{"id":4191,"date":"2019-03-12T13:03:38","date_gmt":"2019-03-12T17:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/?p=4191"},"modified":"2019-03-12T13:03:38","modified_gmt":"2019-03-12T17:03:38","slug":"stay-awake-but-never-stop-dreaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/2019\/03\/stay-awake-but-never-stop-dreaming\/","title":{"rendered":"Stay Awake but Never Stop Dreaming"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Kareem<\/a><\/p>\n

Last year I had an epiphany. And coming from a lower working-class single black mother household, those are pretty hard to come by. It was a deeply humid Saturday morning smack dab middle of June when I heard something of a racket downstairs in my family home. This wasn\u2019t the pleasant, rhythmic noise of pots and pans I\u2019d usually hear the day before Thanksgiving, where my mother would ready her dishes. This sound was of desperation and panic. My mother, who remained a collected person up until this point, was acting erratic the night before. Delirious, vague and intensely sad. She\u2019d emptied the closet near the front door and claimed she was spring cleaning in the summer. In the noisy morning, she faced my two sisters and I with tears in her eyes and said, \u201cI failed you. I tried so hard but I failed all of you.\u201d Confused and admittedly still half-asleep, I was extremely perplexed. My mind raced to probable causes of this behavior. Was it cancer? Did someone harm her? Did she lose her job?<\/p>\n

My mother confessed that due to the death of my grandmother (her mother) in 2014, who was helping her pay the house mortgage, she\u2019d lost the house to a bank in a foreclosure. Like trickling sand on your hands in a summer breeze. This was common, but a shock. The thing that was gut-punching was that my mother had kept this from us for nearly a year and had recently received a notice to vacate the premises. Her eyes were worn and swollen with thick black lines and her skin was a muted mahogany complexion. She looked like the \u201cbefore\u201d picture of a clinically depressed anxiety position. The months that followed were emotional arguments, and limited plans with dwindling opportunities. I gathered boxes and worked a part-time job while my mother and sisters packed for our eventual move. My main concern was my last semester. Would I finish like I\u2019d already planned? Would my grades suffer? Where would I live? That was my 2018.<\/p>\n

Through my own research and self-awareness, I\u2019ve gathered that I\u2019m not alone in this journey to gain a college degree. I recall hearing of one student-mother who is homeless and remains diligent in her studies. Having an unclear future seems to be the source of rampant anxiety within my generation and younger. The notion of uncertainty is something that plagues millions of young people in the midst of \u201cemerging adulthood\u201d or what many sociologists describe as the period of uncertainty in young people\u2019s lives. Millennials, Generation Y or the iGeneration face a number of economic obstacles that previous generations rarely had to. Millennials are getting married later, having children later, refraining from buying a home or car, and are bombarded by student debt and a shortage of entry-level jobs. On the flip side, we are the highest educated and most ethnically diverse youth body in the history of this country. We want to make an impact but we can\u2019t. We don\u2019t come without flaws as well. Millennials have been described as overprotected by parents, lazy, and entitled beyond reason. These demonizing elements, of course, come from a stem or a source of bias.<\/p>\n

Another aspect of the FSC life that I find interesting is the notion of intersectionality, when it comes to family economic background. The majority of the students at FSC come from humble, if not comfortable, suburban white middle-class means. But what of students with LGBTQ backgrounds? Or African-American students? Other minorities? What are the stories behind their eyes? I fundamentally believe that we all have challenges and obstacles on our journey that are relative to ourselves as individuals. Never in my life as a young black man in America do I want to participate in the \u201csuffering Olympics,\u201d arguing who has had the most problems in this country. I\u2019m never asking for an apology for anyone higher in class and status than I am. But I\u2019d be remiss in not mentioning the ease in economic security that some students have more than others.<\/p>\n

As we approach the smack-dab middle of my last semester, I think back to how hard that news was to hear. It hurt me to see one of my heroes so trampled by her reality. My mother and family are safe at my aunt\u2019s home in Westbury. We\u2019re looking for places to live. I\u2019ve had trouble adjusting to the semester\u2019s responsibilities and a part-time job. But I persevere because of the students and faculty I\u2019ve talked to, and the experiences I\u2019ve absorbed. I had a rare epiphany that informing yourself with the realities of our time, with the intricacies of our intersectionality, with the difficulties facing our generation and the generation after us, will help us to better prepare for that uncertainty. But as we use knowledge to protect us, let\u2019s not forget about what\u2019s at the heart of knowledge. Curiosity. Talk to a friend. Talk to a stranger on campus. Visit the Health and Wellness Center. Take a trip to the Mental Health Center. Exercise. Do something you love. You\u2019re not alone. Remain aware. Be prepared. But don\u2019t ever dare to not dream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year I had an epiphany. And coming from a lower working-class single black mother household, those are pretty hard to come by. It was a deeply humid Saturday morning smack dab middle of June when I heard something of a racket downstairs in my family home. This wasn\u2019t the pleasant, rhythmic noise of pots […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":4194,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[221],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4191"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4195,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4191\/revisions\/4195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}