Amy Potter: Leaving Penn without a sense of self

When contemplating my final column of the semester -- and the last chance that I will ever have to address the Penn community as the executive editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian -- I was overwhelmed with possibilities.

Or not.

Instead, I sat at my computer for four hours straight, typing introductory sentences -- and then promptly erasing them.

I called two co-editors to solicit their opinions. I chatted with my roommates who were procrastinating (those term papers can always wait). I even solicited the opinion of a DP veteran who was bored in his New York office.

And yet, nothing came. In an entire afternoon of brainstorming, I managed to accumulate zero words of any importance.

I had envisioned a column stating my ultimate conclusion -- the end-all, be-all, prolific, heart-stopping essay that would stick up for the noble rights of the journalist and the college newspaper.

But all I really had the motivation to write 750 words about was this year's college football national championship game -- but you'd be reading the sports section if you were interested in that.

With my successor already elected and my utility at the DP waning, it became apparent that I -- the Penn student, the individual -- had very little to say on her own. If I wasn't sticking up for the DP or tackling a Penn administration issue as a person "in the know," the words just weren't flowing.

But then I had one of those genius moments, realizing that something I had read for a class actually had an application to my life, and not in a solely academic setting. It was one of those realizations that makes the hundreds of thousands of dollars my parents have dropped on my education almost, well, worth it.

I flipped open Paul Gergen's The Saturated Self, my assigned reading from a history seminar. In 1991, Gergen published the first edition of his now well-renowned book, and in the past decade, its relevance to society (and American society in particular) has only increased dramatically.

The premise of the work is the negotiation of the self under increasingly intense technological pressures. Gergen is attempting to understand how the influences of contemporary life -- whether it be a cell phone, wireless Internet or transatlantic flights -- is affecting the identity of the individual.

His conclusion? Not a particularly optimistic one.

Gergen puts forth a strong argument in support of an encompassing identity crisis in "modern" society. The individual is forced on a more regular basis to juggle ever-expanding lines of communication from numerous sources. But by increasing the sheer number of expected relationships, Gergen argues, the individual in society is not really bettering himself. Instead, he says, the individual is reaching its point of saturation and in the process losing complete sight of the self.

Which is precisely what I have done in the past three and a half years.

I've spent countless hours typing out articles on DP computers. I've stayed up late into the night wrestling with charges of racism, selectivism, slander and defamation. I sacrificed my personal relationships for those of the DP's -- and it really may have been worth all the effort.

I would never say, of course, that I would take back a day of working at the DP -- the experience, knowledge and opportunity that I have been privy to as a result of this paper are myriad. I am that well-connected individual that Gergen describes. I am fully capable of taking advantage of connections from New York to Milan to Seattle to Albuquerque. I have the ability to take a decently paying job next year, rent a nice apartment and live the life of an early-twenties professional. The world, it appears, is my oyster.

But without the rudimentary knowledge of who I am, it's one giant sea of confusion. I have, after all, applied to be a wedding planner, a risk analyst, a marketing manager and a bike tour leader.

It turns out that I can't be happy with any of those options until I figure out what is going to make me happy, just in general.

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm states in his book, The Art of Loving, that in order to love anyone else (your fianc‚, your mother, your dog) you must first have a finely tuned understanding and love of yourself.

Nietzsche preaches the same wisdom: "One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam."

So here is my prophetic statement: Wherever you are in life, be conscious of the balance between what you want and what others may want for you. And, if possible, do a better job of keeping tabs on yourself than I have.

So here's to roaming, wandering and finding the inner self. Maybe in a couple of years at least I'll have me all figured out.Amy Potter is a senior World History major from Albuquerque, N.M. and executive editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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