Lilly

Don’t take those classes, they say. You’ll burn yourself out. You can’t work that much. You’ll get home from your first semester of college and be overjoyed; you don’t have any homework, your parents are subjecting you to more food than you’ve seen in the past two weeks combined, you can finally go barefoot in the shower again…

By a week into break, I’m thinking to myself, I miss school. My sense of discipline, while great, is reliant on my surroundings. It’s easy to put in the hours when I’m holed up in the physics lounge or even my dorm room—compact, devoted spaces where the world snaps into focus. As much as I love being home, it’s different here. My brain sifts through a long list of potential tasks and decides, one by one, that they aren’t worth the effort. At least not right now, it says cheerfully. There will be time to do all that later! But now, now you can text your friends and watch meaningless YouTube videos and no one can stop you!

And that’s just the thing: no one can. Except for myself.

My mother says that I’m much more assertive than I was in high school. “I think it’s because I’m really responsible for myself now,” I tell her. It’s not that I wasn’t a year ago, but my experience at college has called on my initiative, my drive, and my willingness to be uncomfortable. I’ve learned that I can’t rely on motivation alone, that discipline is essential when it comes to those Friday nights when you’d rather be doing anything but your math project or Monday mornings when you know that you could just not get up, skip class, would it really make a difference? But no, every little bit counts.

Now, I’m learning that discipline is much harder to maintain when you aren’t in an environment that calls for it. But listen, every little bit does count. If that means cranking out internship essays over break, I have to do it. If that means listening to French music for a week before the semester starts, I have to do it. If that means refreshing my memory on line integrals with a pencil and my old calculus textbook, I have to do it. Being prepared for every eventuality is the best way to ensure I’ll be comfortable moving into second semester.

If discipline is hard to maintain, I have to turn to motivation again. I go see Hidden Figures with my mom, watch The Right Stuff, read Commander Chris Hadfield’s wonderful memoir An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. I let myself dream about being an astronaut like I did when I was little, look up how prohibitively expensive it would be to get my pilot’s license, remember my brief moment in control of an old Piper Cub over the summer. What would Hadfield do? I ask myself, or John Glenn, or Katherine Johnson?

I’ll write my essays, mumble to myself in French, integrate the divergence over the volume if I must. I missed my classes by a week into break, but now I’m only a week away. ♦