Giles Corey is a name that I will never forget, and not just because it’s a fun one to say. If you aren’t familiar with Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” or the general lore behind the Salem Witch Trials, allow me to fill you in:
Way back in 1690s Massachusetts, Corey was a farmer in Salem, who, along with his wife Martha, was accused of practicing witchcraft. It was customary that if the accused fessed up to their dealings with the devil and prayed for forgiveness, the satisfied accusers would let them go back to living their simple lives in the lovely seaside town. On the contrary, if they refused to admit to their alleged sins, they would be executed — regardless of the truth.
This tradition created quite the dilemma for many devout Puritans in the town who believed that a life of dishonesty would send them to hell. Corey was one of many who refused to confess, insisting that he was innocent of such fantastical activities. I imagine he knew that lying would condemn him to hell eventually, whereas the truth would simply fast track him to heaven, and I suppose he chose the latter. This I find a bit ironic, considering Corey was a well-documented petty thief. During his trial, the men of the court began placing heavy stones atop his body as they continued to question him, but he was already “committed to the bit,” as my best friend would say. He could have simply given in, played the part that the other Puritans wished of him and been spared. Instead, all he said was, “more weight,” until he was gone. Talk about dying on a hill.
His gravestone reads: “Giles Corey. Pressed to death.” I visited it once during my senior year of high school, when I was considering going to college on the East Coast. After eating copious amounts of seafood and observing an array of largely unimpressive but outwardly beautiful brick buildings, I decided to opt for the University of Michigan, the alma mater of the very man who wrote Corey’s tale.
I sort of admire Corey’s commitment. You see, I have been placing stones of my own upon my chest willingly — my desires, my regrets and my fifteen unfinished assignments, all neatly wrapped together with a bow. Like the comfort of my weighted blanket, I hold these burdens near and dear as they dig into my ribcage, threatening to cave in on my lungs at any moment.
Like many of us here at the University, I often find myself testing my own limits. I gauge how many credits I can pile on, how many jobs I can work and how many more vices I can adopt. My fellow self-inflictors and I were born with a stubbornness for the ages and an unwavering belief that we can do it all. There is a certain satisfaction that comes from pushing yourself as close to the breaking point as you can get. Unfortunately, it’s only a matter of time before this weight becomes crushing and we struggle to breathe beneath it all.
We all have moments that force us into personal realization against our will, and one of my most memorable ones came in the second semester of my freshman year. Ravaged by mononucleosis and strep throat, my grades slipping and rejection letters from student organizations coming in quicker than I could cry over them, I was coming to terms with the fact that I was putting too much pressure on myself. I came to college convinced that I was ready to grind until I was six feet under, but six months in I was already out of steam. I felt aimless and depressed. Worst of all, I felt like I had disappointed sixteen-year-old me, who once had expectations that eighteen-year-old me was starting to realize might be a tad unreasonable. Suddenly, my long list of potential extracurriculars and the complete lack of white space in my planner didn’t look so exciting. In fact, they hurt my head more than my incessant fever did. Was I really doing all these things for myself, or was I doing them because I felt that I wouldn’t be impressive enough if I didn’t?
By the time my NyQuil fog had worn off, I realized that I needed to make some serious changes to how I approached college. At an academically rigorous university, where I’ve never seen the “work hard, play hard” mindset illustrated in such full force, it’s easy to get swept up in the intensely competitive campus culture. Not only are we expected to keep up with our challenging school work, but suddenly we’re offered unlimited ice cream, a complete lack of a curfew and the responsibility of doing our own laundry. Self-management quickly becomes a skill very few of us were taught but none of us can manage to live without any longer. Might I amend the famous words of Spiderman’s Uncle Ben to say that with great freedom, comes great responsibility.
Yet, my relationship with work isn’t as simple as one of love and hate. Allotting myself free time is one thing, but allowing myself to relax and enjoy it is another battle entirely. While it was often tiresome, filling my Google Calendar to the brim came with the satisfaction of feeling like I was a part of something. Particularly after the pandemic, it felt nice to have a purpose — a reason to leave the house. It healed me just as fiercely as it tore me apart. After years spent alone in my bedroom with no real reason to get out of bed, even a grueling eight-hour work shift started to look appealing.
In my quest to find out if this was a universal phenomenon, I looked outside the University’s walls. Many miles away in a New York City apartment, I found a kindred spirit in Shalini Hayenga, a recent graduate of the University of Cincinnati. Hayenga studied international affairs and history with a concentration in Asian studies and was the engagement manager for the university’s undergraduate student government, in addition to being a member of at least 10 other campus organizations. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, she said getting so involved on campus was therapeutic for her after the isolation of starting college during the pandemic.
“I felt so happy being involved on campus,” Hayenga said. “Coming off of two years of being exhausted for no reason, it felt really good at the end of the day to be tired for a reason.”
That doesn’t mean her experience was entirely sunshine and rainbows, though. Hayenga expressed her appreciation that her student government addressed important world events and political discourses in real time, but noted that it also resulted in some unpredictable workloads.
“A lot of campuses weren’t even having those conversations, so I thought it was really great,” she explained. “But it also meant that we were randomly having Senate meetings from 6 p.m. – 11 p.m. during exam week.”
She spoke in particular about the last few weeks of her senior year, during which her personal projects, organizations and academic responsibilities all began to take a toll on her.
“I truly did not feel like a person, which was something that someone in grad school had said to me once and I was like, ‘That’s crazy!’” Hayenga said. “But then I was like, ‘I don’t feel like a person right now.’ I haven’t cooked for myself, I haven’t showered in a week. I am just eating and breathing and sleeping these projects.”
So where exactly is the line between overwork and simply working hard to accomplish our goals? I think that the problem arises when we forget that we have identities beyond “student.” There’s a certain part of some of us that glamorizes the struggle. We brag about our hours spent in the library and the number of espresso shots we had to take in order to finish our essays. Yes, college demands a lot of us, but in giving it our best effort, we have to make sure we aren’t also giving up our humanity.
I’m certainly guilty of suffocating myself under mountains of extra work and pressure simply because it makes me feel more worthy of going to this school, but somewhere along the way, perhaps around my mono stint, I decided to trust the admissions committee. I am here for a reason and there’s no point in working myself to death just to prove a point. College is a balancing act; a tightrope we walk so that hopefully one day it becomes a balance beam, and maybe eventually a smoothly paved sidewalk. I’ve become skilled at walking the thin line, though I worry I’ll waver if I don’t reach solid ground soon.
But does that solid ground really exist, or is the American workforce an even more unstable landscape? It depends. In the same way that the freedom of college can make time management more difficult, professions that provide employees with greater autonomy over their schedules might make it more complicated for people to maintain a work-life balance — especially in a post-pandemic world where so many employees work from home. While technology offers benefits when it comes to accessibility, perhaps there’s such a thing as being too accessible. The ability to answer emails and take meetings easily from our homes at any hour may be impacting our ability to step away from it all. I sit here writing to you from the floor of my childhood bedroom at midnight on a Saturday, just because I can. Does “off the clock” even really exist anymore? Are we doomed to a future of never-ending amalgamation of the personal and professional?
It’s not only just the amount of work that weighs on us, but the way we approach completing it. In 1955, British historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote Parkinson’s Law, which I recently came across on Instagram Reels. Parkinson stated that, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Essentially, if I give myself all day to study for an exam, I will take all day to study for it, but this doesn’t mean I’ll be efficient about it. I’ve found Parkinson’s observation to be quite accurate. If I tell myself I have to finish something within an hour — as long as that’s fairly reasonable for the task — it’s likely that I will. When we take to over-romanticizing “the grind”, we might start to ignore the prioritization of efficiency and instead glamorize the exhaustion of filling our days with work that we could have accomplished in a few hours.
I still do my fair share of hard work, but my illusion that sheer busyness is impressive has faded. I have begun to prioritize what is important to me. I organize my time to spend less of it in a senseless struggle and instead seek to maintain a healthy split between efficient work and truly relaxing free time. When the clock strikes midnight, I usually cut my losses and go to bed. I don’t pick up shifts on my only day off. I let myself rewatch “Seinfeld” even when I could be getting ahead on homework. If my GPA drops a bit but I am carrying less on my shoulders, I shrug with a newfound lightness and move on. Call it laziness if you must, but I like to call it balance. My humanity is important to me, and I don’t intend to hand it over any time soon.
While I have previously found a certain dark beauty in Corey’s choice to allow his innocent body to be crushed to death stone by stone, I’m starting to understand that while the sentiment may have been a grand one, the execution — pun intended —wasn’t particularly necessary. As much as I craved more weight at the beginning of my college experience, I’m not sure I’m strong enough to carry it all anymore, and I think that’s okay. Maybe there are ways to commit to something without burning yourself at a stake, and while it’s an admirable thing to die for your principles, I find it an even more admirable thing to live for them.
Statement Columnist Paige Wilson can be reached at wipaige@umich.edu.
The post No more weight appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply