Lilly

I start small. I ask someone for help on a physics problem. “Yeah, of course, I could use a break from my astro homework,” she says, and then, “oh god, do I even remember kinematics?” We work it out together step by step and laugh uproariously at our mistakes. I ask someone else to proofread a short essay before I turn it in online. “Yeah, yeah, sure,” she says, distractedly, and when I turn my computer to face her she scrunches up her nose. “Can it be, like, later? I’m kind of busy.” I am learning who my friends are.

Sometimes, I feel like I learned all the wrong things in high school—pride, secrecy, hypercompetitiveness. A substitute teacher I had in a calculus class once said something along the lines of: “If this doesn’t come easily to you, then I for one don’t want you building my bridges and healing my children.” Asking for help was a show of weakness, a failure of intuition—especially in science and math courses. If you want to spin that a positive way, it taught me independence, right? Problem solving, using different approaches, figuring shit out on my own. But my sense of academic independence is so pronounced that I’ll sit 20 meters from my astronomy professor’s open door and agonize over the homework by myself because I can’t bring myself to admit that I simply don’t understand. At college, it’s even easier to ask for help than it was in high school—in theory. In practice it is just as hard, and maybe harder, because I am still trying to learn how best to stand out.

But it’s funny, because while I’ve always been more comfortable in my “academic skin,” so to speak, I feel a lot better about the balance I’m striking outside of the classroom. I don’t have a lot of friends, but I also don’t care about sitting alone at dinner anymore. I am finding places where I can be vulnerable—I go to a meeting of my college’s queer union and find myself opening up about things I had never before said out loud. Later my friend says she’s proud of me and I tell her thanks, and then I’m like, “So, about this other physics problem…”

I am learning to prioritize. And when my desire to succeed takes priority over my pride, I will find help. ♦