I only believe in "soul" as an adjective.

"How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person?"

--Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

(via Choosing Pancakes)

Choosing Pancakes and I, along with some of our other friends, were having a conversation last week sometime which briefly touched upon the concept of the self as body v. the self as something like a soul. She seemed quite surprised by the fact that I don't believe in somethings-like-souls. And I think that very little of that disbelief is due to the fact that I associate the term "soul" with religious indoctrination, or religiosity at the very least. 

I just don't see where something-like-a-soul comes in. To the best of my knowledge, everything that I am and have been and will be results from combinations of nature and nurture--that's genetics and the biological aspects of my body and mind that I don't necessarily understand on one hand and ecological processes, the spaces and places and sociocultural situations I've found myself in throughout my lifetime on the other. I have nothing to convince me that some other person with the same biology and who has been through the exact same set of everyday lived experiences as I have been through wouldn't come out to be me (though I suppose I have nothing to convince me that this hypothetical person would be me either). 

What am I, really, essentially? I am thoughts in a brain in a body in a particular social location in a world. I am memories. I am hopes and dreams and decisions and emotions. I am a mind. If a critical difference lies between the term "mind" and the term "brain," then perhaps there-in lies the "soul," but I don't know that I buy that. I could fathom calling something the "soul" that is actually the sum of one's lived experiences that have come to shape who and what they are, because that's the only thing I can say is essentially me, but I feel like that's not what my friends were talking about. The better terms for what I'm talking about, I suppose, are the "self" in the social-psychological sense, or the "self-concept" or "identity" in a sociological sense. I am me by a series of happy and unhappy accidents. I could have been anyone. Anyone could have been me. That negates the idea of a soul, in my mind.  

Things I Love about the First Week of School:

Everyone still has TIME for each other. I think I had forgotten what it was like to have a whole group of girls gathered in a circle around my room eating snacks and having hours-long conversation about boys/relationships/love/sex, fears, being a woman, the future, ways we think we'd raise our hypothetical children, insert-anything-else-under-the-sun-here until damn near 4 o clock in the morning. This is bonding. This is how friendships are made and cemented. This is part of what I want to always remember about college. I used to have roommates (three of the four girls in my room tonight used to be my roommates), and this kind of thing happened often, but since we all moved into singles, my girl-talk has been mostly one-on-one or (don't call me a traitor) with guys. (Guys can girl-talk surprisingly well. Many of my closest male friends are incredibly insightful, oftentimes in very different ways than my closest female friends, and I value that more than they may realize.) I am so tempted to say that nights like these somehow ARE college. They're the quintessential experience I'm not sure it's possible to have under other circumstances. Even when you feel like the conversation keeps circling back to earlier points/roadblocks and going nowhere. Even when you feel like it's the entire room against one or two of you. Even when shots are fired at a member of your group and everyone else falls all over themselves laughing. Even when inside jokes/knowledge are exchanged between certain members of the group, leaving others out. I was in a philosophy class for 25 minutes once. I couldn't do it. I prefer my philosophy to be of the 4-am-exchanged-between-friends variety.

How do we ever lose time for this? Why do classes and homework and things with deadlines take precedence? When does this time for each other and stimulating conversation become a waste? It didn't always when we were roommates. What do these walls (read: buildings) between us do to us? How do we make it stop?