Exercise 1
Walk to the mouth of Sullivan’s Creek in autumn.
Look at the shoreline of Lake Burley Griffin—observe the algae, the shit, the rodents. Look across the lake, taking note of:
The spectrum of ochre, citrine, and amber formed by a cascade of deciduous leaves.
The finesse with which black swans cut through West Lake.
Occasional groups of talkative kayakers.
Return your gaze to the shoreline. Walk back to your room and think about how much you hate it here.
Many of us act as if we were transported to Canberra suddenly and violently, against our wills.
The claim that Canberra is decidedly boring is made frequently, as if in an attempt to reveal the brutality with which we were moved here.
This is the very brutality that drove us to apply to study at ANU, and, as a corollary, accept life in Canberra as a possibility.
The trouble with authoritative commentary is that it must be informed by more than immediate impressions.
Without more than such impressions, those who claim to be endowed with authority amount to nothing but charlatans.
After all, what have you done to support your claims?
How exciting was your life before the invisible hand dropped you here, anyway?
How many of you have found total satisfaction in your comfortably insular Vaucluse routines, or lay claim to Melbourne’s cultural superiority despite living a winter’s day away from the NGV?
How can social monotony be liberating, while the structure of a planned city is stifling?
This is not to suggest that one should not have an opinion about one’s city.
Rather, it is an appeal for a more careful treatment of epistemically modal phrases.
If Canberra is so objectively boring, one’s argument must surely depend on something more compelling than ‘I think’.
Exercise 2
Buy the Routledge edition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus from Harry Hartog. Skip to the end, and read the shortest proposition:
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence (Wittgenstein, 2001, p. 89).
Interpret this literally, as divorced from the preceding six propositions (tonight’s date won’t care about logical atomism, anyway). Consider this interpretation; consider acting on it.
References
Wittgenstein, L. (2001). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness, Trans.). Routledge.
I grew up in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, a place not many ANU students are from. Looking back on high school there, even though it wasn’t the best period in my life, it made me feel like I somewhat belonged. There was always a new club for me to join and I had a great group of friends, who never made me feel isolated for the things I found interesting. Maybe it was because of all those American college movies I had watched growing up, and all those YouTube videos I had watched in anticipation, but I believed that university would be the place where I became more confident and grew into myself. I assumed university would make me feel like I completely belonged.
I had two weeks of the ‘University experience’ before COVID-19 hit, but it was nothing like I expected. That first week of uni, I remember printing out my resume and immediately applying for every job in sight. I assumed every student was doing the same. I was sorely mistaken.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only 40% of people in tertiary education are working part-time. I was surprised when I found out that some students at ANU have never had to work, and will not have to work throughout their entire degree, to take care of themselves. This made me feel like an imposter at ANU, acutely out of place at such a prestigious university.
My first tutorial at ANU also made me feel like I was out of place. The way tutors speak is something that still perplexes me to this day. I felt like I was sitting in a Master’s program for International Relations, not my first ever uni class. I believe lots of ANU students have felt this, as I often see it plastered all over ANU Confessions. Some lecturers do not know how to teach and they can often make the course feel inaccessible. It became even more difficult over COVID-19 when everything was online; it was even harder to learn. For example, I took a French Introduction course, thinking it would be a pretty simple class. I had taken a little French in high school and thought I would have an advantage, – I was wrong. The lecturer attempted to teach a whole year of high school French in a few weeks!
There seems to be a pervasive expectation at ANU that University is our only priority, and ANU continually fails to take into account the complex and busy lives of its students. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in 2017 – 2018, 15% of people ages 18-24 had experienced high levels of psychological distress. With the impact of COVID-19, I know that this would have increased. As a student who works part-time and suffers from psychological distress, I can attest that the help provided by ANU is minuscule. Because of this, it is so easy to feel like you do not belong, or feel out of place. That first year of university impacted how I saw myself. The thing about imposter syndrome is, everything you feel about yourself is tipped on its head. The way you perceive yourself and the people around you is completely different. You internalise it and feel like you are the only one feeling this way – as if you are the only person who is in the wrong place.
Imposter syndrome also makes you feel like you are in a constant race to keep up, and ANU reinforces that toxic narrative.
Have you ever noticed that most tutorials seem to be during the middle of the day, making it difficult to work and study at the same time? Some lecturers, even after COVID-19, still expect students to go to their lectures in-person and you may even lose participation points if you do not attend. I do not have time to go to a three-hour lecture on a Monday morning, especially when it’s a day I work. ANU perpetuates the pressure to keep up with your peers, you need to graduate when everyone else graduates, you need to get HDs, and you need to be prefect, mentally and physically
When you break them down, though, none of these goals make sense. When it comes to graduating ‘on time’, people change their degrees, I know, shocking! When you do that, you often end up extending the time you need to study before graduating. Many people also do fewer courses to work or take care of their mental health, which also extends their degrees. It feels like to finish your degree perfectly in three or four years would mean that you didn’t work, and never had a mental breakdown, ever!
Moving on to pressure to get all D’s or HDs, not all courses are the same, also shocking! Unless you have done the course already, you do not know what to expect. Your tutor might be a harsh marker and maybe the last exam is really hard for no reason. When you take a look again at these societal expectations that make everyone feel like they are doing something wrong, you realise that they do not make any sense. Many students take time off here and there, many students are working multiple jobs to afford to stay in Canberra and many students are simply trying to pass their courses and survive.
The one thing imposter syndrome has taught me was that it is easy to idealise everyone around you and look down on yourself, what is more difficult is to treat yourself with kindness and remember that this path in life is your own and no one else’s. Tertiary systems also need to look at every student as an individual and provide more financial and mental resources. While I do not believe that uni will ever get easier, especially if ANU continues to forget about the welfare of their students, I do believe that the communities students have created, such as ANU Confessions and ANU Schmidtposting will continue to bring us comfort, so we never fully feel alone.
Comments Off on Greenwashing Our Drowning Futures: A Call to Action from the South to the North
We are not facing a climate crisis that is imminent in the distant future. But we are in the middle of a climate catastrophe as we speak. While here in Australia, much as in the rest of the Global North, we convene in siloed conferences and policy forums; discuss climate resilience and mitigation in hallowed halls and ivory towers; deliberate on what the future may hold in a still distant 2050 – a future with a projected global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius – for millions of people across the world, 2050 is already upon them.
One-third of Pakistan has been submerged in the recent catastrophic floods. Between June to August this year, Pakistan’s southernmost provinces faced a 400 percent increase in their average monsoon rainfall. In addition to this, Pakistan is home to 7200 glaciers, the largest number in the world outside of the polar regions. Rising temperatures due to global warming are accelerating the Himalayan glacial melt in Pakistan at a much faster rate than previously anticipated by scientists.
Just in the recent catastrophe alone, 33 million lives were affected – more than the total population of Australia. This includes 16 million children, and 650,000 pregnant women without access to proper health services, with much of the infrastructure devastated. Four million acres of farmland has been destroyed, causing an acute crisis of food insecurity, and large swathes of the country are still underwater. While it has been estimated that the waters will take six more months to recede, the flood-ravaged lands are becoming breeding grounds for water-borne diseases – cholera, malaria, dengue – while experts warn the coming of a “second wave of death and destruction.”
Pakistan merits our attention for the sheer injustice of its people facing the worst brunt of climate catastrophe, while the country’s global share of carbon emissions is only less than 1 percent. An injustice that is compounded by a severe debt burden of $130 billion and crippling International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities, including taxes on oil and electricity, at a time of an unprecedented disaster. Or the entrenched effects of colonial and imperial entanglements that relegate the country to a ‘no man’s land’ – whose worth is dictated merely by imperial interests and ‘strategic’ relevance to the Global North; and whose calls for immediate debt relief, as demanded by the Pakistani activist community, are drowned out by racialised tropes of ‘violence’ and ‘danger’. But Pakistan is also a glimpse into our collective future – a symbolic front for our advocacy as a country that is already ‘ground zero’ for the climate catastrophe and exhibiting the impact of the dreaded mark of 1.5 degree Celsius.
In this context, we are fast approaching the 27th Annual UN Climate Change Conference of Parties, or COP27. Previous conferences settled upon emissions reduction agreements as outlined in the Kyoto protocols or the Paris Agreement. Not only have these agreements been inadequate but they have also allowed governments to perpetuate climate vandalism through an ostensible facade of seeking climate solutions. Greta Thunberg called last year’s COP26 conference in Glasgow more of the same “blah blah blah”. She called for protests around the conference to reject the same old greenwashing, saying that “our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises.” The nature of the current climate catastrophes, if anything, expose the hollowness of such initiatives. Even if governments fully adhered to their emissions reductions as agreed upon in the Paris Agreement, the world would still reach apocalyptic levels of climate catastrophe everywhere in the coming decades. A worsening of the disastrous effects is already being felt.
The upcoming conference is set to be held in Egypt this year, even as Egyptian climate activists are protesting this charade of greenwashing and demanding more. The Sisi dictatorship has enforced draconian laws to limit access to information, including their country’s net carbon emissions and is continuing to warehouse hundreds of political prisoners in state prison cells. Recently, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a high-profile democracy activist on a hunger strike, wrote a letter “about global warming because of the news from Pakistan” and raised concerns about the impending climate catastrophe that will reach us all. Highlighting the 33 million lives affected by the floods in Pakistan, he questioned the (in)adequacy of state responses as global warming continues. This letter, too, has been suppressed by the Egyptian authorities. Other democracy activists in Egypt have also called on climate activists around the world to not allow the Egyptian government to greenwash the dictatorship through the upcoming COP conference.
In Australia, we have a particular responsibility to answer these calls of solidarity from Egypt and Pakistan. Australia is one of the largest contributors to global fossil fuel emissions per capita, particularly from coal export emissions. These emissions are conveniently not counted in the Australian Labor Party’s latest climate bill. Such creative elisions and the absence of any enforceable targets have allowed the Labor party to plan a significant escalation of fossil fuel emission exports, by greenlighting the opening up of 106 new coal and gas projects whilst posturing to address the issue of emission reductions.
There is no lack of academic seminars on the impending climate crisis at the ANU. But beyond these siloed academic engagements, it is pertinent to ask where the university – as an institution – stands on climate change. It is imperative to move from knowledge production to action. The ANU itself has been the subject of a nearly decade-long divestment campaign. Students have overwhelmingly called for full divestment from fossil fuels in two referendums run by the student union ANUSA, first in 2014 and then again last year. The most recent data available to students indicates that our university still has large-scale investments in fossil fuel companies. There is also a shroud of opacity on the specificities of their investments. Without a clear breakdown of companies that ANU invests in, such as what they provided in 2016, we can’t be sure if ANU still invests in companies like Woodside Petroleum or big banks that finance coal projects as they did in that year. What we do know is that ANU’s infrastructure portfolio, which includes millions of dollars invested in the Kwinana gas-fired power station, actually increased its total carbon emissions by almost 23 percent last year. There are no enforceable targets in ANU’s investment portfolio as part of its ‘Below Zero’ campaign and its reports rely heavily on the discredited ESG exposure scores to demonstrate how environmentally sustainable they are.
That is why we have organised a speak-out for climate justice this Friday, the 28th of November to maintain the pressure. We cannot allow for the green-washing and climate vandalism carried out in our name. Or turn the demands for climate justice and debt relief from the Global South into “feel good” opportunities for the Global North to give paltry sums in “charity.” Despite the platitudes offered by elite institutions and state actors (be it ANU’s Socially Responsible Investment reporting, the Australian Labor Party, or those convening COP27) to set out tentative and non-enforceable targets, we are witnessing an unchecked expansion of fossil fuel extraction. Meanwhile millions of lives are already in the throes of disaster, their homes washed away, their farmlands and infrastructure devastated, with no return to normalcy in sight. This is only just the beginning. It is no longer tenable to discuss the climate crisis in terms of a projected future – when this future is already upon us.
Heba is a Pakistani student at ANU and Nick is a member of Socialist Alternative.
This article was written on the stolen land of the Ngunawal, Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respect to Elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty has not been ceded. There is no climate justice without Indigenous justice.
Comments Off on Love Stories: In Conversation with Trent Dalton
Go hug someone you love, ASAP!
On Saturday the 13th of August, I sacrificed an hour of my busy afternoon to the gods of the Canberra Writers Festival. The event? Love Stories: In Conversation with Trent Dalton. The attendee? Me, alone – I had failed to convince any of my friends that this was an event for normal people (I.e., non-bookworms, people who hadn’t read his book and therefore didn’t immediately begin writing a series of letters to all the people they love). Love Stories is Dalton’s most recent book, inspired by his best friend’s mother leaving him her antique typewriter. In honour of her and her life, Dalton took to the busiest corner in Brisbane with a sign saying, “Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?” The stories he collected and the conversations he had with people, safe to say, had quite an impact on me.
Having attended another Canberra Writers festival event that morning, I was dubious about this one. Although I love, admire and deeply respect Trent Dalton, the morning panelists had made me want to (in order):
become a leader of industry (maybe like a CEO in a male industry type vibe), using her position to pull other women and disadvantaged groups up with her;
pursue journalism (idk, one of the panelists was a journalist and she sounded like a baddie);
hug my parents (and thank them for never telling me women should be seen and not heard);
hug my (dearly departed) grandmother and tell her that while I understood why she was forced to be polite, accepting etc. etc., things had changed, and I wished she hadn’t been so strict on forcing my sister and I to become nice, quiet, polite young women.
The ability of this event to inspire these feelings within me came from the honest and inspiring connections between all the panelists and the discussions of their experiences. I was therefore unsure that the one white man on stage (being interviewed by the wonderful Lisa Miller) would be able to provoke in me the same thought-provoking, inspiring, empowered ideas that the morning event had. And yet, it kinda did??? Maybe even more so?? Weird. The fact that the first event managed to instill so many immediate and forceful feelings within me and yet not be the best event of the day is still disturbing to me.
When he (Mr Dalton, naturally) first came on stage and began speaking, I was a little shocked and offended at the number of times he used the word “like.” Although I study linguistics and am aware that no forms of language are inherently better than any others and I shouldn’t judge people for how they speak and so on and so on, I’ll be honest, it made me cringe. It made him sound (in my humble opinion, speaking with all the authority of an undergraduate university student) rather inarticulate. The opposite of the eloquent, moving speaker I expected him to be.
As the event went on, I began to see how wrong my first impression truly was. Not that Dalton didn’t use the word “like” a lot, he did. And not that he didn’t swear, because he did. Or have a bit of a bogan accent (he definitely did). I just came to see that there was far more to him and his message than his initial appearance led me to believe. And like, I knew this before, but he really made me believe it. Because he appealed not to my head, and my university education, which said, rationally, the first event had been better, but to my heart. And my heart said that any person who could make me, over the course of an hour, want to:
Go and hug every person in my life,
Fall in love (straight away, if possible – anyone interested?)
Cry
Send a message to all the people I’ve lost
Begin saying ‘I love you’ more (maybe even to my tutors? Life is too short)
was someone that I should really take notes from.
I could tell that everyone around me was affected in the same way. As Trent (calling authors by their last name is so outdated) spoke about his dead best friend’s mother, who bequeathed him the typewriter he used to write the book, the two women in front of me hugged, clearly having also lost someone recently. As he spoke about his mother’s experiences of horrific domestic violence, the audience all around me gasped. When he joked about his former teacher telling him he would one day be the head of an outlaw bikie gang, we laughed. That was the power of this event, and what the first event had, in some way, been missing. Trent speaking so openly and honestly about love, and its importance in all our lives, made us all feel a little closer to the person sitting beside us than we had been when we first sat down. He used love, his experiences of it, and others’ experiences of it to weave the common thread of humanity through every row of that theatre.
I was also deeply impacted when Lisa Miller, the interviewer (or conversation partner I suppose), asked Trent what the whole point of his book was. While most of his responses to questions were rather roundabout, he did directly answer this one in the end. And the simple answer was: love.
He described it as the kitchen scene within his Brisbane home. The environment that you look forward to returning to at the end of the day. The place you tell your loved ones about your stuff-up at work. The place you laugh and hug and cry and get relief from the world at the end of your 8-hour workday. The place you feel safe. And while not everyone has the luck and incredible privilege of having a place like this to return to, many of us do.
And I, on behalf of Trent (and I hope he would approve of this, as I am not sufficiently close to him to ask), would like you to appreciate that extra hard today, or tomorrow, or whenever you are next there. Appreciate the people who make you laugh when you’re on the verge of tears, and who make every problem seem smaller just by sharing it. Appreciate the fact that we, as humans, have the need, the desire, the drive, to create these connections which give our life meaning. And don’t forget that you, too, are part of this ongoing and resilient chain of humanity, and that you deserve a pat on the back for your role in it.
After all, if you go and hug someone, or tell someone you love them, or you, personally, get yourself through a tough period in your life, you are contributing to the loved and lived experiences of others, and of yourself. We are all a little patchwork of the love we have given and received over the course of our lives, something which Trent made me incredibly proud of and grateful for. Thanks, Trent (love you!).
At midday, on the 2nd of July, Garema Place was transformed into an amphitheatre.
A crowd of people had overflowed the square and arranged themselves to stand at attention to the amplified voice of protest – a marquee fitted with a PA system. The protesting assembly declared their intentions in the form of a forest of picket signs, disgusted by the overturn of Roe v. Wade. For the past fifty years the US Supreme Court’s landmark case has protected an individual’s right to choose.
The messages were varied in tone, but united in meaning; the cuttingly blunt and the mockingly witty.
“Abortion = Healthcare!” “Girls just want to have fundamental human rights!”
Approaching this scene, I was, for the first time, hit with the scale of the gathering. I wondered aloud who the intended audience of the demonstration was.
Surely, we weren’t seeking the attention of the offending American judiciary? Nor was our national government likely to be moved. Even supposing we did sway the heart of some MP, or an ACT Minister, what exactly did we expect them to do about the erosion of bodily autonomy in a country half-way around the world?
One of my companions knocked me out of my cynicism. She pointed out a pair of young girls, not older than five or six, accompanying their mother at the rally. One held a twig with a sheet of A4 paper taped to the end – a picket sign in miniature.
“There’s your audience.”
…
Packed into the square – steps and tables standing in for bleachers – we listened to a series of speeches. Topics ranged from the specific and horrific consequences of anti-abortion legislation, to the details of the Roe v. Wade decision, and strong calls for more radical and progressive reform in our own government. The style of the speakers also varied. The event saw touching personal storytelling, cautious optimism from veteran activists and firebrand oratory from the socialist contingent; all serving to unite and ignite the crowd with a potent mixture of outrage and hope.
At the close of the speeches, from somewhere within the audience, a drum started beating. We followed it, and our small armada of signs marched through Civic Square, the Legislative Assembly and the shopping centre. Loosely escorted by police, alternatively stoic and professional or enthusiastically supportive, we marched on the road. The slight sense of trespass and the disrupted traffic only added to our sense of importance and unity.
As the task of calling “What do we want?” and “When do we want it?” passed through the crowd like a baton, the accompanying “Abortion Rights!” and “Now!” echoed off the surrounding buildings; my mind turned again to who this was all for.
A week later, I don’t remember much of the speeches, nor do I remember those who gave them. What I do remember is their oratory skills and genuine passion for the cause. What I remember is the crowd. I remember when the speakers brought up some shameful statistics. I remember being appalled. And those around me shared my sentiment. When a story of strength or some progressive proposal was forwarded, I remember cheering – along with everybody else. I remember the beating of the drum, a bass note for our cries of support and denouncement.
In this way, by the fluctuations of hope and outrage, the consistency of our agreement, and the sense of group disobedience the assembly was turned from a collection of strangers to a unit with purpose. Group mentality, good versus evil, us and them; they’re old tricks, but undeniably effective.
…
A protest is a tool – like a crowbar or a chisel. It’s an instrument that works to effect change on a social system and its effectiveness, like any tool, depends both on the force generated by it, and the precision with which it is wielded. The elements that give a protest its force, how it generates and focuses the energy of its participants, are well studied, widely practiced, tried-and-true. But the matter of when and where to apply that energy, and who best to bring that force, these are open questions.
This is a solidarity march. In solidarity with a series of protests across the country – part of a larger demonstration as a warning to our own government. But this march is also for us, the marchers; in solidarity with one another. By gathering, marching, listening to speeches and making signs we reaffirm each other’s belief that reproductive rights are human rights, and that those rights are worth defending. We are all, in some way, those young girls; and we teach one another what their mother is teaching them – when our rights, our freedoms, and the principles we believe in come under attack, this is what we do.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
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Letters to the Editor
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The Thursday of O-Week I went out by myself, with the intention of running into some friends and joining them. Living off campus as I do, it is not possible to wander into a common area and find people, and my housemates had their own evening plans. I caught an Uber into Civic and stood in line outside One22, a party of one.
This would have been unimaginable two years ago, in my first year. I was apprehensive, felt foreign to myself and everything around me. Now, I felt good. Sure, I was getting looks from other groups, specifically ones made up of young men, but it was all mostly harmless, and it had little effect on my mood.
I walked up the all-familiar stairs of old Wolf, bid the bloke I was casually chatting to a good night and lined up for water. It was going to be a sober night.
And so, for the next 40 minutes I drank my water, asked random groups of girls to dance with them and kept my eyes peeled for any friends I could join to appear. I was sober, technically alone, and having a fantastic time. I felt whole, grounded, and confident enough in being a proper, full, and settled person to be able to do this, unlike first-year Karolina.
Growing older means you settle into yourself. You connect with who you are internally and carve out a little space for yourself among the nearly eight billion people who walk this earth. Your existence becomes your own. You learn to claim it and revel in it, wholly and absolutely.
Whenever I tell people I regularly go out sober, they usually respond positively saying “I wish I could do that”. I meet strangers and explain that my friends haven’t come yet, or that they left already, and they are almost always welcoming and friendly. Through my independent adventures I’ve realised that everyone is searching for connection. Everyone wants to feel comfortable within themselves.
The formative moment occurred after Laneway in February 2020. After a beautiful 10 hours of live music at the Old Mill in Port Adelaide, a friend and I headed into town for the afterparty. Tiah and I giddily ran up the stairs to Rocket, which anyone from Adelaide will know as a more indie version of One22 and danced the rest of our energy out. She went home at 2 AM and I decided to stay – the DJ was sick, I felt electrically alive and dancing was an expression of truth.
Hence, I stayed, by myself, in a crowd that was already thinning. At first, I just stood by the bar, sipping water, trying to find an inconspicuous corner I could claim. I wandered over, and immediately looped back to the bar. Too scary. I noticed a small group of people dancing like they meant it, I approached, explained that my friend went home, and asked if I could join them. Yes! Welcomed with enthusiasm, I danced with them until 4 AM, until my body gave way, and my energy was spent. I thanked my companions and got home safe.
The moment that I returned to Rocket after seeing Tiah off, I was strengthening my connection to self. When I walked over to those kind strangers, I was affirming my place in the world, and quietly saying “I exist”. When I felt the bass pulsating through my veins and my body moving in time, I was grounding myself in my own existence, taking ownership of who I was and what I stood for. I was becoming a real, full, and settled person.
Nothing really prepares you for the debilitating existential angst of realising ‘holy shit I am an actual person who is meant to have values and thoughts and a proper life’. You enter the world as an 18-year-old– fresh faced, and unable to internally answer if you even like yourself. Everything comes at you all at once, and you walk down Uni Ave feeling like a meaningless speck that is at the same time bursting with a desire to have a space in the world, to be meaningful.
The changes I’ve experienced in my sense of self over the last two years have been beyond what anyone could have explained to me. It’s like the dust has settled, and instead of frantically looking around and being uprooted from the everyday, each foot on the ground is filled with intention and with conviction.
This space you create for yourself is one you must fill, occupy, and take full ownership of. Doing so requires an understanding of yourself and enough tenacity to claim said space. It’s your little meter-squared surrounded by everyone else’s and a way to affirm your existence amongst them. Your personhood fills your body, transcends it, and grows its roots through the space. I think growing up is the process of making and cultivating that space for yourself. While maybe it always exists, you need to become whole, complete, and full enough so that you can step into it and make it habitable.
I want to get to a point in my life where I only say and do things I mean and believe in. There is a quote in the film Frances Ha, where the titular character Frances says, embarrassed, “I’m not a real person, yet”. I guess my way of living with intention is going out sober and being assured enough to dance with sweaty strangers in the dark. My space is my own, stable enough in its foundations to allow me to stand alone in the line to One22, the perimeter strengthened by my values, goals and confidence that has been through more rejections than approvals.
Becoming a person is scary. It’s a process that you have to completely commit yourself to. My way of navigating that process was giving up drinking in first year and carrying myself through social situations without the blanket of alcohol. It was journaling, failing two subjects, taking a year off uni and moving back home and doing lots of things alone and then with people. It was learning to smile and say “hi” to the person I kind of knew but whose gaze I always avoided. Your life is your process, and your space is waiting to be yours.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
Comments Off on Ambition on Fleek: How Pinterest took me from GirlFlop to GirlBoss
At the start of my final year of high school, things were about as far from perfect as they could have been.
COVID-19 was starting to rear its ugly head in places that actually mattered to the media of the Western world. Bushfire smoke meant my summer days at the beach were limited. My grandmother had been dying in hospital for months, and I had just been prescribed antidepressants for my depression and anxiety.
To make matters worse, what I had always struggled with in high school wasn’t the workload itself, or writing essays. Between my undiagnosed attention deficit disorder (ADD) and the subjects my father had ‘encouraged’ me to do, the key factor I was missing was motivation. What good would it do the world if I wrote an essay on the significance of the policy of containment in the Cold War? Who was actually going to care about my thoughts on TS Eliot’s textual integrity and canonical status?
These questions lingered each time I sat down to gather notes for Modern History, or sketch out a Legal Studies essay. Most nights ended with me crying at my desk – mostly because of my general emotional instability, but partly because of schoolwork.
Being a student in these end times is, in a word, utterly Sisyphean. What could the relevance of the structure of the communist Russian government in 1918 possibly have in this warming world, with WW3 on the horizon, where every choice I make as a consumer will eventually trace back to the mistreatment of a four-year-old sweatshop employee? I repeated this rhetoric to my psychiatrist, to my parents, to my school counsellor, even to my cat Jackson as we laid outside together. Jackson had motivation, drive, a reason to get up and face the day in the morning. He had trees to climb, birds to abuse, other neighbourhood cats to terrorise. I only wished some of his sense of purpose could rub off on me.
I couldn’t escape this mentality throughout the bulk of the year. What good was it to pay attention in my online classes when I could simply mute them with a click of a button? When we returned to school, I was so behind that it seemed impossible to make up lost time, however purposefully it had been lost. Modern History classes were ripe to explore the internet in; I memorised the fifty states of America, played online trivia, watched the West Wing muted with subtitles on, even started and finished a podcast with over seventy hour-long episodes just through the transcripts.
The most valuable past-time, I found, was not any of these, but the website that would be my saviour – Pinterest. Oh, Pinterest.
I had known of the site for years, of course. It was an oasis of aesthetically pleasing images, Keto recipes, and easy workouts that had served to further my middle-school disordered eating. Due to the latter, I hadn’t frequented it much in recent years, but faced with the unending torture of double Legal Studies, I found myself on it more and more. I made a new account so as to better suit my current hyperfixations. Little did I know, that decision would come to serve me more than I could have ever anticipated.
Logging onto my Pinterest feed, freshly wiped with no knowledge of my niche interests in 90s adult animation and Donna Tartt novels, I was faced with the selection the site showed to an average new user. Again — Keto recipes, OOTDs on emaciated Instagram models, and motivational quotes.
I could have never imagined the impact these quotes would have on me. I saved one, and then another, and then another. They saturated my feed, and would echo in my head relentlessly. One day, or Day One? You decide. The disembodied voice of a GirlBoss was right – today was the first day of the rest of my life, a life in which I understood to what extent the USSR rejected capitalist ideology.
If I was to be so bold, perhaps this knowledge I had deemed ‘irrelevant’ could become relevant, if only to be a stepping stone to the future empire I knew I could build. I could manifest success. Pinterest told me to be savage, not average. I wouldn’t be average any longer. Today was tomorrow’s yesterday.
Of course, I will disclose that after a particular depressive episode that concluded with a 49 percent markin my Modern History trial and a pesky 4/25 in my Cold War essay, my therapist prescribed me dexamphetamines for my now-diagnosed ADD. But it wasn’t the small white pills that made me focused, of course – it was Pinterest. It had always been Pinterest. I was, as the website had instructed, addicted to the feeling of having my shit together. I was going to create the life I couldn’t wait to wake up to.
As a writer, I do value honesty. And so, reader, I will be honest with you – the life I ‘couldn’t wait to wake up to’ didn’t involve Modern History. I know that the good guys won in the Cold War, that Nelson Mandela ended racism; what else was there to know? And so, I took the leap I knew I had to as a GirlBoss. I stopped going to most of my Modern classes, because I’m a powerful woman, and I’m not going to let little things like two out of my ten HSC units bring me down.
I visualised my highest self, and I showed up as her.
When my friends filled me in on practice essays I missed, I’ll admit, these things concerned me. But you don’t grow when you’re comfortable, my desktop wallpaper reminded me, and so I embraced the discomfort. Pinterest allowed me to actualise my true self. It told me to ‘wake up Beauty, it’s time to Beast’, so I lied to my parents. They didn’t need to know about Mr Kwok’s panicked emails to me, not when I was on my own path to greatness.
You may seem doubtful, but this story has a happy ending. I graduated at the top of my English Extension 2 class, and the top of my Studies of Religion 2 class, because I’m a fucking GirlBoss. I put in the work, and I exclusively focused on the things that came naturally to me with little extraneous effort. With the help of dexamphetamines, I cleared the useless knowledge of ‘democratic principles’ and ‘significant figures in Nazi Germany’ out of my head.
Why would I consider the political tensions in the Weimar Republic when there are real political issues happening right now? I’m a passionate socialist, and I don’t have time for Mr. Massey to bring me down talking about whatever happened to the system in Germany in the 1920s. Gustav Stresemann certainly wasn’t a GirlBoss, and he’s irrelevant now.
I just barely snuck into the top 50 percent of my Modern History cohort, which was good enough for me. If anything, my placing third in Extension English and first in Extension 2 is a testament to the power of language.
Now I’ve graduated and harnessed the power of motivation, who knows what hardships I’ll conquer next? I’m seventeen, out and experiencing the real world, and I see no reason to change my ideology. Now I know the value of a simple Pinterest board, there’s nothing I can’t face – whether it be toxic friendships, normalised substance abuse at university, WW3, or the impending destruction of our environment.
My mantra is simply to keep GirlBossing, Gaslighting, Gatekeeping, and Getting refills on ADD medication.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
I recently came across a TikTok by a primary school teacher. She responds to the weeks of summer vacation that teachers get and how some complain that this makes the profession easier. “I didn’t choose your career for you. Sub for my class one day – just one day! See what I do for 180 days.” One user commented, “I can do your job for a day. You talk to first graders on a computer… I’m a psych nurse dealing with serial killers. Do my job for a day.” Others responded similarly. The comment section was a battle of professions – people sitting at home, behind their screens, competing to prove how difficult their work was. The video creator, Miss Franklin, later responded with the following: “What everyone should learn from this trend – EVERYONE’s job is difficult and has their own advantages/disadvantages. Respect one another’s profession.” The whole argument seemed so silly to me. Why was this teacher associating “respect” for a profession with how much others acknowledged its difficulty?
In our introductory lecture this semester, my Psychology lecturer mentioned that the subject could arguably be considered more difficult than some natural or life sciences. This is because it studies human beings who change their behaviour following new research they read, speculations, and predictions. I learned from my Economics lecturer that famous physicist Max Planck supposedly told John Maynard Keynes that Economics was too difficult for him for similar reasons.
Why are we so fascinated with proving the difficulty of our work? Is it because we need to show that we can do work that is harder than what the ‘average’ person can do, if such a measure even exists? Is this how we channel our yearning to reach our full potential, leave a mark that transcends us, and ‘be special’? After noticing this trend, I began to suspect that the need to prove the difficulty of our work is rooted in toxic hustle culture.
“I am so burned out. I barely slept this week.”
“I’m such a typical stressed college student. I had to drink a bunch of coffee to cram for my finals.”
“Who says an Arts degree is easy. I’ve been studying all day.”
Let’s stop looking at stress and burn-out as badges of honour. Let’s stop the “I’m so overworked, it’s terrible” while secretly feeling hints of satisfaction at the thought that we have “done enough” or done things that are “hard enough” to feel worthy. Let’s stop trying to validate the amount of time or money we have spent on honing our craft by convincing others of its difficulty.
I feel very privileged to have been brought up knowing that my parents will support me regardless of the subject or career I choose. I know not everyone can afford that freedom. We often hear from relatives and family friends who think differently. Some question or look down on my decision to pursue the social sciences instead of a STEM subject. Others assume it is because I didn’t have the skills to do anything ‘better’. In the past, we have gotten caught up in defending our choices and agreeing that difficulty is subjective. All professions and subjects are difficult, and difficulty depends on each person’s skill set.
Recently, I’ve started realising that by feeding into this discussion, I may subconsciously be contributing to the idea that difficulty matters. Even if there were one objective measure of the difficulty of subjects and professions, would it indicate value? If being a first-grade teacher was ’easy’, would it be any less important? By protesting against the idea that STEM subjects are more difficult, more valid, or more respectable career choices, I may end up feeding into a culture that assumes that difficulty is equivalent to value or worth. That acknowledging difficulty is somehow equivalent to respect. It is not hard to understand why. Many of us have been conditioned to work harder, put in more hours, and push ourselves to reach our full potential. We sometimes fall into the trap of assuming that competing in fields that are traditionally considered difficult is the best way to achieve, fulfil, and realise our potential.
The value of a profession and the worth of the human who pursues it does not depend on how little vacation they get or how many hours they have worked overtime. By associating pride with difficulty, we blind ourselves to the fact that our lives are being swallowed by a culture that rewards placing work above all else. Instead of trying to one-up others and glorifying exhaustion, we should start shifting the conversation.
We should redirect our focus to the satisfaction we get after our work has made its desired impact or the fulfilment we feel at the end of the day. We should stop comparing how ‘difficult’ our jobs are and appreciate that teachers are just as crucial as electricians. We should understand the joy that actors bring to our movie nights and thank humanities students for studying the storytellers who have enriched our past. We should thank psychologists and doctors for their contribution to health and still recognize the importance of journalists, homemakers, and museum curators. Hustle culture, toxic productivity – whatever you want to call it – has dug its roots deep into our conversations, language, and behaviour. By recognising why we say and do things, we could start freeing ourselves from it.
February 14th, Valentine’s Day. It’s almost midnight. I come home after an evening out with friends. Our own little ‘Galentine’s, so that we do Valentine’s the right way by celebrating our friendship. So we ate, then got ice cream, then did some karaoke. A good time, all in all.
I check my phone as I sit down in my room. I have several unread messages from my friend from back home. She seems kinda annoyed that I haven’t responded.
“Hey sorry, I was out haha. What’s up?”
“Ohhh with friends? Busy celebrating Valentine’s Day?”
“With friends lol”
“Does Valentine’s Day not ring a bell?”
I frown at my screen, confused. Was I supposed to wish her a happy Valentine’s? Had we scheduled a video call for the 14th that I completely forgot about?
It suddenly clicks, and I smack my forehead. Then, I smack it again, and a couple more times for good measure. In the panic of my epiphany, I had dropped my phone. I pick it back up and start typing frantically.
“Oh my god.
I’m an idiot.
IM SO SORRY
I LOVE U A LOT OKAY
MY BRAIN IS JUST DUMB
HAPPY BIRTHDAY”
I feel like the biggest, most heartless, most unforgivably callous fool in the world. She, thankfully, is graceful about it and responds with an “IKR 😂”. I promise to get her cake from Australia. She says it’ll do as an apology.
We talk on the phone for a while. She sends me pictures of her chill, at home, (kind of) quarantine-friendly celebration with a handful of friends. As I browse through them, I feel a small sadness creeping in. It isn’t big, nothing too overwhelming. Just a breeze’s worth of melancholy. One that lingers instead of just blowing over. Cold enough to make me long for a sweater. It is a familiar feeling.
As we keep talking, other friends come up. She tells me some of the things she knows about how their lives are going. I make mental notes of my negligence: several other birthdays forgotten, a wedding I couldn’t attend but should have sent my best wishes for, college acceptances and job placements that I definitely should have known more about. A long list that I must attach to an older, even longer one. At this point, it is probably long enough to stretch between India and Australia. Perhaps, I could lay it down and walk across the ocean on it. But I do not know if that would solve everything. It is easy to blame things on the kilometres between us but maybe the real distance is the one between thought and action.
When our call ends, I pull out my post-it’s and mark some important dates on my calendar. I set reminders on my phone and send out a few messages. Tiny steps. Nowhere near enough to cross an ocean. But, if I take a few more, I will be a little further out, a little more under the sun. Perhaps it will be warmer there.
I get everything I want.
I understand how that might sound, but it’s true. If I want that scholarship, I’ll get it. If I want that internship, I’ll get it. I’m not a straight HD student, or a straight Distinction student for that matter — I simply write well. I can talk my way through any selection criteria, any interview panel, any phone call. This seems great, and I bet you want to know my secret, but if I’m being honest, there isn’t one. Though I have gathered a few tips and tricks along the way which I would like to share with you.
One
Find a new best friend.
Who should this best friend be you may ask? ANU CareerHub, obviously. I check this godsend of a website every week, without fail. Next, research the employment avenues your academic college offers. For example, the CBE Global Talent Portal and the COL Legal Vitae are incredible avenues to explore current job opportunities. Create a LinkedIn profile, trawl through Seek and Indeed — do it all. You’ll be surprised what you can find when you’re actually looking.
Two
Document your life story and lock it away for safekeeping.
Jot down every opportunity, experience, or job— however minuscule— that you’ve ever had and attach them to the classic selection criteria. The compulsory ‘youth leadership’ program you attended in Year 10? That was extremely challenging and required a high-level of independence and maturity. The 10-day school trip you took to New Caledonia for French class? That explored your comfort zone and taught you how to adapt to new and unfamiliar environments.
Your life experiences don’t need to be special, they just need to sound special.
Three
Think outside the box.
As soon as I was accepted into the ANU in 2019 I began job hunting. I knew Kambri was about to open and I was determined to work somewhere in this ‘bold new campus experience’. I found one relatively ambiguous and uninformed news article highlighting the first few vendors to open up in Kambri and within days I had found a Kambri vendor’s Facebook page, set up an interview and soon after the job was mine. This all happened in January of 2019, so it’s a little too late for you now. That’s okay, think further outside the box. Handing in your resume to the cafes on Lonsdale Street isn’t going to get you to where you want to be. Before you say it, no, Kambri was not my forever-plan, but I was able to draw upon my ‘unique understanding of the ANU student experience’ to receive another job offer for a marketing role on campus, which was exactly what I wanted.
Four
Forget everything I just said.
All of the above is genuinely helpful and it has made all the difference in my career, but it hasn’t actually helped me. After a confusing and wholeheartedly what-the-hell 2020, to put the cherry on top of the cake little old me decided that she had no idea what she wanted to do in life.
I was suddenly questioning everything.
Should I quit my internship?
Should I defer uni?
Should I spend all my savings?
I spent my summer days crying down at the Cotter (very coming-of-age film of me) and feverishly writing in my journal, but nothing seemed to help me find an answer. I guess questioning your future is a rite of passage for all 20-somethings, but this was never where I was meant to be. It’s taken me a long time to accept that I need to make a change in my world, but I think I’m at a point now where I’m excited to leave everything behind.
So here are my steps for success. These may not (should almost certainly not) apply to you, but this is what I hope will work for me.
Quit all jobs*
Defer my university program
Travel Australia
I guess the most important take away from this is that you can beef up your CV as much as humanly possible, you can receive every accolade and opportunity under the sun, but you can’t satisfy the suffocated feeling inside you that wants to truly live.
I was the girl who knew exactly where she was going, exactly where she wanted to be. Right now, this girl has no idea about anything, but she’s pretty excited by that.
*A note to any of my current employers: this will be occurring in Semester 2, 2021. I promise to give you ample warning and I hope that I can work with you again in the future.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.