As Life Goes On

Blog Post #4: In Baton Rouge - Finished The Moviegoer and now currently reading A Lesson Before Dying

How often do you think about the meaning of life? Does it constantly run through your mind, or do you hardly think of it at all? In the past, and even still sometimes today, I have always had this bad habit of constantly thinking about the meaning of life and just how my life should be lived to the point where it would stress me out. For days on end, I found myself stressing about the life I want to live or the life that I felt I should be living, instead of just…living. The overwhelming emotions I feel in relation to life itself still plague my mind at certain times, usually when I’m alone with my thoughts, laying in bed before I go to sleep. Although with that being said, I’ve gotten a lot better at not letting it all get to me. I hope what I am trying to explain is making sense because as I sit here writing, everything sounds right in my head. Maybe you could understand what I am saying because you have also felt this way before, or maybe you don’t, and that’s totally fine too. 

Everyone interprets the term “meaning of life” so differently and I think that it depends on how they see their life going or even what they find so significant to live a life they love. In accordance to stressing about a life I wanted to possibly live I also found myself always wanting to be this perfect image of myself that I created in my head. I felt like I had to become this person I wanted to be, not just externally, but physically and mentally as well. I would tell myself “when I become that Maya, things will be great. My life will be great and I will be perfect”, but of course I could never get to the accomplishment of becoming that person or living the life I had created in my head because I had set this unrealistic standard that was impossible to reach. And you want to know what the funny thing is? If you were to ask me now what that life that I had desperately wanted looked like, I couldn’t tell you what it was I wanted to achieve, I just wanted to feel right in life. I wanted this content feeling of how things were going for me and I just never felt that and I honestly never thought I would or even come close. As the days went on, as the months and years went on and I was still consumed by this immense feeling of not amounting to everything I wanted and thought I needed in myself and in my life, the days blurred and everyday just became the same. It was a never ending cycle and I wanted to get beyond that. It wasn’t until I started to look at everything from a different point of view. What exactly was I trying to achieve? And most of all what exactly was I doing to make things better for myself? Of course I wasn't doing enough.

The book Moviegoer was a book that I had a hard time understanding until I got through most of it and finished reading it all. I feel like this book was one of those ones where you had to get through the whole story to understand everything, as if the beginning and middle made sense once you got to the end. Although Binx and my own experience were different in many ways, I felt like I resonated with some of what happened to him. I think that people always interpret and  take very different ideas from certain books they read and I felt that this was one of those books where it was just so easy for that to happen. When we were lying on the grass under a shaded tree having our discussion about the book and as we were all speaking and saying what we took from the book and what we thought it was about, some people mentioned relationships and religion and although I did connect those things to the book, I really resonated with “the search”. What I took from the book was Binx’s journey to becoming content with his life and just accepting what was possibly meant for him. For so much of the book it seemed like he was trying to be like the people in the movies he saw, and he was being pressured by his aunt to follow a certain path in his life when she told him to go to medical school. In the end it seemed like he fell into what felt right for him, and everything worked out. I’m not saying his and I’s experiences are the same by any means, but I feel like to me a part of my own self reflection and realizations are similar in some way. I realized that I was living in this bubble of constant unrealistic standards, and this constant stress that I felt to live a certain way was my search and I needed to get beyond my “everydayness” of life. Being stuck in that bubble and toxic cycle made me forget to appreciate life as it is and this trip is teaching me a lot without me even noticing.  

Not in a million years did I think that I would have the opportunity to experience such an amazing trip for a class. Applying to go on a trip out of a state that I have never really left before was already a terrifying big step. Now that I am here I would say that I’ve probably done more new things on this trip alone than in my whole life. It almost makes me sad, just how little I have done in my twenty one years of being on this earth. I’m eating new foods I’ve never tried before, I’ve been on a boat for the very first time, and most importantly I’m making new friends with strangers. Usually it’s so hard for me to get to know people and make friends, so I try not to do it often, but I did this time and I’m happy. I’m appreciating and loving the way it smells outside after it rains, the warm wind whipping past my skin, and the beautiful nature that I am able to capture through pictures as the trip goes on. Although I was doing better at not stressing about my life before coming out here to Louisiana, I truly do think that this trip will leave me with a shifted mindset. That I’ll return home going through life differently. This is so much to unpack and even though all of this isn’t what I took from the Moviegoer and Binx’s life, the book and his story did elicit a lot of these thoughts. 

Today, I’m learning not to stress about my life and the things that I can’t control. I’m learning not to rush things, to just let life be beautiful and eventful. I’m learning to be happy with things as they are now and to be present. And most importantly, I’m learning to appreciate life in general because I only have this one. I can’t waste it on living in the bubble of my “everydayness”. Today I am just…living.

Coming Through History

Blog Post#3: Still Currently in New Orleans - Finished reading Coming Through Slaughter and now reading The Moviegoer

Started Writing on May 27, 2022

No matter how much you know, or how much you think you know, there’s still always so much to learn. During my time in New Orleans, I have learned something new everyday. I think it makes things easier because I am literally visiting a brand new place I have never been to for the first time, but at the same time it feels so much more bigger than just learning new things in a new place. New Orleans is a city that has so much history a part of it. It is in the build of the city, the tragedies it has gone through, the incredibly unique traditions, and even the people that live here and as a class we’ve been able to see a variety of museums and exhibits focusing on different things connected to New Orleans. 

We got to visit the Whitney Plantation, the Mardi Gras exhibit, and an exhibit about the hurricanes that New Orleans has been through, including hurricane Katrina. The place that left me feeling so much emotionally was the Whitney Plantation. I myself, being a person of color, and my parents have always made it a habit to learn about my past and history, especially when it comes to slavery. I like learning about it and I feel like I know a good amount about things that happened during slavery, but this visit to the plantation showed me that I still have so much to learn. It opened my eyes to just how bad things were back then, and hearing about some of the first hand experiences from people who were in the middle of everything while it was happening was like taking a slap to the face. When we had first arrived to the plantation we were given a souvenir about the life of an actual slave who had lived on the plantation and I think it all hit even harder when I was walking through this area in the plantation about all the experiences of many slaves that spanned over a decade and I actually found the name of the person I received on the wall. Her name was Ceceil George and she actually had a life on the Whitney Plantation and she was apart what makes the history there. Going there made me want to learn even more about slavery and I am going to make it an even bigger goal of mine to do just that. One of the things that I appreciated the most about the plantation was that it catered to remembering the slaves, not the people that owned. It was dedicated to learning about the lives of the slaves whether that was their names, their experiences, how they ran things as workers, and their own history. I’m glad I was able to visit. 

The Mardi Gras exhibit was very informative because all of the things I thought I knew about Mardi Gras were either wrong or had much more depth to it. It was extremely fascinating to learn how it was created and how it became what it is today. The exhibit also consisted of a variety of different outfits people wore on the floats. What I didn’t know was that a lot of the outfits actually had a lot of meaning behind them. I had assumed that some of the outfits were created for the aesthetic, but I was quite wrong. Lastly, right under the Mardi Gras exhibit was the one about the hurricanes. This one left me with a feeling similar to the one I felt after leaving the plantation because I knew that all of these tragic stories were about actual real people. Once again, I got to hear a lot about first hand experiences from people that lived through the hurricanes. I would have to say my favorite part about this exhibit was the ordinary heroes part. It was the part that was dedicated to random pedestrians who were seen as heroes because of the helpful things they did for people whether that was helping people get out of their flooding homes or helping a woman give birth on the street after the hurricanes had ripped through the city. New Orleans carries so much history and I love that it is memorialized here to be remembered and never forgotten. 

As I was visiting all of these locations about the history of New Orleans, I couldn’t help but think about the assigned book Coming Through Slaughter. Although this book is about the life of the infamous Buddy Bolden it also is about the history that connects to him and what New Orleans was like during the time he was alive. We literally got to visit the exact area where he grew up in New Orleans, which was quite surreal. One of my favorite things about this class and one of the reasons why I liked Coming Through Slaughter was because of the fact that it was about a real person and this class focuses on learning about the past and just how important it is for how things are today in this historical city. As the days go on and this trip comes closer to ending, it truly saddens me. Not only am I sad about possibly leaving the people that I now consider friends, I am sad to not continue learning more about New Orleans while being here. There is and always will be much more to learn, day after day.