When I think about it for too long, the idea of originality makes me a little nauseous. In a fit of nostalgia — and a desire to procrastinate studying for an exam — I reread my Common Application essay earlier this week, which centered around the feeling that everything I write was destined to be a worse version of something that’s already been created.
As I was backspacing, rewriting and growing ever frustrated with this Editor’s Note, I realized that four years later, I never really resolved the worries I discussed in my Common App. Each time it’s my turn to write one of these notes, I wonder what I have to say about the “Dartmouth experience” that hasn’t already been reiterated a dozen times — in fact, Tess has already written about the struggles of finding inspiration. I’ve started keeping a document of random anecdotes, hoping that when I dig through it I’ll stumble upon something meaningful. But the truly original experiences I’ve recorded — a late-night screening of “Clue,” getting second-place at Collis Trivia after getting all eight “classical ballet” questions correct or FaceTiming my landlord after my roommates and I accidentally ripped our shower head off the wall — don’t necessarily merit 600 words of reflection preserved in perpetuity on The Dartmouth’s website.
Now it’s week seven, and I’m too exhausted to wrack my brain for a unique yet meaningful event or craft a never-seen-before metaphor. Instead, what’s fresh on my mind is one of the most clichéd, unoriginal topics out there: the weather. For my non-Hanover readers — as in, my parents and sometimes my little brother — it snowed on campus over the weekend, an amount that felt unwieldy. Each time it snows, my roommates and I have two choices: shovel the driveway of our off-campus house with the two cheap, electric green shovels we purchased from Target, or pay $40 for a snowplow.
For most of this term, we’ve resisted calling the plow, thinking it’s not worth it to pay that much per snowfall when we can do it ourselves. But what this strategy fails to account for is that all of us are busy and none of us really want to shovel. Each time it snows, we try to clear away some of it, leaving what we inevitably miss to freeze to the ground. Over the course of the past seven weeks, the surface of our driveway has become a gross combination of half ice, half packed down snow.
The several inches of snow we received over the weekend was the proverbial nail in the coffin, and we finally called the plow. The stubborn crust of ice and snow that seemed so intractable to us was cleared in a matter of minutes, and returning home to find the asphalt of our driveway visible for the first time this term was almost euphoric.
The point behind all of this, I think, is that the process of writing a meaningful reflection often feels like untangling a knotted ball of yarn, and the pressure to say something original only seems to make it harder to tease apart the tangles. But after hours of pacing around my bedroom in the dead of night, sitting hunched in the library backspacing and waking up filled with a simmering dread, the narrative thread eventually emerges.
Similarly, having our driveway plowed likely would not have felt so rewarding if we hadn’t spent weeks building snow piles that slowly encroached on our parking spaces. In both of these cases, I took what can be considered the easy way out. Calling the plow when there are six of us to shovel is like admitting defeat, and maybe writing about the weather is, too. But sometimes, that’s what you need — a reset to move forward, a return to the familiar to find clarity. Maybe the answer is not to keep striving for perfect originality but to occasionally embrace the clichés to make sense of the other uncertainties.
This week in Mirror, our stories span from the basement of a fraternity to the woods of Pine Park. One writer spotlights the different ways students get involved with photography on campus, while another spotlights queer community within traditionally exclusive Greek spaces. A third highlights BIOL 61, “End of Winter,” a class focused on how winter affects ecosystems and the environment. Finally, one writer reflects on the emotions evoked by the music she listens to when going out.
An October 2023 New York Times review of the revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” described the show as “finally found in the dark.” Crafting the narrative of these Editor’s Notes feels the same way — fumbling around metaphorically blind until something comes into focus. Maybe it’s fitting that I’ve recognized the benefits of taking the low-hanging fruit only in the final weeks of the 181st Directorate; sometimes, the path that’s right in front of you is the hardest one to take. So if the week seven stress has left you, too, wandering in the dark, perhaps the “easy way out” is the switch that will turn on the light. Thanks for sticking around, Mirror. See you next week.
