On a rainy Wednesday afternoon this past week, my professor let out a big sigh. He was tired and the chalk resting in his hands seemed over it too. We had spent nearly three hours discussing the impending doom of the world, whether it be from climate change, pollution or food shortages. Technology couldn’t save us, we had realized. “Nature is wiser than humans” was scrawled in my weary professor’s handwriting in the center of the board.

The class had consisted of people postulating solutions, but we were dancing around the real problem. Systemic, global-scale, widespread change would be needed to solve a problem like environmental destruction, and we were just twelve twenty-somethings around a wooden table. What could we possibly do? We cared, but we felt powerless. I could see it in the lines on my professor’s face: a career of classes just like this, where the truth sinks in and naïveté gets crushed. It was beginning to show on my classmates faces too.

I see this same look in my social circles and around the Dub all the time. It’s the ringing silence in the middle of a Dub Club that comes not from people being afraid to speak, but from a striking inability to say enough. It’s in the fallen tears at Take Back the Night, the clenched jaws during a protest, the nervous chuckles from the student who never realized their privilege until it was screaming at them from a PowerPoint display.

It’s the physical expression of growth, uncomfortable change and being forced into a world where some are pushed back by their identity every step while others walk on unknowingly. It’s helplessness and hopelessness all at once.

When I call my mom on the phone and tell her I’m feeling down, she pins it all on this. “It’s all so heavy,” she tells me. I immediately get defensive. These are real issues. There are problems out there that people are ignorant about or continue to deny after clear evidence is presented. There are people dying, people hurting and a whole world going to shit. Who cares if it’s heavy? As a person with privilege isn’t it my responsibility to do something, regardless of how it affects me emotionally?

There are times at St. Lawrence when I feel as though the summation of my academic experience could simply be: “the world is, like, super fucked up”. And it is. There are a lot of problems, from the environment to gender inequities and racial discrimination, that can stump us with their sheer weight.

Yet, nothing can be accomplished without some retention of optimism. Not idealistic worlds of perfect equality and rainbows while everyone lives in denial, but having faith in the continuation of change.

The truth is, I certainly can’t figure anything out when I’m exhausted, covered in chalk dust and giving up on the world. I can’t think like that. And honestly, what would the point be if it all really were that hopeless?