Letter from the Editor: There is No Lesson

Jules Bourbeau ’25

Managing Editor

The day that we publish this issue also happens to be my birthday. I write this not to ask for well wishes (please, no), but to express the strange and dissociative experience that often comes to me with each passing year. When you have dealt with severe mental health issues your entire life, as I have, each orbit around the sun feels more and more improbable, as if you’ve pulled off some master heist in order to stay on this earth. I know that talking about this might make others uncomfortable. Despite all of our societal progress in destigmatizing mental illness, we have really only succeeded in destigmatizing the occasional episode of anxiety and depression. Once someone lashes out at something innocuous due to their PTSD, has irrational beliefs due to OCD or psychosis, or is chronically suicidal, then all of the education and openness suddenly disappears. 

This editorial is not a polemic about mental health acceptance, however. I am not interested in begging others to recognize my humanity – I save such rants for the Opinion section. I am interested in reflection, because what better time is there to reflect than a new year of life?

Last year, on the day I turned 21, I woke up with a long scratch down my leg. My more well-adjusted self recognizes that this was nothing more than a strange coincidence. Things like that happen sometimes. We wake up with strange bruises or cuts and then forget about it. The superstitious part of me, however, felt it was a horrible omen (see what I said about irrational beliefs?). I ended up being correct. I will not go into detail about the events of the past year, but suffice to say, I have been through a great deal.

Now is the point in which, usually, I would turn this editorial around and give you all some inspiring message of hope. “Don’t worry,” I ought to say, “because things are starting to look up!” But that would function only to comfort, and it certainly does not comfort me. I actually want to teach you a lesson, one that is somewhat paradoxical. The lesson is that sometimes, there is nothing to learn. Sometimes, you are beat down, and it doesn’t teach you how to fight back. Sometimes, you fail, and it doesn’t make you any more likely to succeed in the future. In much of life, there is no lesson.

As I apply to graduate school programs (I wish good luck to those in the same boat), I feel this truth pressing on me all of the time. I felt it when writing essays for my application to undergraduate institutions, as well. These essays feed on trauma, they always want to know about hardships and loss. There always has to be some grand story of how you then overcame it. The more dramatic, the better. Sure, you can write about how hard it was for you to get denied from your high school baseball team, or, even better, you could write about your mother getting cancer. I have even seen people joke when something particularly awful happens to someone: “At least you’ll have a stellar college essay.”

These prompts have always felt exploitative to me. They seem to want to turn our lives into stories from a novel or film, as if every bad experience needs a moral to go along with it, to make the blow of tragedy hurt less for those who have to witness it. I have found, however, that it can be freeing to accept that there is nothing to learn. There is no more pressure to find something beautiful in what might have been the worst moments of your life, no obligation to heal faster than you are ready to. In fact, there is no obligation to heal at all.

I recognize that all of this sounds quite cynical, but I would argue that I am not a pessimist. I try to be kind, to be the best person I can be to others. However, I am also tired, tired of catering to the arc of life that others want me to conform to. I carry everything I have been through with me, and I am okay with that. I don’t want to put anything down.

If conceiving of your life as something always ultimately on a positive trajectory comforts you, then by no means should you let me stop you from doing so. I recognize that this approach is not for everyone. However, if you, like me, are also worn out with the type of philosophy that college essays encourage, then you are welcome to join me in the bliss of unlearning.

So, happy birthday to me (and, as an aside, to my twin, as well). As I enter this next year of my life, I think to pinch myself to check if I am in reality. How have I made it this far? It is thanks to my faith and a host of truly amazing people surrounding me, but it is also something undefinable. I will keep circling back to when I was 17, nine, five years old, and someday I will circle back to now. It is a privilege to wonder at the meaning of things, so I say not that there is no meaning, but perhaps that I am not interested in learning it. What do I want to say with all of these words? Well, there is nothing to learn, and thank God for it.