Say Yes to Stop Brainwashing
Tags: Year In Review, Thoughts, Zapfv

I used to brainwash myself often. I scrubbed my brain hard with soap and water and the ideas came out pristine, but pale and not at all like my real first thoughts.

I always “cleaned” my ideas. I had them in a little heap in my head, and I’d sort through them all. “No,” I said to one, then “no” to another, and even more “no” and “no” and “no.” I washed each of them, hoping they would look a bit more presentable. When I finally did gather the courage to raise my hand or make a quiet Tweet in class, the ideas were so watered down and different from how they originally appeared in my head that they were no longer a good representation of myself.

If there’s anything I learned this year and from the rest of high school, it’s that learning isn’t supposed to be perfect and clean. Learning is messy, mottled with failure and screw-ups. For example, I consider the essay I wrote for the New York Times Learning Connection contest in January my worst work from this year. I struggled with trying to connect my flimsily crafted thesis to my poorly chosen article, and while I managed to hammer out something resembling a coherent argument in the end, I still didn’t like it. Did I learn anything meaningful from the project? Not from doing the project, no. Like I said, my argument was weak and vague, and I don’t think I actually learned anything significant from thinking about the contents of the essay itself. But that was the learning experience⁠ — that sometimes your work sort of just sucks, and that’s really, truly okay.

Past me would have said “well, this is embarrassing. I’ve been writing about my perfectionistic tendencies for THREE years now, and it looks like I won’t ever stop criticizing myself!” Sophomore year, I wrote a story about self discovery, a humorous meta-story about myself, and how I realized that failing is okay. And even before that, I’d already written about failure, pressure, and other ways I make myself overly stressed for no good reason. However, it didn’t matter what I was writing about: without fail, I’d always get out my little brain-sponge and make sure those ideas were presentable, clean, and didn’t step too far out of their boundaries when I shared them.

I’m glad I was able to find so many outlets where un-brainwashed ideas were actually encouraged to be shared this year. In zero drafts, in which I could write my beloved paragraphs of text without worrying about capitalization, proper punctuation, or formal language, none of which I like to use when brain-dumping. In Twitter posts, in which I could share any of my thoughts in what was not just a class space, but a space where everyone else also just saying whatever. There’s no brainwashing there, just unfiltered thoughts, ones that you can say “yes” to without second-guessing yourself.

Someday, when I’m brave enough, I’ll even be able to raise my hand and speak in class without having the usual second, third, and fourth-guessing my answers. Instead of criticizing myself and saying “no” constantly, I want to say “yes” more often. Saying “yes” is the way to stop brainwashing, and to stop brainwashing is to put yourself out there in the truest form. Sometimes, that truest form isn’t as perfect as I’ll envision it to be, but that’s more than okay. That’s learning in its raw beauty, free of unnecessary self-defined boundaries and “cleaned” ideas that are more appearance than substance.