Source: ALMA, Unsplash
By Ayesha Siddiqui
I have a playlist on Spotify called “Songs that feel like spring of year 10.” I don’t remember when I made that playlist, but I think its existence speaks to a sentiment that can no longer be harnessed. I remember it well, but trying to conjure up some semblance of what it feels like again is like grasping at straws.
Spring is approaching, and there was a time when I would have more to say about it. Maybe that isn’t true. It seems easier to mourn than it is to celebrate; I often find that I have more to say about loss than I do about joy. I don’t quite know why that is, but I suspect it involves something about foraging for scraps of meaning when it is found nowhere else. In that case, I may just have more to say about spring than I ever have before.
I can tell you that the spring of Year 10 was the last time spring felt like that. For whatever reason, a lot was not quite the same in the post-pandemic world. Perhaps the coalescence of these emotions with the timing of the pandemic is a fluke. Perhaps the pandemic was merely a catalyst for what was inevitable. Perhaps it wasn’t any one of these things, but a combination of external factors and the human condition. I could spend a lifetime trying to figure out why I no longer experience joy as I used to, or why spring now means nothing more to me than a liminal space between the end of winter and the emergence of summer, and still get no closer to feeling something more again. Now, at university, I sometimes almost wish for spring to at least be marked more intensely by the rigour of finals season. I tell myself that at least then, I’d feel the crushing demands of urgency and the fervour of purpose. But being perpetually behind on your tasks doesn’t leave much room for any distinguishing traits of finals season to surface. It’s the same all year round. All of it. The seasons dissolve into others, but the acrid taste of despair lingers in every one of them.
It is easy to limit such despair to a U of T-specific phenomenon. We joke about the choices we have made and find collective comfort in our tricky relationship with the colloquially expressed “U of Tears.” Believing this is almost hopeful: with an end in sight, the weight of it is easier to bear. Some adopt the “I’m just scraping by to get my degree” approach, while others find it in themselves to give their all to the remainder of their years. Either way, the end arrives, one way or another, and so does the suffering. However you may have gotten there, what matters is that you have gotten there.
In my senior year of high school, my English class read a play called Every Brilliant Thing. It inspired us to create our own list of brilliant things about this world. You know, the things that made it all seem worth it. They could be little things, like finding extra fries at the bottom of the bag, or very specific things, like watching the sunrise and eating cereal outdoors on a mild winter morning before school while everyone else is still asleep. And yes, in case you’re wondering, that was taken from my own list, which I recently revisited. But revisiting it was bittersweet. It managed to somehow remind me of all the brilliant things I had not considered in a while, while also reminding me of all the brilliant things I simply could not consider because they did not exist anymore. Although, perhaps they weren’t so much about the things as they were about the people they were related to at the time of my listing. Realizing this was when I palpably felt the magnitude of the grief I’d kept with me since the spring of Year 10. I hadn’t felt it in a while.
Sometimes it feels like life is the accumulation of grief, and in order to survive, one must balance that which is lost with that which is gained. I owe my English teacher, Ms. Fenton, for this list’s existence at all. I think about how I was not planning on being an English major when I was her student, but I don’t know how to tell her about the path life took me on that led me to now being one. I know that when I wrote Brilliant Thing #53, Hugs given by people who normally hate them, it was about a girl named Carol who I was not close enough with to know if I will ever see her again. I know that when I wrote Brilliant Thing #68, When your friends live within walking distance from your house, it was about evening walks with my best friend Priya that made me feel as though perhaps I didn’t really need much else from life.
Now, most days of the year we are not on the same continent, and the days we are are few and in between. It could be a lot worse; we are, after all, in the digital age. But there’s something to be said in how here, at university, despite my friends and I being young adults living on our own terms with no curfews or anything of the sort, all within walking distance of each other, there is a certain underlying melancholy—one which perhaps stems from the newfound responsibility of adulting. There exists a certain monotony to the days, where each hangout seems to happen only to fill the time between deadlines. With little spontaneity or casual, whimsical encounters and unbridled laughter, there is little overlap between moments of careless joy and those of isolating academic rigour. Is that what it’s all about then? This whole “real life” thing? Completing task upon task until the distance between you and those you once loved grows insurmountable, and then you are left with the skeletons of your dreams and a shell of a person.
I don’t quite know what I’m getting at. All I know is that I’m often sad, and I’m always tired. I find little fulfillment in the pursuit of knowledge when it leaves me with little room to breathe. I find myself wanting the days to end, but I stay up far longer than I should for fear of facing another day of getting little done but feeling the exhaustion as if I did. My list of brilliant things feels like a former memory, bathed in the naivety and hopefulness of childhood. It seems to have dulled, greatly.
I suppose entering your twenties naturally brings with it this kind of existentialism. I worry a lot about the future. I say that in both the vaguest and most precise sense. And I wonder if perhaps part of growing up becomes seeking that more profound kind of meaning when times seem to be perpetually in flux, and are as uncertain as ever. Can life feel anything but distressing when the burden of figuring out the rest of your life is no longer a distant concern? I know I am not alone in feeling this. Is this not simply the human condition? We live, we feel, and we suffer—but like most things human, it is not everlasting. Perhaps our transience, then, is what will save us.
