“Many men did not accept the new freedom that women had come to enjoy. Because men in the military were used to taking orders, they expected to be masters of their households upon their return home. World War II showed people that the world and the future were unpredictable.”
These are opening lines from a term paper that I once labored to perfect, one that probably meant a lot to me four years ago. It had slipped my mind until I went back very far into the hard drive of my computer and the folds of my brain to remember the first papers the 18-year-old person with my name and my birthday and my Social Security number wrote upon entering Boston University in 2005. It was for a women’s studies class I took when I was unaware of my own freedom and the string of battles that would prove that my world and my future were about to become uncertain, confusing, joyous, anticlimactic, devastating.
Everyone who attends college goes to find themselves. This is somewhat misleading, because when we leave, we have only begun to discover what it is we might become; though we have come to understand so much, we leave having scant idea about who we are. It is when we leave that we re-examine the selves we have left behind in the metamorphosis, questioning and re-questioning our best and worst decisions and what-iffing until we exhaust our brains with self-doubt. Why did I come to Boston? What was I running from? Am I still running now? Why didn’t I visit before I moved? Who let this happen? Who was I then? Who is the girl who believed in all that? Who is the woman who does not now? The college senior who has it all figured out when she graduates is one who has truly learned nothing yet.
Leaving college now is different from in 1975, the year my parents would have graduated from college if they had gone, or in 1950, the year my grandparents would have, if both of my grandmothers were not already mothers, and if my grandfather had been allowed to learn to read and write. We are perhaps one of the first graduating classes who have been stuck so far up the river without a paddle since the river was The Depression and the paddle was the New Deal. If we do not have the good fortune of being able to go to graduate school or have not miraculously landed a job, our loans must be paid and our credit card balances transferred because we mistakenly believed the generations before us—because going to college means being successful, more successful than them or everyone we know back home. But we, too, have bought the $160,000 mistake (or what we pray has not been a mistake) and sold our souls for the corporate jobs our hippie parents shook their fists at from 1967 to 1975, until they took their first government and corporate jobs, too. The impulse is to get angry, until we realize we have not understood hard times until now, and we still do not, and probably never will.
Leaving college is one of those manufactured instances, a rite of passage that invites self-reflection and nostalgia, regret and remembering. It is in these unavoidable, artificial moments that I am most unsentimental. Until I begin to say goodbye to the individuals who have meant the most to me, I will not weep for the time I have lost and the time I will begin without them.
It seems that I knew everything until this moment. I could work hard, get jobs that pay next to nothing because I am living off loan money, bury my nose in a book, call friends, grab a vodka-and-diet or four, make fun of others and myself and dance stupidly and hide the fact that I can actually dance well, go to concerts, see the Yankees ten times too many, charge it all on the Visa—it will be fine, I will be able to pay it, someday. This is not how it was supposed to be.
So going to college, for me, has never been what it was supposed to be, or what others thought it was supposed to be, or what I had been told it would be. I know now that your college years are not, in fact, the Best Years of Your Life, or at least I hope that the universe is not so cruel as to let you live them in your early twenties when you know so very little. The last four years have been much harder than anyone ever told me they might be. I did not attend hundreds of crazy parties; I never made more than four friends with whom I still try to spend time; I never believed I would have nothing to talk about with the friends who know me “best” from home; I thought traveling abroad would make me appreciate the world when it made me more alienated from myself and others than ever before. I sometimes think that if I were to sit next to a stranger alone in a bar and tried to tell her my story—while certainly not the hardest she has ever heard, perhaps not even harder than hers—she might be inclined to think I should receive the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Dramatic Comedy, a category in which I am the only nominee. Maybe that is just how it felt to me.
How it felt to me: like the war raged on, and no allies could penetrate the front to come to my defense. Leaving my empty thirty-first floor corner apartment at the end of my single semester at New York University, overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and the city that felt like home, unloading my belongings onto the cold concrete of my garage to rush to the hospital to tell my grandmother I loved her for the last time, her mouth hanging open, one side of her motionless and drooping, holding her hand and praying she would die so I could keep believing in a merciful God, which I could not; finding young love, and falling out of it; gaining weight and losing weight; reading that my friend from freshman year died in her sleep on my senior spring break, I will just see her at graduation, I meant to call her, I am sorry, Tori, that I did not call; catching a peeper watching me from outside the window of my first apartment; taking Imitrex for migraines, Nexium for a stomach ulcer; going back home to resume my part-time job selling lingerie with my very expensive degree from my prestigious private university; trying to swim, fighting the undertow and the very strong current bringing me out to the curve of the earth where the sun disappeared, feeling my heart beat in rhythm, I am, I am, I am.
It all comes back. The selves that I was, and with whom I am now so unfamiliar, still walk with me daily. Because I am a different “self” now from four years ago, my former selves serve me only in that they remind me who I am not, and can never be again. I condemn them as I will in ten years condemn the self I am today. I have lost touch with the 16-year-old whose long, blonde-brown curly hair needed a trim and six fewer sprays of hair spray, whose intent to please and set an example at all times kept her from ever being irresponsible in the slightest. I have lost touch with the ambitious, lonely but not friendless high school senior who had never sipped alcohol, for whom it was not enough to win $2500 in awards on graduation night and almost $100,000 in math and science scholarships, but who had to give her attentions to guys who knew better (she did not, surely) so she could feel good and mature—because that is what adults do. (They do not, presumably.)
And I am not sure I any longer recognize the hopeful girl who walked through Harlem and the Tate Modern and Coney Island and Saratoga Springs and Harvard Square and le septieme arrondissement and looked at a world to which she could contribute something worthy. I cannot remember the girl who swung her leg out of a small airplane, leapt out and fell freely to the earth, who felt inspired by a politician and her generation for the first time when she cast her ballot for president last November, who snapped pictures of every block in New York even after living there for six months because it is just that breathtaking. Her, though—her, I would like to get to know again. It is important to keep in touch with the selves we strive to forget and the selves we hope to remember. ? And so I write. I write to understand, to force order upon chaos, to make sense of the times I held her hands when the nurse tried to find the collapsed veins hiding from one more needle—squeeze as tight as you want, Nan, to put these memories down in my hard drive for when my brain grows old and I no longer remember what it was like to be me. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. I will remember that the girl who wrote for the first time about oppression that affected her mother and her mother is not the woman today who is graduating from college, knowing that she is free to determine her own course, understanding that her future may be uncertain, but the victory is sure to be worth the battles. She will struggle in the trenches, come out dirty, tired and wounded, but she will be very much alive, even if her allies do not show up. She will move forward, surrounded only by open sky and empty ground, will keep going, will choose the selves she was, is, will be, guided only by her beating heart.
ADDENDUM
To finish this paper—the last one due in my undergraduate career—I reflected on the time I spent in college, while trying to write in the style of Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. At the beginning, I took an excerpt from something I wrote (as she did) and tried to find its purpose (if it has one) and its relation to my life. Though Didion tends to start broadly and write about herself in small doses, I wrote a lot about my experiences and feelings.
To write like Didion, I attempted to use the following literary devices: repetition (I listed feelings and experiences and separated them only by commas or semicolons, in addition to italicizing questions in my mind), details (including years and examples), parenthetical thought, change of tense (I use past and present tense, sometimes in the same paragraph), existential thought patterns (“what does it all mean?”), breaks between sections, interjection of personal thoughts in descriptive sentences (or interrupted thoughts), use of the French language, direct intertextual references (to Didion and Sylvia Plath) and postmodern name-dropping (referring to medications), no use of contractions, themes of darkness, an authoritative but skeptical voice, and long sentences and paragraphs. I also tried to incorporate the theme of war from the beginning excerpt throughout the piece and use historical metaphors for my own life.
I realize that some of my references may only be understandable to me. The part about “swimming to the big rock” refers to a metaphor in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and also to being caught in a bad wave in Maryland two years ago, before I was pulled back in to the shore. “I am, I am, I am” is a quote from the novel, and also the tattoo I have on my wrist. (Plath writes that her body’s instinct to live is in opposition to her depression. She hears her heart beat and it reminds her that she is alive, and it sounds like the rhythm of “I am” said over and over.) A few of the sentences are also borrowed from Didion herself. I could not think of a better style, or a more influential author, to help me reflect upon my life as I left college.