Stumbling & Smiling Through
By Sri Vidya Uppalapati
I’m not telling you to smile when you stumble. I’m instead reflecting on the fact that the times when I had stumbled the hardest and I felt the most stagnant, I somehow took some of my best photos. I had just moved from the off-campus university district of Ohio State University to a nearby Columbus suburb. As I pulled five years of college photos off my wall and stacked them away in a box, I realized that each photo was both truthful and a façade.
The last three years have been unimaginably difficult. I spent months failing or barely passing classes, questioning my major in my junior year, lying about how I was doing, sleeping for sixteen hours or not at all, and suffering from severe anxiety and depression without realizing the invader in my body had a name.
Two years ago, I was crying in my single bedroom apartment, desperately lonely, and knowing only that something had to change. I changed my major, started therapy, learned about SSRIs and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which it turned out was not an invader, but a protector that is a part of how I am wired.
Today, I am in a new apartment, happier in some ways, and still stumbling along in many others.
I just got off academic probation last week. I also unpacked photos this week from the semesters I spent on academic probation. There I am, dressed up and smiling. One part of me thinks, “What a lie – you slept through class but made it to the banquet.” Another part remembers, “Ah, these were taken with the friends who lit up my darkest days.”
I suffered a serious spinal injury in late October, so I have spent the last months in intensive physical therapy. Every time I look at my new body, 25 pounds heavier, slower, and barely able to take the stairs, I am tempted to think “I hate how I feel”. But I also look at the beach vacation photos my cousins and I took last month and I think, “Oh, golden yellow and rust are the perfect colors for me. Look at me – I look sunkissed.”
My therapist and I were talking about this in our session on Monday. She said, “Remember that a moment can simply be a moment… Or it can also hold everything that came before it and set up everything to come after it. You don’t know which moments will be which. You can simply live each moment as you wish.”
So I write this to myself, and to you, powerful girl. Your poise is not a lie. Your chaos, stumbling, and struggles do not make you unworthy. You have vast potential and you don’t have to fit into anyone’s box.
I am entering my sixth year at Ohio State University. It took me three years to find out what I wanted to study. Now that I am where I’m supposed to be, it doesn’t matter that I’ll be taking classes with sophomores or that I have now publicly written that I was on academic probation. I will not lower my head as I stumble and smile through the next chapter of my life.
I will stumble again. But I have stumbled in the past and still found a reason to smile. I could, and have, and on bad days, I will sometimes choose shame and stagnation instead of facing the risks of living. But as Courtney Milan writes in The Countess Conspiracy, “A life without risk is one where I tell myself I’m not worthy of taking a chance. It’s a life without hope for the future.”
And I do hope for my future. I have so many lives I could live. My imagination won’t keep me locked in my room, imagining options in safety without opening the door, picking a pair of shoes, deciding to be someone, and manifesting a dream today. As I painstakingly take the stairs down from my apartment, I’ll look up to see a friend or catch my reflection… and I’ll smile.
Want to connect with Sri Vidya? Find her on Instagram at @srividyauppalapati.
