we stand up for the lookout
On Saturday I graduated from college. I am still processing it.
Mostly: I will never have to do a single piece of academic work again for the rest of my life. I will never have to live in a dorm. I will never have to eat dining hall food again?! I will never have to fake being okay with being a student. I'm pretty sure I've haven't ever been so busy as I was recently in a social sense and just with having something to do every minute of every day - it wore me out, but now that it's done I have more time to focus on things and it's...it's weird. It's really weird.
I just want to say that I'm enormously grateful and privileged to have gotten the education I got, and to go to the school I went to, as much as I had a very complicated and negative relationship with it most of the time. Bryn Mawr might not be a defining characteristic of who I am, but it will always be a part of me, for better or for worse. I'm not the same person I was four years ago and I like the person I am now a hell of a lot more. However that happened and why, at the moment I'm glad and I'm proud. I stood on that stage in my stupid regalia that smelled disgusting and slippery hat, and got my diploma, which I didn't believe would happen for a while. It didn't rain but it was about to the whole time, I felt sick and panicky and exhausted, but fuck it, I sat down and my friend and I high-fived with our pieces of paper tied in yellow ribbon that we couldn't read because they were in Latin.
For the last two weeks my nostalgia goggles were on, like they are whenever you are about to leave a thing. I am definitely the kind of a person that experiences places very strongly. I can't just drift through a place and not completely internalize it, which maybe isn't super healthy but is still true. Bryn Mawr was never really my home, but there were people there who were home for me, and I guess that's more important. (And one of them, my very best friend in the world, is moving to TEXAS, what is up with that??)
I have always struggled with traditions and ceremonies - in theory I think they are beautiful, in practice they kind of stress me out. But now what I'm thinking about is:
When we were freshman, they gave us lanterns. They look like
My class had the green ones. When I got my lantern, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I felt special to have a thing that generations of women had before me, it seemed like part of a fantasy that promised I was really going to find my place here, that things were going to be so awesome.
And then, you know, they weren't. These past four years were probably the worst of my life. I spent a lot of time dealing with really terrible stuff, and being sad and angry and struggling. My lantern wasn't a magical thing: it sat on my desk and was mostly ignored, it got scratched and broken from moving around, it didn't mean anything special.
But every step sing, it got to come out. I lit a candle at the base, the glass walls were illuminated, the light shone out with hundreds of other lanterns exactly like it, and for a few hours I felt like I was a part of something like I had imagined when I started - something big and beautiful and, yeah, magical. Even if I would leave and go back to whatever was going on in my real life, I had that.
I think I'll still light a candle in it, every once in a while.
Mostly: I will never have to do a single piece of academic work again for the rest of my life. I will never have to live in a dorm. I will never have to eat dining hall food again?! I will never have to fake being okay with being a student. I'm pretty sure I've haven't ever been so busy as I was recently in a social sense and just with having something to do every minute of every day - it wore me out, but now that it's done I have more time to focus on things and it's...it's weird. It's really weird.
I just want to say that I'm enormously grateful and privileged to have gotten the education I got, and to go to the school I went to, as much as I had a very complicated and negative relationship with it most of the time. Bryn Mawr might not be a defining characteristic of who I am, but it will always be a part of me, for better or for worse. I'm not the same person I was four years ago and I like the person I am now a hell of a lot more. However that happened and why, at the moment I'm glad and I'm proud. I stood on that stage in my stupid regalia that smelled disgusting and slippery hat, and got my diploma, which I didn't believe would happen for a while. It didn't rain but it was about to the whole time, I felt sick and panicky and exhausted, but fuck it, I sat down and my friend and I high-fived with our pieces of paper tied in yellow ribbon that we couldn't read because they were in Latin.
For the last two weeks my nostalgia goggles were on, like they are whenever you are about to leave a thing. I am definitely the kind of a person that experiences places very strongly. I can't just drift through a place and not completely internalize it, which maybe isn't super healthy but is still true. Bryn Mawr was never really my home, but there were people there who were home for me, and I guess that's more important. (And one of them, my very best friend in the world, is moving to TEXAS, what is up with that??)
I have always struggled with traditions and ceremonies - in theory I think they are beautiful, in practice they kind of stress me out. But now what I'm thinking about is:
When we were freshman, they gave us lanterns. They look like
My class had the green ones. When I got my lantern, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I felt special to have a thing that generations of women had before me, it seemed like part of a fantasy that promised I was really going to find my place here, that things were going to be so awesome.
And then, you know, they weren't. These past four years were probably the worst of my life. I spent a lot of time dealing with really terrible stuff, and being sad and angry and struggling. My lantern wasn't a magical thing: it sat on my desk and was mostly ignored, it got scratched and broken from moving around, it didn't mean anything special.
But every step sing, it got to come out. I lit a candle at the base, the glass walls were illuminated, the light shone out with hundreds of other lanterns exactly like it, and for a few hours I felt like I was a part of something like I had imagined when I started - something big and beautiful and, yeah, magical. Even if I would leave and go back to whatever was going on in my real life, I had that.
I think I'll still light a candle in it, every once in a while.