Crawling into bed at 3 in the morning the other night, I felt terribly confused. I was even more confused as to why I felt so confused. Things felt rearranged, but nothing looked out of place. Things lacked recognition, but nothing in my daily and weekly activities had changed. Things worked in distortion, but everything operated as it always had.

I couldn’t figure out why nothing seemed right anymore, with the exception of crawling into bed at 3 a.m..

Conveniently blaming these emotions on caffeine withdrawal, sleeplessness or premenstrual syndrome wasn’t going to help me, especially since all are short-term causes to a possibly long-term problem. Rooney telling me through my headphones that “I [was] a terrible person” wasn’t helping me either. I really needed to investigate these emotions before the bewilderment barricaded my ability to complete everything on my To-Do List.

Pause for a second. Breathe. Take one step at a time. Breathe again. Step one is to get to sleep, but that’s highly unlikely. I’ve somehow recently transformed into a night owl after 19 years of being an early-bird.

Step two, figure out my grievances. “What am I so confused about?”

I chose to begin by recalling the events of the day, evaluating and analyzing the conditions and consequences of each one. I considered what appeared to be the least puzzling event of the day, the REACH Women’s Leadership Panel Discussion. There, we had discussed women’s leadership, its unique struggles and responsibilities as well as societal conceptions of women in leadership positions.

Afterward, I felt inspired and self-confident, but I couldn’t dwell on my new knowledge for long, as I rushed from the discussion to the next thing on my list.

Here, with Beyonce blaring in my headphones, I realized the solution to the situation. With the increasing clutter of tasks after the end of Fall Break, I lost myself in everything I needed to do and got caught up in empty boxes on the To-Do List. Unlike the errands that I check off, however, I cannot simply check myself off, and then move on to the next errand.
Who I am must remain under constant scrutiny and improvement because who I am correlates with what I do. I cannot neglect who I am in all the busy work, because once I neglect who I am, my actions become a distorted reflection of who I am, thus irrelevant.

For example, a person can act generously, but this doesn’t necessarily indicate that the person is a generous person. The person could have alternative or ulterior motives behind his or her actions. Therefore, action doesn’t point to character. Unless the person develops a proper correlation, then action never will point to character. This is something I shouldn’t have forgotten, considering that the topic was touched upon in philosophy class and showed up on the midterm.

“What is my character?” should be the question I ask to ease the uncertainty. In the midst of everything I had to do, I failed to connect my actions to my character and see how they fit with who I am.

The Goo Goo Dolls invite me to run through my headphones, even though I never really ran, but did something more along the lines of accidentally leaving myself behind.
I should have seen all of this sooner, because the sooner anyone sees this, the better. Our culture focuses too much on the action and not enough on the person, cresting a society that encourages generous actions instead of generosity, diplomatic rhetoric instead of diplomacy and honest appeal instead of honesty.
Until we look to ourselves before our actions and not the other way around, people of character will become fewer and fewer between.

The confusion will subside once I realign myself and spend the time to figure life into the second half of the first semester. In the meantime, I am at least not confused about crawling into bed in the wee hours of the morning. I heard David Bowie, and step one commenced

Allison Reilly is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.