Dear Reader,
Chaos is a lifestyle at Colorado College. We juggle jobs, social lives, classwork, and a myriad of responsibilities, all while trying to find the time to eat, sleep, and return missed calls. Blocks One and Two are the most hectic part of the year–campus is covered with yellow move-in carts and discarded furniture, you’re getting daily emails from the three thousand clubs you signed up for freshman year, relationships are beginning and ending. Things slip through the cracks. You forget to buy your friend a birthday card, the bookstore fines you for a long-lost textbook rental, the number in the red bubble of unresponded-to texts rises. Everyone’s life is a little messy, and for everyone, that messiness is different. So for our first issue of the year, we wanted to hear about the unique ways chaos appears in each of your lives. What does it mean to feel chaotic? Does it overwhelm you? Fuel you? Maybe a bit of both?
We asked for chaos, and we got it. These pieces contain all of the wild ups and downs we hoped for. The writers immersed us in the beautiful and overwhelming nature of existence, exploring their relationships with the messy pieces of their lives and inviting us to do the same. Margalit Goldberg talks about embracing a messy room and allowing a space to be lived in. Kanitta Cheah brings us a stunningly tumultuous prose-poem exploring the daunting unknowns of life, and Charlotte describes the controlled chaos of “Hot Girl Summer” which media constructs as an ideal for young women.
As you read through this issue, we invite you to explore the chaos in your life, too. We invite you to try something new, to enjoy the unexpected, to open your mess drawers and appreciate the clutter. Cook without a recipe, dance without shame, say that thing you’ve been meaning to get off your chest. We encourage you to ask questions with no answers and sit with the unknowns.
If there’s one thing we learned while working on The Chaos Issue, it’s that nothing is as neat as it seems. Once you realize that, things get a little easier and a lot more fun.