In the last couple of weeks of last semester, I set a goal for myself: dilly dally. After spending so much of freshman year crashing out over the smallest of things, I was tired. I wanted a looser mindset, so dilly dally was obviously the right choice for me.
I set goals for myself, in the subcategory of dilly dally:
- Academics? Stress.
- Everything else? Whatever happens, happens.
- Don’t let every minor inconvenience affect you for a week
Three weeks into the semester, I had broken all three of those.
I’ll admit, I’m not the most easygoing person out there, if at all, but there’s something about Beloit that just makes it harder for me to just relax. Every day is something new. Every day I wonder: why do I know this? Why am I now involved with this? Why is it my problem?
Within my first few weeks of my freshman year, I understood that at college this small, it feels impossible to live a completely separate life to those around you. You may not know everyone, but you know of them. You may not know what happened, but you know someone who knows someone who does. Because of this, lines start to blur, and things that I should not be concerned about, become the only things I think about.
Part of the problem is that I’m used to the opposite. I went to a pretty big high school; there was a certain disconnect that went with that. I passed through the same hallways every day conscious that I did not know half of the faces that surrounded me. There were people I knew, people I vaguely knew, and hundreds of people whose lives had nothing to do with mine. I didn’t care about things that did not concern me.
Beloit is different though. I now care about everything. Everyone is interconnected with one another, everyone has beef with one another, I now have inherent beef for them. That’s the process. Over time, this became a problem. By the end of my freshman year, I felt socially drained, so much so, I went into hibernation. That’s when I decided that I needed to start dilly dallying my way through life.
During the summer I dilly dallyed religiously; I held so much reverence for my newfound lifestyle. I probably couldn’t explain half of the things that were going on in my social life. When I came back to Beloit, however, I was pulled into a whirlwind of my own ignorance.
Why did I ever think this could work here? Delusion, maybe.
Don’t get me wrong, I know people who somehow manage to dilly dally in Beloit. But I just haven’t figured out how to do it in this environment without absorbing everything around me.
It’s probably that a lot of people in Beloit, to put it lightly, just suck. I have inherited mortal enemies on this campus. As a result, I know so many things about them, past, present, and most definitely, future. And those people now continue to irritate my entire existence. I see someone for three seconds one day, they get pointed out to me by a friend, I participate in the gossip and tell another friend, I learn more, and then keep on learning, and the rest is history. I now know everything and more I could ever possibly wish to know about them. It’s truly not an exaggeration.
Somewhere along the line, I stopped minding my business and started collecting everyone else’s. This is not how it was meant to go. Dilly dallying was supposed to mean that I would care less, instead I just became a walking encyclopedia of other people’s problems. I, too, am a gossiper.
As much as I’m ashamed to say it, I have failed the Dilly Dally Doctrine.
That’s okay, though. There’s always next year.
Featured image: Bethany Yu’27
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