Not many college
graduates share the same ambition now. And for that reason alone, and as
being a journalism graduate myself, I deem it only proper to dedicate this post
and share her essay as a tribute.
“We don’t have a word
for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want
in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m
scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.
It’s not quite love
and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an
abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the
check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to
bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we
did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.
Yale is full of tiny
circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses,
societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part
of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers
— partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on
the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.
This scares me. More
than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web
we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I
feel right now.
But let us get one
thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of
us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away
from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having
parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST
years comes from clichéd “should haves...” “if I’d...” “wish I’d...”
Of course, there are
things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own
hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late.
Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High
School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private
insecurities follow us and will always follow us.
But the thing is,
we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their
reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these
impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect
fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.
We’re so young. We’re
so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this
sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay
alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it
is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more
specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or
inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must
settle for continuance, for commencement.
When we came to Yale,
there was this sense of possibility. This immense and indefinable potential
energy – and it’s easy to feel like that’s slipped away. We never had to choose
and suddenly we’ve had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know
exactly what we want and are on the path to get it; already going to med
school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both
congratulations and you suck.
For most of us,
however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what
road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in
biology…if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I’d
thought to apply for this or for that…
What we have to
remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can
start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that
it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating
college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility
because in the end, it’s all we have.
In the heart of a
winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a
call from my friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I
began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably,
it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my
friends were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they
weren’t. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull
out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible
outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room
I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone,
at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably,
unbelievably safe.
We don’t have a word
for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at
Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled,
scared. And we don’t have to lose that.
We’re in this
together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.”
____________________