Illustration by Meg Cuca

“When they go low, we go high.” As Michelle Obama took to the stage at the Democratic National Convention earlier this year, she began a vital counter-narrative during this troubling election: a narrative of hope, of morality, of faith in the nation. She urged the electorate to think of their children, to rise above pettiness and to see how far we’ve come. She did not mince her words, pander or speak with hyper-partisan political jargon. Instead, she spoke her truth. As a black woman in a role historically seen as adjunct to her husband, she occupies a particularly vulnerable place in our society—as we saw with the constant barrage of insults she faced during the 2008 election—but she has proven her strength, power and grace time and again, and has now emerged as a voice of authenticity and strength in a demoralizing time. Michelle Obama is the conscience of this election.

A recent WSJ/NBC poll found that she is the most popular figure in the current political arena, with a 59 percent approval rating (8 percent above her husband, who was rated second-highest). Granted, it helps that she isn’t a politician, but she has also perfected her ability to rise above the political small-mindedness and speak from her heart, defending the values of the nation, while acknowledging its many difficult truths. As she said at the DNC, “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.” She says what needs to be heard, her message both acknowledging a painful and complicated reality, and showing just how far the United States has come.

One of the most disheartening moments of the election was the release of the tapes of Trump’s degrading comments about women in his 2005 interview with Billy Bush. Michelle Obama, voice shaking with vulnerability and anger, stepped up and delivered the response the nation desperately needed.

“I have to tell you that I can’t stop thinking about this,” she said. “It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted.” She continued, “The measure of any society is how it treat its women and girls,” explaining that women often have to “pretend like this doesn’t really bother us, maybe because admitting how much it hurts us makes women look weak.” Her voice, ringing with authenticity, carried a message that was anything but weak: “Now is the time for all of us to stand up and say enough is enough. This has got to stop right now.”

This is a big moment. She’s a woman, she’s black and she’s angry, an intersection which has traditionally been devalued by society. And yet, it is arguably her speeches that have brought the most comfort to a seething nation, her words that have touched millions, and her presence that has brought a much-needed ray of hope in a trying time. That is so important.

New York Times Magazine recently published a series of thank you letters to Michelle Obama from well-known public figures. In her letter, Gloria Steinem wrote of the Obamas, “I have never seen such balance and equal parenting, such love, respect, mutuality and pleasure in each other’s company. We will never have a democracy until we have democratic families and a society without the invented categories of both race and gender. Michelle Obama may have changed history in the most powerful way—by example.” Actress Rashida Jones wrote, “Michelle Obama will have her own legacy, separate from her husband’s. And it will be that she was the first first lady to show women that they don’t have to choose. That it’s okay to be everything.”

Michelle Obama went from being Barack’s mentor at their law firm to a dedicated first lady to a hero for millions around the nation. Her courage, her vulnerability and her authenticity have touched the country deeply. Her voice has been heard. She has made a difference.

Happiness is overrated.

I know, I know, I’ve resorted to a controversial grabber to get your attention, but I promise I’m going somewhere. The pervasive myth of happiness as the ultimate goal of life is everywhere. We’re told to do what makes us happy. We’re encouraged not to worry; to be high spirited. Perhaps we were even lured to Whitman by the shiny promise of a “cult of happiness.” But what about the times when life just sucks? What about those of us who tend toward a baseline state of melancholy and malaise? What is it that is so innately wrong about sadness—despite the slight discomfort—that means we have to do everything we can to rid it from our lives and join the smiling masses?

In his book “Against Happiness,” author Eric Wilson warns about the extinction of sadness in a culture that is over-medicated and addicted to the elusive concept of happiness. He explores the well-trod, yet undeniably powerful link between depression and creativity. He argues the importance of “sweet sorrow” and posits that experiencing the world from a state of mild sadness can enhance and enrich the meaning of one’s life. Wilson laments the boring, tired, repetitive nature of the world and says, “Then along comes what Keats calls the melancholy fit, and suddenly the planet turns interesting. The veil of familiarity falls away. There before us fall bracing possibilities.”

Blindly striving for happiness and rejecting melancholy creates a culture of fear. Instead of embracing discomfort, uncertainty and anxiety, most of us will do anything for a bland state of contentment. In thinking that we have to avoid negative emotions at all costs, we let our need to flee from unhappiness dictate our lives. It’s seductive to chase contentment, yes, but humans are far too nuanced and complicated to turn a blind eye to our sullenness and blues. Accepting sadness adds poignancy to life, makes us more creative and helps us find and discover ourselves.

This is not by any means intended to romanticize depression or the tortured artist motif. Depression is an incredibly painful form of suffering that extends beyond the scope of general malaise and should be treated as such. What I’m discussing is sadness, glumness and those melancholy moments that we often feel deep in our guts. But it’s also true these days that more and more people are being treated and medicated for very mild depression. We are constantly given the message that to feel anything less than perfect happiness is to have a problem, one that must be fixed with the utmost urgency.

Personally, I’ve struggled on and off with bouts of both depression and anxiety. I tried medication and, helping me out of a dark period, it made everything feel easier and lighter for a time. But I’ve begun to understand how to separate my occasional depressive phases from my propensity toward melancholy, and I see now that my life is much richer when I have full access to the array of emotions that my physiology can dictate. My blues are a part of me, a part that I value, despite the discomfort.

It’s okay to feel sad. It’s okay to be melancholy. While many of us don’t operate from a baseline level of glumness, we surely all feel down from time to time. Running from these feelings, desperately chasing after happiness, detracts from personal growth and enjoyment. But embracing the discomfort of sadness makes us stronger, wiser and cultivates many other character-building qualities that emerge from sitting with uncomfortable emotions.

Genuine moments of joy are always tempered by splashes of pain and melancholy. We cannot selectively numb our feelings. I exhort you all to ride the cheesy, metaphorical rollercoaster of emotions that is human experience. We don’t have to fight melancholy; we don’t have to hide from sadness. In embracing moments of darkness, we can more clearly experience the light in our lives.

Illustration by Catalina Burch.

I’m not going to convince you that climate change exists. Because, although this truth might be contrary to some peoples’ beliefs (looking at you, Republican party!), it unequivocally does. And because you are all bright, intelligent, well-informed millennials, I know you know this. What I would instead like to talk about is the intersectionality between climate change and other issues (I know, I know, could it get any more Whitman?). See, climate change is also a women’s rights issue, a class issue and a race issue. It’s all connected and it’s of vital importance that we observe this intersection.

Consistently, it is affluent communities that engage in environmentally unsustainable practices, yet it is disproportionately minorities who are hit with the brunt of the consequences. Take Hurricane Katrina for example. The impact of the natural disaster was clearly split along racial lines, significantly hitting New Orleans’ poor, black communities the hardest. It was the black people who were left on rooftops for extended periods of time, who were overlooked in initial aid programs, who were considered criminals as they roamed the streets of New Orleans after they were denied help. During a telethon for victims in response to the hurricane, Kanye West declared, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” This was not a coincidence: this was a racialized response to climate change.

As Naomi Klein, author and activist, explains, “If you have a culture that treats people like they’re disposable, that doesn’t value people, then, when you confront a crisis like climate change, those values will govern how you confront that crisis.” Our society gives less value to poor communities and communities of color. As the effects of climate change grow stronger, society’s lack of respect for minorities becomes further polarized. Our reluctance to react to climate change is connected with the systemic racism and class discrimination that pervades our society.

According to a report released by the UN, the groups most vulnerable to climate change are those who are politically, economically and socially marginalized. In developing countries, decreases in crop yields will be first and most strongly felt, significantly worsening already rampant malnutrition and low qualities of life. Additionally, it is in poor communities that weather-related disasters have their worst effects. During Superstorm Sandy, low-income households and housing projects – mostly populated by people of color – were hit the hardest. Nearly half of families requesting federal aid had annual incomes under 30,000 dollars, and the majority of people making claims to FEMA were from low-income families.

On another note, women’s subjugation is, in part, adding to the detrimental effects of climate change. Overpopulation is a significant factor influencing climate change, and developing countries have considerably higher rates of population growth. Because women in such countries are generally discouraged from entering the workforce, from pursuing higher education and from exercising their autonomy, they are often relegated to the domestic sphere and expected to be mothers. Were women to have other opportunities available to them, they might have less incentive (or might not feel as strongly pressured) to dedicate their lives to motherhood. The statistics show that in developed countries where women have the freedom to pursue careers and education, the rate of population growth is noticeably lower.

Climate change is also inhibiting the lives of women. After all, in poor nations, it is predominantly women who are responsible for gathering water, fuel sources and food – precisely the resources that climate change affects most strongly. The pressure of this growing scarcity in resources makes the jobs of girls and women more difficult, demanding and dangerous. According to UN WomenWatch, women’s health is more likely to deteriorate than men’s during times of growing food shortages. Women are also more likely to die after natural disasters because they lack knowledge and training in basic survival skills.

At the end of the day, the sad truth remains that climate change – though universal and all-encompassing – doesn’t affect us all universally. It is gendered, racialized and divided along class lines. If we acknowledge these unfair and disproportionate circumstances, we can begin to move forward. If we finally give value to those who have been marginalized, we can then give value to the grave environmental danger in front of us. Climate change isn’t some abstract, far-away, intangible thing. It’s a real problem, it’s a people problem, and it’s high time we took that to heart.

Our student body contains a collection of blossoming young adults coming of age at a charged moment in time when we are constantly bombarded with unobtainable ideals, success stories and standards of perfection. In such an environment, it can be anything but easy to navigate the world from a place of confidence in our own abilities. As the disconcertingly happy façade of social media existence pervades our daily lives, it is often a burdensome battle not to look at our misshapen, patched-together, messy selves and feel alienated from the mass of shiny, happy people who seem to know exactly what they’re doing. It’s easy to feel like we’re holding ourselves together well enough to convince everyone that we belong, while somewhere deep down we feel like frauds.

There is, conveniently, a name for this nagging sensation: the impostor syndrome. It refers to such feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt and fraudulency; it’s the sense that we are somehow faking it, while everyone else is actually making it. There’s a discrepancy that comes about when we feel societal pressure to appear like we’ve got everything on lockdown. Because, under that handy little mask of control, there sits a whole lot of muck and chaos. For virtually everyone. But as we go about the world, admiring all the polished people who seem to have everything figured out, we may start to feel more and more like frauds. When we succeed, it’s easy to attribute it to luck or convenient circumstance. When we fail, it’s hard not to identify that failure as our innate mode of being.

But here’s the catch: to some degree, we all feel this way. We all slink out of the classroom some days, feeling like everyone else knew what was going on while we tried desperately to hide our lack of understanding. We all find ourselves smiling and nodding aggressively in uncomfortable social situations, wishing we could navigate with the ease and confidence others seem to have. Quite frankly, this is a darn exhausting way to live, particularly when it’s an over-inflated and truly unjustified fear.

It’s tricky not to get wrapped up in the drama of our egos. On any given day, there are always opportunities for our self-esteem to take a beating, and we so often indulge in self-effacing thoughts. But sometimes we can’t trust the neurons that fire away, reinforcing our insecurities. Sometimes we have to stop and look beyond ourselves and see that when we work hard, when we find blooming moments of success, we have earned it. We are constantly creating and doing incredible things, which we would be able to see if we weren’t so primed to doubt ourselves.

So what then? How do we slip out from under this heavy weight that has us constantly second-guessing our abilities and morphing us into self-diagnosed fakes? Well, for starters, know that you belong—inherently, intrinsically and permanently. You just do. You deserve to be wherever you are and, believe it or not, you have the qualifications. In this splintered and imperfect world, working hard and doing our best is the golden, shimmery standard. And that is enough.

This is college. Things are harder in college, people are smarter, standards are higher. This is also life. Life, where we are constantly hurled into situations that challenge us, that make us feel slightly unnerved. Life, where we are encouraged to show the world our highlight reels and leave out the bloopers and the not-so-polished behind-the-scenes. Life, where people are defined by categories, by differences, by where they do or do not belong.

Which is all to say, it’s painfully normal to find ourselves in situations when we feel like the weakest link, like the one who has to try just a little harder to keep up with everyone. But we can let go of the debilitating fear of judgment. Either no one is an impostor or we all are. As is natural of beings whose entire consciousness revolves around their own lives, it can be hard to see the bigger picture, hard to see anything outside of our immediate concerns. We’re really all just bags of organs, walking around, trying to figure out life. No one has it all figured out, no one feels infallibly confident all the time, and no one spends their days thinking about whether or not you belong.

Go forth, bags of organs, and enjoy the ride; you have nothing to prove, you are not an impostor.

Illustration by Eric Rannestad.

Failure is a trite topic. It has been trotted out time and time again, raked over by great minds from all eras and walks of life. Yet it remains pertinent. We love to laud the transformative, growth-inducing, character-building results of failure. We love to say how important failure is to true success, for strengthening resilience, for discovering ourselves outside of our external accomplishments. All these things are true, and yet, failure absolutely sucks. This piece is not about blindly praising failure, but rather seeing its value in a nuanced light: we can’t address failure without a nod to its discomfort, but we also can’t address failure without acknowledging its valuable effect on our lives.

I’ve failed at my fair share of things and, knowing myself, I’ll likely continue in such a manner. College, however, is an Everest of craggy challenges waiting to snag us into the tumult of failure. It is a breeding ground for subtle tripwires, waiting to burst into catastrophe whenever we misstep. Whether in academics, social life, or romantic relationships, there are countless faux pas lying in wait during the course of a college career.

In a sense, wrestling with this inevitable failure is exactly what this time in our lives is for. As we climb towards adulthood, we’re tasked with figuring out who we are, what we want to do, and what we envision for our futures–no easy feat. If we journey into the arena and explore, take risks, and challenge ourselves, we will stumble. Our egos will be bruised, our sense of self-worth challenged. There’s a high likelihood it’ll hurt sometimes. But this pain forces us to build our identities around our characters, not just our accomplishments. Just because we’ve failed doesn’t mean we’re failures.

We won’t excel like we did throughout our youths. We’ll make seemingly irreparable mistakes. We’ll humiliate ourselves beyond salvation. We’ll try something new and crash spectacularly. These things will happen; they are facts of life. But the resiliency of the human spirit is impressive. We can be knocked down time and time again and still rise up every time. In rising, we learn much about ourselves. We learn that worth is not inherently attached to external success.

Humans are like eggs. When we first confront failure, we tend towards resembling a raw egg. When our shells crack open, it is as if our insides are spilling out, falling all over the place. It understandably feels like the ground has been ripped out from under us. But what we must discover is that we are more like hard-boiled eggs. When our shells crack, it’s a good thing. We learn that our core is not only strong, but also more valuable than our outer veneers of success and perfection. My analogy may be odd, but I hope the message is clear: our value lies in our characters, in who we are as people (hopefully “good eggs”) rather than in the laundry lists of success stories or images of infallibility we attempt to project.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön wisely said, “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible within us be found.” Here we are, burgeoning young adults, learning how to meet the world. We have a near infinite number of opportunities to fail. Let’s get to it. Let’s embrace the discomfort and discover paths to our places of indestructibility— indestructibility not in the sense of being immune to failure, but rather in acknowledging that failure cannot break us. We can always find our way through, and we can always try again.

Many of our lives are afflicted by a sense of scarcity. “I’m never enough, I never have enough,” we say. There’s an implicit desperation to acquire everything, to be the best, to finish first. How do we measure our places in this exhausting rat race? We compare. We juxtapose ourselves with the intimidatingly intelligent and talented girl with the coveted internship, or to the witty and gregarious boy with lots of friends. We go about the world subconsciously placing ourselves in an arbituary hierarchal ranking, occasionally allowing our sense of self-worth to be ground down into nothing. It’s an exhausting way to live.

At the heart of this comparison lies a desire to be perfect; a fear that if we aren’t “measuring up,” then we aren’t enough. If someone else throws the frisbee further, gets a higher grade or secures a prestigious job, we are somehow falling behind. We’re running desperately on a treadmill, glancing left and right at those around us, trying to run faster, to do more, to be better. Not only is this unsustainable (especially for those of us who are out of shape) and detrimental to our self-esteem, but it also obscures our own unique light. I’m well aware that I’m officially journeying into territory that may be deemed “cheesy,” but, please, put on your self-help-loving hats and join me over here–it’s soft, fluffy, and full of positive affirmations: you are your own unique person with your own unique talents. There is no race. Your self-worth is not at stake. This is just you and your life.

Of course, it’s complicated to change the way you think. Complicated in the sense that even if we recognize that a rising tide lifts all ships, we can still feel a pang of jealousy when someone else rises and we don’t. Complicated when it comes down to realizing how much labor goes into accepting ourselves completely. Case in point: I once cried in therapy because I couldn’t say, “I’m likable just as I am.” We can be so accustomed to defining ourselves in relation to others and to analyzing what they have and what we don’t. But the thing is, where comparison stops, true characters begin. Life begins. If we can live a life that’s wholly our own, a life in which we don’t do things because others do them or define ourselves in contrast to others’ talents, then we can find meaning. That’s when we are at our best and most radiant. That’s when we make the world light up.

There’s really no unit of measurement for the human soul. Someone else’s talents and someone else’s journey have no bearing on our own. Yes, we’re all wandering around together here on Earth, often in very close proximity, but everyone’s skills, passions and paths are too wildly varied, too fantastically nuanced to compare. If we can trust in ourselves and realize that we are okay as we are, then we can take our lives in directions that are right for us.

So let’s drop all this comparison business. Sometimes it’s okay to allow someone else to be a better athlete or to have shinier hair. Know that it’s okay if someone scores higher on a test or is a better rock climber. We each have innate value and worth, just because of who we are. It’s time to step off the treadmill and start walking to the places we truly want to go. Then we can encourage friends as they walk along their own paths, as they climb their own mountains and reach their own peaks, all the while knowing that our journeys are unique in their own special ways.

We all know those lucky people who know exactly what they want from life. They have a passion, a plan and a paced journey towards their goal. I’m happy for them and I admire them, but I’m not of the same kind. I am as far from one of those people as Donald Trump is from a climate change march. It’s easy to place the passion-driven people, the people with a plan, as the gold standard because, honestly, that’s the type of person conducive to society’s definition of success. But what if that’s not the only way? What if it’s okay, even wonderful, to be lost? What if wandering around, following little bits of curiosity, will lead us to a place that’s perfect for us, a place that we could never have imagined?

Author Elizabeth Gilbert describes people as either jackhammers or hummingbirds. The jackhammers are those who have known their truest passion since they could remember. They know what they want to do and how to do it. The hummingbirds, on the other hand, flit from hobby to hobby, interest to interest. They don’t alight anywhere for too long, but rather drift around the world. It’s hard being a hummingbird in a world that values long-term goals and well-thought-out plans. But contrary to popular belief, being “lost” isn’t a bad thing. Yes, it’s slightly unsettling and disconcerting, but it’s nothing to worry about. In fact, it can lead us exactly where we need to go.

As Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement speech, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.” Such is the case with this sense of aimlessness. We can wring our hands and exclaim about our loss of direction in life, feeling a sense of desperation churning in our guts, or we could instead embrace these moments and make the most out of whatever little nugget of curiosity we happen to be following. In place of worrying about finding the right path, we can happily chase our immediate interests wherever they will take us, and, more often than not, that will orient us exactly as we need.

Life is full of opportunities we would never have seen coming, failures that alter our course of action, moments that change the way we see our lives and countless switchbacks that take us places we never would have envisioned otherwise. To some degree, we’re just along for the ride. So instead of trying to force a plan over the undulating and unpredictable sea that is our lives, why don’t we dedicate ourselves to each little moment and let our lives unfold however they may? We might be lost as to what to major in, what to look for in a career or whether we’ll find the “right person.” While it’s unsettling to not know the answers to these questions, it’s also very much okay. Every thing that happens to us is part of our becoming. One day we’ll look back and smile to see the unexpected ways in which the most extraneous bits of our lives connected.

Some of the people who I admire most in life got to where they did by way of numerous unexpected twists and turns. Some of the people with the deepest wisdom are those who tried many things, who journeyed many places and who followed whatever their whims of the moment. We can’t see it now, but things have a way of working themselves out. Our actions in this moment can’t entirely dictate our future, so maybe we can let go of these constricting expectations to have a well-thought out plan, to know exactly what we want to do and instead let ourselves get lost in the right direction, let ourselves trust in the integrity of the jagged path. The world will take us somewhere – somewhere we may never have imagined, but somewhere that is exactly where we are meant to be.