When I packed my life up into a few cardboard boxes and rode out of my hometown, I was filled with a plethora of feelings: fear, excitement, anxiety, sadness. Now that I stand on the other side of the divide, staring back at my college experience some four months later, I realize that many of those feelings have abated, or at the very least decreased in intensity.
It’s finals week, which aside from marking a creeping sense of dread in my stomach that I have one last chance to make the cut, means that I am officially halfway through my freshman year of college.
When I first arrived here I wrote a passage about how I had survived my first week of college. Some of you may have even read it. Looking back on that article now, I can’t help but find some parts rather humorous (“I’ve registered for my own classes, fed myself, done my own laundry”) and others rather touching (“Still, this place doesn’t quite feel like home. Everything is too fresh, too new”).
That article was published on August 29th, and in retrospect, that was far too early to make sweeping and grandiose statements. Though I think it accurately reflected how I was in that moment, I’m not hardly the same person who wrote that bit back then. In the time between then and now I’ve climbed mountains, crossed rivers, lost love, played the part, explored cities, heard businessmen and presidents speak, danced, laughed, made friends, cried, and come closer to my own than I ever have before.
You’ve heard the cliché that college changes people, yes? I never believed it, no matter how many times it was reiterated to me. I knew who I was as I crossed that graduation stage, clasped that diploma, kept on walking all the way to Atlanta, Georgia. I knew who my friends were, what my values were, and where I was going, or at least I had a sense of the general direction.
Which isn’t to say that a lot of that has changed in entirety. I believe I had a firm idea of who I am now when I first rode out of the Dairyland all those months ago, but I’ve become a more realized version of me. I’ve become hyper-aware of my identity and what I stand for. Being one of the only Midwesterners within a hundred-mile radius does that to a person. Juxtaposition does that a person.
As such, I’m not so afraid, excited, anxious, or sad anymore. This place is less foreign and much more like home. I’ve built relationships, friendships, and memories here. I’ve come across a million and one different ways of looking at the world, none of them inherently faulty, all nestled in side by side. Wisconsin is still home to me, but Georgia is a little bit too. I still have a general sense of direction for my future, but the door’s so much more wide open than it’s ever been before.
Alright, I know that this was corny, and probably nowhere near as compelling for you as it was for me, but I do think it’s a message that needed saying. I’ll leave you with this: I’ve always loved the stars. Loved looking at them, studying patterns in them, wondering about how something so big could sit so far away. Wondering if someone out there was staring back at me, the two of us divided by the big black abyss we call space. I’ve gazed at the stars, alone and with people I love. It wasn’t until at college a group of friends and I sat down in a field and looked up at the night sky, straining our eyes to see the meteors that were supposed to be falling that night, that I realized the similarity between those stars and the one’s that stretched over the Great Lakes and the home I had left behind. If those skies could hold their identity despite the changing landscape, despite the years and the miles, maybe I was the same; maybe I had always been me, it just took a change of scenery to realize it.
