A little (pity) party never killed nobody
Last night, my roommate won an award for the Accounting Society along with a handsome scholarship. Last week, one of my good friends was selected as a Fullbright Scholar, one of the most prestigious recognitions that any student anywhere could ever achieve… like, ever. Another one of my friends is launching a new app called “College Bounty”and has been meeting with potential investors, customers and other such VIP’s in the hopes of getting it approved for the public market. And, finally, my childhood best friend has her bridal shower this weekend. All these people around me are finding success in their majors, their extracurriculars, their futures, their dreams, their relationships. Inspiring, really. Intimidating, honestly.
Because while these people are signing contracts and getting money and changing the world, I’m over here trying to figure out how the heck to print off an assignment that’s due in five minutes from the moody printers in the Sandbar. My computer skills are nothing to brag about, but still. Knowing how to print an essay should be an basic human activity by now. So I glare at the printer screen, curse it under my breath, and sprint to the library where, at least, there are more printers. As well as a gazillion other people printing off stuff before class, too. The stapler breaks, my coffee spills on the keyboard, and I gallop to class only to receive an email notification that class has been canceled. Altogether, not your ideal successful morning (Monday, of course) or your ideal successful person (me).
That was when I took a serious look at my life in comparison to those around me. All the incredibly talented, driven and, dare I say it, “so blessed” people who I was privileged enough to call my fellow students were truly making their marks on the world. What mark had I made on my world? I mean, I synthesized benzocaine in my organic chemistry lab last week. Oh and I ate a whole box of Special K after that. Success, my friends, is in the eye of the beholder.
On a more serious note, I know it can be very easy for me, the competitive person that I am, to look at everyone else and feel incredibly inadequate. Everyone else knows how to print their essays. And they get every internship, scholarship, relationship and opportunity. Everyone is a mover and a shaker. Especially as a junior, I see so many of my fellow juniors rising up to take on leadership positions both on and off campus. From the Board to Student Government to the Ambassador’s Council to the million clubs, everyone is president of something. And if they’re not president of something on campus, then they have some super legit internship in Santa Monica that requires them to wear business casual every day. Or maybe they are already accepted at three medical schools, maybe they have written a couple books or maybe they are contemplating the pros and cons of a mission work opportunity versus full-ride grad school.
For those who are doing the above and more: keep doing it. Carrying the orange and blue where you go so that people think that we do more than sit at the beach and hammock on Alumni. Bearing Pepperdine’s values of truth, service, leadership, love. Working hard for yourself and for what you represent. Doing it big. Making Pepperdine proud. Making the rest of us non-achievers look bad — just kidding.
You are all inspirations, even if we may hate your guts sometimes for being good at everything, because, and here I am being frank again, I came to a very big realization: I am not good at anything. Everyone is so talented and I am so not. Why do I have to be stuck with my ordinary self? Why do I suck so bad? Why aren’t I talented? My dear friends, you have just entered the most dangerous party of all: The Pity Party. It is all too easy to spiral into a dismal and defeatist I-am-not-good-at-anything kind of mentality with the demigods and goddesses flying out into the world ahead of us. It may feel like we are incompetent, slow, or just plain unlucky. It may seem that the papers pile, the lab reports stack, the exams never end and the work stretches like the San Francisco marathon ahead of us — more than 26 miles of all uphills.
Dear friends, it is because of those hills that we can build the muscle we need to propel us through the downhills, across Fisherman’s Wharf and straight into a bread bowl of creamy clam chowder at the end of the race. Bad mental picture? Okay, fine, putting the weird metaphorical language aside, this is what I am trying to say: just because we may feel like our lives are irrelevant or that our little victories are inconsequential or that we are simply just not good at anything, we cannot wallow in our individual Pity Parties. A little pity party never killed nobody (thank you Lorde and Gatsby), but there comes a time when moaning and groaning and hating everyone else for their successes becomes ridiculous because when we’re done moaning and groaning and hating everyone else for their successes, we are at the same exact spot when we started moaning and groaning and… I think you get the point. Pity Parties are stationary, they are not future-seeking nor are they future-improving. They are the most dangerous kind of party because they don’t get us anywhere.
Sure, we may not have gotten the job of our dreams and sure we may still be paying college loans until we’re fifty. Sure, we may have trouble figuring out how to print an assignment one rough Monday morning. And sure, everything may just seem like an endless series of uphills. So what? Uphills were never meant to be easy. Four weeks, dear friends, four weeks and we’re done with this year. Maybe we haven’t discovered our passion or really found success the way we want to, but there is literally nothing stopping pounding the pavement of four weeks until we have reached the end. Come run with me, tell me about your successes, inspire me. If you don’t think you have any talents or successes, let’s ditch the pity party together and run instead. Uphill repeats. Four weeks. Ayo waves.
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Follow Taylor Nam on Twitter: @nam_nam330
