking for online submissions only), and respond both personally and thoughtfully. Those who they do publish are not only grateful, but get to write The New England Review on their resume, a name which continues to carry serious weight in the literary world. And so the small scale that initially shocked me begins to impress me. As someone who has submitted a few things myself, it’s nice to know that my words are being discussed around a real-life table, by real-life people (because who counts as real more than Carolyn, Marcy and Eli?) who want nothing more than to get those words out and into the world—so much so that they place free copies all over the college.
And so with Carolyn, Marcy and Eli working diligently away to keep The New England Review relevant and afloat, the onus shifts to us – students of the very college with which the magazine is associated – to at very least pick up the fruit of their efforts. It shouldn’t prove too much of an extra-curricular chore: the poetry and prose included is beautiful, and selected with more thought and intentionality than I previously imagined possible. That, and the very thought of The New England Review’s existence is immensely heartening: in an academic environment where a particular brand of beaten-down-liberal, collegiate cynicism underlies every conversation, just down College Street there sits a clapboard house filled with women who refuse to succumb to disillusion. Instead they believe fiercely in the value of stories, and will continue plunking away on yogurt-encrusted keyboards to get them out and into the hands of grateful, if shrinking, audiences.