To Be Determined
By Moona Ahmed
There is a weight, On the lid of my Eye. A yearn to sleep Not for rest But for the weak Reason Of wanting to shut off And shut down. To not feel Just to take up space, Unconsciously. The abyss of sleep Is coldly comforting, For those who dread The coming weeks Of the years that lay Before us. There is a weight On the lid of my eye, Because I'm weak. Strong, Is unbreakable, Unmistakably solid, But if something can never break, Or crumble, Or ever liquefy, At the eve of trouble, Muscles would be not muscles, But slabs of petrified meat.
In the fall of 2011, I made the biggest leap of faith I ever took. I started my first year of college in the hopes of becoming a Mechanical Engineer. Doesn’t sound scary, just sounds like a lot of work—but to me it was scary. I was terrified, and that is exactly why I chose to pursue it. This was outside of my strengths, this was a world I knew nothing about. I had never taken a physics class before. I chose it simply because it was hard.
“So tell me what you want to be? What’s the plan for college?” My high school history teacher leaned forward asking me with pure curiosity during my class exit interview for the end of the spring semester 2009, my sophomore year. He called me OCD once about my work—I took it as a compliment. I loved his class. I loved history.
“Well, I’m not sure, maybe something with history, like international affairs? Diplomacy? Not sure.” A popular major for this high school, which was one of the very few schools that were primarily writing intensive in NYC.
“With your grades, you have a lot of options. I’m sure anything you choose, you’ll do great in.” He genuinely meant that, and it stuck with me. Anything, I could be anything. But this advice drove me crazy. Anything?
So I began my search to figure out how to boil ‘anything’ down to the ‘one thing’ I would want to be. Growing up all I wanted to be as successful. What that meant I really did not know except I knew it involved being good at anything that came my way and having some importance because of it. I wanted to be important in society. As the youngest of four in a single parent household, I had high expectations that I put on myself and wanted to earn my spot amongst the adults. I wanted to outdo my siblings and go above and beyond for my mother to show her that her hard work raising me paid off. I wanted to be the one to graduate with an unexpected bang. ‘You? Little you graduated with this? Wow!’ They’d say. It was ambitious but vain, I’m aware. I was young. I was competitive. As a child, I would look to my siblings and see them studying and at age 7 I decided I would study too. So I whipped out a boring encyclopedia and just read for leisure--no, for success. I just wanted to be a success, whatever that truly was. The dilemma, however, is that I never came around to defining what success really meant to me beyond being good at anything that came my way. All I knew was getting straight A’s would somehow get me there—at the shiny soles of the shoes that are success…to be worn for the rest of my life. I just did not know the shoes I would choose might be too big for me.
Entering my Junior year of high school in the fall of 2009, I suddenly started to slip up. I was not as good across the board anymore in all subjects. It was as if evil spirits seemed to come to haunt me during one class and one subject alone. Pre-calculus. I studied profusely. I gave it everything I had. But there it was, a sad B- burning a hole through my report card, which had only ever experienced neatly lined up A’s in the far right column. B-. This cannot be. I started to see myself as a failure. Anyone else I’m sure would be fine with a B-, heck, looking back a B- is great! But at that intense moment, gripping that freshly printed report card, everything around me started to blur and blackout. I did not meet my own standards of success of being good at everything. What fields even use this? I searched and engineering popped up every time. Engineering? What is that anyway? Way too broad. That’s when my history teacher’s comment came back to me. Anything. I was not about to let pre-calculus put my Anything in danger. I could be a damn Engineer if I damn well wanted to. So I set my horizons on becoming what my grade was telling me I couldn’t. Slightly absurd? Prideful? Yes.
“Math is optional for your Senior year.” My homeroom teacher was way too chill about the graduation requirements. “I’d like to still proceed and move on to Calculus.” “Oh AP Calculus? That’s great, but you would need an A in Precalculus for that.” “I meant regular, non-AP Calculus...” Gritted my teeth a bit. He made it happen. With the understanding that math started to become a subject I had to put more work into than other classes, I attacked Calculus with all I had. I came out the other side with an A, top of my class. I could be an engineer now, I can be anything.
And so, that is exactly what I did, I applied to schools as an engineering major as a true test of my standards of success and uphold my math skills. I wanted to continue to be good at everything because I can truly then be Anything.
Fast forward to 2012, I had a shaky year and a half of college. I was surrounded by peers that came from technical high schools—not writing-intensive ones like I did. I was the underdog. There I was, Sophomore standing, straight A’s out the window, unclear where I was going. I could not share this information with my naturally math skilled peers, they would not understand why I even pursued this in the first place. They would not be able to understand my version of success or the importance I gave to the word Anything. Why would I choose to be an underdog and pursue a career when all the odds were clearly against me from the beginning? I should have known when I got my B- in high school that being an engineer was not the best idea. Those shiny soled shoes of success? Yea, way too big. I was heading towards failure full speed ahead and I didn’t know any better. I failed my first class. It wasn’t just any class. It was a class that encompassed the essential basics of Mechanical Engineering, a class called Statics. I failed something so basic. My professor told me to drop out or consider changing majors. Someone close to me tried to give me his advice, “Women belong in the kitchen anyway.” We aren’t close at all anymore, go figure. Luckily, I never had a knack for internalizing peoples negativity. I had an early understanding that people’s perceptions are bound by their own ignorance, and this was no time to cure them. I had a crisis at hand--a glaring F. This was almost like junior year of high school precalculus class all over again. The grade was evident and spoke for itself with no actual words or expression, just a simple letter. F. What happened to Anything?
I gave that F so much power over me, so naturally self-doubt followed. I felt like I did not have control. I thought I could do it all. I thought I could be a true jack of all trades; be an engineer who could also write a killer 30-page essay–eloquently constructing a finely tuned argument that even an opposing, biased reader would cave. An engineer who could also paint, draw, and make 3D pop-up cards from scratch for her brother’s birthday. A female engineer that can do it all. All? Anything? No.
I was on my way home from school, wanting to close my eyes and try to escape the reality that I, unfortunately, put myself in by choosing this major. I was not cut out for this. That’s when I wrote the first part of the poem all the way up to the line that only reads one word: “weak.” I don’t usually write poems, however, a part of me was dissatisfied leaving that poem to conclude there, to accept that it would end with the word weak. So I did not title it. Writing it made me feel worse, it was almost as if I were giving my F grade some expression or voice it did not deserve. I left it on my phone and I pushed on, against all odds in a school and a major where I stood as an underdog. My mom had to sit me down repeatedly and remind me that giving up was never an option for her raising four kids on her own, and it can never be one for me. She told me to adapt and roll with the punches. She was tough and I had to emulate her. I retook the failed class and I studied harder than the rest of my mathematically talented classmates claimed to have studied. I kept changing my approaches to studying, I kept changing my mindset towards each and every test. I can do this. I pushed on as I reminded myself of that F grade. This F cannot be the way this ends. And it wasn’t.
May 2015 there I was crossing the stage, pumping my fists in the air as my purple gown flew behind me. My hat dropped and that was kind of funny and embarrassing, but regardless I crossed that stage and shook those hands. I did it. I made it. I’m a Mechanical Engineer. In 4 solid years. Me. I got a job lined up months before I graduated. I retook the failed class and it became my strength. I might have stopped growing at age 15, standing at 5’ 3,” but I grew into those shiny soled shoes of success.
That was the day I finished my poem, I followed the single worded line “weak.” with the line “Strong,” since one cannot exist without the other, yin and yang. On that day, I learned the most valuable lesson of my life. For those who never quit, you can never be weak without being strong at the same time. It takes weakness to identify strength and strength to even find your weakness. Be honest with yourself, but don’t limit yourself. Adjust, put in the work, and keep pushing. That is how I got through this, that is how an underdog was able to turn an F around and nail all the harder classes that came after. I am glad I earned my degree the hard way, this would not have been worth it otherwise. The shine of the shoes I finally wore, was that of resilience. This has been my greatest accomplishment thus far and now, looking back over this experience, I have finally decided to title this poem, Anything.
