College is a time to explore and adventure- the four years you spend at school are often described as a time in which you’ll “find yourself.” But what exactly does this mean? Finding yourself is an almost obsolete concept- if you haven’t already been found, then how are you here? Finding yourself isn’t a full time job- it’s something alluded to often, that most people have acknowledged happened to them- but how? Finding yourself in college isn’t a class you can take and pass. Instead, it’s just par for the course- part of the experience. Finding yourself, a hugely large concept, is done through smaller, simpler tasks of finding everything else that you possibly can.
In school, you’ll find new opinions. You’ll find people who nod at everything you say, and people who vehemently disagree with you. You’ll find out the reasons why, and you’ll try to understand them. When you find new opinions, you’ll also find out how you deal with them. You’ll find out what kind of listener you are, how open-minded you are, how much you invest in personal experience or how high you hold facts. There’s no right answer to any of these things, and often times, they’re not things you had to sit down and think about before. But when everyone around you is presenting something new, the process of accepting or understanding is hugely important. Finding the process that you go through is a part of finding out who you are.
You’ll find new hobbies and passions. After 18 years of never going to a sports game, you might find yourself at center ice during every school hockey game. You might find yourself buying football jerseys and face paint, or you might find yourself tailgating in parking lots. After 18 years of thinking that you’re good at one thing, you might find out that you’re also great at another: maybe you found a new passion for reading, or language, or even science. Things that you never thought of exploring before are all right at your feet, and finding these opportunities and discovering which things speak to you are another piece in the puzzle of finding yourself.
When it’s said that you’ll “find yourself” in school, people aren’t talking about a huge revelation or an “aha” moment. You don’t find yourself overnight, and you certainly don’t find yourself with an explosion of fireworks. In fact, you don’t really find yourself at all. You find out what you like to do. You find out what you think about Victor Hugo and Flannery O’Connor. You find out what types of music you like to listen to during car rides on nice days, with the windows down and music all the way up. You find out what you like to do on the weekends you’re stuck on campus when it’s rainy outside and all your friends went home. And before you know it, when you find all of these things, you begin to realize who, exactly, you think you are.
