In October 2022, I was a little over one month into my freshman year of college. I must have already been fantasizing about a gap year, however. Recently, I came upon a short piece of fiction of mine, dated October 11, 2022. I remember reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation, being simultaneously awed by moshfegh’s prose and dissatisfied at the novel’s attempt at modernity, but I truly do not remember writing this piece.
The disorientation that comes with forgetting one’s own writing can only be described as a delayed reckoning with a betrayal of the self.
These days, I have been overtaken by these reckonings, each one a mini earthquake to the “I” that my self claims. In college, I refused to call myself a “writer,” at least of the creative variety. As I go through years, almost a decade now, of old blogs, short stories, diary entries, and essays, “I” have been forced to reexamine this insistence as either self-denial or self-preservation. To write, to claim to be a writer, is to claim a small part of the Earth. I have never had such courage. And yet, I must write. This blog will become a small part in my project of writing.
The story is titled My Year of Reading and Overtaxation. It does sound like my freshman year self, however little I can remember of her. She was quite annoying. She was also deeply insecure and extremely neurotic, which truly rings out from the page. When I forgot this piece of writing, I must have forgotten her as well. Her, and the fact that I have been craving A “My year of” since one month into college.
Now, Here I am. On the precipice of a year away. On the verge of remembering that I once desired to write.
“I can never read all the books I want… And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
My Year of Reading and Overtaxation
Last year, I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. As a Princeton student, I’ve obviously never rested or relaxed in my entire life, so it was a great way to live vicariously through the novel, which follows a Columbia grad (that tells you all you need to know right there). Probably as a result of her substandard education, she is extremely depressed and aimless, spending her days watching old Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS and taking extreme concoctions of pills in the hope that a year of disassociating will magically produce a better person. At the time I read this book, it resonated with me because I, too, had a whole year of absolutely nothing looming ahead of me. I was taking a gap year.
Instead of wasting my life like the protagonist of MYRR, however, I decided to spend a whole year enriching my mind reading as many important books as I could. I had already wasted one whole book of my life on a contemporary novel. What do I mean by important? Well, obviously, books that add something to the literary canon. Things I could drop nonchalantly in conversation with other Princeton students and show off, quite alluringly, my erudition. Look, I would silently gesture, at how many books I’ve read. More than you, probably. Look at how I mention them so casually. Homeric allusions in between courses at a dinner party, Joyce in line for an overpriced coffee. It’s not a big deal, I just like to read. Yes, I’m probably smarter than you because of it, but who cares about little things like that?
I set a strict schedule for myself and planned every book I would read for the next year meticulously. Every morning, I woke up at 5 am, went on an eight mile run, and ate a breakfast of heart-healthy bran, oat milk, and organically-grown berries. I mean, I was reading for a year, not becoming a MIT student for gods sake. I had to keep up my physique. It would be 6:30 am when I finally situated myself in front of my standing desk and began my work for the day. I calculated 14 hours a day that I could dedicate to reading, from 6:30 am to 8:30 pm. At 8:30, I would then allow myself to eat dinner, exchange a sentence or two with my parents/landlords, and go to sleep.
14 hours a day for 365 days equals 5,110 hours of reading- nowhere close to enough time to make a dent in the work of brilliant minds. It was so unfair. They had the advantage of a millennium on me. Even with my superior reading speed of 700 words per minute, it would be impossible for me to read every book I wanted to read, which was every book in the world. So I chose carefully. I had a specific set of criteria for every book I put on my list, but it boiled down to this: [criteria].
One hundred books passed. It was almost violent how quickly I devoured them. I was incredibly strong, reading two to three books a day. I could feel my brain absorbing all the words I was reading, implanting them deep into my mind. I consumed every book on my list, getting smarter and smarter as I drained every little bit of information from Kant and Aristotle, from Steinbeck and Hemingway and Nietzche and Melville and Chaucer and Kerouac and Sophocles and Milton and Poe. I read it all and saved the bits and pieces of my impressions inside of me, becoming more and more important as I did. I understood it all, because of course I did, and also because I was deeply afraid of not understanding it at all. I was going to become the smartest girl in the world, buoyed on the words of big men that came before me. When I closed my eyes at night, pages would scroll beneath my eyelids, everything I had read that day floating up to the surface in an excruciatingly exquisite moment of simple truth. And then when I woke up, I would lay in bed perfectly still for exactly two minutes before my alarm went off, sentences and syntax and rhetoric entering my mind like the rays of sunlight peeking through my blinds and into my room. Words even invaded my runs, which I had previously thought of as my time for myself. But in this time of reading, nothing belonged to the self. I was a slave to the simple unit of a book. Every day, I ran the same course in under an hour. 3 miles uphill, from my neighborhood to the high school I went to, then 2 miles around all the sports fields, and then 3 miles back. I would listen to the thud of my feet against pavement or grass and think with the rhythm of my heart, I’m the smartest girl in the world, I’m the smartest girl in the world, I’m the smartest girl in the world. And as the words became a part of me, I felt myself becoming so.
GUESS WHAT??? I recently completed my junior year at Princeton University as an English Major, and I would still be hardpressed to say I am intimately familiar with the likes of Kant, Aristotle, Nietzche, Chaucer, Kerouac, Sophocles, Milton, and Poe. (I admit, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Melville are in my wheelhouse). I confess, I am not exactly captivated by the thought of reading the tomes of these great thinkers and novelists for one year. Still, I would like to reclaim my comfort in a routine.
“I had a specific set of criteria for every book I put on my list, but it boiled down to this: [criteria],” I wrote.
What is [Criteria]? Its original meaning eludes me. Probably, knowing my freshman self, it was something along the lines of: [A work that changed literature as we know it] or [Something everyone thinks is important]. To Freshman Julia, I really want to ask: Why were you so afraid of the blankness in between those brackets?
[criteria]
[ ]
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation
- My Year of REading and Overtaxation
- My Year of Writing
- My Year of Playing!
- My Year of Prancing and dancing!
- My year of Loving
- My Year of clinical depression
- My Year of Living
- My Year of Sleeping
- My Year of backpacking Europe
- My Year of Liberal disaster tourism
- My Year of Protest against Capitalism
- My Year of Harry Potter Movie Marathons
- My Year of Strava Marathon Training
- My Year of Lesbianism
- My Year of Anti-LGBTQ+ Activism (Ok I won’t even joke about that actually)
- My Year of finally getting on anti-depressants
- My Year of the Book Blog
- My Year of Learning how to draw
- My Year of hAppiness
