Bringing Down the House

The Whitman Experience. How many pages could I write about the Whitman Experience. Going to Whitman College was and continues to be an extraordinary learning experience for me, but not, perhaps, as you might find it described in the pages of a visitor’s pamphlet. I have learned and grown as much, in fact vastly more, moving beyond Whitman than I ever did working within Whitman, but for that very reason it has become an incredibly valuable reference point in my life. It’s a complicated thing, and by no means do I wish to throw mud on the college because my time there was amazing and many of the TOOLS I acquired there have proven invaluable in carrying me to this point in my life and will continue to carry me forward ever forward into the future; however, many of the VIEWS I picked up at Whitman were less than empowering, and far from serving as the bastions and pillars of a dynamic and prosperous worldview were in fact roadblocks to the development of any such thing.

‘Tis a complicated web composed of many threads. Let me first start by saying that in no way is Whitman at fault for the shortcomings I took away from it; the fault rests solely with me. The way I interacted with certain aspects of the small liberal arts college environment brought out not the worst in me but but certainly weaknesses and warped them in such a way that I perceived them as strengths. Warped them in such a way that I perceived them as strengths, let me repeat that one more time because it is very important. My perception of the Whitman experience amplified my weaknesses and made me think of them as strengths.

Whitman is something you take with you and move beyond.

Whitman is small. Whitman is insular. Whitman is about being as smart as you can, as critical as you can, as insightful and academic as you can. At least that’s how I saw it. They say that Whitman is a bubble and it is. They say that Whitman is a fantasy land and it is. They say that Whitman and the Real World have little more than a tangential relationship and if they do then you have to remember that what seems to be true is only true on a single solitary point on the endlessly streaking line that is larger life.

Allow me to explicate.

Or forgive me for failing to, whichever the case may be.

How about I spell it out straight. I began to judge value based purely on perceived level of academia. So-called stupid people I shunned, anything that I could understand was too simple and therefore slightly contemptuous, all pop-culture was shallow and meaningless, all big business (perhaps even all business in general) was trying to sell me my soul pinned to a price tag, people with money into money who thought about money were also shallow and meaningless, people who used anything but the most esoteric of writing styles were below me, Republicans were shallow and meaningless, people who believed in things were trying too hard because, well, to put it simply, I knew everything and in the end everything boiled down to being pretty much shallow and meaningless.

Is this the natural outcome of the liberal arts education? No, but it’s where I left it, with a sharp brain that was focused with laser precision on the holes, the cracks, the flaws, the problems with things, and furthermore, with inventing the ways in which those holes cracks flaws and problems rendered the remaining whole unfit for much but the discard pile. I had a discard pile miles high and not much left that I could call a treasure.

This, luckily, is who I used to be, because Whitman is something I used to get past myself.

Whitman took those elements of my personality that I brought with me to Anderson Hall in 2004, insecurity, uncertainty, negativity, fear, and turned up the volume on them. That’s not to say that I brought only negative things with me to Whitman, or that during my time there only the negative parts of my personality grew; I’ve got plenty of good points that received a similar boost. However too many key pieces of my reality were put together of negative components and the truth is I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE IT. I thought I was just being real. All of the aforementioned thought patterns seemed to me inevitable objective conclusions to be drawn from the things I was studying. That’s the way the world actually was and a faint sense of futility was the only thing you could logically or perhaps even responsibly take from it all.

Those were my conclusions, but it turns out that they were neither impartial nor by any means inevitable. I learned a lot at Whitman, but I never really learned about the weaknesses that riddled the foundation of my being. If you don't fight those kind of things face to face they’re never going to go away; in fact, they are far more likely to just pilot you from the shadows. I got a lot of good things from Whitman. I got a lot of great friends, I got a lot of great experiences, I learned how to begin to think, I grew a lot, I challenged myself a lot, I had a lot of fun, I got a lot of dicking around out of my system; however, my failure to really address my own limitations kept all of those things from being as meaningful as they could have been.

And yet, paradoxically, because an inability to really get down to business at the time has led me to the greater understanding I have of my own fallicies today, everything about those four years, everything good and bad satisfactory unsatisfactory fulfilling unfulfilling easy challenging happy or sad can only be viewed as vital contributions to an incredibly positive experience. There are no bad experiences because anything that didn’t go as you planned is only great feedback for getting it right the next time. Or the next time, or the next time. Or maybe the next time. Doesn’t matter as long as you’re moving in the right direction.