Thoughts of home(s)
Andrea, I blame you.
I started writing a response to your post about not feeling attached to Lawrenceville anymore, but it set off my own run of thoughts, so here goes:
I got into a conversation with an old friend recently about Lawrenceville, and what it was like when we were there. And I couldn't help but be surprised by how fiercely attached she still felt to the memory of it. It's been a while since I've really sat down and thought about it. Oh, it comes into my thoughts fairly often, and I always love telling stories about my time there, but so often it's more analytical than guttural. I think, "Well, here's how my years there affected me," and less, "Hey, what were those years, anyway?"
In a way, though, we both agreed that we'd never been happier than we were when we were there. I feel foolish using the word "happy" at all, since I'm not sure what I mean by it. Because I can certainly be honest about my memories, to some extent, and remember how miserable I was so often at Lawrenceville. I always felt inadequate, unprepared, unintelligent, untalented. I looked around at almost every single one of my classmates and imagined for them brighter futures than I did for myself, greater successes and more meaningful experiences. I was rejected from the things I pursued more often than I was accepted, failed more than succeeded, went to bed at night frustrated more often than content.
And yet. Though there were the Saturday nights when nothing happened, that left me angry and frustrated and terribly lonely, there were far more days of hilarious escapades in large groups of friends, one-on-one conversations until 4 in the morning where I felt a mysterious, overwhelming connection to the people who are now mostly strangers. Some of my Lawrenceville friends will likely be friends for life, though the times apart will grow longer and longer, and the things we share will quickly diminish. Still, we'll always have the connection of our pasts, however much or little value we place on it in various parts of our lives. We will share not just the memories, but the lingering affects, the untraceable but poignant lasting effects of having known such people in such a place at such a time.
I entered Northwestern aware that it would never be my home. Everyone said, "give it time," but frankly, it had nothing to do with that. Home is the place you grow up, and I'd already done that some place else. Northwestern is too big, too ever-changing, too full of people and programs and places I'll never really know. I might not have been on the Science Olympiad at Lawrenceville, but I knew everyone on it, I'd studied in the classrooms where they met, and I was friendly with the man who ran it. The only time I've been in the engineering building, here, I was trying to find a friend who worked there.
Northwestern is wonderful, and I like it very much, but it'll never be mine the way Lawrenceville was. And when I visit now I feel too old and out of place, but in the same way I do when I go back to my actual "home" - it's my home, but the people have changed and the old storefronts are gone and it's not quite the place it was when I was there. But I can walk down the old paths and streets, enter the stores where I've bought things for years, and feel like I belong. Maybe not within the present of the place - I am neither New Milford resident nor Lawrenceville student - but as a part of its history, as someone who knew the place once upon a time, when it was something so different and yet so very much the same at its core.
I started writing a response to your post about not feeling attached to Lawrenceville anymore, but it set off my own run of thoughts, so here goes:
I got into a conversation with an old friend recently about Lawrenceville, and what it was like when we were there. And I couldn't help but be surprised by how fiercely attached she still felt to the memory of it. It's been a while since I've really sat down and thought about it. Oh, it comes into my thoughts fairly often, and I always love telling stories about my time there, but so often it's more analytical than guttural. I think, "Well, here's how my years there affected me," and less, "Hey, what were those years, anyway?"
In a way, though, we both agreed that we'd never been happier than we were when we were there. I feel foolish using the word "happy" at all, since I'm not sure what I mean by it. Because I can certainly be honest about my memories, to some extent, and remember how miserable I was so often at Lawrenceville. I always felt inadequate, unprepared, unintelligent, untalented. I looked around at almost every single one of my classmates and imagined for them brighter futures than I did for myself, greater successes and more meaningful experiences. I was rejected from the things I pursued more often than I was accepted, failed more than succeeded, went to bed at night frustrated more often than content.
And yet. Though there were the Saturday nights when nothing happened, that left me angry and frustrated and terribly lonely, there were far more days of hilarious escapades in large groups of friends, one-on-one conversations until 4 in the morning where I felt a mysterious, overwhelming connection to the people who are now mostly strangers. Some of my Lawrenceville friends will likely be friends for life, though the times apart will grow longer and longer, and the things we share will quickly diminish. Still, we'll always have the connection of our pasts, however much or little value we place on it in various parts of our lives. We will share not just the memories, but the lingering affects, the untraceable but poignant lasting effects of having known such people in such a place at such a time.
I entered Northwestern aware that it would never be my home. Everyone said, "give it time," but frankly, it had nothing to do with that. Home is the place you grow up, and I'd already done that some place else. Northwestern is too big, too ever-changing, too full of people and programs and places I'll never really know. I might not have been on the Science Olympiad at Lawrenceville, but I knew everyone on it, I'd studied in the classrooms where they met, and I was friendly with the man who ran it. The only time I've been in the engineering building, here, I was trying to find a friend who worked there.
Northwestern is wonderful, and I like it very much, but it'll never be mine the way Lawrenceville was. And when I visit now I feel too old and out of place, but in the same way I do when I go back to my actual "home" - it's my home, but the people have changed and the old storefronts are gone and it's not quite the place it was when I was there. But I can walk down the old paths and streets, enter the stores where I've bought things for years, and feel like I belong. Maybe not within the present of the place - I am neither New Milford resident nor Lawrenceville student - but as a part of its history, as someone who knew the place once upon a time, when it was something so different and yet so very much the same at its core.