My senior essay for my high school newspaper concluded with the line, “There’s nothing else left but everywhere else.” I had to get out of my hometown and immerse myself in other cities, befriend new people and rack up new experiences.
I was ready to start over, but for the first year or so, I was so entrenched in my ways that I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know what I wanted because I had such a crippling fear of seeming inauthentic that I didn’t entertain change.
Throughout freshman year, I periodically composed late-night, diary entry-esque blog posts (which shall remain un-hyperlinked), punctuated with ludicrous proclamations like, “I don’t need coffee to keep me going. Just the constants in my life.” I lived in awe of the fact that I finally lived in Chicago after having visited many times as a kid. I would go out to the Lakefill and feel a rush as I gawked at the booming skyline, feeling every possible emotion, hearing every possible sound. I would squint at the northeast edge of the horizon, trying to imagine the exact angle toward which I would have to direct my vision in order to line up with my house in northern Michigan.
At some point the novelty wore off, but the overwhelming nature of it all did not. I started stomaching Seattle’s Best coffee in Allison Dining Hall and amassing an armor of jadedness to get me through the deadlines and general absurdity.
My high school boyfriend was part of my identity crisis. He went to Loyola, and we broke up in February of sophomore year. Up until that point, I could scarcely recall a Saturday spent in Evanston. From this, I figured out how to look at my life and go, “Okay, you have a good/bad thing going for you. Act accordingly.” College was about walking the fine line between letting go and letting yourself go. Or as a SWUG might put it: between being a real person and a hot mess.
Meanwhile, during breaks, I grappled with the idea that “you can’t go home again.” It felt like either Evanston existed or my hometown existed, but both could not exist at the same time because I could not be in both places at once – and because both were changing all the time. It took me until junior year to get over that, having finally gone back and forth enough times to realize my past and present were not mutually exclusive. Now more than ever, Chicago/Evanston and Traverse City, Mich., feel like exactly what they are: two cities, miles apart, on the same lake.
Then suddenly, way too early, it started to feel like college was ending, just when I felt established here. Seniors would graduate, juniors would study abroad, friends would take leaves of absence or go on journalism residencies and nothing would ever be the same. Meanwhile, “real-adult things” were increasingly happening, like leasing apartments and grocery shopping with my not-so new boyfriend and crossing state lines without consulting mom and dad. Last summer, a few of my closest friends announced they would graduate early. Some wouldn’t come back after Fall or Winter Quarter.
Never mind the maddening realities of the U.S. student aid system. Lucky for me, I’ve made great friends who I am confident will make great efforts to make sure this is not goodbye. Lucky for me, college still going on, as I write this two weeks before graduation. Even if it feels like it’s been winding down for the past two years.
It’s not over until you stop learning, and I haven’t. This year, I opted out of extracurriculars, thinking I’d finish every page of assigned reading and make dishes with acorn squash in them and go for Lakefill runs at dawn or dusk. These feats have seldom happened. Instead, I usually hit the pillow without having brushed my teeth, with the PDF I’m supposed to have read up on my computer screen. I close the laptop put it at the foot of the bed. I get up when I can’t hold my pee any longer. I spend more time applying for jobs than reading for the three surplus elective classes I opted to take. I wrote this essay before I started working on my final papers.
In short, I still don’t always do what I intend or what’s best for me. And maybe this is the point of a liberal arts education, but I’m leaving here much more aware of what I haven’t learned than what I have.
And I still have no idea where I’m going next, in case you dared to ask. Yet somehow life keeps going and changing and twisting into something else to the point where I feel like I’m floating, because there’s no way my two legs could have gotten me right where I’m standing at the moment. I’d call myself somewhat passive, but I also know that, yes, my actions had something to do with it. But where I am now still astonishes me. Because remember five minutes ago, or five hours ago, or five years ago, when I was over there, thinking that, and it was kind of similar to this, but these things hadn’t happened yet? When I was at home, applying to Northwestern, eager but clueless?
If I can do anything that I couldn’t do before college, it has less to do with my journalism skills than it does my ability to walk down the street with a sense of purpose and autonomy, peppered with fear and healthy skepticism. It’s because of everywhere I’ve been, not in spite of everywhere I still haven’t.
You become authentic when you stop trying so hard. Or when you stop trying so hard not to. When you discover something about yourself that is so real, so obvious that you don’t even have to declare it, you start to feel like you can just coast. Coffee helps, too.
Lydia served as Life and Style Editor, Assistant Managing Editor, Print Senior Editor and Print Managing Editor for North by Northwestern.