For years, I saw it in movies and read about it in books. Now that I’m in college, I see it firsthand in my peers. Throughout my first semester of college, I would come home to find that my friends were transitioning into completely new people; or at least they wanted to. I hear people say that they want college to be a time in their lives to try new things and to figure out who they are.
I understand that this is a time of freedom and a time of experimentation. Kids are experiencing independence from their parents for the very first time. It makes sense that people are going to go off the deep end for a little while. But, I just don’t buy the whole identity crisis thing. People come to college and they act as if they weren’t a person before they got here.
And the worst part is that I succumbed to this for a little while. Because everybody else seemed to be blossoming into new people, I felt like I needed to become a new version of myself in order for my college experience to be valid. That uneducated, young, high school version of myself didn’t seem to be good enough anymore. The people around me seemed to have already submitted to shedding their former personalities. And although some part of me knew that I didn’t need to participate, I longed to anyways. I longed to fit in, to have that surreal collegiate experience that I scoffed at my senior year of high school.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of reasons to feel like you need to evolve. Initially, as a college freshman, you have no friends, no organizations, probably no job, and no idea what it's like not to see your family every day.Those things are all frightening, terrifying even. It makes you feel like you need to morph yourself into something that will make friends, fit into your new place. That’s the thing though; maybe you’ve changed what club you’re a part of, or what the names of your best friends are, or now you a little bit more about calculus, but deep down you’re still you. You’re still that girl who loves burritos, and cheesy romance novels, and believes in people and true love. You’re still you. Or at least, I’m still me. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with personal growth. I think there are little things changing about people all the time.
There are definitely big moments of change as well. I can look back at my pre-college years and point out times in my life where I changed significantly: having my first major surgery, my baptism, meeting my best friends, meeting my boyfriend, and many more. These are things that changed me down to my core. Despite this, I was still the Taylor that everybody knew (and hopefully was at least able to tolerate). I was still me. I’m not proud of how shaken I was my first semester of college. I’m somebody that felt exceedingly confident in who I was before I got to college, and I still felt as if maybe I was wrong. I felt like maybe my entire personality was situational, created by the sports I chose to play and the people that I chose to surround myself with.
It took me months to understand that
1) it’s completely okay to feel scared and alone your first semester of college.
2) It’s also okay to want to change things about yourself.
3) You don’t have to worry about your identity, you’ve been creating it for almost 20 years, and it doesn’t just disappear.
It’s all going to be okay! We’re all going to go through times in our lives that change us, and maybe for some of us, one of those changes is going to happen during college. It’s also okay just to be who you are. You can look for new hobbies, new friends, and new knowledge without losing the person that you were before. As simple as this sounds, I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that one of the answer choices for who I wanted to become was simply myself. I want to take new classes, meet new people, better myself, and keep making the Taylor I started with into something great.
Maybe you need a clean slate, and if that’s the case, you should start one! I just want to remind people that it’s okay not to be ashamed of being the same person you were in high school. Being assured of yourself is something to be proud of, it’s not something to hide. I am Taylor Plate. I like to write, talk to people, play sports, and complain about my 50-year-old man knees. I believe in fairytales, that struggle leads to greatness, and that the world contains wonderfully good people, despite all the bad things that seem to happen.
So, who are you?