Letter to students at Allegheny College

This morning my smart phone sent me another article about the droves of college students with mental health problems: Time Magazine’s “Record Numbers of College Students Are Seeking Treatment for Depression and Anxiety – But Schools Can’t Keep Up.” So many students under the pressure of intense course work and number of courses required. College counseling centers have long wait times; private counselors are expensive. There are now anxiety therapy groups with meditation, nutrition, yoga; virtual reality programs where you are immersed in and desensitized to and taught coping for anxiety-causing situations. You can also learn how to take notes.

Dear students:

God help you if you are as neurotically screwed as I was during college. However, maybe He helped me graduate with a music degree though I was a sub-mediocre performer, couldn’t compose two bars with any art or intelligence, demurred my way out of giving a senior recital. Though Allegheny College had a fine reputation, it somehow purveyed an educational philosophy that was enshrined in this unorthodox regimen – three courses in each of three nine-week trimesters. Yes, nine or eleven classes in an entire year was considered solid future-prep.

I would actually recommend this for students who are not terribly comfortable imagining they are adults or will soon be adults.

I don’t think I would ask tense and troubled students to fall deep into their psychology, which would mean to dig into roots and causes and into arcane yet smack-you-in-the-face questions of identity. That’s an undermining thing to do, unless you’re in the Piquant Elite for whom sickbed psych (the embracing of diagnostic labels) has become a self-medication or, bluntly speaking, your badge of honor. Most of you want to feel you are being yourself, not hitchhiking on your parents’ ride. You want to feel OK, not anxious or depressed or suicidal. You want to not question the rightness of your being there.

But you may not be able to feel or have these values.

So I will do the psychology for you.

Twenty years of clients have taught me that most adults, all the way to age ninety-nine, have existential and life meaning questions about themselves. They have never come up with definitive answers. That they have often stopped asking the questions over the years, or have grown a personal serenity, or have numbed the questions or buried them under species of “success,” doesn’t alter this. One of the various benefits that have happened is that adulthood comes to be like many kinds of fears: It is much more fearful when anticipated than when joined.

I would swear on a stack of bibles, bubbles and baubles that there is no established, ratified ascendancy to the State of Adulthood. Not at 18, or 21, or 13 if you’ve “become a man,” or at 11 if you had to “grow up too fast,” or at the loss of your cherry or your devastation by a mass shooter, or at graduation or marriage or first job, apartment and lava lamp. We each of us have the seeds of our own kind of grown-upness in the kernels of our birth, nine months pre-birth, our childhood, our adolescence. These factors write our personality, our defenses, some of the substance of our horizon, and our philosophy which together, in their idiosyncratic origins and nature, must be completely unique, not some inadequate or superior petitioner appealing to societal standards or consensus. You are yourself, insularly, even invisibly to the world. And setting aside the extreme difficulty of knowing one’s own molecules, you can accept that no one else can really see your essence. They don’t know. And therefore, they have no right to assess or judge you as adult-worthy. As worthy. Maturity is individual, as a million differently bowed and bent trees are beautiful.

The young adult you are will have potholes and roadblocks that come from your history. These obstacles or “dysfunctions” are not defects in your soul, your birthright, though they can bend your heart in ways that hurt you and others. They are injuries and they are learning experiences. Possibly two of the best insights (though in the nature of lead balloons) we can gain are that we are holistic in mind and body and time, where the past is not the past: It is our foundation and living roots. And that we are messy works in progress at the very moment we are needing to enjoy the fruits of our life.

I was a lost soul from my first steps on campus to my Dissociative Day of Graduation. I can “brag” of a feat that I’m pretty sure few to no other students can claim: Not for a single moment, not a millisecond during my time there had I entertained the twinkle of a thought of what I might do with my life the day, month, year or decade following graduation. Can you imagine . . . missing that cogito for the entire four-year rite of passage? Additionally, I was too self-blind to know I was a depressed person, and framed my wan aesthetic nature as a kind of disturbed positive. Then there were a few years of floating around the country on Greyhound buses, getting jobs here and there, meeting people but staying neurotically on the perimeter. In time, it took a bad marriage – or should I say a good teacher – to get me to look inward at my own demons (which started with a troublesome birth and benighted parents), feel some stillborn painful feelings, find a real direction for myself.

We all know the truism that college is “not for everyone.” And it is certainly true that anxiety and depression and moribund feeling may be prohibitive burdens. I would suggest, though, that if you want to be here on this campus or another, notwithstanding these troubles and questions of “who am I?” and “what is my meaning and purpose?”, for reasons that come from you not your parents’ flowchart, that in itself means it is right: You are reading something real in you, something organic. But remember that this rightness is a beacon within your history that has roadblocks and gold nuggets, potholes and sun-drenched seeds. I urge you to be the profound and sober college students you can be: Get help for injury – help to feel and know. Accept the uniqueness and complexity of the human state – your human state. And sally forth at your own damn pace.