April 2, 2024
As a person who is coming to be. Okay, I've been in a poetic mood, so here's a manifestation of that. TLDR; School is fun and university is another place with its own fun and stressors. Hamidah's projecting. Yadda yadda.
If you’re a high school senior from the US, this past weekend was probably quite consequential—or rather, it probably felt like it. In deciding where to go, it feels like you're asking: where will I spend the next four years of my life?
This feels like a modest question. There’s more than that. Right? The decisions you make and where you decide to go will decide your future like nothing has before. Now, I don’t think I buy into the terminal state that is starting your degree. Though, I wish I did. I wish I had more buy-in, more mental stake. This institution's perceived optionality has definitely affected my attitudes towards the institution, for better or for worse.
University being inconsequential just isn’t true. But I’m being pedantic. Still. The choices you make and the state you find yourself in are affected by the events of the past and impact the events of the future. So, it’s not like the choices you make don’t matter, but it’s what you make of the experience. Cliché, I know. But, your school might reify a value of yours better than the others, a few more values than some.
I think there’s this other narrative where your college makes an angsty person out of you, where you live in the negatives. It can be an environment where you’re forced and you choose to live against the grain. It’s probably really hard to do long-term and likely not worth it. So much so, that if you feel like this is the only way for you to exist, maybe you should transfer. But maybe it's worth it to stay and tough it out—it's character building.
Nevertheless, what I mean by this is my school is in a large city. I wanted to attend a tiny liberal arts college in upstate New York. Maybe I’m quirkier than some, but I wanted small classrooms and a really tight-knit community. Before I had to commit, I spoke with an economics professor there, and he mentioned how the students would help onboard new faculty, and he was just super nice. I felt like I would have a really happy and comfortable time there. I decided not to go there.
In retrospect, I’m glad I chose my school. Starting at my school, though, was really turbulent. It’s a city; my move-in was rushed, and the first week felt pretty jarring. Teetering. I came in with a lot of fear because this was not a small liberal arts college, quite far from it, but the neuroticism made me more active in making my experience than I would have otherwise. I’ve gotten really good at navigating places independently, my French has improved, and I feel like I immersed myself in reality in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise.
This time last year, I was stressed out of my mind. Right now, I’m in my second semester of university and less stressed—the stress is packaged differently I think. I’m taking a pretty light courseload, or rather, courses where the classes are more optional than not. I always thought I would be a STEM major; it wasn’t until Grade 11 that I considered that there was a world where I wasn’t. There was a world where I would be a humanities major and write all day long, and this could be rigorous and I could make a promising career out of that. It was also out of fear. If I tried hard at this thing that I knew others were really good at, then they could judge me; they could judge me with precision, and point out exactly how I failed. My failure would be legible.
I haven’t declared my major yet. I have an idea of what I’ll study, and I’d like to think it comes from something more intrinsic than it once did. I still think about what major combinations seem the most outlandish, which class would translate to this specific skill that would allow me to work on this specific thing, but there is a different approach. It’s funny that I say this because my intended major is not unique, and I feel suspicious of the choice. They said to be wary of convergence and maybe I should. Hesitant to declare. Hesitant to commit. Hesitant to place my trust in a major. Our add-drop period is annoyingly short, so trying out classes to see whether you just vibe with the professor is hard.
Anyway, it’s been hard to articulate, but I have this sentiment, or notion, that I’m trying to make sense of—which is this person who is coming to be and what that means. Being in the transitionary state feels very weird, and now you are responsible. I think college kind of shields you from this in some ways. It’s the first space, at least for me, that as an adult by law, I’ve existed in, independently. Although age by number is arbitrary, and my brain isn’t fully developed, it’s a time in your life when you start making choices that matter. It’s interesting how this is the space where people realize this, where you’re supposed to realize this. If you’re coming from boarding school, maybe this feels less like a rite of passage: the bit of living away from home. That’s how it felt for me.
When I was a baby and then a little toddler I would say I was pretty embodied. I definitely wasn’t independent, and I hadn’t unlocked human skills like speech, complex (or basic) reasoning, or fine motor skills, but I was a person, and it was indisputable. It was indisputable for different reasons that being an actual, full person is now. Then, it was ignorance, a lack of self-awareness, and now it would be because I’ve hypothetically risen above the perils of internal back-and-forth. It would be because I reassociated, because I was self-aware. I was young, really young, and didn’t have an identity, but I was whole, or at least I think I felt whole. That’s what I imagine feeling whole was.
I got older, and slowly, this identity, wholeness, my personhood was breaking down, becoming fragmented. Now, at the ripe old age of 18, it’s like I’m holding these pieces in my hands, the ones I could catch. And you’re not sure what to do; I’m unsure what I want, although I can kind of intuit it. And I don’t know what happens when you reattach the pieces you have left. These three pillars hold up an idea of reconstruction, my reconstruction, and I'm waiting to see how they manifest.