Last week my roommate and I walked to our campus' bookstore and officially ordered our caps and gowns for graduation. After filling out the order form, shaking our head at the atrocious price of class rings, and glancing at the alumni t-shirts that would soon be on sale, it hit me: I'm a senior.
Now, I've been a senior for eight months already, but as my roommate and I walked back to our dorm, a feeling of homesickness began to settle in my stomach. The grass underneath my flip-flops, the smells radiating from the caf's dumpster, the other students passing by me on longboards: they would all be gone soon. In just over two months I'd be gone. Graduated. And nothing will be the same.
The realization of this is terrifying. Graduation is terrifying. That's the truth behind it, because suddenly you want everything to change, and yet, you want everything to stay the same.
Moving on is a part of life, as is change. Everyone knows that. But when you're forced to face this reality, when everything around you is suddenly temporary, the future becomes scary and exciting all at once. I don't want to leave college. I don't want to leave my friends, my roommate, my professors. And yet I know there is a whole other world out there waiting for me with new friends, new opportunities.
Things will always change. Everyone has to accept this. But this seems especially hard when you're a senior, when you know that things are going to be different soon, but you wish that time would slow down, just for a second, so you can laugh a little longer with your friends or stay up a little later with your roommate or actually work on that paper you've been promising yourself you'd start now for a week and a half.
I guess senior year is all about this dissonance of knowing things have to keep moving forward, but wanting them to stop. It's a strange feeling. It's kind of like being nostalgic before you even have something to be nostalgic about. But this is what should motivate us.
So here's my advice to current seniors: take this awareness, this feeling of homesickness, and force yourself to make your senior year the best you can. Go out more. Work harder. Expand your horizons and try new things. Make new promises. Take it all in because, soon enough, you'll be walking across that stage and things will never be the same. But don't forget that there's a strange beauty behind this craziness.
And congrats, class of 2017. You made it.
