"You sought knowledge when you should have sought yourself. So while you flung open the doors of your mind so too did you slam shut the doors to your heart. If you never wake and if you never find the truth in those old words, then find the truth in mine.
Rouse what remains of your character so that you might be someone, instead of being someone else." G.F.
I spent my last night at Smith College in the lab. cleaning. it felt like the right thing to do. This space, after all, will have held nearly ever good memory I will have of my college experience.
It is May. It is warm. It is lonely inside this building but I prefer it that way - when it is quiet. I am sad but somehow not at all. I won't be moving on, after all.
For weeks (months, really) I've listened as everyone talked incessantly about their plans. About their sadness about having to leave. I try to be sympathetic but it is mostly fake. I've been waiting for these last days for what feels like ever: counting down, checking things off, not saving anything for the last minute. They drag it out too, trying to allow you every second to drink in the last bits of this place when all you want to do is try not to trip as you walk across the stage to snatch your diploma from Carol and get the hell out of there.
Somehow I know that these experiences are pretend. What is real waits for me outside of the iron gates, not in ivy-covered brick buildings but instead in a small house on the top of a hill in a town you have not heard of. What is real is where I came from before I was here. The only reality here is in books. It's in facts and pages and imprinted in rocks. But when you stop hearing the facts and reading the books and seeing the rocks because you've stopped searching for reality and started only trying to finish your homework, it's over for you. The reality that is available here, it's over for me.
I am tired and not from lack of sleep. I sleep all the time.
For my friends, this is the beginning. I congratulate you. Go out, away from here, and begin the rest of your lives with incredible confidence and tenacity. Be the person you want to be and have learned to be, here. Savor every experience until the right one comes along. It is coming. You will be brave in the face of adversity. You will not be silent when you observe injustice. You will fight to protect the rights of your future daughters. And so will I.
Please understand, however, that this is the middle for me. My life will not begin anew when I walk across the stage, although still many uncertainties will lay ahead. And before you get ahead of me, if their is fleeting pity in your hearts at this moment for some kind of intellect wasted, stop. Stop right now. Find it inside yourself to believe me when I say that I have knowingly chosen this path for myself. Maybe the only decision I've ever made not cloaked with the martyr inhabiting me. Please don't belittle the weight of my words by suggesting that I am harboring secret ambitions from you. I am not.
At some point during the year, I could no longer reconcile my sadness. I had experienced such success and no longer could I find solace in it. This existence was superficial, at best. not real. I was twelve different people, one for every scenario, plus one extra for on-paper. For anyone else who has attempted this mathematical improbability that you can divide yourself into 12 different personas, that is 12x100% of yourself, for every second of the day = 1200% = not real. The only place you get a break is driving in the car, alone, or sleep. They're the only methods of escape.
If I am so smart, like they say, why the struggle? Why not use this experience as a platform to jettison myself out into the world? Why the hardship in place of what would be a very successful career? It's not the doubt, if that is, at first, your reaction. It's anything but that. Some days, I am so strong. Like a tiger or an ox. I could do everything, all at once. I could continue exerting the full force of my self, pouring my energy out like sand grains in my egg timer, but I am finally feeling my emotional boundaries here, in these last moments, maybe for the first time. I've finally found it, the edge.
"The energy needed to maintain this life in masks and veils is far greater than the proposed energy expended on the anxiety of the unknown".
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