Dr. Annie Selak
Photo by Mina Derebail
If you’re reading this, you are not a burden.
In my role in the Women’s Center, students often come to my office when they are at their lowest low. I often hear them say something along the lines of “I don’t want to burden anyone with this,” where “this” could be a feeling, or an experience, or even themselves.
I want to say this clearly and directly: I have never once experienced a student to be a burden.
When a student comes to me, it is an honor to be welcomed into their life in that way. It is not a burden. It is not a waste of time. Whether it is for a 10-minute meeting or months of meeting regularly, I always experience the opportunity to journey with students as an immense honor.
Part of what makes Georgetown special is that students are not just a number. The reason we have spaces like the Women’s Center or Disability Cultural Center or LGBTQ is to accompany students throughout their journey. Accompaniment can take lots of different forms, and it is a process that we can shape together. Just like a friendship, no experiences of accompaniment look identical to one another. Accompaniment can look like crying in my office. It can also look like celebrating together at Rangila. More often than not, it looks like “ordinary” relationships that are anything but ordinary. It can be talking about the latest Taylor Swift album or the best coffee in Georgetown or Thoughts on the latest trend. It can be sitting in silence knowing that being together matters.
Accompaniment doesn’t need to have a plan or a direction. One of my favorite quotations is from Rainer Maria Rilke. He wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
When you reach out to others, it is ok if you don’t know exactly why you’re reaching out, or what you want to happen. We can figure it out together. Through accompanying one another, we can live into the answers together. And honestly, what we create together will be more enriching than whatever you or I could plan on our own.
Dr. Annie Selak,
Georgetown University Women’s Center Director
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