Would you like your Maladaptive Daydreamer served Sautéed or Caramelized?

This is an essay I wrote for my introductory college-level writing seminar on February 7th, 2023

 EXHIBIT A:

Upon hearing my angel Mother crying, Dad came into the kitchen to see what the matter was. Her Diagnosis: “Onions are so Sad!”

EXHIBIT B:

When I began volunteering with the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture in November of 2020, my experience working with plants was sparse. Though I had learned some basic skills such as weeding and composting while working in my family’s raised garden in our side yard, including a concept which I would practice that summer: One evening very long ago, I had been asked to go into our garden and trim some green onions for dinner. On that occasion, I had been selective about which green onion stems I would truncate, giving the shorter ones more time to grow, but I did not know at the time that the longest stems would go to seed if allowed to grow longer. This day, I had been assigned to trim back sweet potato vines which were encumbering a part of the garden near where the tomatoes were growing. Green onion stems are completely hollow on the inside, so I expected the sweet potatoes to be as well, and they were; but I was not anticipating them to contain a soft, white liquid that seeped out of the holes I had created in them. It appeared to me at that moment - as I described to a fellow volunteer who had given me the assignment - as though our sweet potato vines were crying. He then explained to me that what we were doing was helping the plants (as opposed to hurting them). Of course, these were a sort of root vegetable. Had we left the potatoes alone, they would have wasted their strength building a sprawling network of vines, thus resulting in some very wimpy potatoes come harvest time, with a useless mess of un-eatable vines that are only good for making fertilizer.

EXHIBIT C:

Earlier that same year, my routine basically revolved around the Central Pantry. It was quite an eye-opening experience being able to see and help the many different kinds of people from the community - many of whom were immigrants - who came to obtain groceries and other living essentials that we were providing for them. One afternoon, while I was restocking the shelves as I usually did on a typical day, I tried to offer my assistance to someone who appeared to be taking more than her allotted two items per person from a large cardboard box of assorted food products. I had not intended to pick a fight, I was trying not to be racist, I had not known this person was a foster mother of half a dozen children (but I can relate, coming from a large family myself), I didn’t realize that I had been following her around; I was just trying to do my job. Yet here I was, in the middle of a confrontation. I had to step outside of myself in order to understand how she felt targeted by me. I was supposed to be helping the people first, the pantry second.

EXHIBIT D:

The week of homecoming 2022 was for me an emotional space mountain. At the end, I found myself sitting on the fence considering whether or not to attend the fall formal. Just one or two days earlier, some rather awkward exchanges over text message following a regular face-to-face interaction with one of my closest friends on Tuesday night led to her dropping an emotional bombshell, which she prefaced as follows:

You know what, I'm going to be completely honest with you. I'm just going to lay out the whole truth for you, even though it's difficult, because neither of us deserve this.

She then proceeded to describe to me over text the reasons why she felt the pain of trying to maintain a relationship she felt wasn’t really being reciprocated. Even now that we have made amends, it still hurts me to go back and read what she wrote, and to think that even just for a moment, she believed her own assumptions that neither I nor anyone else in my family really cared about her. But almost paradoxically, I also felt a sense of liberation upon seeing horizons of newfound potential being opened up to me the very first time I read her confession:

I would also like to apologize for not talking to you about this sooner. I am sorry if I led you on or caused any hurt or confusion. Please forgive me for my selfish actions and for not being fully honest with you

I later learned a month after I sent it, just how relieved she was to see my reply:

I appreciate that you’re being honest and upfront about this.

For me, this was primarily a sharp reminder that keeping good friendships intact is something I need to take more seriously. In the conversations we have had since November, each of us has gained a deeper understanding of the difficulties the other had been experiencing.

EXHIBIT E:

Perhaps just as bad as failing to exert enough effort in a relationship is exerting too much. I had desired to get acquainted with a student whom I had met during the fall semester; though she wasn’t much for talking as I had discovered upon our first interaction in the dining hall. Shortly thereafter, when I found her reading in the student commons, I took the opportunity to introduce myself. On only a few occasions after that we would make a little light conversation over lunch (though she preferred to sit alone) though I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was trying to avoid me. Everything went downhill when I ran into her in her natural habitat - underneath seven giant glowing white lily pads - after she informed me that she would be going to see her family over thanksgiving break, our moment of awkward silence stretched out into the quarter hours. I wish that when she had asked me if I needed anything, that instead of trying to ask her out on a date, I had made an effort to understand her personal boundaries. I had hoped after I had talked this encounter over with the student conduct officer that I could make amends with her (at this time, I had not yet renewed the bond with my other friend) but now I fear that I will never see her again.

EXHIBIT F: 

Currently, I have a tendency to collect (and often thereafter neglect) items that I find are uniquely interesting to me - either tangible or intangible - especially when I notice no one else having any sort of investment in each specific item that I acquire. After a while, these items, be they moments in time, topics, relationships, or physical objects  - which you can think of as being branches of a fruit tree representing my life - accumulate, typically resulting in a disorganized mess that weighs down on my trunk, as I will have to sort through them later on. As such, I’ve developed a bit of a reputation in my family of being something of a packrat, since I am usually hesitant to discard anything for fear of wanting or needing it later. This became especially problematic right after my 20th birthday when the lease on my terabyte of cloud storage expired, and I proceeded to relocate as much of my digital life as I could into other containers, which are now getting full themselves! The majority of those large files consisted of artifacts from my early aspirations as a filmmaker and a software designer. It was and still is an experience to sift through these and watch parts of my past life pass by. I have found that I need to take time to actually organize what I collect if I want these to be really useful to me in the future.

CONCLUSION:

  The world is multilayered like an onion, and people are also like green onions in that we need to be pruned back. Sometimes, pruning can hurt and sometimes, like the sweet potato vines, we cry when we are pruned, but pruning almost always comes as a helpful reminder that sometimes it is important that we grow down before we grow up, to build our roots and give them rings. Sometimes when an epiphany comes, we must wait to act on it, sometimes an injustice needs be endured for a time before it can be rectified. The world is complex, because the people who made it complex are complex, because they were made complex. When we try to break our own code and get frustrated; we tip over because our branches are top-heavy and our roots - our layers - have not yet been given the strength to carry them. 

Who are we at our center, but the seed from which we grew?