Undergraduate / "Genius is said to be self-conscious." Princeton Quote essay [2]

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. R. W. Emerson in "Self-Reliance"

"Genius is said to be self-conscious." Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre

When I first read Jane Eyre I had no idea what that sentence meant. I held on to the definition of self-conscious as the cliché thirteen year old girl with body image issues. I thought of self-conscious as someone who has spinach in their teeth on a date they have been waiting for for years. I thought of someone who feels unworthy or somehow less than what they consider the "normal". I thought of everything I felt a genius not to be. And then I realized what self-conscious actually is. It is completely disjoint from body dismorphia, from timidity, from self-worth issues. Being self-conscious is everything but those things. It is being perceptive of one's emotions, one's torments, one's weaknesses, one's fears, one's way of being...

Being a genius is acting on what you perceive without remorse. Genius is knowing what you are horrible at and temporarily absolving your failure to give yourself mental space to fix it. It is thriving in one's body, fearless and emancipated. Genius is non-competitive. It is accepting of the brilliance found in other people because what makes them intellectually beyond the average person is their willingness to learn. A true genius recognizes the brilliance of the world, of the people of the world, and is never afraid to become a student again. It is never afraid to question or to ask. The roll of a teacher is not any more familiar to a genius than the roll of a student. Brilliance is something that cannot be hidden. Attempting to hid it is as futile as hiding the sun from the dawn or the moon from the night. It is something deeply rooted into who we are and for whom we are becoming. It is a way of being versus a state of being. Genius will never be static, rather its dynamics mimic simple harmonic motion, always oscillating, but aware of its position.

Most importantly genius is born into itself. It just is. It doesn't have to be, or become, or try. It simply is, which is why it is self-conscious. It doesn't need permission to exist, rather it is too concerned with the process of being to worry about trifling matters of "permission." This essence is what Emerson was referring to in "Self-Reliance." Genius is selfish; it acts on what it believes and perceives and is immune to society's constant coercion to conform, which is a part of what makes it so brilliant.

The day I finally understood these quotes, a light-bulb lit up in my head. In fact a flood lamp burst on and all of the stage lights switched on. My retinas imploded, and I winced at the brightness I had finally come into. Understanding these sentences changed my entire perception of what it means to truly "be." I realized that everyone's genius, that my genius, would exist effortlessly if we let it. From then on I have ignored the concept of permission, usurped authority that occasionally hasn't been mine, and have existed boldly without remorse. I am what I am when I am it. I haven't yet crossed paths with my genius, but I'm not looking for it either. Besides, I don't have to. If I am living correctly my genius will be self-conscious and my only duty to myself is to "do is all that concerns me, not what the people think."

Undergraduate / 'Curiosity' - Princeton Topic of Choice [6]

I do not believe in "narrowing my focus." My curiosity simply does not allow it. My curiosity is the type of curiosity that constantly overpowers my discretion with a certain scary consistency. It gives me insight into what I could know and relief from the perpetual school derived fear of what I should know. It breaks open paths for me to travel. It unfurls paths that are blackened and blanketed in thorns, paths that have dim roads, empty and gray. It exposes paths that are neither here nor there. It divulges paths that are brilliant with flowers blossoming, butterflies blooming from gilded cocoons, trees and bushes pregnant with the fruits of their winter labor. It reveals paths that have no end and paths that are infinitely small. My curiosity gives me infinite directions to take. Due to this, I am bequeathed a certain yet unfathomable infinite potential and a responsibility to direct my focus but never to narrow it.

I would like to be a rollercoaster engineer, a pathologist, a paleontologist, a cosmologist, an anthropologist, a writer, a poet, a ballet dancer, a mathemagician (an excellent mathematician), a teacher, a Trader Joe's store employee, an inventor, a cardboard box designer, a physicist, an archaeologist, a literary critic, a cobbler, an aeronautical engineer, and a doll maker. I want to be someone close to the community, someone who can help people, someone people feel comfortable talking to, someone whose door is always open, someone whose only weakness is her unceasing love for people. I want to be someone worth becoming, someone worth the trials of being, the pains of failure, the hurt of falling, and the heartbreak of my mortality, to enjoy the product of my labors, the sweet fruits of my success as primarily a human being and secondarily as a woman.

It is possible for me to be all these things even in small ways. I am no less an aeronautical engineer when designing paper planes in calculus or when building helicopters for the army. I am no less of a Mother Teresa when giving a homeless man my lunch or when mortgaging my home to open a food bank. I am no less brilliant teaching fifth graders physical science than teaching particle physics at MIT. The principles and their applications are the same regardless. The scale of the motion is irrelevant to the motion itself because all motion is a procession, a procession that will render an equal but opposite reaction every time. Each action reaction pair is an inception of motion that is brilliant beyond comparison. An attempt to compare futile because there is no quantitative measure for the level of beauty or potency of an action.

Walt Whitman in "I Sing the Body Electric" said, "All is a procession, the universe is a procession with measured and beautiful motion." I am composed of matter from the universe: the universe is inside of me. Therefore, I have the "moved beautiful motion" of the universe inside of me. I am a brilliant scarlet streak painted on a crisp canvas of a sunset sky. I am that pensive silver that protrudes through that. I am a royal blue that awakens our sensibilities. The universe is composed of me just as I of it. The universe composes and is composed of everything and anything.

I am bound by the same principles the universe is. I am as boundless as the universe, and there lies the inception of my potential. I am situated on a precipice in the universe harnessing my energy, waiting for my implosion, waiting for my potentiality to become kinetic. Waiting for my big bang and for the universe to be born inside of me so I can become as unbounded as the galaxies and worlds that surrounding me. I can be everything, anything, just as the universe can. I just need a place, a school, a college, a mountain, a burning bush, a library, a mosque, a temple, a shrine, a monastery, everything, anything to give me the resources to help direct my curiosity. Everything, anything to teach me how to accept responsibility for my inherent infinite potential.