Tag Archives: personal narrative

Author recounting an experience (or experiences), autobiographical pieces

The Lifelong Quest of Becoming the Greatest Side Character

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I used to think I needed a lead role. I got my role as Scarecrow in my middle school’s Wizard of Oz, but when I was in my freshman year of high school, all the leads went to the upperclassmen. Of course, I cared about doing a good job. But I had no named parts, and I was surrounded by actors who I considered vastly more talented than I. Even so, I was stopped by a stranger after one of the performances. They grabbed my shoulder and said, “I don’t know who you are, but you were my favorite character. Don’t stop doing what you did up there tonight,” before disappearing into the after-show crowd. I will never forget this compliment.

When I was a kid, I would watch superhero movies and imagine myself in their place. I would imagine having the power, the attention, and the story. That was the person I wanted to be: The Hero. When I was a late teenager, I watched an anime called Mob Psycho 100, a show about a main character who is not very expressive. He is supported by ‘the body improvement club’, which only appears sporadically. They would exercise with the scrawny protagonist and be proud when he runs just a bit longer than the day before. After I saw the body improvement club, it became clear that I was wrong. I did not want to be a hero. I knew my calling: I wanted to become a side character.

Side characters serve two roles in a story. They interact with the main character(s) to progress the plot, and they expand the world that gets to be seen. I want to convince you of how fun it is to serve both purposes in other people’s stories. 

You’ve probably heard the slogan “there are no small roles, only small actors”. I stand by this claim not only because it makes the story more engaging, it also reminds actors that side characters are equally deserving of depth, understanding, characterization, and analysis. As a side character, you can embody a wider range of experiences. You can be a rival, a lover, a mentor, and more—all in the same show. Legally Blonde is full of one-off, high-impact characters: the Harvard administration from “What You Want”, the gawking guys in “Bend and Snap”, the department store workers in “Take it Like a Man”, the Judge in the various court scenes, and of course, Carlos, from “Gay or European”. They are the characters that make this play so fun to me. 

Out in the world, I try to embody this ideal. I question the role I get to play when I meet a new stranger. I see people walk by and wonder what worldbuilding I am facilitating by being in their space. To take the place of a side character is to take on the responsibility of enhancing the moment in support of someone else’s chance in the spotlight.

To me, being a side character is the freedom and confidence to know you have changed a person’s life simply by being a part of it. I don’t need to always be a main character to make an impact. It empowers me to accept the way other people enter and leave my life. All I need to do is appear, give a little exposition, provide a little inspiration, and I have changed the path of another protagonist’s story. And now and then, I get to appear, make a big splash, and disappear into the crowd knowing that I’ve made a difference and earned a powerful round of applause.

Advice: Be Careful About Advice

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tldr: if someone comes to you about a relationship in their life, know that the risk of encouraging them to move towards forgiveness and love is that they might listen to you.

I called up a family member recently for advice. The last time I asked this family member for advice, I was calling them from a 7/11 employee’s personal phone. I was 18 (I am 21 now), stuck at a gas station I had trekked to from a broken-down car, armed with a dead phone of my own, and the only other phone number I could remember was my mom’s, who was at work. This family member told me he’d call someone else to come help me, forgot to do so, and proceeded to take a nap. Suffice to say, I try to avoid leaning on this family member. It tends to be a bad play.

In this moment, I called him because I truly felt there was no one else I could turn to. Why? I wanted to talk to someone about feeling like a friend had crossed my boundaries recently. Everyone I had talked to felt strongly that I should give this friend another chance because I knew his intentions had been good. I began to worry that anyone who supported me and had my best interest at heart— as in, anyone I could talk to at Olin— would tell me the same thing. Yes, this was black-and-white thinking on my part. I felt that, for me in that moment, one more person encouraging me to forgive would push me from my place of indecision to fully reincorporating this friend back into my life. I felt emotionally dysregulated, and I worried any path I could take would prove to be extreme.

And so, when I called up this family member (this phone call itself being an extreme path)— who I personally consider to be tripping 24/7– I was very surprised to hear the strangest, best advice I felt I had received on the issue: “I don’t know you or anyone else like that— good luck, though.”

As someone who tends to see more red flags in retrospect than in the present, someone who doubts their decisions constantly, someone who believes wholeheartedly that we all have an infinite capacity to love no matter what we lose— this was very liberating for me.

I say this to say, sometimes people are tripping. The emotional warfare between friends is oftentimes more unintentional than it appears on the surface. I wish the world was a safer place every day— I wonder how much more beautiful we’d all be to each other if it was. And still, still, I give this caution: If someone comes to you feeling like their boundaries have been crossed, consider that you may be dealing with someone who doesn’t isn’t often believed about being in pain. Consider that the grace that they do (or do not) give might reflect the grace they have received. Give them the gift of admitting you don’t know where you can, however you can— have hope that by, in some part, refusing them your undying support or condemnation, you create space for them to look within and believe themselves about what they feel. Have hope that if you disagree with them, they will make a better choice tomorrow. That you will make a better choice tomorrow.

In the end, I came to my own peace about the situation. I found the forgiveness for that friend in my heart that had been there all along. Every piece of advice given to me, regardless of whether it felt high-quality to me at the time or not, helped me to get to that place.

I don’t know you or anyone else like that— good luck, though.

What Does It Mean To “Do Something”?

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To say there has been a lot of student upset towards the College is, perhaps, to put it mildly. There is a certain call-to-action in the air: Students at every point in their Olin journey want more dialogue, more power, and more institutional change. In this time of undeniable friction, what does it mean to Do Something as an Olin student? Is being a voice for change our right or our obligation? And, perhaps more pressingly, how does our answer to that question as a community change based on the identity of the Oliner in question?

This essayist presents Bipolar I: a tale of psychosis and, perhaps, the path of least resistance.

During my first involuntary hospitalization, a Bipolar I diagnosis and an unsolicited prognosis were given to me hand-in-hand: “College probably isn’t in the cards for you.”

As you might imagine, I took that advice and ran… far, far away from it. It may be an uphill battle more often than not, but I’m here at Olin. I’m here. More important to our discussion today, though, is that my psychosis is here with me.

Once I got to campus, I didn’t wait long to seek psychosis-related accommodations at Olin. I didn’t know what to even ask for, or if I should be asking for anything at all, but I knew I needed to try. I stumbled my way through that initial meeting best I could, both overexplaining and underexplaining the hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions that I knew would make my time here difficult.

I’m a junior currently—things may very well be different now. But what will always be true is that Olin College’s first accommodation offer to me was a smart pen: a note-taking accommodation. I’m not ashamed to say I cried real tears at that point in the meeting.

At the time, I was told that flexibility regarding my attendance would be considered an “unreasonable” accommodation. Reading through the Binder of Accommodations Past, few of the reasonable accommodations seemed like they would make a difference in my case—and of course, that makes sense, if we think about accommodations as a way for someone experiencing unique challenges to have a similar class experience as their peers. How can we accommodate psychosis in our classrooms? I don’t think it’s possible or desirable. While measures can certainly be taken to reduce a psychotic student’s stress, ideally reducing the likelihood of an episode, there is a certain amount of waiting-it-out and not-being-in-class that must be done should issues arise. So, I argue, psychotic students should be allowed leniency in their attendance. Nonetheless, I was on my own in this department, and I Did Nothing. I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling to Olin College, and the accommodation policies were reinforcing what I already felt: That I could only really be an engineering student as long as I had enough good days in a row.

When I came back to school from my second involuntary hospitalization this past Spring (we win some, we lose some), I was initially told I would need to have weekly check-ins with Olin College regarding my mental health for the rest of the semester. Whether these check-ins were intended for my benefit or to assess my stability is still not clear to me. What I can say is, they were certainly not to my benefit. I Did Something: During one of these check-ins, I expressed the stress I experienced over feeling like I had to give up more of my privacy than other students 100% of the time due to the more extreme experiences I encountered 1% of the time.

I was told hospitalization “changes things.” I would come to understand in time how accurate, if vague, that statement was. While these in-person check-ins transformed into email correspondence as the semester progressed, the feeling that I was being tested remained, and the idea that the College was just waiting for me to slip up eventually morphed into one of my recurring paranoias.

Olin College has opened so many doors for me and truly given me some of the best opportunities, friendships, and faculty relationships of my life. I cannot express enough how grateful I am to attend this school, and I will be the first to say that my accommodations of flexible deadlines and being able to leave class unexpectedly have greatly benefitted me. At the same time, Olin College has failed me, too—and for me, the functional result of Doing Nothing and Doing Something regarding my disability was the same. 

Over time, I began to craft a new idea of what Doing Something in this department meant: Instead of trying to change how the institution responded to my psychosis, I invested more time in my own health and the health of my friends. I Did Something Quiet. I supported my friends and learned to accept their support in return—simply that.

So, we return to our fundamental questions: What does it mean to Do Something as an Olin student? Is being a voice for change our right or our obligation?

These days, with all the building pressure and dissatisfaction felt by the student body towards Olin College as an institution, I cannot deny that I feel an expectation to Do Something Institutional, both because I am an Oliner, which is its own conversation, and because I am disabled, which is this conversation. 

I believe that, as a student, being a voice for change is my right, not my obligation—so why, as a disabled student, do I so often feel pushed to speak?

Ultimately, yes, the College’s response to my disability has degraded my student experience to an extent. However, being told to Do Something Less Quiet in response to this—to Do Something Louder, Something Bolder, Something Inciting—makes me feel more like an outsider than an Oliner. And I wonder if other Oliners of other identities feel the same way. While I absolutely agree that speaking out is important, to say that Olin’s improper approach to my disability obligates me to speak out feels, to me, like it politicizes my identity as a disabled student. This seems dangerous: I carry my disabled identity with me everywhere I go. Do I then also carry the burden of representing psychotic people with me everywhere, too? A burden made even greater by the fact that there are so few psychotic students at Olin to even join the fight?

I take my right to my voice as a student seriously. And yet, why should my right to live my Olin life in quiet, treading my desire paths and supporting/being supported by friends along the way, be taken any less seriously? If I choose complacency for the rest it provides, am I less of an Oliner? What does it mean to Do Enough, and who decides?

I sit here, writing this article now because when times were at their toughest for me as a psychotic student at this school, I slept. Sleeping protected my mental stability and therefore my ability to be an Oliner. In a similar way, I believe Doing Something Quiet protects many students’ ability to be Oliners. I see no shame in it—and yet, I feel shame in having been quiet for so long. If that’s you—if you carry an identity with you as quietly as you can—keep going. Know that I have decided. I am Doing Enough. I am Oliner enough. You can decide the same, if you’d like.

Any and all thoughts appreciated: adeeter@olin.edu. Thanks for reading.

Follow-Up On “Olin Is Racist”

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When I sent in my first-ever article to Frankly Speaking a month ago, I didn’t expect people to care so much. It was mostly a vent and a way to call some people out on their actions and let them know they need to improve.

But people listened, and honestly, that restored a lot of my faith in Olin. I have been watching and listening, keeping track of how others have reacted, and some have improved their actions and even apologized to black students for their past micro and macro aggressions. 

I have been amazed by the way Oliners of all backgrounds have responded to my article. Some told me it made them finally feel seen, others said they weren’t surprised, but that it made them think more critically about this community, many sparked conversations because of it. Thank you for listening, and thank you for caring for those who chose to learn from my experience rather than see it an outlier.

Not all the responses to my article were positive, though, Some people forgot about the article immediately after reading it, some refused to read it after seeing the headline, some say it was exaggerated to cause drama—I’ve even heard some people believe that I’m not really black and that this was trying to smear Olin’s reputation. 

Let me make a few things clear: nothing was exaggerated, the experiences I described in my article were real, and I am currently a black female student at Olin. In fact, I left out some horrible details.

The best thing to come from this article was that this helped strengthen and bring the black community at Olin together. So, if you are struggling with racism at Olin, come to a USB-C meeting. We can’t fix the system, but we can support you and give you a space where you are heard. 

Other black students have shared with me that they faced similar experiences to mine. Many black students and staff have been told explicitly that they don’t belong here because they’re black. Many black students are called by the wrong name by their classmates and teachers, and we don’t say anything to avoid fights, but it hurts. When working on projects and research, our ideas are often ignored, and we have to push extra hard for a single idea to be considered. These racist practices have been normalized at Olin, and that is what makes for such a toxic environment. 

Many unconsciously believe that we can’t be racist because we are a small, liberal engineering school in Massachusetts. The answer is that everything is rooted in racism in the USA. Spaces like Olin that try to pretend systemic racism doesn’t exist, will only perpetuate the problem. The only way to actually combat racism is to talk about it. Acknowledge how your privilege will disadvantage others. Recognize the power you hold over others. Stop believing that you aren’t the problem. We all are, including me. If you want to learn more about confronting internal bias, I recommend reading some of Ibram X. Kendi’s books, many you can get through the library. To those who claim they want to change, here is your first step. 

Olin says it wants to get better, but know that I will keep watching. I will keep providing a safe space for other black students. I will follow intently everything the administration does to better support their students. 

Be better Olin, I’ll be watching.

Olin Is Racist

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I came to Olin so excited to learn and innovate. I had high hopes of becoming a great engineer, making great friends, and doing important research with kind professors. Overall, I have been satisfied with my classes and this community. I have great and understanding professors and strong friendships. I am learning in a way that finally fits me, and for once I don’t feel out of place. But I am not okay and not happy. I have been holding this in for a while to avoid causing trouble, but I won’t be silent anymore. 

Once, when I first got to Olin, I was in the library reviewing some course material. As I was studying, an upperclassman who I had never met approached me and stood next to my seat, looking at me very intently. I greeted them and asked if I could help them with anything. They responded curtly, “People like you don’t belong here.” 

I was shaken and said the first logical thing to come to mind: “If you mean here at Olin, I am here to become an engineer.”

The upperclassman smirked, then remarked before walking away, “People like you don’t seem like they would be good engineers.”

For a second, I was confused by what they meant by “people like me”. Women? Did they think I was a BOW student? Why me over anybody else in the library?  

I then took a good look around and realized what that upperclassman meant. I was the only black student in the library. I was the only black woman in the library. 

What the upperclassman meant was: Black women shouldn’t be engineers and don’t belong at Olin. 

That hurt me more than I could ever express in words. After that interaction, I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Someone felt so strongly that I didn’t belong at Olin that they went out of their way to tell me, just so I would know my place. And no one else in the library piped up to defend me, came to comfort me, or even shot me a sympathetic look. Most even turned away. 

To some, this might not seem like a big deal, but it was. I am no stranger to racism and sexism in the STEM world: I was bullied out of coding camp at age 10 by a group of boys who insisted that girls are “too sissy to handle computers.” In 7th grade, a teacher had students pass around my perfect score test while announcing “if someone like [my name] can get a perfect score, then anyone can succeed in my class”. When I got a spot in AP Computer Science in 11th grade, some boys at my school started an online campaign against me, saying that the “diversity spot was taking away seats from guys who actually deserved it”. 

I came to Olin because I hoped that a STEM school run by an esteemed black female engineer would be better, and would be an inclusive and uplifting environment. Yet someone felt so much hate at the idea of a black woman being at Olin and becoming an engineer that they had to tell me that the community I worked so hard to become a part of didn’t fully accept me and never would. That broke my heart because my dream, my safe space, my community, were now gone. Despite this, I will stay in a space that is set against me and I can’t change it alone. 

Despite my crushing disappointment, I pushed my doubts from that interaction aside and let myself believe that it was just one person and the culture at Olin is different, but it’s not. 

In my time at Olin, I have experienced more microaggressions than I can count, been left out of team talks because my input “didn’t seem necessary”, and my mental health has been ignored by both students and staff alike. I even had another interaction with a different student who told me that I “don’t seem like the typical engineer”, and that maybe I should “reconsider if Olin is the right place for me”. This prejudiced culture has had horrible impacts on my mental and emotional health. I frequently had panic attacks last semester and developed an eating disorder from pent-up discomfort, rage, and insecurity that I felt nobody noticed. I have been close to fainting and no one ever asked me if I was okay. 

I never said anything because I knew that if I told others, no one would care. People don’t care if the black girl is unhappy, if she is in a bad place mentally, because to most, we are forgettable and negligible. That is just a historical fact. I have seen students see me have a panic attack and walk past me laughing about how I’m “so extra”. And when I have shared my story people zone out, say I “overreacted”, or pretend to care only to forget the next day. 

The first person who listened to me about the library incident was Gilda. She was the first person who noticed I was struggling and took the time to talk to me and share her own experiences, so I didn’t feel so alone. I was surprised by the fact that Gilda, an esteemed and respected engineer and certifiable genius, also faces racism at Olin and has also had many students come up to her and tell her “you don’t belong at Olin” and yet they are never able to explain why.  

It is crazy to me how someone as wonderfully kind as her receives so much hate from the student body, but I have noticed the ones most vocal with this hate are white.

Now, I am not trying to imply that all students at Olin are racist and discriminative. I think there are a few who are, but the majority of the student body and some of the staff have clear internal racism that they haven’t addressed. They need to examine their own bias or truly think about where some of their opinions come from. Everyone holds some prejudice—it’s a sad fact about our world. If you don’t work to dismantle your own prejudice, then you are part of the problem. 

Olin as a community is racist, and we can’t keep ignoring it.  

As a community, we value black students less than other students and lack open spaces where black students feel safe enough to express these feelings. This is what Olin is, and we need to change.

CORe Needs to Change

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When I came to Olin in Fall of 2021, it was the tail end of the pandemic and clubs were starting to rebuild from the previous year. I am an avid coffee drinker, and Acronym was a large part of the reason why I chose Olin. Joining Acronym allowed me to deepen friendships and get to know older students who I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise. As a senior, the majority of first years that I interact with are the active Acronym members. I don’t believe that this is a unique experience, and clubs have been the most important experience for me to engage with the Olin community. 

At the beginning of my sophomore year, a friend and I were told that we were now in charge of Acronym. We were told that we could no longer use the Admissions desk, and changed the location to the library. Through the location change, we doubled attendance and made Acronym a space for casual conversations with professors and course assistants. 

At this point, Acronym was classified as an organization. All organizations had to exist for at least a year and received a budget. Clubs were generally smaller and met less often. Clubs had to request money from CCO whenever they wanted to spend, as they were not given a budget. In the ‘22-’23 school year, there were only twelve organizations and twenty-two clubs. 

After running Acronym, I wanted to join CCO to help provide others with the same positive experience that I had from my clubs. I was the Vice Club Chair last year and was the Club Chair until my resignation last semester. My job as Vice Club Chair was to fill out reimbursement forms for all of the clubs, and I normally processed only a couple hundred dollars a week. Last year was the first year that CCO got rid of the clubs and orgs structure, and every group received a budget. There were forty-two groups last year, with an overall budget of $28,000. Most groups did not receive enough money, and the student activity fee was increased. 

This year, there are sixty registered groups that receive funding from CCO and the overall budget is $55,000. My job was to work with the Vice Club Chair to allocate budgets, process all p-card payments, and make sure groups are spending their money. I also ended up filling out reimbursement forms, and all reimbursement requests were completed up to my resignation. I was processing thousands of dollars each week and constantly stressed over making sure I was filling out forms correctly. 

I received limited support from the Student Government Advisors. There was a significant amount of misspending in the fall, and the advisors were too busy to help me. They also asked me to not use the Honor Board to deal with misspending, because they told me they would handle it. They completely forgot about helping me for a month, and more incidents kept happening. 

I was spending at least 20 hours per week doing CCO work. I devalued my homework, wasn’t able to apply to grad school, and delayed my search for full-time jobs. On the date of my resignation, I received an email from my design depth professor saying that I didn’t have enough completed assignments to pass the class, which means I wouldn’t graduate. I was considering resigning for two weeks and this email solidified my decision to resign. I was able to catch up on work, and I am on track to graduate this spring.

This shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Student Government should not be burning students out the way it has this year. 

For Staff:

  1. Hire a full-time person to support Student Government. Stop making students do the work of full-time employees. Be upfront about your bandwidth to help students. 
  2. Pay Student Government positions. Students involved lose time to have other paid positions or take more classes.
  3. Hire a new Academic Life Administrative Assistant.

For Students:

  1. Be more understanding and respectful when engaging with CORe.
  2. Go back to the clubs and orgs system. Cap the number of student groups allowed. There does not need to be this many groups for a student body this small. This needs to be done through a constitution change, as the advisors are not willing to deny creation of groups. 
  3. Do not allow for a system that might compromise students ability to graduate and have a future after Olin.
  4. Blame the system for the current reimbursement procedure. There are many reimbursements to be done, but individual students don’t cause the underlying problems of CORe. 
  5. Recognize when something is causing harm to your wellbeing and stop doing it.

Dribbles

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Submitted Anonymously

He sits at his cluttered desk in his room. Taps a pen to his desk, looks at his iPhone, checks Facebook, has no updates. Thinks about doing homework, but instead goes on Reddit. The next day, he will remember none of what he reads.
…
Looks at his outlook, has a meeting with his design team in a half-hour but he must eat first.
Instead, he takes a nap, wakes up late for the meeting, then goes to the dining hall to grab a calzone.
He arrives to the meeting late and apologizes, but he mostly just feels sorry for himself.
…
He walks out of class on Friday. “Man, I need to drink” He thinks. The emptiness in his stomach pulls at him. Wheaty, bitter beer—that is what he needs. He eats a large dinner so he can drink more. At the party, he talks to people, and successfully lands a few jokes. He drinks a lot of water before going to bed, and wakes up without a hangover. Damn, what a champ! But really he cannot carry the feeling of winning for long, recalling the beer pong loss the night before, and—aughhhh!–the person that he wanted to talk to but didn’t have the courage to.
…
Monday night, he tries to do homework. He looks out the window and watches people walking past the Great Lawn in the rain. Their feet are moving quickly, pressing the fallen leaves into the pavement. The cold air and fall leaves remind him of that night freshman year, walking back to the train station at the end of the line, the scent of crushed, dry rot filling his nostrils, feeling the cold air pulling at his flesh. What a night, the last night he saw Taylor. It was skin, Bananagrams, hipster hip hop, dinner in Newton and clothes on the floor. Was this the beginning of something? Taylor—What if?
But unfortunately, no. Taylor had an idea of him, and loved that idea. But ideas are ideas, and one can’t hold the hand of an idea or kiss an idea.
He falls asleep, dribbling a bit on his paper, blurring the ink. Ohhhh, damn. Another meeting! He wakes up, prints out pictures for his personas and rushes to the studio.
…
Weekend Wednesday, walking through Parcel B, he tries to be profound. He looks at the colors of the leaves, the layers of colors and shapes, mixed together by the sunlight. Nature, and Nature and—well, not really. But trees. He’s walking in an area with a lot of trees, so yeah, that kind of counts. A branch brushes against his arm, and he pulls his arm in, imagining an itch where there’s none.
He walks to the lake that he heard about on Carpe, and it really is there! It shines and sparkles in the sunlight, as bodies of water do, and he feels a little more beautiful and peaceful inside. But this is an odd feeling. It makes him anxious.
He kicks a rock into the water, and it splashes. Not much, but enough to disturb the surface. He smiles.
…
Thursday evening, he’s biking to back to Olin after picking up food at Roche Bros. In the poor lighting, he sees a smudge on the road–a squirrel, flattened on the pavement. Its guts are drying as dark red lumps and strings, stuck to tufts of fur. Gruesome, but visually fascinating. He stares at it in shock, and rather than steer away he just goes bump over the body. He shivers. That body felt real.
The dry air is making his lips crack so he licks them and pulls them together, focusing on Olin just a few minutes away.

Living a Life Without Love

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We all are familiar the different types of “love”: platonic, heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, pansexual, etc. But many often exclude the possibility that being aromantic or asexual is one of them.

Love is everywhere. You grow up with it on television. You read about it in books. You start dreaming about it sometime in puberty. You hear about it every single day of your life. People who lack that desire are depicted as twisted or deprived: they’re either the villains bent on world destruction (like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) or someone who has not yet met that special someone (like Batman before Catwoman). People seem to forget that there ARE people in this world who have no desire to experience the “joys” of a relationship.

I am one of them.

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Relay for Life: Hope and Community

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Community is a sense of being a part of something larger than you, being surrounded by individuals with passion for change. I participate in Relay for Life for the sense of community that grows in such a short period of time. We become linked by our connections to cancer as we join to fight against it.

On March 10th, 45 Olin students participated in the Wellesley-MIT Relay for Life, and the strong sense of community was most definitely present.

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