I have been trying to write something here for days. All the words are there. I can feel them swirling around in my brain with every moment that occurs in this - The Final Week. And my finger tips have felt the literal urge to write something, and so much to the point that I get excited at the prospect of needing to type some words into Google.
But how do I write about this? How is it that, ironically, this culmination finds me the least literate that I have been allowed to be in the past four years? How can I construct the prose of such a gigantic ending/beginning for me in way that is not a lame reflection or, well, fake? And how do I do it without spontaneously weeping?
I am not the same as I was four years ago in many ways, but if there is one way that I am most certainly changed it is in the fact that I am now a crier. I cry. I cried in the beginning when it pained me to even hang up the photos of my friends who had once never left New Jersey suburbia but were now scattered across the Northeast. I cried at the end of each year, mourning the loss of something that had finally felt routine and normal and fine, as I would be uprooted to a new year, a new room, new people. Although, I cried at each beginning as well, uncertain with every new semester in a decision to be in a place that I thought I would only make once, but instead made dozens upon dozens of times. And I'll cry this week, too. Because of the obvious, the cliches, and the worries of "what ifs."
God, I hate crying.
There is something about America and the importance we place on accomplishment that no one ever really talks about. Accomplishment, in all it's glory, is actually little more than something ending. Sure, normally it involves achievement or the opening of doors or, hell, more money. But while outwardly everyone focuses on the accomplishment, I can only think - at least from personal experience - inwardly you are dealing with a void. A period on all that you've known for so long. And it particularly does not help the situation when everyone around you is asking "So, what are you doing next year?" followed by a caution of how you are leaving the best years of your life behind you.
As these years of my life have been marked equally by good things and moments of heart-wrenching grappling with myself over my decision-making processes, I hope that this comment is not entirely true.
Recently, I was chatting with a school friend (about plans for next year, if you couldn't guess). If I hadn't realized it already over the past couple years, I am entirely envious of her decision-making skills. From what I gather it goes something like this: She has a feeling in her gut pointing her in a specific direction, she researches it carefully, talks it over with those she is close to and those she regards highly, makes the decision (yay or nay), and then goes with it, happy as a clam in what she has decided. The perfect combination of pleasing the brain rationally, pleasing the heart emotionally, and pleasing the mind and nerves with balance.
Sigh, I am not like that. When I'm dealing with a forked road, I stand toiling, calculating, and screaming at the intersection for far too long, collecting notes upon notes only to burn them all at the slightly different beat of my heart. And then when Time finally forces me down a road, I walk backwards, staring longingly at the intersection and often running from Time back to it. It is not a healthy process.
The beginning of this thing I've done for four years now was marked with the biggest and really first large decision I've ever had to make for myself, and its ending signifies, in part, the many more decisions I will need to make in my life. It is easy to see why this - along with this huge feeling of ending upon me (I really do hate change) - is worrying me. I am only solaced in the idea that somewhere within the whirlwind of these years in which I had placed myself, I know I have collected some helpful things - tools, if you will. Knowledge and the people who have taught me, and those who have done nothing but love me. Because yes, I have been changed in that I am possibly more weep-y and more erratic in ways I do not enjoy, but I am also in other ways grown. Grown into this person that I truly do believe that somewhere lodged in my soul has the capacity to make the decisions necessary to build the next era of my life into one that will, in fact, actually be better than, if not at least comparable to, the last.
You'll have to excuse this over-injection of myself into this blog these next few days or weeks, but I do hope you find something to enjoy and take away from within my thoughts.
Congrats to my Class of 2009 and everyone who is graduating this spring :)
