In Pursuit of Self-Reliance by Olivia

In Pursuit of Self-Reliance by Olivia - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

College was a time of loss for me. I lost home in moving far away. I lost friends for the same reason. I lost what had been, up until then, carefully preserved innocence. Most importantly, I lost a sense of myself that had previously come easily. Surrounded by fraternities, sororities, and a world where drugs and alcohol seemed the key to popularity, I forgot how to exist as my own entity.

“Insist on yourself, never imitate,” says Emerson in his famous essay, “Self-Reliance.” I read this essay my junior year of college, in an English class dedicated to American literature but also to explorations of philosophy, the mind, and the self. The professor teaching the class, Marc Edmundson, had been one of my first professors in college – a decided hippy (perhaps a retired one), with long hair, funky (often purple or pink or green) glasses, either clog-like or gladiator-sandal-like black leather shoes, depending on the weather, and a slow, deliberate and ponderous, almost Dumbledore-like manner of speaking to his class. The class I took from him my freshman year, entitled “Self and Soul” and built around some of the most important books in the history of Western society (including Plato’s Republic and the Bible), quickly became my favorite. For the rest of my time in college, I took a class from Edmundson every year.

In Mark Edmundson’s classes, we talked a lot (although I, having always been shy, hung back at first and occasionally even through my senior year). We talked about literature, of course, but something about Edmundson’s tone and his questions made it clear that we were talking, really, about so much more. We were talking about the stories beneath the stories, about the people who wrote them; we were talking about a universal process of self-discovery and self-realization.

As I grew up, as I moved from on-campus housing to off-campus housing, joined a sorority and left one, painted my room yellow, and wrote in my journal more and more, I began to look more closely at my life – why I lived the way I did, and who inspired me. I never ceased to get down on myself for not quite fitting in, for not quite loving what everyone else seemed to love – going to every possible party, sharing in small talk and drinking and laughing about nothing, really, at all. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just love those things too, why it always had to feel like I was pretending.

Then, I stopped. I stopped pretending. I realized, after going abroad for a semester and meeting friends I can only describe as soul mates – fiercely independent, each one different, but loving and curious at heart – that the only people I had ever truly admired were the ones who dared to be themselves. Marc Edmundson had taught me that above anyone else. Eccentric would be an understated word to describe him. He had explored the world in unconventional ways: he had been a taxi driver in New York City out of college, for example, and later became a college professor and published author. How strange, how wonderful. He approached his life, his sense of self, with utter confidence, despite being obviously different, even weird.

Mark Edmundson taught me, in his personhood and in the literature he prescribed, that I should never try to be anyone but myself – chase my passions, my dreams, yes, but never chase a person or a trend that fails to understand you.