cosmicdjeanette

[cosmicdjeanette]

Embracing the Absurd: A Reflective Journey on Authenticity and the Search for Meaning in Life

Learning about the absurd, was personally one of my favorite units of this class because when we moved on to the last two units, it began to make even more sense to me hence why I choose to reflect on Units 4, 5, and 6 together with one final post. I now understand that absurdity, authenticity, and the meaning of life are all connected in a beautiful way but there was a time when I didn’t. Within my first week at Michigan State University, I made an observation that most of the girls at MSU tend to dress the same to the point where it sometimes felt like a uniform.

During the day, girls tend to wear small gold hoop earrings with their hair slicked back and held together by a hair clip that is a nude color with these accessories typically being from the website Princess Polly or Pitaya on Grand River. In combination with their hair and accessories, girls will typically sport a matching Lululemon set with white athletic shoes. During the night when they’re heading to the bars closest to MSU, “The Riv”, “Dublin” or “Harpers” (referred to as “Harps”), they tend to wear black leather pants from either Hollister, American Eagle, or Abercrombie & Fitch. They typically pair these with white air force ones or black and white Nike dunks and top it off with a crop top or a long-sleeved bodycon shirt.

When I noticed this repeating pattern of how most girls on campus dress, it immediately made me feel like an outcast therefore, I tried my best to fit in and wore the clothes that I saw everyone wearing but after a period of time, I began to feel uncomfortable because I knew that it wasn't who I really was. At night, I would cry myself to sleep knowing that I would have to wake up in the morning, carefully plan my outfit, and put on a mask just to brave the world outside. I began to feel like a character in a play, wearing a costume because I knew that I wasn't being authentic to myself. At night I would question myself asking “Why did the universe put me on a campus that it knew I would not fit in at?”.

I am a different person now than I was freshman year and I no longer change myself in order to fit what I believe is the status quo but from this class, I’ve also learned that searching for meaning from the universe is what Albert Camus would define as absurd. Before this class, my definition of what absurdity is was much different than it is now but I’m happy to have learned about Albert Camus and his existential absurdity because it helped me to make some meaningful connections that have contextualized my first-year experience on this campus. Looking back, I realize that being inauthentic to myself made me engage with absurdity but from this, I have also learned that the universe will never provide you an answer or meaning for anything. Therefore, when it comes to asking questions like “What is the meaning of life?” don’t expect the universe to spit back an answer to you.

My inauthenticity and inability to stand in my values and beliefs led me to explore the absurdity of the universe and ultimately helped me to determine that I am the only person that can figure out what my meaning and purpose is whether it’s on campus or elsewhere. Currently, I like to think that I have figured out what my purpose on this campus is and I believe that it is to leave a lasting impact. To do this I’ve become involved in many different parts of campus from helping to kickstart the Academic Scholars Program within the Honors College to volunteering during the Spartan Days of Service and along the way, I discovered like-minded people that embraced me authentically.

#Units 4 #5 #and 6

[cosmicdjeanette]

Mortality and the Fear of the Unknown: A Personal Reflection on Death and Anxiety

My first and only brush with death was in 2018. While driving my siblings and I on our way to school one morning, my Mom’s 2010 Toyota Corolla was hit by a Honda Accord. I don’t remember how the accident even took place, all that I remember was that one moment I was sitting in the front seat of my Mom’s car, dreading a Math test that I had to take at school later that day while listening to Drake and the next moment I was waking up in a hospital room with a broken arm. Thankfully, everyone in the car survived with very few injuries but I remember laying in the hospital bed thinking to myself how terrible it would’ve been if I, my siblings, or my Mother died in that car accident, and with that thought came this nauseating feeling that reminded me of my own personal mortality.

This feeling arose again during a trip that my family had taken to Ghana to go and visit my Aunt. My Aunt had been quite sick for a while but because of the lack of resources available to Ghanaian doctors, they struggled to figure out what was wrong with her. I remember seeing her for the first time during that trip, the sclera of her eyes were a dark yellow and she was nothing but skin and bones. I distinctly remember thinking to myself “ How is it possible for a person to be that skinny and still alive?”. That day, my Aunt and I talked for hours about any imaginable subject; she asked me about life in America, how I was doing in school, and what I wanted to do as a career in the future. I asked her if she enjoyed living in Ghana, if she wanted to go back to her job as a pharmacist, and if she would ever visit America. She promised me that she would but unfortunately, she never got the chance to. The next day, my Mom received a phone call from my Grandmother but she was too busy cooking in the kitchen to go to the living room so she asked me to grab her phone and pick up the call. I picked up the call, heard my Grandmother wailing and screaming, and immediately knew what had occurred. I broke it to my Mother that her twin sister had died and I watched as the light inside her eyes quickly faded away.

That very next day, I sat with the adults as the planning and preparation of her funeral began and again, I felt that nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach which I now know is called death anxiety. During unit three, I learned that being conscious of your own mortality after witnessing or being close to death and feeling that intense fear of the dying process is actually a common thing that most people feel which made me feel less odd about experiencing it. Reading the “Psychology Today” article about the phenomenon helped me to understand that watching someone you love pass away or having a brush with death can break through the defense mechanism that we have about our own mortality.

Learning this helped me to realize that having anxiety about death is something that everyone experiences and that it’s all a part of the human condition. I wish that I knew more about death anxiety during these two moments where I experienced it because it would have helped me to realize that it’s not odd to feel anxious about the possibility of death. Nowadays, instead of remembering my Aunt as she was while she was sick, I choose to remember her as the intelligent, hilarious and caring person that she was before as it is my way of keeping her alive. I would like to end this reflection with a quote by Canadian writer, Jonathan Auxier, “Say not in grief he is no more, but live in thankfulness that he was.”

The image above is of my Mother's twin sister & my Aunt, Grace.

#Unit 3 #Death and Anxiety

[cosmicdjeanette]

The Intersection of Feminism, Freedom, and Responsibility: A Personal Reflection

Despite growing up in a very conservative, African household, I like to think that my parents gave me a lot more freedom than most people's parents did but, that freedom also taught me at a very early age that freedom comes with a lot of responsibility. Coming to college helped me realize two things, a lot of people were raised in very strict households by controlling parents and because of this, when they go to college they “get loose” to the point where they act irresponsibly simply because they’ve never had the freedom to do much of anything before. This is a common observation that I had made especially amongst my male friends and I began to wonder why until Marilyn Frye helped me to answer the question. In the first semester of my sophomore year, I took a class called “Philosophical Aspects of Feminism” which required the reading of Marilyn Frye’s “The Politics of Reality”.

Reading this text helped to further understand some of my own personal experiences as a Black woman but it also helped me to realize just how much freedom men are given in the world to behave in whatever way they see fit. When kids go off to college, it is expected that they do crazy things since they have no sort of adult supervision but the difference is that women are taught to be prepared and in fact, fear the negative consequences of freedom while Men are allowed to be as wild and free as they’d like to be which places an invisible burden of responsibility on women to protect themselves and stay vigilant at all times, a stark reminder that in this world you can never be as free as a Man. 

I think that a good place to witness an example of freedom and its varying degrees of responsibility would be inside of a bar. As a college student at a university that has a reputation for partying, a bar is a pretty common place for everyone to go and party which means that as long as you are of the legal age, you are free to enter a bar and drink; however, here’s where the responsibility between Men and Women varies. From the perspective of a Man, I think that the biggest responsibility they would face is to not drink too much (if they chose to) but as a woman in a bar you have to be responsible enough to know that you can’t leave your drink unattended, have to cover up your drink when you have it, go to the bathroom with a friend to avoid danger, know the signs of being drugged so that you can identify if you have been, share your location with someone just in case something bad happens and keep self defense weapons like pepper spray on you at all times. On a college campus, women and men are given the same amount of freedom but only women have to carry the burden of responsibility that comes with it. 

Frye’s reading helped me to put terms onto the different experiences that I had faced as a woman but reading it again, specifically in this class helped me to contextualize what she was talking about outside of just feminist philosophy. It helped me to understand and connect the readings that I had done to the topic of freedom and how the responsibility that is placed on you in connection to dealing with the consequences of freedom can vary depending on your gender. I hope that one day, the world has progressed past the point where we are now but until then, this is what we as women have no choice but to face. 

#Unit 2 #Freedom

[cosmicdjeanette]

Exploring the Significance of Existence and Kierkegaard's Philosophy on the Meaning of Life: A Personal Reflection

The nature of existence is one that has always been hard for me to comprehend. As a child, I believed that the reason that humans existed was because God put us on this Earth and therefore, that's how we came into being. That wasn’t something that I challenged until my parents separated. I feel like some background is needed in order to understand how my mind has changed on this specific topic. My name is Jeanette, I personally don’t think it’s a very unique or meaningful name but to my parents, especially my father, it was. You see, I was named after my cousin Jeanette, who has always been the over-achiever in our family.

I was originally supposed to be named Vanessa, but last minute my Dad was able to convince my Mom on the name Jeanette because he wanted me to be just as successful and smart as my cousin. My parents saw this name as a blessing that one day their child will grow up to be as amazing as the original Jeanette but I saw this name as a curse because to me, it meant that I was born in the shadow of another person. For as long as I can remember, any thing that I achieved was compared to the other Jeanette’s which made me feel as if my existence centered on surpassing all of her accomplishments. This can be a difficult thing to live with as a child, always knowing that whatever you achieve will never amount to what your cousin has done. After the divorce of my parents, the comparisons finally stopped but a part of my existence still revolved around academic success and honestly it still does. 

The first unit of this class focused on the topic of existence and one question that I’ve always struggled with is “Is there a purpose to our existence and if there is, what determines it?”. As a child, my existence revolved around living up to the comparisons made between me and my cousin and I believed that God had put me on this earth for some mysterious reason. As I’ve gotten older I no longer believe in God but nowadays my existence revolves more around being as successful as I can when it pertains to my work. I honestly don’t know if there is a purpose to our existence on Earth but if there’s one thing that I’ve taken away from this class, it’s that it is up to individuals themselves to decide if there is a purpose for our existence and it’s also up to them to decide if our existence is predestined or influenced by external factors.

During the first unit, one of my favorite readings was “The Crowd is Untruth” by Kierkegaard and the reason that it quickly became one of my favorites was because it helped me to realize something that I’ve been unconsciously doing my entire life. In the reading, Kierkegaard highlights that a person’s worldview is often influenced by our own biases which is something that I knew but never really analyzed in relation to myself and my world view. Kierkegaard “The Crowd is Untruth” helped me come to the conclusion that the way I approached the question of my existence was incorrect and that my own personal biases affected the way that I approached it. I realized that for my entire life I approached this question looking for some sort of concrete answer (which I often provided to myself based off of my own biases) but there really isn't one. Existence itself is a multi-faceted concept which is why I struggled to come to terms with it so much and instead of exploring the world around me in order to find some answer, I imposed my own on it since I was so desperate for one. These days, I no longer try to engage in the idea that my existence revolves around any God, any person or any grade. I try to engage with the question of existence with an open mind and I think that would make Kierkegaard proud.

#Unit 1 #Existence