From Farm to Fork: Contemplating students’ needs
Yet when $4.2 million flows into the University for the establishment of a “contemplative center,” the trustees have agreed to build a second art museum.
Yet when $4.2 million flows into the University for the establishment of a “contemplative center,” the trustees have agreed to build a second art museum.
The University’s failure to foster a campus dialogue about mental health or mental illness is appalling.
It’s a pretty simple concept: If you pretend to be confident and successful for long enough, you will eventually become confident and successful.
Only a few things can stop this campus in its tracks, stopping each and every one of us, busy and stressed in our own unique way, if for only a few moments.
Sometime within the past week, I got derailed. On Sunday evening, I felt an overwhelming desire to crumple into my roommate’s futon and devolve into a hot mess of tears. In the time since then, I’ve had an overwhelming sense of sadness — not overwhelming in that I don’t feel happy, but in the sense that even when I have high highs, like seeing Mae Jemison, being accepted into Sophomore College and finalizing housing preferences for next year with my wonderful “drawmies,” I return to this low state of emptiness and confusion.
I remember the day my feet stopped paddling. It was fall of my freshman year and I was drowning. After 18 years of swimming towards a destination that was suppose to make me happy but really just left me wanting more, I stopped. I could no longer pretend to be perfect. Behind my perfect grades, smile and “white” feathers, I was perfectly unhappy. I had lost all joy in college life. I felt like I had nothing left to give.
Freshman year, I discovered the infamous “Stanford duck syndrome,” where on the surface everyone looks calm but underneath is paddling like mad to stay afloat. I would soon discover that I, too, was a duck…
Danny considers the causes of stress on campus, and how to deal with them.