This week, dear reader, I want to talk to you about something uncharacteristically serious. And not in the fun way, where I pretend I'm going to talk about something weighty, feint in a semi-grown-up direction and then make a joke about trousers.
Reader — dear, gentle, perhaps slightly adrift reader — I want to talk about mental health. It's monstrously, sometimes scarily, important. In the long run, it might seem that the tribulations of young personhood constitute a roller coaster one has to ride to reach the distant, stable side of life's fairground. So often for young people — and, despite what you might have read from my own fingers, I include myself in this category — mental health problems, from the diagnosable to the draining, are seen almost to be part and parcel of the university experience.
You might be away from home and responsible for yourself for the first extended period of time. This might be your first experience of being completely in charge of your schedule and your ability to keep up with that schedule, even if you occasionally forget to wear trousers on a Tuesday. Fret not. We've all done it, some of us more than once, and some of us with a faint but very real sense of delight. Often it's just a pain to feed yourself semi-sensibly, day after day, bowl of cereal after bowl of cereal.
You may, lovely reader, have seen the film "Igby Goes Down," starring Claire "My So-Called Talent" Danes, Jeff "Sardonic Quips About Dinosaurs" Goldblum and Kieran "My Brother's Drug Mule" Culkin. It's a charming and enjoyable movie about love and cynicism on the Upper West Side, doing its best to tackle the deficit of white-wine-and-quippery resulting from Woody Allen's decisions first to stop making watchable cinema, then to film in countries where his dialogue makes less than no sense, and finally to cast Scarlet Johannsen in roles that require more of her than possession of a formidable bosom.
In any case, there's a revealing scene in the film in which Culkin's smart-arsed prep-schooler quizzes Danes' character, a catering waitress on leave from Bennington College, about what compelled her to take time off. Danes replies, "Entenmann's cookies, beer, diet pills, tension — life."
They're talking about Bennington, a college so full of hippies it makes Brown look like Dartmouth (Ivy League humor! It's like humor, but less funny!). Even so, the mid-college implosion is a solid enough trope to allow even Dimply Danes a crack at the joke. I'm sure anyone whose partner has forced them to watch "The Family Stone" will see where I'm going.
What I want to say to you, dear reader, in the most avuncular tone I can muster, is this — a good number of the trials forced upon you today won't matter in the long run. Twenty-eight years isn't a tremendous amount of time in which to acquire a sense of perspective, and I'll be the first to admit that the fortunes of the England rugby team have a far greater effect upon my well-being than ordinarily I would allow to a group of men in short shorts.
Even so, I think back to the traumas of my undergraduate days with a wry smile. To be honest, it's probably more of a dirty smirk. The system in which I did my undergrad studies was very different from the one you navigate, dear reader, but it was similarly stressful. Every five days, an essay was required about a particular pile of reading. As a result, three of every five days was spent in paroxysms of terror, wondering how I would be able to convince Professor Sir Eminently Crusty, who had been teaching the class since 1945, that I had something interesting and original to say about Nietzsche.
Here's the rub — don't worry, my hands are clean. I can barely remember those days. I can barely remember Professor Crusty, and I sure as sherbet can't remember any of those essays. I can't remember the tiffs I had with friends and neighbors. I can, however, remember the times when it seemed like the pub was the only place in which I could escape the feeling that everything was piling on top of me — which is why the pub is the greatest invention in the history of humankind. There were other things — things that are still with me — that have exercised me inordinately in the years since then. Those things I have sought help for. The others have just tended to float on past like the latest Lindsay Lohan scandal.
Whatever it takes, poor beleaguered reader, take care of yourself. Exercise. Get away for a while. Have your friends tickle you. I once wore a full mascot-style tiger costume to a cricket club dinner, and that helped. If you need to, go to Psychological Services and talk to some of the wonderful people there. And if you do nothing else, when Tuesday comes, try to put something on your bottom half, for all our sakes.
Stephen Wicken GS is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in history with a conveniently selective memory.
