A Few Reflections on A New Day (March 18th, 2020)

How do I start a brand new project of mine in times like this? As the world revels in the fear and anxiety of a global pandemic, I find myself confused more than anything. In the matter of a week, I have found myself bunkered down in my apartment in Georgetown, removed from most of my closest friends and living in the anxiety of having to operate on a day-to-day basis.

So why have I chosen to start a poorly constructed website and do what every suburban high schooler does by creating this blog? The manifestation of this is two-fold. The first is that this is a deeply personal project. Writing has always been therapeutic for me. It is an opportunity to engage with myself and the world and to trade in the bleakness of the day with an optimism of the future. Moreover, as we pass through these difficult times, writing is also an opportunity to memorialize the trials and tribulations of all of the narratives that I will encounter in the coming days, weeks and months. Secondly, writing is a communal activity. No writer can thrive by solely relegating themselves as the protagonist. Rather, the protagonist becomes the intricacies of human nature. It is the conversations that arise in times of despair, the ways humans make meaning in the midst of agony and the internal conflicts many of us face. This is why authors like James Baldwin, Fyodor Dostoevsky and George Orwell meant so much to me. Their writings navigated me through difficult times because each one of their characters inspired a sense of hope and confidence about the human spirit. Potentially my writing can do that for someone else. But even more so, I hope that my writing can bring some semblance of a community. That in writing about the people and places that occupy our current times, we find strength and optimism in each other; that we are not isolated individuals but interconnected through a shared struggle and fear about the rapidly changing world around us.

I want to delve a little bit more on the point of community. I spent a significant part of my junior year attempting to find myself through the communities Southeast DC. I engaged in a few projects, most significantly, attempting to do an ethnographic study of individuals in the Barry Farm Public Housing Complex. I want to relay a story here that I find apt for us fairly privileged college students. In the Barry Farm community lies a basketball court that is at the heart of the culture of the community. That court hosts the Goodman League, where NBA stars like Kevin Durant and Michael Beasely grew up on. In the summer going into my junior year, I spent one or two nights a week hanging out there with a few of my closest friends and I learned something very critical about the human spirit. That is, in the midst of housing dislocation, high crime rates, government disinvestment (and general negligence) and poor police-communal relations, individuals formed community and found joy at the Goodman League. During those games, the music was blaring, individuals were dancing and laughing, people represented their neighborhoods with great pride and love was ubiquitious. The problems of the world were subsidiary to the spirit of competition and levity. Conditions of abjectness did not define their existence; instead, they chose to find happiness and fulfillment with each other.

And thus comes the thesis of my post today: in the midst of angst and grieving, we can choose to have a paradigm shift. Naturally, grieving is part of the process and should be fully embraced. I too have grieved. I grieved when many of my closest friends departed to their respective homes and I was left-particularly as a second-semester senior-wondering when I will see them again. I grieved over the fear that elderly individuals in my life have. I grieved over the anxiety of what tomorrow brings. And in coming to terms to this grief, I had to drop pretensions of how I should act or what I should do and instead, embrace it and let those emotions fully flourish. But grief by its very nature is temporary. It is a moment, not a lifestyle. And once we let the grief pass through us, we are granted a choice: do we extrapolate our condition as a general rule of how to navigate life moving forward or do we participate in the world as best we can? I am trying to choose the latter. This is the hand we've been dealt-but if those at Barry Farms have taught me anything, it is that even in the bleakness of the absurdity of life, we imprint our own will on the world.

I find Fyodor Dostoyevsky very critical in times like this. As much as one can find a general theme of a writer's work, I will try to summarize his here: one cannot find true happiness unless one has hit the depth of struggle and despair. Yes, these are certainly trying times, but there is ample light at the end of the tunnel. Relationships will become stronger, the spirit becomes more resolved, the minuteness of daily activities will become beautiful. We are collectively reliant on one another but we will find a collective sense of happiness. This is also a time to contribute to the most vulnerable among us: check in on the elderly in your life and those of us who are able to, dedicate yourself to their needs. If you are financially able to, donate to organizations who are helping the homeless. If you are in need of books or food, buy from local organizations who are in trying times. Of course, this comes from an immense place of privilege on my end. As a young, healthy individual who has financial support, I recognize that my own words may be empty and tone-deaf. But I still believe we all have a responsibility to one another-to call each other, to assist each other and to have faith in a future of optimism, hope and happiness.

I leave my first post with a quote from the increasingly relevant (and my emerging personal favorite) author, Albert Camus:

"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger-something better, pushing right back."

I hope to continue this project. Please, in the future, if I can help in anyway, shoot me a message either through email (hs859@georgetown.edu) or through social media.

Until next time,

Hash