When* bad feelings happen to good people
*all the time but especially this past week when the last of the college decisions came out
There’s a scene early in the 1985 film A Room with a View where young Lucy Honeychurch and Charlotte Bartlett, her nervous, fussy chaperone, discover that their room in the Florentine pensione where they’re staying has no view. Charlotte looks down at the dingy courtyard below and says sniffily, “This is not at all what we were led to believe. The signora distinctly said: “ ‘A room with a view!’ "
So much of life involves being gobsmacked by the difference between what we were led to believe, or what we believe we were led to believe, or our own wishful thinking and cold, hard reality. For example: last week marked the end of college decision season for freshman applicants. Ivy League schools released their decisions on Thursday, known to some as Ivy Day and to others as A Day of Infamy, or Mixed News Day, or OMG I AM PUTTING MY ECSTATIC REACTION VIDEO ON ALL THE SOCIAL MEDIA Day. UC Berkeley also picked Thursday as their decision release day, clearly because the Cal admissions office thought that a day that already includes a landslide of notifications from eight colleges that have achieved mythical status in our cultural imagination does not contain enough drama or heartbreak. Stanford released their decisions on Friday afternoon.* It’s like the Oscars, where everything builds up to the Best Picture award, but with less Spanx and more hoodies and instead of one winner and anywhere between four and nine disappointed also-rans, there are roughly 20,000 winners and close to 500,000 unhappy high school students who were led to believe (or who led themselves to believe) that admission to a T20 school was a golden ticket to fortune and glory. (Spoiler alert: it’s not. I wrote a whole memoir called The Golden Ticket about that. Publishing the memoir was also not at all what I was led to believe, or led myself to believe. More on that later.)
This is the time of year I get a lot of requests to help with letters of continued interest for students who have been waitlisted or with appeals for those who have been rejected by their dream school. (Fun fact: colleges don’t like to use the verb “rejected.” They use the more neutral-sounding “denied admission,” because clearly that will make students who have been rejected denied admission feel so much better. Also, please read this brilliant parody of a Harvard rejection letter that still cracks me up almost 10 years later.)
It’s like the Oscars, where everything builds up to the Best Picture award, but with less Spanx and more hoodies and instead of one winner and anywhere between four and nine disappointed also-rans, there are roughly 20,000 winners and close to 500,000 unhappy high school students who were led to believe (or who led themselves to believe) that admission to a T20 school was a golden ticket to fortune and glory.
Anyway, everyone I spoke with last week was mad. Students who didn’t get into their dream schools are mad, and that includes students who are mad because they got into Dartmouth but not Yale or UC Davis but not UC Berkeley, or Purdue but not Carnegie Mellon. Students who got into Yale or UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon are mad because they didn’t get into Harvard or Stanford or MIT. Students who did not get into any of the aforementioned schools are mad at the students who did, especially at those complaining about the schools they didn’t get into.
I feel their pain. I was supposed to be on vacation in Big Sur with my husband this week but a big chunk of Highway 1 slid into the Pacific Ocean this past Saturday so we are not in Big Sur.
Still, I’m probably less devastated by this turn of events than the people who got stranded in Bug Sur and had to spend the night in their cars or emergency shelters before being escorted out by the highway patrol, and definitely less devastated than people who don’t have cars, or access to emergency shelter, or enough food. But that’s human nature, isn’t it? Like the wife in The Fisherman and His Wife, we want more than whatever we already have. I know, I know: we’re supposed to identify with the humble, good-hearted fisherman who’s content with what he has and who releases the magical, wish-granting flounder back into the ocean, not with the fisherman’s shrewish wife, who keeps wanting more—a cottage, then a palace, then to be king, and finally to be God. (Another spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well.)
I keep telling my students there’s no such thing as a perfect school, any more than there’s such a thing as a perfect spouse or a perfect pair of jeans. This is a line I came up with while writing my TEDx talk. Do you know why I haven’t shared my TEDx talk here? Because I convinced myself beforehand that I would be smart and funny and dynamic and stylish and sleek. I convinced myself that my talk would go viral. Do I even need a spoiler alert here? At last count, the talk had 398 views on YouTube. My mom saw a picture of me on stage and said, “Cargo pants?” I drew a total and terrifying blank two sentences in and blathered idiotically for a good (or, actually, a very bad) minute until I remembered what I was going to say. Watching it makes me want to hide under furniture. What’s that, you say? Surely it’s not so bad? Go ahead. Laugh.
I learned not to twitch when people said, “oh, a hybrid press” in the same way that some people say, “oh, was that your safety school?”
Back to my memoir. I got stupidly lucky and signed with an agent who loved the memoir and was convinced that it would be embraced with open arms by the publishing industry. It was topical, she said, and urgent, and raw, and honest, and necessary. There might be an auction. My husband did some research on the internet and told me if there was a bidding war I should go with Hachette, mostly, I think, because he liked the way it sounded. You can tell where this is going, right? There was no auction. The memoir was rejected by over 70 publishers, including Hachette and a couple dozen publishing houses you’ve never heard of. I ended up working with She Writes Press, a hybrid publisher based in Berkeley, and I learned not to twitch when people said, “oh, a hybrid press” in the same way that some people say, “oh, was that your safety school?” And if you think that writers who publish traditionally are immune to resentment and envy, trust me, they’re not. They’re seething because someone else got a bigger advance, or their book went to auction, or sold more copies, or got more likes on social media. Don’t believe me? Read Yellowface.
This is where I’m supposed to say something wise about the journey, not the destination, the process, not the goal, yada yada. But I’d be lying if I did. We want recognition, dammit. We want prestige. We want validation. We want more, bigger, better. We beat on, boats against the current.
I will never acquire the serenity of the enlightened fisherman in the folk tale, but I’ll tell you this: the best stories live in the gap between aspiration and reality. They’re funny and real. They make us want to know whether the person who fell on their face got back up and kept going, and if so, how. We all know people who got back up. Sometimes we are those people. If you have young people in your life who are disappointed or angry or sad about what happened last week, tell them those stories. Because yes, we want prestige and validation (or I do, anyway), but we also root for the underdog, and for good reason.
*Stanford decisions always come out on Friday at 4 pm because the thinking goes like this: send out the decisions, disconnect the phones, lock up the office, and run away, hoping that the big emotions will settle over the weekend. Having answered the phones in Undergraduate Admission the following week, I can tell you that no, they won’t.
Great timing for your post: I am currently on a spring break college tour with my high school junior. I should start bracing myself now, I guess, for the next year and all its attendant emotions. Oof.
I am reminded of a writing book by K.M. Weiland, who talks about how there is going to be a difference between what your protagonist *wants* and what your protagonist *needs.* I feel like that's true for so many things in life, including college admissions, publishing paths, the person you think you want to marry, etc. So many students want admission to the handful of highest-prestige schools when what they really need is found at other schools. I wish that message could gain traction in our community.
P.S. Love the Room with a View reference.
I did not laugh at that Ted talk. I wondered why in fact it hadn’t gone viral. So wise, and smart and human. This: “human lives are tangled and complicated and often end up going weird places.” Um, yeah they are and do. Some of the happiest college students I know are not at their top pick school, and some of the least happy (and most gobsmacked) are. We’ve created impossible expectation sets for this generation about what they should achieve and what life should look like based on that achievement. I’m all for debunking, so let’s get this Ted talk a million more views at least! And please tell your mom: those are SLEEK cargo pants.