Nonetheless, it remains a great mystery to me why we put ourselves through this. Why do we take on Herculean tasks and put ourselves through hell to try to accomplish them? Why not just stick to what we know, what comes easily? No matter how bad we feel about ourselves during midterm week, we're all pretty brilliant at something. Why not just stick to what we know?
It is pure masochism? What pleasure do we get from doing something that seems impossible? Why, for instance, did I stick out MOL 214: Introduction to Cellular and Molecular Biology last spring? I knew I wasn't going to be a science major and I'd already fulfilled my ST requirement. At the very least I could have dropped it to Pass/D/Fail. But for some reason I just couldn't. There's nothing logical about that - it's not like high school, where you take AP Calculus BC just so you can put it on your college application; here, you don't get points for working your ass off for that B in a math class when you could have gotten an A in an English class.
This seems to be a Princeton phenomenon: We go after the things that seem unattainable, not because it necessarily gets us anywhere, except potentially the insane asylum, but because we want to do them. We apply for the most prestigious and selective internships, we bicker eating clubs, we apply for Woody Woo or a creative thesis - we go after anything and everything that it's highly likely we can't have.
Maybe this explains why I've lately developed a tendency to start papers the morning that they're due. All of a sudden there's not just some hazy deadline in the next couple days; there's a real and scary deadline in the next couple hours. There's a real chance that I can't actually churn out five pages in two hours. Or that what I churn out won't make any sense. That's when the little man in my head, who my friends like to joke is constantly running around in circles saying "oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, oh crap," starts to pick up the pace and gets dizzy. The stakes are up: It's not just about whether you'll get an A or a B, it's about whether you'll pass or fail. It's the academic version of do or die.
Perhaps the proper analogy is to skydiving. When you first jump out of a plane, before you open the parachute, you're just free falling. And for those few seconds, you really feel like you're going to die because you're at the mercy of gravity. If you didn't have a parachute, you really would die, and for those few seconds, I imagine you're conscious of how powerless you really are. Having never been skydiving, I think of rugby, when I'm sprinting full speed at some girl twice my size who's probably going to put me on my ass. Why do any of us like running full speed into large, solid women? It's anyone's guess. But for those few seconds, you've got nothing to lose. You sense impending doom, so you go all out because you can't stop the inevitable. But it's a rush for that tiny chance that maybe, just maybe, you'll pull it off.
It's not that we're looking to fail. We're looking for that rush. We put ourselves in situations that might very well be impossible precisely because we don't know what will happen. We're after that high where for a minute, as much as we are Type-A control freaks, we're flying by the seat of our pants. For once, we're out of control. So no matter how overwhelmed you feel this week, embrace it. Let go and enjoy the ride.
Alexis Levinson is a comparative literature major from Santa Monica, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.
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