(By Laura Manzano- Class of 2014, William & Mary Blogs,
September 11, 2013)
1: There will be a night, when you are lonely
and a freshman, that you walk down the hall and find others like you, so you
awkwardly rally together and talk about your favorite movies and SAT scores on
the gross furniture in the lounge of your dorm on a humid Saturday night in
September, and all of the sudden you forget to care about all the college
parties you were so excited to attend. Three years later, approaching
graduation, you may find yourself doing the same thing with the same people,
but only this time you’re doing it because you want to, and because these
awkward freshmen have somehow become your family. Only now there may or may not
be alcohol involved.
2: Being apart from your parents for the
first time in your life will help you see them as real people. They are no
longer the superheroes of your childhood, but they fall and they bleed and they
may need your help, sometimes. This is not necessarily a change on their part,
but a greater realization on yours, and it is not at all a bad thing. You’re becoming
an adult, and in observing this new adult world through a more realistic lens,
it seems only appropriate to begin with the most idealized aspect of the past
eighteen years. Don’t be afraid of it – embracing an individual’s complexities
can be the hardest part of relating with another human being. But remember that
you are a part of each other. Your mom and dad will be your mom and dad for the
rest of your life.
3: Someone close to you will disappoint you.
It will hurt more than many other things because friendship is stronger and
less drastic than romance, and in theory should last until ties have gradually
faded, and not because they have been decisively cut. If talking about it or
thinking about it months later still makes you mad or sad, reach out to them.
In life, just like in literature or in film, no significant character leaves in
a dramatic fashion without coming back at some point down the road.
4: There will be a moment, or rather, a
seemingly perpetual series of moments in which you approach a realization that
you don’t, in fact, know what you want to do with the rest of your life. After
graduation, the proverbial path is unpaved and on an incline and it may even be
hot outside. College will get you there, but you may feel it hasn’t taught you
how to walk on it. Do I really want to do math for the rest of my life? Is law
school the right choice for me? Here’s something no one will tell you: you’re
not supposed to know how the rest of your life should unfold when you’ve barely
emerged through a quarter of it. Take a deep breath. And by deep breath, I mean
a year off. Give yourself time to live outside of school. Travel, meet people.
For a little while, get a job just to have a job, and remember that job is not
going to be your career. In college, there may be a moment when you see George
Saunders speak to a room full of people just like you, and then one of the
greatest and well-decorated contemporary writers will tell you that he
originally got his degree in geophysical engineering, and worked for an engineering
firm for seven years. Realize that no one is meant to be settled and
established and have it all figured out by the time they’re twenty-four, unless
they want to be completely bored for the next seventy years.
5: You will trip over a brick on this campus.
You will hear this everywhere, and that is because the only thing more certain
in life than tripping on a brick is that by the end of it, you will be dead.
You will trip on a brick not once, not twice, not seven times, but probably
somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty-eight or eighty-nine times.
6: There will be a lot of moments when you
are rejected. By a professor, by a job, by an application, by a girl, by a boy.
It’s likely that multiple rejections will happen in a short span of time, and
they will make you never want to get out of bed again, even for warm Caf
cookies. In these moments, you will undoubtedly feel the opposite of what you
should feel, because in reality, the courage that has compelled you to put
yourself out there in the first place is greater than many people can claim.
College may teach you that everyone needs to be broken down to nothing before
they can become something. You are not a great anything until you’ve thought to
yourself at some point that you are the worst anything that has ever lived.
7: If you’re lucky enough, you’ll experience
love, and if it’s real, you’ll be scared to call it that just yet. You may not
be anxious or excited. You won’t lose your appetite, because that seems to
indicate that to remain in love with someone forever means you will never eat
again. That to desire a hamburger means to have fallen out of love. The thought
of him or her won’t make your heart race. By that point, if you’ve sat on it
long enough, your heart will have adopted him or her as an integral cog in the
regular mechanics of your circulatory system. They say that love is selfless.
And you’ll have a moment when you realize that part is true. Their happiness
will become your happiness – a scientific, economical, reliable correlation.
And that feeling, unlike Hallmark love, will be unascribable to any one color,
unless that color is black, simply because, of course, black is a combination
of all the colors – those both beautiful and less beautiful, but nonetheless
necessary to paint an honest world. If you find yourself feeling this way, or
even at the very least think you feel this way: congratulations. It requires a
brave person to put their own heart in this position, no matter how involuntary
it may seem.
8: Finally, you’ll visit Washington D.C. for
the first time on any given weekend, and fit in as much sight-seeing one could
do in about 30 short hours: the magnificence of the Capitol building, the
grandeur that is the Lincoln Memorial, but most especially – the beautiful
stillness of Arlington Cemetery. The sky will be cloudy and you may be tired.
You’ll inexplicably cry at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as you watch the
guard walk across the horizon with a reverent ferocity. You’ll say a quick
prayer for anyone who has ever sacrificed anything for your sake. You’ll smear
away the tears that have somehow snuck into your eyes, and turn to pan across
the landscape: tens of thousands of tombstones, extending farther than you will
be able to see. The names will mean nothing to you and everything to you at the
same time, because those unrecognizable names and their sacrifice are the
reason you’re able to stand where you’re standing. The most important and
essential moment you will have, at any point in your life, is the one in which
you understand that you are not in this alone – that we need to be good to each
other in order to survive.
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