Making Change: Understand More, Fear Less.

This is a awesome guest post by an awesome girl who has awesome things to say.  It was originally a speech done at a Morning Meeting at our prep-school. I'll leave it at that because her the quality and honesty of her words need no introduction. Just read it and let your soul simmer and your heart flutter. And after that, consider how you too can go and make your little bit of positive change in the world. 

Good morning Taft, for those who do not know me, my name is Juste Simanauskaite. I am a junior and I came to Taft as a sophomore last year from my homeland Lithuania. During these two years in the United States, I have come to understand that everyone is capable of making a change. Now I am trying to become one of those people. I am attempting to make a change by fighting for gender equality. The story that I am about to tell you is very personal and important to me. By no means, am I trying to make you feel sorry or pity me; my goal today is to reveal the unfortunate reality that we all live in.

My life has truly been a rollercoaster. Going up and down every single day, experiencing the little joys and struggles of life. However, right before coming to Taft my rollercoaster shut down, the controls broke, and I was not sure whether they would ever go back on. I wish I could say that the situation that I have been through was only 1 of a kind; however, what I experienced is relatively common for the 21^st century. So what happened, you ask? Well, here is my story:

Three years ago, I was a completely different person. I was a 15-year-old girl, just like many of you here at Taft. September of 2012, I started a new high school in my hometown. I was extremely excited to meet new students, teachers, and jump right in into my high-school years. It was one of those feelings you get when you wait for something so much that you can’t even fall asleep, just like waiting for Santa on Christmas eve. However, the excitement was soon gone. The more the year went on, the more alone and isolated I felt. I saw all these socially and academically gifted people making new friends, having fun, and enjoying their time there. However, I was not like all those girls who could talk and flirt with boys for hours and hours. I thought I was not pretty enough, not funny enough, not skinny enough to do so; I felt that I was just not enough. However, that was the standard that a popular girl had to live up to, otherwise you would end up feeling just like me, unwanted, unnoticed and unheard. Up until December of that year, my insecurities and thoughts were slowly killing me from the inside. Every day at school reminded me of a nightmare. Nevertheless, no one knew because I smiled through all the pain and got used to the idea of being a nobody.

As if that was not enough, one day, my dad came home with a new purchase of which he was very proud. A brand new scale, with the fancy options to calculate body and muscle weight, water percentage, and what not. Of course, he wanted all of us to try it out: my mom, my little brother, and me. My mom made the first step and I followed. At that moment, as silly as it may seem, my heart and mind were torn apart. I found out that me, a 15-year old girl, weighed 15 pounds more than a forty-year old woman did. That was it. That final factor was the last trigger that influenced my unfortunate, stupid, and unwise decision, which has irreversibly altered my life.

A year later, I was already facing the doom and consequences of anorexia. After the “scale - incident,” I started out by challenging myself to change my eating habits and began exercising on a daily basis – or what I called it living a “healthier lifestyle.” I read all the articles and books that I could find about what was good for my body, when and what to eat, what to cross out of my diet. My head poured with ideas and thoughts of becoming healthy. First, I took out sweets, and junk food. This of course, most of you would agree, was not a bad thing; however, after a month or two this progressed into no bread, no fats, counting calories for every meal, and making every portion size as small as possible. Control, control, control, no cheating, and control – those words were always in my mind. I felt guilty for eating “too much,” I felt guilty for not exercising for one day, I felt guilty if I ate something after 6pm. Nevertheless, the worst was yet to come because I did not realize that my behavior was leading to a dangerous disease. I thought of this as a positive change: making myself healthy, feeling good about myself, becoming more confident about my body because I felt that this was the only way to be recognized and noticeable. Months passed, and I started seeing the changes – my waist was slimmer, my legs were skinnier, my collarbones started pointing out from my chest. I was proud of myself, I was proud that I finally was approaching the accepted standard of a girl that I wanted to become. What was even more flattering – were the compliments from my classmates, especially guys because they also noticed my shape change. “Juste, you look so good.” “Juste, have you been working out?” “Juste, would you like to go out for coffee sometime?” For the first time people recognized me, they wanted to talk, hang out, and spend more time with me. Therefore, after all of this feedback I saw no point in stopping; however, I did not realize what I was doing to myself until the damage was already done.

After a year of living under my “healthy” rules, I started feeling exhausted all the time, my body temperature was never higher than 96 degrees Fahrenheit, my blood pressure was also very low, and my periods were gone. My parents were concerned; however, every time they said I was not eating enough, I responded “I am, you just never see me eat” or “I ate soooo much at school, I’m not hungry” and by sooo much I usually meant 2 apples and a banana.

All of this became even worse. It took me a while until I understood that maybe feeling cold all the time, drinking 10 cups of hot tea during the day and not having the energy to stay up past 8pm was actually not a good thing. This affected my mood, my academics, and most importantly me! People around me started noticing that I was fading away, day by day there was less and less of me left, both physically and emotionally. However, I could not admit that something was wrong with me and I wanted to prove that everyone else was wrong by saying that. So I looked up the symptoms of anorexia, the disease that people were accusing me of because I wanted to prove them wrong. It turned out that my so called “healthy lifestyle” was not healthy at all, rather the complete opposite. I scrolled down through the symptoms for the disease: 1. Skipping meals, 2. frequently making excuses for not eating, 3. lying about weight loss or the amount of food eaten, 4, adopting an extremely limited diet including only a few certain “safe” foods, 5. cutting food into tiny pieces, 6. obsessively and repeatedly weighing oneself, 7.frequently checking in the mirror for flaws, 8. complaining about being fat, 9. wearing baggy clothing to hide small size, 10. excessive exercising, fatigue, and lack of emotion. I was shocked when I realized that I could identify myself with every single one of those symptoms. I felt as if someone was reading my mind. It took me a year to realize devastating effects of my attempt to be “socially acceptable.” But by then I was a 16-year old that had lost 40 pounds, completely damaged her health, and forgot what it meant to enjoy life. All the stress, anxiousness, starvation, self-discipline, and exhaustion.  All of that for what?

When I try to think of reasons why I had to change in this way, the only thing that I can come up with is that I was trying to fit in; I was trying to live up to the standard of a woman that would be attractive and noticed by others. Even though I managed to recover, I managed to understand my mistake, and I had the willpower to change once again, only this time, for the better; unfortunately, after going through all of this, I am truly concerned and devastated that I am not the only one.1 in 5 women in the world struggle with an eating disorder. That means that out of the 296 girls at Taft, 59 are likely to be affected by this disease. In addition, 53% of 12-year-old girls feel unhappy with their bodies, 78% of 17-year-old girls feel unhappy with theirs and 95% of people with eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25. What do all these numbers indicate? Probably the fact that my story is similar to many of those girls out there. The standards, however, are not only for body shapes, they are created for everything: social media, jobs, ethics, and much more! Therefore, the stories are endless. Women are raised to want to fill the social roles in which society needs them. And unless we talk and become aware of the issue, the outcomes are not going to be positive

            As you may have all heard, I was screening a movie here at Taft called “Miss Representation” just a couple of weeks ago. Right after it more than 30 students gathered and discussed the gender issues that we are facing today. Why is this so significant? Well, the more we talk and discuss, the more stories we share, the more aware we become of the current situation. Yes, you may think that Taft is like a bubble, isolated, and far away from the issues and problems of the world. However, I would like to argue that actually our bubble just represents a smaller model of the bigger world around us. I guess, I will only speak the truth when I say that the issue of stereotypical gender standards is present at Taft as well. Right now, I want everyone to just take a moment and think how could we all prevent those stories from happening, how can we as a community make a change? What will it take us to get rid of those social standards and how are they affecting each one of us personally? Just think. Today, my goal was to make you think and realize that we all together, women and men, make this environment a better place for all of us, we can stop the harm of unhealthy social standards, and we can make this change happen. That we can do by listening, admitting, and talking about the problem. My life may have been different if I had seen enough images in society accepting me for who I am. I now clearly see that the roller coasters we all ride in are controlled by us and influenced by others. I hope after hearing my story we will all be more kind to others and ourselves and embrace the words of Marie Curie “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”  

Find the video of her speech here: https://vimeo.com/155022762

An Adventure with the Buddha in Connecticut.

Hi all. I had an assignment for my Buddhism class which asked us to compare our journey to The Taft School with that of the protagonist of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and also with the Buddha himself. Anyhow, here's a little summary of my adventures in American prep-school through the lens of Buddhist philosophy. Have fun. 

An Adventure with the Buddha in Connecticut.

I.

“We know that egotism is a bad thing; we know that all the great world traditions- not just Buddhism- urge us to transcend our selfishness. But when we seek liberation- in either a religious or a secular guise- we really want to enhance our own sense of self.” – Karen Armstrong, ‘Buddha’

Now that it’s started snowing, I’ll go ahead and tell you about my little journey here and somehow link it to The Buddha. Before I begin, I have a thousand apologies to make but I’ll just mention two of them. One: I’m sorry for the horribly colloquial tone of this paper, but the assignment called for a personal response- and, unfortunately, what I feel is far less nuanced than what I think. Two: this assignment also asked about our goals and I’m sorry to say that I’ve already failed in fulfilling the goals of my little journey here... But that’s okay. It’s started snowing and that means I can finally get around to talking about my little journey here, so-

Here we go.

II.

“Then he suddenly saw clearly that he was leading a strange life, that he was doing many things that were only a game, that he was quite cheerful and sometimes experienced pleasure, but that real life was flowing past him and did not touch him”- Hermann Hesse, ‘Siddhartha’

My favourite poets used to hang around in New England, especially at Harvard- and so did a few of my favourite scientists and philosophers. So when I, a Lower-Sixth Form student at Maru-a-Pula School, was selected as part of the US Scholars to come to Taft, I relished my luck to pursue the footsteps of my American legends. I saw it as my great chance to chase the legacies of Cummings, of Eliot, of Ashbery- and even Thomas Kuhn- the radical philosopher of science who graduated from both Taft and Harvard. This may sound all terribly simplistic and hackneyed and pretentious but this was essentially what I thought the purpose of my life to be: just like every other one of my peers that I have learned to criticize for sharing such similar, basic fantasies: go to college, get my degree, pursue a career that I can be violently successful in. For a long time, I deluded myself with thinking that my version of this surface goal-chasing was deeper than everyone else’s- after all, I was dreaming of getting a PhD in physics and/or philosophy and/or literature and becoming a poorly paid academic who would write books and give lectures and be well-known for looking like Cornel West but instead be from Africa. There were a few rare moments where I would pause to think that I was, perhaps, being a raging hypocrite. I figured that craving for success was lofty and admirable because my desires lay in books and art rather than in money and land. I became very good at ignoring the fact that my desperate wanting, my lusty craving to be ever-more intelligent was essentially and fundamentally the same as buying individually tailored suits and trading stock prices. But still! I was coming to the land of Big Dreams, to America itself, and Taft was my orgasmic green light at the other side of the world; the Daisy to my Gatsby and that was all that mattered.

The really sad part is that I knew all along that I was full of it.

III.

“Without knowing it, he had endeavoured and longed all these years to be like these other people, like these children, and yet his life had been much more wretched and poorer than theirs, for their arms were not his, nor their sorrows his... Were they not playing a game without end? Was it necessary to live for it? No. This game was called Samsara, a game for children,  a game which was perhaps enjoyable played once, twice, ten times- but was it worth playing continually?” ­–Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Underneath my excitement for America was a dark sense of unease. In the land of dreams, people who looked like me were being shot for looking like me; people who didn’t look like me were losing their jobs because other people who looked even less like me were controlling the economy; on the TV screen a president who almost looks like me was wrinkling and greying because all these people still can’t get over the fact that they don’t look like each other. Meanwhile the Harvard website spoke of this strange oddity called ‘opportunity’ while their acceptance rates plummeted annually. I spent more than a few hours refreshing the Taft website wondering whether their words had double-meanings as well and further wondered about the casual messiness of the world around me. In Botswana, I was beginning to hear hints of the same globalized double-speak of ‘opportunity’ as the wealth-gap between citizens increased. I was moving on from one private school to the next, one ‘opportunity’ to the next; and the only thing that I started appreciating about my opportunities was the fact that I only had to theorize about the casual messiness of the world around me rather than directly experience it. But still, even at a distance I could tell something was off with the reality I was living in. Was I so special that I deserved to be given a scholarship to Taft while some of my friends wondered and still wonder how they’ll pay for university? Was I so special that my parents were able to afford the tuition of my old private-school in Botswana which led to my scholarship to Taft when my government’s educational funding becomes increasingly out-of-reach for my friends? And then the biggest questions of them all- my little brother and my high school poetry-prodigy friend both died before they had the chance to be further offended by the ugly suffering of this reality: does my survival make me more special than them? Obviously not- so why the hell am I here in Connecticut watching snow fall on the ground when they aren’t? And how the hell am I supposed to continue living in the nonsensical pain of this meaningless world?

Why is it that we call samsara ‘opportunity’?

IV.

“...he was still plagued by desire and still immersed in the toils of consciousness. He had begun to wonder if the sacred Self was a delusion. He was, perhaps, beginning to think that it was not a helpful symbol of the eternal, unconditioned Reality he sought. To seek an enhanced Self might even endorse the egotism that he needed to abolish.” – Karen Armstrong, “Buddha”.

I mentioned earlier that I failed in fulfilling the goals of my journey here. While my goals changed shiftlessly in the murky wind of my mind, I still failed to reach any one of them. The most obvious (and most pathetic) goal was to get into Harvard. The other goal was then not to care about getting into Harvard or not (ongoing; also pathetic). Another was to make High Honors. Yet another was to finally finish my first collection of poetry, ‘First Adventures in Adolescent Heartbreak’ (also pathetic). Yet another goal was to learn how to forgive myself for harbouring such awkwardly elitist goals while being a self-proclaimed humanist. And then  there was the goal to finally kill of my awkward elitist goals so I could become an actual humanist, rather than a self-proclaimed one. I was also supposed to call my mother every Sunday and stay in contact with my friends. Write delicate, philosophical and self-effacing poetry about the trees in New England. Do my physics homework. Hand in assignments on time. Go the gym. Find myself. Love myself. Try not to get over-involved with the black struggle.

All of them: failed.

V.

“But today he only saw one of the river’s secrets, one that gripped his soul. He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. Who could understand, conceive this? He did not understand it; he was only aware of a dim suspicion, a faint memory, divine voices.” –Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

There’s one more goal that I want to talk about. It was the reason I signed up Honors Humanities, for Philosophy and eventually, for Buddhism. Also, this is the part of the essay where I actually relate my experience to Siddartha and the Buddha. I didn’t mention this goal earlier because I would be lying to you if I said that I came to America with the explicit purpose of fulfilling this particular goal in mind. Rather, I became very skilled at convincing myself that the reason I came to America was for the sake of adventure. Adventure. That’s the word I had in my head when my visa came through and when my Taft acceptance letter came through and when it started snowing. It’s the same word I’ve had in mind with every conversation and every book I’ve read here. I’ve referred to adventure in various forms, all awkward and needlessly intellectualized to make it seem like a bigger deal that it actually is. Last semester, in our Philosophy classed I called this adventure the ‘space between the physical and the metaphysical realms’. This semester, Siddhartha calls it ‘Atman’ and Gotama calls it the ‘Self.’ I chose not to include this goal in the preceding sections of this essay because I earnestly believe that the quest for this mysterious adventure is separate from the samsara I’ve been trapped in since birth- much of these entrapments of suffering being self-constructed. And I really, really, really do believe that this is the case otherwise I wouldn’t have saved this section for last. I wish I could give a better reason than that, but, like I said earlier, what I feel is far less nuanced than what I think. Yet even if feeling is less nuanced than thought (which you know I think I know is true), the unfiltered quality of feeling can be nurtured into thought. The depthlessness of my academic success-chasing still could not kill this implicit and fundamental goal of adventure that I had in my mind when coming to Taft. Even if my philosophical ponderings about the nature of life and being are not the actual occupations of my feelings- for I have spent a great deal lying to myself thinking that they are- they, in essence, remain the true occupation of my feelings; for it is these same ponderings of faith and wonder that have kept me alive in the shameless samsara of America. I don’t know how else to unpack this argument, but this simplification might help: I came to America saying that what I wanted was adventure; but what I really wanted was a Harvard acceptance later;  but what I really wanted even if I thought I was lying to myself about it was actually the adventure because that’s the only goal that survives failure because it never ends.

VI.

“He had begun to wonder if the sacred Self was a delusion. He was perhaps, beginning to think that it was not a helpful symbol of the eternal, unconditioned reality he sought. To seek an enhanced Self might even endorse the egotism that he needed to abolish. Nevertheless Gotama had not lost hope. He was still certain that it was possible for human beings to reach the final liberation of enlightenment.” – Karen Armstrong, ‘Buddha’.

I don’t expect to ever reach Nirvana and I’m not trying to. I am, however, curious about whether such a thing exists or not. Does Nirvana look like Plato’s World of Ideas?  Does Nirvana have shape or form? Does the ‘Nothingness’ of Nirvana constitute Somethingness? You see, unless I stop asking these sorts of questions, and I promise I won’t, I’m probably not going to experience the brilliant hyper-consciousness hiding away in the folds of space-time. That’s fine with me- I think too much and I’m happy with that. My fundamental disagreement with The Buddha thusly lies here: I don’t want the experience of Nirvana, I want the proof of Nirvana.  But then again, that’s what I think; not what I feel.

What if...

Votre.

I graduated fresh and bloody from my mother's womb,
a gift, greater than any other.
My sister before me too.
My brother after me was swallowed up by Him
mere hours after drawing his last breath his first.
Behold:
This is my unambiguous declaration against
this universal truth: my unparalleled defense
of the dignity of man
against the temperature-empty, relentlessly inhuman
universe unconcerned with these ventures
which characterize knowing it

not. For one day I shall call
my teachers by their first names. One day
they shall call me doctor. This is the totem
declaring the worth of the living and the dead,
my sister and my brother: myself. The totem
of the disenfranchised and  barely and disabled
and black. Even also less including I guess
the enriched the cup overfloweth and mighty
and colourless. Our skin and bones and graves
and blood and virgin and lust and chest and
breasts and being and nothing and isness is

beautiful

regardless of everything. It is mine.
It is yours. It is yours.

Votre.