I feel like I’m losing my mind. Not a niche indie 2000s Tumblr version of it, but an actual version of losing my mind. It’s not pretty, it’s not aesthetic, and there is most certainly nothing therapeutic about losing my mind.
Growing up, I thought of college as a new beginning. You escape from your little town, you leave your friends and family behind, hell, you even change your name. In a sense, it’s the beginning of the end. The last chapter where mistakes are allowed. You do things you’ve never done before. If they fail, you apologize and you move on. If they don’t, you integrate new behaviors into your life. That part of college is true. Everything else has not been my experience.
It could be that the problem is me. Or everyone else, for that matter. Maybe we’ve grown up enough to have defining qualities that remain stagnant no matter what we do. Maybe for some people, changing who they are is not possible. Maybe pretending I’m inherently different from who I was two years ago is just complete blasphemy. In any case, college hasn’t been revolutionary or life altering for me. It’s just been the same.
And all throughout my college experience, I’ve kept wondering why I expected a change so dramatic that I would barely recognize myself afterward.
It’s not like I’m unhappy with who I am. I like who I am. But I just thought who I am would change. There’s a contradiction somewhere. I want to be the person I am, but I also expected to become someone else. And maybe that’s the problem with the way we imagine growing up. We’re taught to think of it as a transformation, as if one day we’ll wake up and realize that everything is different. That we’re different.
I expected college to be that moment.
I blame the movies I watched growing up. They convinced me that college was always a new cast of characters, a new set of experiences, and a new version of yourself waiting to emerge. Even when things went wrong, they seemed to go wrong for a reason. Every mistake became a lesson. Every embarrassing moment became a funny story. Every bad decision somehow contributed to the person the main character was supposed to become.
I’ve certainly gone through enough of the pains of college to expect something to come out of them. And yet, here I am, still waiting for the part where it all means something.
Because real life, unfortunately, does not come with a script. Sometimes you make mistakes and learn something. Sometimes you make the same mistake again. Sometimes you have an experience that is supposed to change you, and afterward, you’re still you. You still think the same way, react the same way, and carry the same parts of yourself you thought you would leave behind.
And what are you supposed to do with that? How do you know if you’re growing when you’re still the same person who has to live through it? If I’m constantly wondering whether I’ve changed, maybe I’m blinding myself to the small things that have. Or maybe I really did expect too much from a place that was never going to turn me into somebody else.
I don’t know which possibility is more frustrating.
Featured image: BBC
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