A Resentment for Intellect

An adapted Instagram diary entry from March 25th, 2024. Original entry can be found here.

If you’ve met me in the past three or four months as biked across New Zealand & Australia, you might’ve heard me say that I’m stepping into my dumb blonde era. Wanting to become like Elle Woods. Attempting to turn off my brain- to not think so anxiously or intensely for once. Not wanting to work hard and be intellectual. I’m back here at Emory, flown in for for an honor society alumni event, and I have begun wondering about the education I received, the high caliber I held myself to (and my classmates as well) for so long. The past versions of me which have included a deep sense of academic and extracurricular perfectionism or accomplishment at any and all costs. How, with everything I did achieve at my young age- from attending a top 21 institution, accepting two undergraduate awards for leadership, initiation into an honor society, being president of an art club for two years, captain of my rowing team (and beating our team record for women with less than three years of experience), singlehandedly leading the completion of a 680sq.ft mural in campus, and a few other things I may be forgetting- I decided to “throw it all away” and lead this life of financial, emotional, and physical unpredictability and unconventionality.

Being back in Atlanta- my second home- has reminded me of all the great things I have done and hated myself for.

So often in the United States, if you are classified as a “gifted” child, you end up working extremely hard in school and extracurriculars to get into a good school, feeling the guilt of not utilizing all of your “potential” to make it into an Ivy (or near an Ivy) so you can be guaranteed a successful and better life. And, with so many students in our country, you must fight to get into a good school. If you are a lower income student, you must fight twice as hard, working part time jobs in high school and college, lacking the extra resources to succeed as your peers, with financially and emotionally stable families, had.

I first became burnt out by high school graduation, my brain and body a mess for too many reasons to articulate in a simple blog entry.

In college I forced myself to push through that burnout, because to not push yourself in a US college means to acquire high sums of debt for nothing. I became resentful upon my college graduation. Resentful that I was deemed intelligent. Resentful about having potential and intellect that I was supposed to use every ounce of. Resentful at myself for my workaholism, whether that was self-imposed or originating from the expectations of others. It made me angry that I worked away my youth in order to “achieve” (achieve what anyways?) in whatever way I believed I was supposed to achieve. That I didn’t have the chance to simply live, breathe, find myself and learn for the simple reason of learning that so many adults will tell you is the prime importance of college anyways.

Since graduating and working what was an “ideal” job on paper, I’ve wanted to throw away this academic part of myself. Shed myself of my history and burn it in the frantically contained dumpster fire that was my life. I wanted a blank slate, and I wanted to be unassuming. I didn’t want to be smart anymore, because being smart led me to years of chronic fatigue, of persistent physical ailments, a lack of friends, a lack of self, and a pile of debt. If I could bike away from my post-graduate problems, maybe I could bike away from them all. Maybe I could become a deadhead athlete like the stereotypes may say. Maybe I could live life as a dumb blonde and not be bombarded with any expectations at all.

But I have been back here in Atlanta, at Emory, surrounded by the people and conversations I once had for four years. With my cousin and her husband, two biochemists with an incredibly bright child who I babysat during COVID. My friend Alice, who I studied abroad with on the Buddhist monasteries in India, and her parents, faculty at Emory, who I sit in conversation with as they pick apart the significance of my life choices which contrasts that of so many Emory students they interact with every day. How I attend alumni events with a wealth of other highly achieve persons- lawyers, city councilmen, business owners, authors- where we are reminded of our network, founded on our shared ambitions.

I walk across campus and I am flooded with memories that I either pushed back into the caverns of my mind, or simply forgot as a result of getting COVID three times in three years from my damaged immune system (perhaps from my years of burnout). I walk through the neighborhood I used to live in and meditate at the small park nearby. I bike through the same paths and neighborhoods I did during the pandemic, remembering the freedom- the real freedom- I experienced in what felt like the first time ever. I no longer feel seething resentment. I feel a bit more at peace and gratitude for this collegiate chapter of my life, and the chapters that led up to it. It is what made me the person I am today, the memories and friendships I cherish. There is nothing I can do about the past- I can’t change the country I was born in, the family I was born into, the resources I both did and did not have which led me to this page and stage of life called Living By Bike. Perhaps my knowledge of what other countries do better than my own makes me frustrated at times, and perhaps I wish I could go back to my ignorance so I wasn’t often plagued with a sense of “others have it better” where I exclusively focus on the good aspects of dozen plus countries I have traveled in, hypothesizing over what my life could have looked like if I was born with the same brain and body but in Australia, England, Switzerland, or anywhere else.

I have known I no longer wanted to be “smart” since college graduation, but it wasn’t until coming back to Atlanta this weekend where I was able to reflect on why I felt that way. I am becoming more at peace with the life I have lived, and learning- slowly- to rid myself of any anger, regret, and sadness I have held onto.