I’d like to take a minute to just analyze the way Wellesley worked and possibly still works. I am writing this because I felt unhappy in a beautiful environment full of opportunity and I think there were reasons why. I am writing this knowing that doing so might further risk any remaining friendships I had, because of the nature of some of those people and their upbringings.
My school was a strange place. Intoxicating beauty everywhere you looked, and lots of drama. A lot of women without an idea who they were meant to be, but whom this was dawning upon, were projecting a lot of psychological remnants of their childhoods and adolescences onto others. I wanted to talk about the idea of equality, which was a term that was frequently mentioned, but hardly ever achieved. Though I had close friends while there, there were several “frenemies” whose intentions were not clear but who I knew could not be trusted. This became most apparent to me when weird books like “Little Birds” by Anais Nin (there is a story in this book about a crazy pedophile guy who exposes himself to little girls who “fly away like little birds”…and this is poetry??) began circulating as gifts at my birthday parties, and especially when someone I went out on a limb for to be their roommate, despite the cries of many of my close friends not to do so, began attacking me because I was “on aid”. Let’s talk statistics here. 60% of the Wellesley population is on some form of aid to attend that school. 60% of students’ families find it unreasonable or unrealistic to pay upwards of, at that time, an extra $50-60k per year on tuition, room, board, and travel expenses. So, she wasn’t just insulting me, she was insulting, well, 60% of the Wellesley population. The idea up to that point had never occurred to me that a sense of inequality would exist in a so-called need-blind environment, or that housing policies might be modified to accommodate for the wealthier among the student body, at our (the majority’s) expense. However, leave it to one said frenemy to invent that sense of inequality and thus open my eyes to the sinister way in which she envisioned such a utopian world. That was just her way.
I guess I never forgot that, one because that friend is not actively in my life anymore, and two because I received a lot of warnings from, I believe, a benevolent God (although I may be mistaken; it could have been the voice of evil), not to march forth and live with these people. They became my “friends,” and I learned to love them, but I also learned to accept less than the world could offer me, and that sent me into a spiral of self-destruction, punctuated by one unhealthy relationship after another.
I guess I want a record of this so my kids, when I have them, my friends, when I see them, can decode my past. And, you know, the internet is forever. Or so they say!
E
