Talha Gondal, Period 1, 12/14/21

 

• Goal Setting & Growth

In my youth, I would read for hours and hours on end in a quiet corner of my local library on Cortelyou Avenue. My mother would drop me off after school and pick me up as the sun set. From E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web or Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, literature became a part of my life from a very young age, but as I grew older the only books I read were those appointed to me by my high school English teachers. Thankfully however, the summer of 2021 reignited my love for written word, and I spent much of my free hours on a park bench in Westerleigh filling empty moments with Renaissance tragedies and the memoirs of New York City theater directors. My local library became a second home and I'd journey there every chance I had, chasing that childhood high.

Funnily enough, I was reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology with a friend when school started back up, and as my Mythology class picked the book up, I put it down in my own time. Amid the college chaos and senioritis, I began having trouble finding space for even just a few pages. It wasn't that I didn't have time, but I didn't have days where I could truly immerse myself in the world of what I was reading. Tales of Lorenzo di Medici's murders in Florence and the smuggling of Murrat Edrisi into Europe faded from my focus as the common app took center stage.

At the time of this writing, 18 days remain for most of my college applications, projects are starting up in every other class, and Macroeconomics exams are becoming a lot less bearable than they were in September. And yet, I'm hopeful that in these next few weeks I'll return to the leather and parchment that introduced me to the philosophies I live by and the mythologies I'm studying today. Resilience towards this goal lies mostly in the limitations I set on myself: my refusal to acknowledge that it's not time that I'm short on, but direction. Allowing myself to become overwhelmed with schoolwork is what has kept me from loving literature like I once did, so I believe that returning to it starts with getting ahead on my academic responsibilities, and allotting free time to turning pages rather than imessage games.

I've come to realize that my hesitancy before picking up a book follows a fear of committing to something that I don't expect myself to finish. My experiences in stressful academic environments leave me with the impression that my workload will take priority over my personal endeavors sooner or later. It's an unhealthy cycle of thoughts that leaves me both stressed and without a book in hand, but recognizing this relationship between my expectations and the decisions I make gives me the upper hand over my doubtful self. As I reflect on a future filled with university lectures, job interviews, and family matters, I've recognized that a "less stressful time" is nothing to bet on. If I continue waiting for an opening that might never come, I may lose my love for literature forever, so I look forward to the next few weeks as an opportunity to challenge the self-restrictions that have bound me to literary procrastination.