Edition 1: New Beginnings

What New Beginnings Means to Me

Samira Mahamoud

DOUBT, in BLOCK CAPITALS, would be the only word that perfectly encapsulates my thoughts throughout my journey to becoming an Oxford student. 

Why did I even apply? It won’t go well. Why didn’t I say that in my interviews? You had FOUR INTERVIEWS and you still miss out vital information! They’ll just reject you now. Can I even meet the grade requirements? I’ll miss my offer and have to settle for another university. That’s fine. I won’t do well with my course anyways.

DOUBT pervaded my mind. Part of it stemmed from my self-critical nature. But the rest, a large fraction must I say, was fuelled by fear. Fear that upon arriving to this university, a major if whilst applying, I would only feel alienated for the 4 years that I studied there. That I’d only be this monster ravaging a place it didn’t belong in.

Prior to completing first year, my knowledge of Oxford was largely shaped by stereotypes and study-tubers who either wanted to study there or were in the midst of their Oxonian adventures. But from these two sources of information, I could only deduce one thing. There was nothing about Oxford that was compatible with my very being… my identity… my existence. A haven for rich, mostly white kids accepting a state-school educated, Somali, Muslim girl from a low-income background? Not possible.

This realisation openly welcomed Imposter Syndrome. Oh how I loathe the dreaded Imposter Syndrome!

Thus, my DOUBT persisted for a long while. Even when I got in. Even with the visible changes that I could see on my father’s face on the way to Oxford - his excitement and wonder as he drove down the unfamiliar roads. Even with the automated voice from the Waze app telling him where he needed to go next. I distinctly remember the unsettling twists of my stomach that would not go away regardless of my attempts to divert my attention elsewhere. Please, something that isn’t about university Samira! 

I had contingency plans upon contingency plans to prepare for Oxford. I had to make friends quickly, immediately accept that I would be a minority in a sea of unfamiliarity, study well, AND get good grades. Slacking and discomfort were NOT AN OPTION.

But nothing I did worked. I was still incredibly uncomfortable and constantly worried about the next day, the future assignments I would get, whether or not I could make friends. If I’d be accepted by my peers despite differing from the majority.

Accepted by my peers.

This fear was quite a shock to me. I wasn’t this conscious of my appearance until I started university. After all, Somalis certainly aren’t rare in South London. 

No matter what you’re doing, or where you are, we all long for a sense of comfort… familiarity. Even now, I still catch myself looking around for someone who looks a bit like me. It happens automatically, as if it’s ingrained in the depths of my subconscious. But when you can’t find anyone, it hurts. The thought of being the odd one out always comes back to haunt you.

Oxford was the only place that I’ve been in my entire life where I felt completely alone. Ethnically, I was a minority. Physically, I was away from my family. Emotionally, I was reluctant to make friends. I didn’t really want to stay like this, and so on a whim I would go to different events to forget about these worries of mine. None of them were able to alleviate the incessant discomfort. And so I decided to try an ACS event. At this point, I had one friend that I knew who’d go to the event with me.

It was amazing.

We were few in number compared to the rest of the students at the university, but we certainly made up for that in community, strength, and laughter. And soon enough, I felt at home.

I managed to find a new comfort through exploring my discomfort, and that made me think about one important thing:

The longer we resist change due to discomfort, the longer we resist the opportunity to grow. 

University is frightening, and it felt even worse when I had no one by my side to start with. But as daunting as that was, it gave me a moment to find my feet. To make my mark in a place where no one knew me. Yes, it truly made me experience profound loneliness for the first time, but it also gave me a place to feel at home too.

A new beginning. I wonder what that means to you?

On Longing, Desire, and Blackness

Nonso

I am so honoured to have been a part of ACS for the year that I studied abroad as a student at Wadham College. Now that I’m back at my home institution, I feel even more grateful for all of the ACS memories I get to hold close to me now.

I was talking to a fellow Wadhamite and now dear friend who is also a part of ACS this past week about longing and desire. Specifically, we were exploring questions surrounding if longing or desire can ever be something genuine and to what extent does longing obscure reality or realistic expectations. I made the assertion that longing, and desire are genuine feelings, but should always be taken with a grain of salt because longing and desire are boundless. There are no limits to imagination and “want”, and often times when we inevitably get hit with that dose of reality, what hurts isn’t actually the reality itself, but the failure of expectations that our longing and desire was rooted in.

I have lived and have been raised in predominantly white spaces my entire life. Up until college, I have never had more than a couple of Black friends ­­– most of them desperately clung onto from childhood or by chance. Because of this, I think part of me has always longed for who I could be and what my life could look like if I was actually surrounded by people who look like me in an intentional way. When I signed up for ACS right as I arrived at Oxford, I was extremely anxious – thinking about things like: “what if they take note of how white I sound?” “What if there’s a dance I don’t know or a song I can’t sing?” “Will anyone be interested in being my friend because I’m so different?”. My identity as a Nigerian-American is a “Frankenstein” of African American things I saw on TV, 2009 Nollywood films and P-Square songs my parents would watch and listen to, and anything else I picked up from being around older Nigerian family friends whenever I saw them. In other words, my lack of consistent community didn’t make me feel whole in my identity and that fuelled boundless imaginative scenarios of what ACS could look like for me.

I don’t say all of these things to invoke pity or sadness, but I do want to emphasize what my story is like because it’s hard for some people to imagine that people like me are out there (and there’s a lot more of us than you probably think!). People can sometimes take having a community like this for granted ­– while on the contrary, joining ACS was quite literally one of the best things that has ever happened to me. For the first time in my entire life, I felt so sure of who I was thanks to the love and support from everyone I met at ACS. I described it to my white friends from my home institution as something deeper than just feeling connected or having a couple of friends to go out with. It was even deeper and more complex than solidarity, and not quite love either. It was this unspoken human synchronicity that I couldn’t possibly find in the previous spaces I was occupying. You can’t put a feeling into words towards an ACS friend biking with you home at 1 AM after listening to your favourite Afrobeat songs at a birthday party, or getting a text at 11 PM to stop by and eat homemade jollof, stopping each other on Magdalen street to check in no matter how busy it is, listening to your poetry while the sun is setting in Port Meadow, praying with and for you at Christian Union events, or a gentle shoulder tap of encouragement at the library. These are all moments I play over and over again because my expectations as a result of years of longing was absolutely blown out of the water. And for that, I can’t thank the ACS community enough.

The Ledge

Leon Gidigbi

Whenever I hear the phrase “new beginnings”, I always feel two conflicting emotions. One is excitement, when I think about all of the potential there is in being able to start afresh. The other is fear. Fear that I might not fulfil that potential, and that I don’t know where to start. New beginnings are always hardest at the beginning (Wow, who would’ve thought!) because this fear feels the most justified. We may feel as if we have no track record in our new environment, and so we question what right we have to convince ourselves that we can do well. This is how I feel in most new spaces, so I figured I’d share my two best ways of dealing with it…

The first way is through understanding that confidence is the result of action and not the cause. We imagine that to do difficult things, we must first hype ourselves up until the fear goes away, and then we can act confidently. But that’s not the case. Because the feeling of fear never really goes away. We just become better at managing those feelings and pushing through anyway. Once you take the first step, the actual outcome is pretty irrelevant. Frankly speaking, you could embarrass yourself and you’d still feel some sense of pride because you have overcome that fear. You have power over it, and no-one can take that away from you. The outcome is often better than we expected anyhow, because fear encourages you to expect the worst outcome. When you overcome it, you realise that the world isn’t actually that scary, and that’s where the confidence starts. You’re out of your head and into the world. After this, things get mostly easier as you start to build up momentum. The first action gives you confidence, which makes it easier (or you better) at the next action, which only gives you more confidence and so on. For example, in my second term of university I was in an awkward situation where I didn’t really like the people who I was hanging with at the time, but I had no-one else to hang out with. Eventually I distanced myself from those people, but that just left me alone. There were plenty of people I saw, and thought were really cool, but I didn’t want to reach out to them because I thought that would seem weird. Eventually, I just took the action and said you know what, let’s go say hi as I walked past their room. I tapped my card into the staircase, so I had no way to back out. I knocked on their door, had a chat and told them I thought they were cool and wanted to hang out. I didn’t feel confident walking in, but when you’re in the moment you’ll manage, because it’s rarely ever that bad. No-one was going to try to kick my ass for saying I thought they were cool, so it was only a conversation. And I came out of the room realising that it only took a conversation to ignite the start of what could be a beautiful relationship. Fast forward to now, I’ve got a great group of friends that have stemmed directly from that, and it’s made my university experience far better. I’d be lying if I said that this process is linear — there will always be caveats, difficult moments, and times where you may not feel so confident. Moments where things might even go badly. But there is only so much that is in your control, and in this case, it is the effort which you can control. Taking action first is your best chance at increasing your confidence, and the traction that builds is what helps us get more used to new beginnings.

Side note: stepping out onto the ledge and having no way to back down is a super powerful tool. Whether I’m in rhythm or feeling unconfident, I often schedule meetings with people I’m interested in speaking to. I take advantage of the leverage that our ability to talk about our interests doesn’t depend on our confidence, so the conversation is a safe zone. Once I’ve scheduled the chat, there’s no way I can back out. I could postpone max. once, but after that I’d be staking my credibility which would be more injurious than overcoming my fear. The power of forcing accountability is it creates artificial situations where you can motivate yourself to do something productive by making idleness immediately costly. The other person inadvertently holds you accountable because you can’t back out.

The second thing, interestingly enough, acts as a safety net for the first. In reality, sometimes we get caught up in our own minds and we aren’t able to overcome the fear. We slowly watch an opportunity go by and grimace because we know we could have taken it, but it’s important to recognise that that’s a part of life. I’ll give you one of my own examples. A few months ago, I was invited to a private consultation event for what is now the Black Equity Organisation (BEO). I was shaking hands and sitting down with names that were on a level I had only ever read about. David Lammy, Marcia Willis, Dame Vivian Hunt. I couldn’t believe the level of place I was in. Do you want to know how I did during that event? Absolutely nothing. I spoke to people privately and mildly networked, but I was asked to come to the event to contribute ideas about how the project should look and pitfalls to look out for, which I didn’t do in the slightest. The person that ran the event even shook my hand at the end and said “Leon, we didn’t get to speak much, but… but” and that was it. My heart almost fell out of my chest with embarrassment. But that was perfectly OK. I was overwhelmed, and understandably so. New beginnings are the first times we step into certain environments and operate in certain contexts, so there’s no valid reason for us to put pressure on ourselves to have to perform. The win is in the effort, so if you even manage to exist in a new environment, then congratulations, genuinely! That’s a huge feat in itself and things will get easier over time.

Let me add to that notion that things get easier as well. Since that BEO event, I have gone to a few other crazy events and met lots of big names. And I have been overwhelmed just as many times. But you know what? I’ve done better and better each time, and I’m far less afraid now than I was in the past. Because it’s all about momentum. Even by showing up, you have taken action, and that will make you more confident when the next opportunity to act appears because now you have a better idea of what to expect. The human brain is designed to adapt, and novelty dies down quickly as a result, and once novelty is gone, so is uncertainty. You become more comfortable with new beginnings as a whole. Some random Instagram wisdom once told me “the top of one mountain is the bottom of the next”. When I first heard it, I felt so demoralised. I felt that no matter how great my achievement was, no matter how high the mountain top was, there would always be a bigger one to climb. It made life feel like a never-ending task to complete, but now it feels like a never-ending chance to improve. That perspective change has been crucial for me because it allows me to get more excited about new beginnings, and I can trust that even when I’m at the bottom of one mountain, I am at the top of another. That is a sign that I know how to climb, and although the terrain of this mountain might be different, I can figure it out. It is in that sense that apart from birth, no beginnings are new beginnings. They are just beginnings, and you will figure them out just like you figured out how to walk, write, read, and get into university. So, breathe, and do your best to take action first so that confidence can build. But if you don’t do it perfectly the first time, that’s perfectly fine. You have a whole lifetime to do this, so you can relax. Being born was the hard part anyway.