Over the past few days, we have learned a couple of things about defining ourselves. There seems to be a tendency to think that our actions, our mistakes define who we are, but, the truth is that those are simply a glimpse, a brief moment in our lives. And we all make them – we all fall down. The trick, however, is to get up and keep trying. One crisis after another, one teenage drama after the next – if we let those consume us, drowning us in self-pity, then we’ve failed to understand that the point of life is to learn to live it, to humbly accept when we make a fool of ourselves and keep going. Mistakes are not the defining point – it is what you make of them, how you rise and face the consequences that matter.
So, as we enter a new semester, a new gallery of potential wins and losses, we look at it with some nostalgic optimism. Yes, things will be hard, yes, we will have a lot of work, but we have everything to make it the time of our lives. To quote Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays (perhaps a little out context), we look at the time that lies ahead and we ask not “Why?” but rather “Why not?”
For our first issue, we want to show you, dear readers, a little bit of everything. We want to remind you that Brown is, in fact, a world of possibilities. With Emma Wohl’s witty article on how to break away from the constricting winter wardrobe, Aida Manduley’s piece on eating vegetarian food around campus (which, to our surprise, shows us that there are a lot more options than we could have ever fathomed), and Suzannah Weiss’s feature on the man who we all know but know little of – Jagdish Sachdev, the owner of Thayer Street’s staple store, Spectrum India are evidence of the very enriching environment we live in.
Don’t let the cold days get you down; instead, try to remember that it only gets better from here on. Welcome to HerCampus Brown!
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Love,
Luisa & Haruka