Classes are starting in a couple few weeks and it just landed on me the other day I am now in my senior year of college. It took me longer to get here than I expected, but here we are.
I have a persistent feeling that there was a right way to do this thing, the college thing, and that I didn’t do things that way.
It wasn’t what I expected.
It was living at home with my mom and dad, commuting instead of living on campus, driving in every kind of weather, listening to my car radio.
Making friends.
Buying textbooks so well-used they were falling apart, with notes from previous readers in the margins. Using the printers at school because there wasn’t one at home, using a tablet instead of a laptop for three solid years. Never, ever taking out loans, even if it meant bending over backwards and turning my life inside out to pull it off.
Obsessing over keeping my GPA in the 3.9’s, but never asking for help with a single writing assignment even when I really needed that help. Spending all the free time that I had giving that kind of help to other people, and hoping that it counted for something.
Working on campus, living in learning centers, working a total of seven different jobs over the course of five years.
Zoning out every thirty seconds in class, all the time. Objectively admirable procrastination abilities. Debilitating anxiety over deadlines and exams. An actual existential crisis when I got a 75 on a term paper, that one time.
Doing the best that I could.
Listening, and asking questions, and speaking up when I had something to say.
Earning scholarships from every department of every program that I was ever enrolled in. And then some.
Knitting in class. Countless $1.07 mugs of black coffee from the cafeteria. Walking with friends by the lake.
Favorite grey jacket, a green lanyard with my car keys, old flip phone, wallet from a dollar store, and a chipped coffee mug. So many composition notebooks, a thousand different favorite pens.
Earning a two year degree in mathematics with honors and crying at graduation because I didn’t want to leave that place.
Somehow believing, in spite of much evidence to the contrary, that I wasn’t bright or resilient enough to carry on down the path I’d been walking. Walking away.
Accidentally taking a gap year, because I didn’t know what to do next. Somehow, traveling the world, a little
Staring in abject horror at the state of the world and not being able to look away, and not being able to process any of it with any kind of grace.
Stubborn determination to go back and finish the school that I’d started, no matter how much time or work it took, no matter how hard it was to remember why it mattered, no matter how strange it turned out to be.
Transferring schools during a pandemic, zoom meetings and online classes with professors I will never meet.
Studying in the back of my car.
Laying in the grass, under a tree, barefoot, eating a salad I packed at home and reading a book for class.
It wasn’t what I expected. I don’t think I was ever sure what to expect.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say, “if I could go back and do it all again, I wouldn’t change anything.”
But that isn’t true, because I would. Hypothetical mechanics of time travel aside, I think that’s just an interesting way of telling people that you haven’t learned anything.
If I could go back…
But I can’t. So that isn’t useful.
I am a senior in college and I don’t know how to put into words how good it feels to finally be able to say that.
It’s been a long time.
I am almost through. At least for a while.
I don’t think that knowing what I want to do is as important as I used to think it was. I like the idea that it’s okay to make things up as I go along, and keep finding interesting things to do until I die.
I don’t know where I want to end up, or how to get there, but I do know what I want to do next.
This fall I’m taking five 300/400 level classes. They will focus on the subjects of nonviolence, medicine, environmental issues, and genocide. The fifth class is statistics, because I am one class away from a math minor and it would be silly not to just go for it.
~~~ I am a terrible hippie and should be banished to the 1960’s as soon as possible ~~~
It is going to take lots of showers, naps, snacks, chats, cats, meds and water to get me through the heaviness of the things I’ve just signed up to think and talk and read and write about for four months.
But I think I’m going to be okay.
One day at a time, until Christmas, and then… one day at a time, until June.
I hope it’s a good stretch of time.