Wednesday, January 30. 2019 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, January 30, 2019 // The Statement 
5B

BY EMILY CONSIDINE, CARTOONIST

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHELLE FAN

”

T

his past summer, I found out 
that my Bursley Residence 
Hall housing assignment had 
been moved from a mixed-gender hall 
to a same-gender hall. It really wasn’t a 
big deal — I knew it might happen and 
I still had a decent room. But I was still 
struck with this irrational nervousness 
for something I shouldn’t have been ner-
vous about.
I’m a girl. I have friends who are girls. I 
already knew half of my floormates from 
living with them last year and I knew 
they were all really nice. A same-gender 
hall shouldn’t have been an issue, and 
rationally, it wasn’t. But as the days crept 
closer and closer to September, I found 
myself getting more and more anxious 
about living in that hall. I kept trying to 
bring it up to friends, subtly, with lines 
like, “Hey, it’s gonna be strange living in 
an all-girls hall, haha!” and they’d just 
respond with, “Why is that an issue?” 
Which I totally get, because it really isn’t 
an issue, but there was still something 
worrying me that I couldn’t seem to 
make people understand. 
One of my friends even said, “You 
know, for a lesbian, that’s kind of sex-
ist.” It wasn’t the first time that I tried 
to explain how my reservations were 
not grounded in dislike, but rather, I just 
didn’t know how to deal with girls. 
Women can be awesome. I’d be the 
first person to say that. I’m the “raging 
feminist” of my family. I’ve marched, 
called representatives, and signed peti-
tions for gender equality and women’s 
rights. The theme of my cartoon in The 
Daily is “women’s issues.” But there’s a 

difference between large-scale societal 
issues and complex personal relation-
ships, and I still couldn’t shake the anxi-
ety of living in an all-girls hall.
I used to be a hostess at this fancy 
restaurant where I was the only young 
woman on the waitstaff. It was just me 
and a bunch of 20-something waiter 
guys and it was chill. We’d talk about 
hair gel and salsa dancing and how much 
we hated our customers. I slipped into 
my “dude-bro” voice, the one that sounds 
like every stoned surfer I grew up with. 
They still treated me differently because 
I was a girl, of course — it took time for 
them to warm up to me. But once that 
initial awkwardness left, I had it figured 
out easy.
About a month later, another hostess 
was hired. She was my age, but nothing 
like me. Long hair, high heels, YouTube-
tutorial makeup. We were stuck togeth-
er at the hostess stand for hours, with 
nothing to say to each other. It was like 
we came from different ecosystems, and 
scientists were just now putting the two 
species in the same habitat to see how 
they would interact.
Eventually, this hostess started talk-
ing to me, most likely because she real-
ized that she could talk about anything 
for as long she wanted and I wouldn’t 
object. Her musing about her personal 
life was better than nothing. She told 
me about her college applications, her 
sisters and most of all, her ex-boyfriend. 
One day she came in to work and said, 
“Emily, I’ve finally figured out what I 
want in a man. He needs to be attractive. 
Physically.” This mutual rapport lasted 

for a few shifts, but then it all went to 
hell. 
One day, she asked me if I ever had 
any boyfriends, and I responded, pretty 
plainly, “I’m gay.” My remark was met 
with a one-word response, “oh.” And 
then she was silent. I don’t know if it was 
deliberate, and I want to give her the 
benefit of the doubt that it wasn’t, but she 
didn’t talk to me much after that.
I’m pretty familiar with the whole 
straight-girl-suddenly-gets-really-
uncomfortable-and-then-the-friend-
ship-is-kinda-over thing. 
It’s been happening since I was a kid, 
even before I really understood it, to the 
point where I’m always a little surprised 
when straight girls are kind to me. It’s 
really cool when they are, but there’s 
a part of me that’s always suspecting 
they’re going to realize they hate me and 
tell me to leave them alone.
Honestly, that’s a terrible way to think. 
It’s its own kind of prejudice. I approach 
too many straight girls with the expecta-
tion that they’re not going to want to be 
around me, or that we don’t have enough 
in common. This belief directly influ-
ences who I befriend and spend my time 
with. I know, it’s pretty messed up.
I think I’ve gotten better at checking 
those assumptions since I’ve arrived at 
college. At least, I hope so. But some-
times, I still get paranoid, and I can’t fig-
ure out if it’s me or someone else who has 
the problem. Is that girl being rude to me 
because she’s running late, or because 
I have short hair? Is she avoiding me 
because she’s busy, or because I make 
her uncomfortable? I don’t know. 

I don’t make it easy for myself — my 
haircut and clothes and lack of makeup 
all signal “this kid never grew out of the 
tomboy phase.” I know that is not how 
it works. But that doesn’t stop me from 
believing people are thinking it. 
My freshman year, I went to an audi-
tion for a campus dance group. I had 
been dancing since I was five, so I had 
been trying out for a few ensembles, 
thinking I might have a shot. However, 
the moment I walked into this audition, I 
immediately felt every girl’s eyes on me. 
Glaring. A room of leggings and pony-
tails and the unshakable thought that 
every single person there wanted me 
gone. Like in a staring contest I wasn’t 
prepared for, I made it 20 minutes before 
blinking. I sighed. I mean, what was the 
point? They weren’t going to want me on 
their team. So I just left.
I’ve been living on this all-girls hall 
since September now, and it has obvious-
ly been fine. Everyone is nice, support-
ive and fun to be around. Looking back, 
there was genuinely no good reason to be 
nervous in the first place.
But that anxiety still sticks around. 
Despite being a woman myself, when-
ever I’m in majority-women spaces — 
whether it’s in a bathroom, a classroom, 
or a party — I keep catching myself wor-
rying if I’m making someone uncomfort-
able by being there.
Maybe someday I’ll get over it. In the 
meantime, I’ll enjoy this hall while I’m 
on it. However, not accidentally, I’m the 
only woman living in my apartment next 
year.

NIGHT SHIFT 
ESSAYS

NIGHT SHIFT

On straight girls and social spaces

I 

am a constellation of contradictions. I eat 
vanilla and chocolate ice cream, often mix-
ing the two together or finding a flavor some-
where in between. I listen mostly to indie music 
and classic vinyl, but I indulge in the stylings of top 
40 pop from time to time (yes, I still like Maroon 
5, what of it!). I enjoy serious and silly movies, 
from “The Godfather” and “Eternal Sunshine of 
the Spotless Mind” to “She’s the Man” and “White 
Chicks.” But perhaps my greatest personal paradox 
is that I’m an “ambivert,” or rather, both an intro-
vert and an extrovert.
For most of my life, I thought I was just an intro-
vert. From elementary to middle school, I was pain-
fully shy, riddled with social anxiety and frequently 
desired to do things on my own. In class, I pre-
ferred working independently as opposed to group 
projects. At home, I read books, drew still lifes of 
the plants in my backyard, watched TV and filmed 
my own wacky short films on my iMac G5 — all by 
myself. Going out anywhere for an extended period 
of time — particularly a place that was crowded, 
loud and overwhelming like the mall, a busy restau-
rant or a bar mitzvah party — was a major struggle.
Even though I cherished my aloneness, a part of 
me knew deep down that I might also be an extro-
vert, but that I just hadn’t found the right people to 
surround myself with. My lack of interest in sports 
alienated me from my male peers, while my general 
fear of social interaction made it difficult to find 
ways to connect with people my age. Still, there was 
something missing, an experience I was craving but 
that also somehow felt far beyond my reach. 
Once high school approached, I found myself 
becoming friends with people who shared my pas-
sion for pop culture and began making plans to hang 
with them out over the weekends. While I credit my 
summers at Jewish sleepaway camp and the Jewish 
youth group I belonged to for exposing me to a wide 
network of like-minded individuals, high school 
was what provided me the opportunity to meet 
people I wouldn’t normally engage with. I started to 
genuinely like being around people: going to mov-
ies with them, having deep conversations, getting 
dinner, venturing to concerts, having sleepovers. 
The more social circles I immersed myself in, the 
sharper I was at socializing. It was as if a key to that 
part of myself had been unlocked and I had finally 
found what I was looking for. 
And yet, every now and then, my introversion 
pulls me back. Between the end of high school and 
the beginning of college, I began to notice the limi-
tations of my newfound extroversion. Talking with 
someone became stimulating at first, but exhausting 
after a while. I’d click “Going” on Facebook invites 
to upcoming events, but on the day of, I sometimes 
couldn’t exert the effort to follow through with my 
initial plan to go. After sophomore year, I stopped 
going to tailgates because I knew what to expect 

and didn’t feel compelled enough to day drink for 
four hours and dance to the same old sing-a-long 
jams almost every Saturday of the fall semester.
Depending on my mood, I found myself getting 
irritable whenever I was with a group of people 
that would rather go to Rick’s or a house party than 
stay in and watch a rom-com. When I am at a bar 
or a party, and enough conversations have been had 
and enough drinks have been consumed, I’ll stand 
in the corner, space out, check Instagram or look at 
the clock to see when is the most appropriate time 
to leave.
At a school as intensely extroverted as the Uni-
versity of Michigan, the pressure to hang out with 
people on a constant basis is especially draining. 
The social environment of a college like Michigan 
is built on a rather cruelly idealistic expectation 
that in order to truly have fun and embrace the 
undergraduate experience, we must interact with 
our friends as often as possible. We aren’t, however, 
conditioned to just be by ourselves. Aloneness is 
often negatively associated with loneliness. 
For me, being alone is not the same thing as being 
lonely. When I spend a long amount of time solo, my 
body will tell me — even sometimes force me — to 
explore the outside world and catch up with friends 
over dinner or coffee. But when I maximize my 
time with other people, my body will persuade 
me that I’m in desperate need of a me-time 
recharge and soon, I’m sitting in the swivel 
chair in my bedroom, catching up on a Net-
flix show, stuffing my face with whatever 
snacks are left in the pantry.
The weird thing about being an ambi-
vert is that I don’t have a preference for 
my introversion or my extroversion. They 
coexist with one another. It’s a symbiotic, 
“both-and” relationship rather than an 
“either-or” dynamic. It’s not because I 
can’t make up my mind. It’s because I 
don’t want to feel constrained to just 
one thing. Confining myself to a singu-
lar trait or interest makes it harder for 
me to grow. If I just stick with being 
one thing, it would be like a betrayal 
to my inner self — a complete sup-
pression of who I am. Though 
I am totally comfortable 
with my ambiversion, 
I worry a lot about 
balancing these two 
sides of myself. A con-
tradiction is a blessing 
and curse, but as a cyni-
cal optimist, I’d like to 
think it’s more of the 
former.

This series is an ode to the college lifestyle that rarely warrants the time to 

wallow in your own thoughts and write for fun. Every month we pose a prompt 

and receive personal essay submissions from students across the University of 

Michigan. The following four writers explored the January prompt of duality.

BY SAM ROSENBERG, DAILY ARTS WRITER
Confessions of an ambivert

The February “Night Shift 
Essay” prompt is all about dis-
honesty. We are taught the risks 
of lying from a young age with 
the tale of Pinocchio’s growing 
nose. Yet, it would be naïve to 
think that human beings never 
lie. Sometimes we mess up and 
tell big lies. And sometimes ver-
sions of the truth squeak by as 
white lies. We lie to ourselves, 
our friends, our family and even 
strangers. Be honest about your 
dishonesty in 800 to 1200 words. 
Email your submission to state-
ment@michigandaily.com by 
February 22. We can’t wait to 
read what you write. 

NEXT MONTH’S 

PROMPT

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

ILLUSTRATION BY WILLA HUA

