 |
| College is a lot of being alone, with other people |
Two. Years.
In terms of my entire lifespan, it's not a huge chunk of time to be sure but it has been half of my college career. Thinking back on it, I suppose I have acquired a peculiar set of skills from my time at Wellesley. Given enough time and resources, I can perform a Western Blot for you. Supposedly, if you plop me into a boat I can conceivably make it move in the direction I want it to go(though at times that's questionable). I can solve murder mysteries using formal analytical Logic(it's always the butler). I can write you pages about Ancient Greek temple architecture and even more pages about soil rhizospheric microbial communities (read: dirt.) I can cut up baby pigs and poison cell cultures. I can ask you to marry me in Japanese and can talk to you for twenty minutes about the dichotomy of representation of Asian women in media and its societal implications. I can tell you, in excruciating detail, about flesh-eating bacteria and necrotizing faciitis. I can even do my own laundry now!
I have been trying to write this post for a really long time but I still don't really know what to say. I feel like I'm supposed to have some kind of mystical knowledge by virtue of having spent two years doing what I'm doing and being where I have been. I feel like I should have some worldly knowledge about life and the universe that I can write about here and explain in great detail. I feel like I should have some sentimental message, just waiting to be wrapped up with a bow and packaged for your consumption. But really, I don't. I just have endless of amounts of questions, questions that had been percolating beneath the surface of my consciousness for the last month or so but haven't really had the time or courage to confront. What's going to happen next semester? What about after Wellesley? What's next? Have I done right by myself by being here?
All the questions and very few(if any) of the answers.
College has always seemed like it is beacon, a place where you go from being a kid to being an adult, whatever that means. It's supposed to a place that prepares you for "the real world" (as though the world I was living in before was 'unreal'!). Being halfway done with this process, impending adulthood is something that occupies my mind much more than it did a year ago. I often wonder if I am in any better a position now than I was two years ago to face whatever challenges I may encounter in the future. What's going to happen when I leave?
I will not lie to you-I have felt tested every single day that I have been here. It was like every lecture had the same challenges; why are you here? why do you want this? how badly do you want this? This school has tested the strength of my conviction to my studies every day. And over the course of my time here, I still feel like it has raised many more questions than it answered-Is it worth it? Am I any better off now than I was then? Does what I'm doing even matter?
I often think about the girl that walked into Pomeroy 212 two years ago. The difference between who I was when I first started college and the person I am to today is tangible and real. It's something I can attempt to quantify, but for the life of me I cannot tell you how it happened. I think I always imagined that it would be as if a lightning bolt struck you and you became immediately and irrevocably awesome but I can't pinpoint any one moment in time where I made a conscious decision to become something 'other'.
College has been weird and definitely not what I expected. I don't think I've ever been more alone in my life and I don't mean that in a brooding cry for help kind of way. You are constantly surrounding by people but they aren't as concerned about you as it seemed people were in high school. And they're not doing this to be cruel to you, they're just busy living their own lives. Parents are accessible but not immediately so but this combination is just kind of bizarre. It's like a study of how you can best be by yourself, with other people-which is odd to say the least.
The summer before I left for Wellesley, I had a teacher tell me that life is like the scene in the Wizard of Oz. The gang came upon a fork in the roads and deliberated about which one was the right road to take. But because both were yellow and brick, they would both eventually lead to the Emerald City. So if anything, I guess it's worth putting in perspective that this is only the first of many forks in the journey. I'm curious to see where it all leads to and I hope you are too.
