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By Hannah Wilson, Class of 2017
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| Hannah Wilson Class of 2017 |
There is a misconception about college life that I’d like to
clear up now. It’s what seniors in high school dream about and recent graduates
look back on with great nostalgia. College: the fraction of a moment where one
experiences unprecedented freedom, accompanied by a kind of responsibility that
requires unprecedented maturity. It is the finding of oneself, the incessant
chore of realizing that the world is so utterly different than one could have
imagined, that people originate from every nook and cranny of the universe and
all somehow end up here, in this place, with these ideas and dreams and pasts
that have whittled away at them and created something irreplaceable, something
unable to be replicated. It is a time of imagination, discovery, and beauty.
And unfortunately fringed with magnitudes of disappointment. And this is
precisely what no one likes to talk about.
I woke up on New Years Day of this year fully believing that
2015 would be the best year of my life. The page had officially been turned on
a year that entailed what I thought was the bottom of rock bottom, and I was
ready to take on another trip around the sun with all the exuberance and zest
for life that I could muster.
It’s ironic, really, the way in which one comes to know
freedom. In relation to the college experience, freedom is eating Oreos and
milk for breakfast because, why not? It’s skipping an 8 A.M. to sleep for an
extra thirty minutes because you know that class will be there Wednesday, and
Friday, and the Monday of next week and so on until this season of learning
ends. It’s doing the homework because you want to, because subject A is
interesting, but perhaps “forgetting” assignment B because in 30 years,
forgetting is exactly what I will have done, and it’ll be of no use to me then.
It’s the freedom of choice. But that’s not the end of the story; in fact, it’s
the very beginning. Breakfast food and assignments and schedules are
baby steps. You have to take them in order to make the leaps and strides that
come along with losing everything and everyone, and waking up one day to an
emptiness you didn’t know was humanly possible.
In the course of six months, my life and all the things I
thought made it worth living disappeared. And when I say this, I don’t mean that I
changed, that I “grew” or “transformed.” I mean that I had a slate, full of
experiences and notions of truth, full of people, and love, and material
things, and environments and locations, and that slate was wiped clean. At the
onset of summer I was forced out of my home, lost over half of my possessions
including my dog, who went to an old friend, began sleeping in my car, and
sometimes on a friend’s couch, and other times on an air mattress in the
basement of another friend’s temporary apartment. My bank account was in the
red and The Man was knocking on the invisible door to a place I no longer
lived. So I did what every scholarship-receiving, near-perfect-GPA, type A
college student says they will never do: I applied for a job, and started to
work. I regained my footing financially, tried to maintain a gentle nature in
the face of the forces that had inflicted this loss upon me, and finally, at
the beginning of August, found a new place to live with my best friend and adopted
brother. And not a month into the new house, my car was stolen. Back to square
one.
What in January seemed so sure and so real had evaporated
into thin air. What was the point in putting on a happy face for everyone,
wearing one of those paper smiles on the end of a Popsicle stick and pretending
to be a person I clearly wasn’t anymore? There was no point, and so I started
telling the truth when I was innocently asked the question, “How are you?”
“I’ve been better,” I’d say, and then I’d immediately realize that I had been
mistaken. “I’ve been better” is not what someone expects to hear, and surely is
not what he or she wants to have to address when they make such a generic
inquiry. And so eventually, I stopped answering at all.
After months of silence, months of pitying myself, of crying
over my house and my dog and my car and all the things that I thought defined
me, I have decided to stop. I have decided to stop crying and start creating.
Freedom is not having the capacity to choose. It cannot be reduced to a
spatiotemporal issue, or some other minute occurrence to be dealt with.
Freedom, in its truest sense, is coming to know oneself, one’s capabilities,
outside the confines of all things material and existential. Freedom is
deciding to be, despite all the reasons one should not be and should not care
to be. It is being cut loose from the control of the universe, and using this
epiphany, if one can ever happen upon it, to start making this life what one
wants it to be.
For a while, I existed, waiting for something to give me
reason to live. But there’s so much work to do, and so small a time to do it
in. I refuse to die at 20 and not be buried until 80.