I remember moving into my freshman year dorm. My parents had driven me all the way up to college blasting the Dixie Chicks and reminiscing about how I used to climb into toilet bowls with all my clothes on as a child. When we finally arrived on campus, they carried box after box up six flights of stairs to my walk-in-closet sized room. They hung up all my clothes and posters. They made sure I had enough bottled water to last me a month. I, in return, had a panic attack in a Jimmy John’s (if you’ve never heard of Jimmy Johns, first of all shame on you. They’re a sub shop that makes your sandwich ridiculously fast) and asked them to leave three hours earlier than they had planned because they were, “stressing me out.”
Last Friday I put on the cap and gown and did the damn thing- I graduated college. Since that day, I’ve been trying to piece together what it really means that it’s all over. My first indication that college wasn’t the defining time of my life was me trying to fit everything I had accumulated over four years into my car. I was surprised that it was so easy. I was surprised that materialistically, the four years had amounted to a slightly new wardrobe, stem less wine glasses, a few books, and shot glasses that read, “I WAS IN MIAMI, BITCH.”
It is a novel idea that we cling to that college will define us for the rest of our lives. Yet, it is easy to forget how we used to think high school would do the same for us. We used to think that every club t-shirt we kept we would sleep in until we were old. That all the friendships that meant the world to us at the time would remain just as strong as they were when we had to suffer through ninth grade Geometry together.
I don’t really feel like a radically different person but no one is able to go through four years without drastically changing who they feel they are. I think the changes feel so subtle because personal growth often happens slowly so we don’t even realize it is occurring. This time when I left college, I packed up my own apartment. I didn’t ask my parents to leave early because they were stressing me out; instead of breaking down at a Jimmy John’s I ordered one drunkenly on my last night in town and woke up with crumbs covering my face.
We are told that if we do our four years, we will walk out the other side of college more prepared for the real world. I’m still attempting to figure out how much weight that holds. Sure, I know how to make a delicious stir fry and check my oil now. I know how to go on a first date and I definitely know I don’t like women in a sexual way, which was something I was still unsure of when I entered college. But wouldn’t I have figured that out on my own even without higher education?
