Hello blog world, it’s Allie.

There’s a huge contrast between my life right now and what my life will be in two weeks. In two weeks, I’m leaving college and Flagstaff to join Nick in California. A lot of people feel adrift after college, especially people with English degrees. I think, as a relatively intelligent person, I probably should have chosen a STEM major, but when I arrived at college, I had vague ambitions about being a lawyer. I also felt a powerful pull towards writing. Now, after four years in school, my writing has improved technically, but my creativity has gone to shit. I think in prescriptive, dull ways. I’m wondering if I can make myself intelligent again. School has taught me to be risk averse, to cram my ideas into a conservative little box with a topic and closing sentence. Climbing has been my saving grace. On rock, I have to improvise. I have to be creative. Coupled with skiing, climbing has kept me from going insane. Without a handful of hours in the gym each week, I couldn’t have forced myself through my monotonous college routine. The promise of a climbing trip always gleamed on the horizon.

Fortunately, I didn’t go into debt. I was lucky. I could have paid a much steeper price for becoming less capable. It’s a little like Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron. In Harrison’s society, people who are too attractive or too smart or too talented in any way are handicapped. That way, everyone comes out average. College accomplishes roughly the same thing. In the end, we’re all good workers without any exceptional talents.

In college, I have been told what to think, not taught how to think. In the humanities, you’re supposed to learn to think critically. You’re supposed to be able to look at the world and select your own values. In reality, in a humanities program, you’re fed watered down liberal values. You become a faux-environmentalist semi-queer-and-feminist anti-racist person who occasionally posts provocative articles on Facebook. Then, your half-ass political friends congratulate you for being socially aware, for liking the right people—Obama, Beyoncé, Ta-Nehisi Coates, etc.—and disliking the right people—Trump and his scourge of the earth cabinet. Somehow, we’ve packaged radical ideas—the James Baldwin-Angela Davis-bell hooks cannon—into something easier to swallow, something innocuous. We’ve made ourselves useless.

Humanities professors, with their liberal ideologies and quirky clothing choices, have the best of intentions, but they’re academics. They tend to be wildly disconnected from the world. Most professors, excluding a few, are entrenched in their academic fetishes—the oddly specific topics they’ve written a dissertation, a book, two books, an article, a hundred articles about.

That’s not to say I haven’t been exposed to some truly incredible writers, from Junot Díaz to Jennifer Egan to Anne Carson. For a bookworm like me, even college can’t fuck up books. Even college can’t fuck up great raw material. I’m hoping I can apply the same logic to myself. Even college can’t fuck up my mind, my ability to think freely. Still, I’m not sure. I spend too much time online. In many ways, school has taught me to favor virtual experiences over real experiences. I have been rewarded for spending time online, plowing through articles and research, with grades. In writing Projecting Reality, in dedicating my life to climbing, I’m working to reclaim my mind. Curiosity and passion separate people who are truly alive from people who are simply going through the motions. I want to feel alive again, and climbing has a way of making you feel almost too alive. Climbing shocks you into feeling—into engaging with the world in a raw, unscripted way.

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