"Please don't forget me, Albus"

Dear friends,

One thing that I have realized about this blog is that I have gone about it all wrong. I don't ever really tell you what I'm actually doing in Oxford. In fact, mostly all I have done is try to tell you interesting stories while seeing how many times I could possibly insert the word 'angst' into a blog post. I realized this when a friend told me that she had directed someone who wanted to go to Oxford to visit my blog. This person is really going to learn nothing about Oxford, but rather only a lot about this strange 'Albus Andrew' figure who has taken over my life. That is all to say, I don't much care if I have gone about this blog wrongly. I, in fact, hate reading boring study abroad blogs that say things akin to: "Today I visited a castle. It was beautiful. God lived in the castle. I like God. I like castles. Therefore, I like castles with God in them." No thank you. I prefer my methods.

That being said, get ready for a new batch of stories about my tutorial experiences.

Today I had my last tutorial ever with Albus Andrew. It was a sad, but glorious hour. I was glad to see when I came in that he had lit the fireplace, likely in anticipation of avoiding my freak show of shivering on his sofa. We went through the usual routine of him saying, "Right, let's see how you got on then," and then me reading my essay on the fourfold Gospel aloud to him. When I had finished reading my last sentence [which happened to be a BAMF sentence], there was the usual long pause in which my mind races wildly while I try to figure out by his facial expression whether or not he liked it. Then he said:
Albus: "Let me start with a broad question. What are you doing next year? Have your plans for seminary come together yet?"
(Um what? Albus? Fourfold Gospel? Remember...we were talking about it?)
Sara: "Um, no. As of right now, both Princeton and Duke think I'm coming there in the fall. I'm going to need to remedy that at some point."
Albus: "And what do you want to do eventually?"
Sara: "Well, I've kind of been thinking for awhile that I wanted to use seminary as a stepping-stone to a doctoral program and go into academia, but Oxford has made me doubt that a lot. I mean, I doubted it everyday of my life before I came here, but Oxford has magnified that."
Albus: "Why?"
Sara: "[insert weaknesses and lack of abilities here]" I'm just not sure that I'm cut out to handle what would be expected of me."

At this point, Albus and I transitioned into territory that we had never ventured into before. We talked about the more personal topic of whether or not I suck at life. Albus lapsed into a 10-minute segment where he told me that he, in fact, thought I did not suck at life at all. He said many very good things that people should not reproduce on their blogs unless they wish to be written off as a pretentious jerk. Basically, he affirmed that he thought I was quite capable and he told me that it would be "disastrous" if I left Oxford thinking that I wasn't cut out for academia, because that just wasn't true at all.

To some of these comments I responded: "Yes well, I often feel as though I can be confident in my writing and my ability to express the content in an essay, but as I'm sure you've seen in our tutorials, I often struggle more with my ability to express things well verbally."

Albus Andrew thought about this and said that he had never thought that I couldn't articulate myself well, and that he had always thought I had responded relatively well to his questions.

Sara: "Well, maybe I'm just too hard on myself sometimes. I tend to be very hard on myself."

He agreed that if I felt like I was doing poorly, then it was because I was setting impossible standards for myself. I said, "I know I do this, but it's very difficult not to do this." Seriously. I don't know how to be a normal person that can be satisfied with the quality of my work. I may have the poorest self-esteem when it comes to academics of anyone that I know. Actually, it's bi-polar self-esteem. Sometimes I can feel very confident about my ability to do well, but most of the time the feeling of imminent failure overrides everything. I happened to be reading back through my facebook status reports over the last 3 years [lame activity, yes I know], but it was interesting to see how many times I had talked about failing at life. "Sara is upset to be failing at life." "Sara is happy that she has avoided failing at life." I really wish I would get over this. I remember one time my junior year getting a 95 on a paper and after seeing the grade, going on a failure walk in which I reprimanded myself by chanting: "failure, failure" to the tune of my footsteps. [WOW, these are maybe not things I should write in a blog]. Suffice it to say, I know that I'm not normal, and I know that I beat myself up too much, but I also know that I will always be this way. I don't see a shift in optimism coming my way.

Having expressed these sentiments about always doubting my abilities, I feel as though having Albus Andrew affirm me so greatly can give me a little boost to think back on in the future. Albus Andrew knows really nothing about me, and he has absolutely no reason to give me praise if I didn't deserve it, and yet he did. Thus, perhaps I can do things decently from time to time. I very much appreciated the opportunity to start from the bottom, and prove myself to him, even though it made me angsty as heck back in the day.

I was recently told that I shouldn't feel as though I have anything to prove, but I do. I really, really do. Maybe I shouldn't operate from this basis, but again, I have no idea how to not.

I was thinking the other day about how this whole tutorial experience has been quite similar to the first time I went skiing (which was only about 3 months ago). I, in fact, am generally quite terrible at physical endeavors such as these. In middle school basketball, when I was put in the game during the last quarter because we had basically already lost, I never ever made a basket. I would have dreams in which I scored points for the team, but in real life, I'm not sure I ever even took a shot. Needless to say, the prospects for my success in skiing were not high. Nonetheless, after about 2 hours of training, "Ski Master Dave" pointed and asked me if I was ready to go down "that hill." Having never gone skiing before and having absolutely no idea what "that hill" entailed, I enthusiastically agreed that I thought I was ready to conquer the hill.

The thing is, I had no idea that the hill, that I will forever refer to with a distinct string of cuss words, was roundabout a 18 mile straight shot to the bottom (of course you know this is not true). Thus, as I started confidently down the hill, I suddenly realized that I HAD NOT LEARNED HOW TO SLOW DOWN. "Hmm," I thought, "I am going really very quickly. There is a fence coming up." [insert lots of cussing, screaming, and crashing here]. This process continued as I picked myself up and hurled myself down the next stretch of death.

As I got into one horrible, death-defying crash after another and was continually helped up by a little boy, I realized that I could not quit because I had to somehow make it down the hill. Thus, I simply could not quit. Unless I died in the process, I had to keep going down that hill.

Why in the world am I telling you this? Because the whole process of my tutorials with Albus Andrew has been a little bit like having to get down that hill. As he would ask me a question and I would flounder and crash in a cloud of my own self-induced failure, I HAD to come up with an answer to his question. I could not quit. I had to get to the bottom.

As my day of skiing continued, I went back to the bunny hill and learned how to turn and how to slow down. After about 4 hours of this, I tried "that hill" again, and I made it the whole way down without falling. Amazing. The past three weeks with Albus Andrew have been like making it to the bottom without falling. In today's tutorial, I may have even won the prize for having the "maddest skillz."

That, my friends, is how my skiing experience is relevant.

I will very much miss my tutorial experience. Every evening (or the wee hours of the morning) when I would finish my essay, and the last pages dropped down into the printer tray, I went through a bit of a stapler ritual. For some reason, in my attempts to staple two separate copies of my essays, I would always staple one of the copies poorly. The other copy, however, I usually managed to staple very well. I would then meticulously check to make sure that I gave Albus Andrew the copy with the nice staple. Not that he ever would have noticed if he got the essay with a staple slightly askew, but oh my was this stapling process important to me.

Well, well...perhaps I have packed enough angst into this post to hold us all over into the next week. It should be pointed out, however, that Oxford is currently going quite well. Tomorrow will be my last Greek tutorial with Albus Jonathan and on Saturday morning I will depart for a 5 day trip to Wales. Of this, I am greatly pleased. I think it will be a delightful time.

I do thank you for reading these thoughts of mine. Perhaps I share more than I should on a public blog, but I believe that authenticity is one of the things I value most in life.

And on that note...

Best,
Sara