Posts Tagged ‘reflecting’

Reflecting Friendships

Friday, July 29th, 2022

I like to think that my worldview has grown a lot in the past few years. Once I took the first steps necessary to become more independent and responsible, beginning with my journey into a foreign country for college and continuing as I make my way towards different travels and milestones, I came to realize many lessons and values that I failed to before. Most particularly, I learned how to reevaluate my relationship with the people around me. 

I often hear about “red flags” or “warning signs” in any kind of relationship on social media, and though these warnings aren’t always reliable, they prompted me to start considering my personal boundaries with others. There were tiktoks and tweets that I came across that made really general statements about interactions, categorizing slow texters or people who use a certain kind of emoji as being “bad” or undesirable. While I know I shouldn’t take these posts too seriously, I began wondering if I had traits that others considered to be “red flags” or absolute boundaries, or just how others viewed their relationship with me in general. Of the faults that I could readily list about myself, I must admit to being a terrible texter. Not because I don’t want to respond, but oftentimes I just forget to, or I get way too in my head about it and end up feeling unnecessary anxiety about my replies instead. I wondered if these “failed” interactions were my fault, or if I was allowed to expect my friends to be more or less accommodating of these faults. 

As with most people, I’ve had my fair share of difficulties in navigating relationships, particularly with friendships. I grew up in a small community amongst a rather static group of peers. Few people entered this circle, and fewer people really left. It’s safe to say that my social circle never experienced major ups or downs, and as time passed everyone kind of just got used to being around each other. While I was fine with this as a child, I started feeling more and more alienated as I grew older and my interests developed differently from my peers. Quite a few of my friendships came to pass in this manner — maintained as an extended familiarity, but fading away without any real attachments. 

As a result, I held a lot of rather naive expectations about socialization when I grew older and started stepping out into a broader community. I figured that with an increased population size I would find my place somehow, and I definitely believed I did, but it was only as my freshman year of college came to a close that I realized that my “place” was just temporary. As this first year progressed, my peers began to shed their early orientation-driven enthusiasm and with it, many friend groups collapsed and faded away. I found myself at a loss as conflicts erupted in the groups around me, and my own relationships with these people grew brittle, and eventually broke away. I was deeply upset that those I had trusted and believed to be close confidants had so easily let go of our friendships. 

In the two years since then, I’ve grown and found comfort in my own goals and interests, but I often recall the naivety I held in my first year, and wonder if there was anything I should’ve changed to keep hold of the people who I thought were important. But at the same time, without these continuing attachments, I’ve had the time to reflect on myself and really focus on my own growth. I’ve come to appreciate being alone most of the time, much unlike the way my old friend group was adamant about doing everything together. I think I’ve found that keeping to myself works a lot better for my personality, and in this time I spent focusing on myself, I’ve also found several very valued friendships that I’m comfortable within and that I trust to be respectful of my boundaries. Most importantly, I’ve come to accept that there are some people who are only meant to be in my life for a period of time, and though they no longer hold that position, I should just be thankful for the joyful memories we shared and let them go without resentment. 

Exploring shared interests is a great way to spend time with my friends without feeling overwhelmed or fatigued — this was from a trip to Dia Beacon!

My younger self was perhaps too dependent on the idea of the glorified “best friend,” the media-marketed ideal of a tight-knit group where everything functions perfectly and no one ever gets hurt. While this may be a reality for many people, it simply hasn’t been for me, and I understand now that this expectation may have prevented me from really being a good friend to others. I convinced myself that the issue was just that we weren’t a fit, and while that may have been the case as well, this selfish belief kept me from putting in as much effort as I perhaps should have. But as I’ve matured and cast aside such habits, I think my greatest lesson throughout these many failed friendships is that there really isn’t a reason why I should need a perfect friend group. More than anything, I’ve learned that I’m perfectly fine and happy even without, and this ideal that I chased all throughout childhood only served to make myself miserable as I compared every relationship I had to “perfection” and found them wanting. There were definitely many connections that I mistakenly let go of due to these misconceptions, but as a wiser (as I’d like to think) version of myself, I trust that I have grown enough to be happy as I am, and hope that in this way, I can foster much healthier relationships with the people I come across in the future. 


One of the best ways I’ve found to catch up with others is to meet up for a meal or a cup of coffee and chat. Use this student discount and treat yourself and a friend!


By: Fiona Lin

Fiona Lin is a rising senior at New York University’s Abu Dhabi Campus pursuing a double major in Literature and Creative Writing and Art and Art History. She enjoys traveling, drinking tea, and learning new languages. In her free time, you can find her reading web novels or playing video games.


For over 20 years, the Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC,  from the East Side to Greenwich Village. Along with inspiration, the company offers students a special coupon booklet and the Official Student Guide, which encourages them to discover new places in the city and save money on food, clothing, and services.  At the Campus Clipper, not only do we help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create wonderful e-books, we give them a platform to teach others. Check our website for more student savings and watch our YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during the Welcome Week of 2015.

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Living in Moments of History

Tuesday, July 12th, 2022

College is a time for a person to grow and reflect. I suppose that is why they call it “higher education,” since in four years, the goal is for you to leave school as a better version of yourself, and ideally, a better human being. You’re not just concerned about landing a career (sorry mom and dad), but you are trying to learn about the world around you and your place within it. It’s a turbulent time in a young person’s life, and when you mix that with a global pandemic that ushers in a time of increased isolation and awareness of current events, it prompts more learning, thinking, and reflecting than ever before.

During one of my Zoom classes in the Spring 2020 semester, my professor declared that we were all “living in history” as we were all exiting the meeting. It took me by surprise, for despite being such a short sentence, the truth of it resonated deeply with me. We were, seemingly, entering a new era of human life. Students read about things like the Black Death or the flu outbreak and thought “this could never happen to us,” yet there we were, dinosaurs with no warning of the impending asteroid. It seemed like, similar to some of our favorite apocalyptic stories, a worldwide catastrophe would connect all of us. Like the cast of High School Musical might say, we would be all in this together.

Spoiler alert! We were not. What was supposed to unite us—a common enemy in the form of a viral disease—was a topic of contention, especially as alt-right groups were fear-mongering to spread misinformation about the vaccine and calling COVID-19 a hoax.

Image credit: https://mississippitoday.org/2020/12/16/marshall-ramsey-vaccination/

But this was only the beginning, and the pandemic was not the only moment of history that we were living through. COVID-19, as many before me have pointed out, brought with it a social reckoning, one that opened many eyes—namely white Americans who did not understand the reality of the privilege they possess—to how corrupt our country truly is. The pandemic has been described as removing distractions from our lives, and it became a time to be engaged and plugged in, critiquing our society and the institutional systems of oppression that were always present but greatly exacerbated by COVID-19.

So much has happened over the last couple of years that it doesn’t do it justice in just one short piece of writing. Beginning with the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, systemic racism and police brutality were once again brought to the forefront of the minds of all Americans. We saw how unfair policing practices like no knock warrants took the lives of Breonna Taylor and Amir Locke. We lived through a dangerously heated presidential election—the first I ever voted in—and though the election of Joe Biden seemed to bring about a shift in the tide, the insurrection on January 6th demonstrated just how fundamentally divided and disappointing our country is. Guns have more rights than any person in this country, as there are always more mass shootings in the United States than there are days in the year (330 at the beginning of the day, 332 when I refreshed the data before posting). LGBTQ+ individuals are being targeted with dangerous legislation like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida, which open the doors to the erasure and silencing of those who identify with the community. Most recently, those in this country who can get pregnant were stripped of their reproductive rights as Roe v. Wade was overturned—a decision made by only five people, but jeopardizes the lives of all Americans seeking abortions and disproportionately affects marginalized communities. More than that, Justice Clarence Thomas is looking to overturn other important cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which targets legislation that, respectively, guarantees the right to contraceptives, same-sex sexual relationships, and same-sex marriage. It feels like we are not only living in moments of history, but we are being sent back to the past and making the same mistakes over again.

If there is anything that I have learned from all of this, it is the importance of paying attention and having conversations driven by human empathy. The pandemic in general showed us that we need to be kind to one another and help each other out when we can, but it also highlighted the inequity our nation operates on and exploits. In a conversation with Dr. Mary Mullen, an English professor at Villanova last year, she astutely pointed out that college campuses like to think they operate in a bubble, one that merely spectates the history of the world around it; but they do not. They are shaping and being shaped by outside forces, and at such a critical moment in our lives when we are trying to figure out who we want to be and come to terms with our own identity, we need to be willing to learn and to listen, especially with all that is going on in our world right now. It’s important to take classes that you are interested in and push you to grow and reflect on yourself—what you think about the world and why. To look at perspectives that reach beyond your own, to remember that humanity can only be at its best when we accept and learn from one another. To include everyone who is left out of the conversation and to remember the stories that are conveniently left out of the K-12 school system.

It feels like the closest this nation has been to unity was in 2019 when we all promised not to post any spoilers for Avengers Endgame. How nice it would be for us to care about each other in the same way again.   

Tough transition, but if you are ever in need of some escapism and fun, be sure to use this coupon for Balance Patch and play some video games!

By: Katie Reed

Katie Reed is a senior at Villanova University studying English and Communication. She is in utter disbelief that she just admitted to being a senior. She loves to read, but has made barely a dent in the increasingly large pile of books on her bookshelf that she told herself she would read this summer. She hopes to enter a career in the editing and publishing industry.


For over 20 years, the Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC,  from the East Side to Greenwich Village. Along with inspiration, the company offers students a special coupon booklet and the Official Student Guide, which encourages them to discover new places in the city and save money on food, clothing, and services. At the Campus Clipper, not only do we help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create wonderful e-books, we give them a platform to teach others. Check our website for more student savings and watch our YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during the Welcome Week of 2015.

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Redefining Success

Thursday, July 7th, 2022

One thing that people don’t tend to tell you when you’re young is that success shouldn’t just be one eventual endpoint. For me, at least, growing up there was a specific idea of success that everyone was expected to adhere to – college and maybe a master’s degree followed by a stable job and financial security. Apart from that, there didn’t seem to be much else. There was no guideline for how to enjoy yourself, to find meaningful relationships or just be happy, as though these parts of life weren’t aspects of  “success.” Coupled with my tendency for perfectionism, this restricted perspective of success became all I was striving for. 

I gradually fell into the mindset that life was just one thing after the other, and though I worked towards each milestone consistently, it was hard to really feel a sense of accomplishment at any point. When I graduated from high school, for example, I didn’t find myself feeling much different. There was a bit of relief, of course, and some sense of excitement, but in my mind I was going off to college, and that was just another checkpoint I had to reach before moving onto the next. I think in my pursuit of that final image of “success,” I’ve missed out on celebrating and learning from a lot of the experiences I’ve already had, forgetting all of the things I worked at to get to where I was in favor of a single-minded focus on what I had to do next. Instead of each event being an individual instance of achievement, they’ve all been routinely filed away as just another step towards that final idea of “success”. 

Not to say that this a “wrong” way of living – it’s a good thing to work towards long-term goals, after all – but it was a method that wasn’t really working for me anymore. The idea of chasing after some “final” state  of great success was wearing me down, and it made me wonder when I would actually get to enjoy myself instead. I started noticing that I was putting off many of the things that I wanted to do, telling myself that I would travel or try new experiences only once I was financially stable and “successful,” regardless of how much I wanted to do so in the present. It struck me one day that if I kept on putting off the things that I enjoy and want to do until some eventual “later,” how do I know I won’t continue to put those things off for some other sense of duty when that later finally comes? What if I end up delaying my gratification forever, until I eventually lose the opportunity to enjoy myself at all? The thought of this scared me. 

In the aftermath of this realization, I’ve been working on redefining what that feeling of “success” should be. While I definitely am still working towards all of those predetermined goals, I’ve been trying to move away from thinking of them as the be all and end all of my efforts. Research has shown that understanding goals and achievements as a journey, with a focus on the process that led to the goal, helps people retain motivation and positive habits they’ve built up throughout their journey. That’s the sort of mindset I want to put myself in. Instead of working single-mindedly towards a specific goal while forgetting almost everything else, I want to take it slow, working just as hard as before, but allowing myself to enjoy the things I want to do. By redefining success as sustaining my ability to work hard towards my goals, I can move the emphasis away from the achievement itself, and start to realize how the process of getting to my goals has enriched my life. 


Use this student discount for a bit of self-care in preparation for taking on another day!


By: Fiona Lin

Fiona Lin is a rising senior at New York University’s Abu Dhabi Campus pursuing a double major in Literature and Creative Writing and Art and Art History. She enjoys traveling, drinking tea, and learning new languages. In her free time, you can find her reading web novels or playing video games.


For over 20 years, the Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC,  from the East Side to Greenwich Village. Along with inspiration, the company offers students a special coupon booklet and the Official Student Guide, which encourages them to discover new places in the city and save money on food, clothing, and services.  At the Campus Clipper, not only do we help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create wonderful e-books, we give them a platform to teach others. Check our website for more student savings and watch our YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during the Welcome Week of 2015.

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Unlearning Perfectionism

Wednesday, June 29th, 2022

Of all the things that people tend to find out about me, one fact stands out in particular: I am a perfectionist. It’s written in my star sign (Virgo) and in practically every personality test I’ve taken, from the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to Buzzfeed quizzes. Even if you don’t believe in personality typing or astrology or superstitions, it’s written all over my daily actions.

There are times when it’s helpful to be a perfectionist. My teachers, for example, have praised my diligence since elementary school, so I’ve earned a lot of gold stars for my efforts over the years. But more often than not, I’ve found my perfectionism to be a burden, an obstacle in my daily routines. Yes, perfectionism has led me to score well in school, but I often find myself wondering whether the time I spent triple-checking my papers could have been invested into something more worthwhile, or at the very least more enjoyable.

The thing about perfectionism is that it isn’t a choice. I don’t choose to pick at even the most subtle details and comb through my papers for typos until my deadlines loom before me or I start spiraling into stress and self-deprecation. Perfectionism is a compulsion, a habit, a state of mind that pushes me to predict mistakes in every  situation, that convinces me that something isn’t right until I’ve made sure (multiple times!) that I’ve done everything correctly, that whispers in my mind that something must be wrong if things go too smoothly. Perfectionism is toxic, and most of all, perfectionism is demoralizing. 

A table at a charity book sale that I color-coded because I couldn’t stand the disarray.

I’ve found that unlike what people tend to assume, being a perfectionist doesn’t always mean investing 200% into my work, or writing and re-writing assignments until they reach that impossible golden standard. It doesn’t mean that I ace all of my classes, or that I don’t get tired of trying to do everything without mistakes. A lot of the time, perfectionism is losing the motivation to even get started on a project out of a fear of falling short. Perfectionism is lying in bed all day, thinking it would be better not to try than to prove myself incapable or inferior to the impossible standards I’ve imposed upon myself. Perfectionism is finding myself too afraid to even apply for opportunities that I desperately want, and pretending in the aftermath of missing out that I didn’t particularly want those things anyway. Perfectionism is lying to my friends and family about my goals and ambitions, because confiding in any of them means that I have just another person to disappoint. Perfectionism is choosing inaction.

I used to think that the worst case, in any situation, was failure. Whether that was embarrassing myself in a group activity, or performing poorly on exams, I was overcome with anxiety when it came time for any kind of evaluation. I cornered myself with a projected ideal of myself, an unrealistic version of a “successful” being, and lived under the stress of never being able to measure up. As I grew older and more cognizant of the ways in which perfectionism limits my actions, however, it has become apparent to me that my biggest loss has been the experiences that I backed out of before I could even get started. There are projects, internships, classes, and even relationships that I hid from because I believed that they would spiral rapidly out of control and somehow become a “stain” on my life’s record, proving once and for all that I really am as incapable as I feared. 

I’ve been actively trying to move away from this mental state, convincing myself that things aren’t nearly as disastrous as they may seem. I’ve started with actions of little consequence: checking my papers just twice instead of three times, going on outings in the city without planning every single step, allowing myself to get lost, and assuring myself that I am capable of working things out if they ever do go wrong, though they do so much less commonly than I tend to expect. I allow myself the space to panic or to feel nervous and afraid, but I also try to be stricter about relaxing, as contradictory as that may sound. I remind myself that the world is embroiled in unpredictability, and to hope for control in the midst of it all is a fruitless endeavor. Instead, I ask myself to surrender control, to remain flexible and adaptable to the ways of the world, and to renew my understanding of order within it all. 

There is too much to lose from feeling afraid of falling short. When I expect things to be perfect, I miss out on the world, but the world isn’t going to miss me. It might take a lot of time, effort, and patience, but perfectionism is just a habit. Habits can always be unlearned. 


Use this Student Discount to find a perfect fragrance, tailored just for you!


By: Fiona Lin

Fiona Lin is a rising senior at New York University’s Abu Dhabi Campus pursuing a double major in Literature and Creative Writing and Art and Art History. She enjoys traveling, drinking tea, and learning new languages. In her free time, you can find her reading web novels or playing video games.


For over 20 years, the Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC,  from the East Side to Greenwich Village. Along with inspiration, the company offers students a special coupon booklet and the Official Student Guide, which encourages them to discover new places in the city and save money on food, clothing, and services.  At the Campus Clipper, not only do we help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create wonderful e-books, we give them a platform to teach others. Check our website for more student savings and watch our YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during the Welcome Week of 2015.

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Chambers of Solitude: the October Schlump

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Big Apple

New York City: you don't have to see all of it in a month

About a month into the fall semester, a phenomenon occurs that I refer to as the October Schlump. It’s easy to recognize: first-year students, (who every night up till then have turned Washington Square into a giant social playground,) suddenly disappear. For a few weeks they are conspicuously absent, and then slowly, as Halloween approaches, they begin to tentatively reemerge from their dorms. What happened?

I know, because I went through it. For students new to this amazing city, that first month is like a dream. So many wonderful things to see and do that were never available before; new friends to make, new places to go, new things to discover. But it really feels like a dream: there’s a constant sense that this is illusory, that at any moment you will wake up and this opportunity you worked so hard for will dissolve around you. When a new friend invites you to go to this party at their friend’s place in Brooklyn, you think, Brooklyn! When else will I get to see Brooklyn?! When you read about a new exhibit at the MoMA, you think, the MoMA! When else will I be able to visit the MoMA?! When you pass a new Mexican restaurant in the Village offering a two-for-one Margarita special, you think . . .  well, you get the idea.

This lifestyle is, of course, impossible to maintain. About a month in, you wake up one day, maybe around 5 PM, and think, what day is it? You realize that you slept through an entire day of classes. See, you meant to just take a short nap – it was 3 AM, you’d just gotten back from a party at a friend’s – Happy Wednesday! – and you realized you didn’t have any clean clothes, so what a perfect time to do laundry! You threw a load in the washer, and then came back up to finish that essay on Socrates – that’s what New York’s about, multitasking! – and about two pages in thought, I’ll just take a quick nap – an hour or two, tops. After all, you haven’t slept in two days, so it’s about time to give the body a little refresher. Now here you are, essay not finished, classes missed, your load of laundry having been removed from the washer and scattered aimlessly all over the laundry room floor by some jerk. And even after sleeping twelve hours, you still feel tired. Or not tired, more than tired – exhausted. Your resources have been depleted; nothing in you wants to get out of bed, go anywhere, do anything. The momentum is gone.

This is the October Schlump. Although skipping meals and missing sleep are major contributing factors, the Schlump is not a disease, at least not physically. It’s the mental state that settles in when you realize that you barely have any idea what you did in the past month. You were in constant motion, you went and saw and did a million amazing things, but you can barely remember any of them. Some of them you liked, some of them you didn’t, but which were which?

So, for about a week, you don’t go out. You stay inside, do homework, get lots of sleep, eat right, and figure out what to do next. In that time, you realize that New York City isn’t going anywhere. It won’t disappear under your feet one day; it will be there the next day when you wake up, and the day after that, and the day after that. You will have at least four years, at most the rest of your life, to explore. So after that week, when friends call you up and invite you to this or that, you can say no, not tonight, rain-check. You don’t even need to give a reason. You can (in fact, you must) spend a night in now and then. And you must do is reflect. You are swimming in a sea of new experiences, new stimuli, new ideas, and some are good for you and some are not. You can have all these experiences but if you never stop to reflect on what they mean, they are – literally – meaningless.

As anyone who’s lived in a dorm can attest, dorms can be a lot of fun, but they aren’t really the best places for quiet reflection. After my October Schlump, I began to seek out places I could go to be by myself, to think and ponder, to reflect and debate. I can’t give you the answers to the big questions of life that all college students confront during those four years – I don’t have them. But I can share with you come places I think will provide the stillness, the solitude, within the bustling metropolis that we call home, to find some of these answers. And I will call them Chambers of Solitude. More to come.

And in the meantime, if you need to a moment of calm and some advice on chill-axing, (sorry, I won’t use that word again,) go here.

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