transition & senior years

I really don’t want to write about transition.

It’s beating a dead horse, at this point.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently; I feel the constant twinge of sadness and low-grade headache that have always accompanied it in my experience. I’ve been restless and distracted in response.

I don’t want to write about it. Not when there is so much else I could write about.

I know the feeling, and I know what it means for my heart and my mind for the coming months. I’ve learned that I will be more sensitive to change, more inclined to panic when things don’t go according to plan. I know I will either hold my friends tight or push them away. I know I will ask “what’s next?” louder and increasingly more fraught and become frustrated when I don’t get a clear answer. I know exactly what is about to happen.

But I don’t want to write about it. In some ways, it feels like old news. I have spent most of my life anticipating the next end and the next beginning.

That cycle has made me reluctant to call this, right now, transition. By and large, America has been in pandemic mode for nearly 6 months. I should not still feel surprised.

I am one week into the semester, staring down a senior year that has begun on Zoom calls, from my bedroom, during a pandemic. It’s been six months, and I was still in school for the first six weeks or so. And yet, all of the telltale signs are there: I am tired and lonely and unmotivated and can’t seem to focus on anything. I’m reaching for comfort food and entertainment. Something feels wrong, but I can’t quite articulate it, so I spiral into exhaustion and anxiety. It’s transition. That is what I’m feeling.

I went back to campus this week, for the first time since early March.

I wandered the halls of the building that has been my home base for my time here, now with plastic dividers up, tables blocked off, and hand sanitizer stations. And yet, it’s a relic of the Old World – projects left behind by seniors who have graduated, a sweatshirt I left in the office, a bottle of iced coffee left in the fridge someone meant to grab after class. Frozen in time.

I felt, suddenly, the jerk of late-stage transition: the newness you thought you were prepared for, but aren’t, and the sudden grief of what you lost. I am aware of the same dissonance when I log into a Zoom class: remember when this used to be in person? It should be now, too.

I don’t want to write about transition because almost all of the tools in my arsenal are powerless in the face of a pandemic. I’m a week into the semester, but I’m already finding I need to be strict with myself in creating and living in healthy rhythms. Drink water. Go outside. Limit the time I spend doomscrolling and get the schoolwork done. Set timers. Take breaks. Eat good food. Make your bed. That is all I can do right now, my routine is all that I can control. I don’t like it. I miss “real life,” a phrase I’m trying to stop using because this is real. This is what life is like, and what it will be like for the foreseeable future. That’s transition in its purest form. Adjusting to a new normal.

I don’t want to write about transition, because I don’t want to write about being a senior. I don’t want to write about college.

I’ve been writing on this little blog for nearly six years, and it has always been a time capsule of my biggest feelings. Many of the most pivotal moments of my life are documented, in some form, here. If you wanted to (and I do not recommend it), you could read posts I wrote in 2015, as an angsty sixteen-year-old who was a little bit afraid of everything. Even things I wrote at 18 and 19 feel dramatic and dated. I’ve learned and changed so much these last few years.

I know that in the scheme of things, 21 is a blip on the radar. I know I’m still very young and very green. Way back in college will be the good old days when we were young and dumb, but still with the safeguard of school. 23, 24, 25 will feel like 14 and 15 do to me now. Memorializing – publicly – reflections about my senior year of college doesn’t feel important. There might even be an element of embarrassment, too. The degree to which I’ve changed in the last three years is a fraction of how wildly different my life will be in three more years. Or six. Or ten. I’m going to get older and grow up more and experience hundreds of transitions. I’ll move several times, I expect, each with all of the baggage of a move equal to that which I carry from a decade plus of moves. I’ll get jobs and change jobs and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a career pivot or two in there somewhere. Maybe one day I’ll transition into being a wife. Maybe a mother. Or maybe not, and I’ll write about that. There are a thousand things in my life that will make how I felt about school in August of 2020 wholly and totally insignificant.

My senior year of college does not matter all that much in the scheme of things, I know. But part of transition is acknowledging the big feelings even when they feel silly. And, as a writer, as someone who still has a flair for the dramatic, I think I owe it to my 15-year-old self to write about it. I think, to some degree, I owe it to my 35-year-old self. She will probably roll her eyes at this, like she can’t believe I actually wrote this, what did I know back then? But I think maybe she will also smile, because man, what a year 2020 was, huh?

So here I am, a senior in college.

I find myself thinking often of my senior year of high school, where that word became imbued with such monumental meaning that we had a day where we, as a class, got out of classes to talk about it. I wrote papers about it. Papers that still exist somewhere deep in my hard drive. I remember a thousand conversations about The Future and College and Life in Five Years. I remember how secure I felt in that little bubble and how big it felt to leave it. I remember taking everything very seriously. I was keenly aware of the last-ness of it all.

Sometime that spring, I made a playlist I cheekily titled “And So Goodbye,” a lyric from a very sad showtune. It is still probably the greatest playlist I’ve ever made, opening with a piece from an opera and ending with two extremely 90s Christian rock songs. It’s very literal and borderline melodramatic, but I’ve listened to it several times the past week. I have very specific sensory memories attached to it, the weird blue of my dorm room carpet and the way the early spring light came through the window directly over my bed.

This apartment feels nothing like that little German town, but the emotions I poured into selecting those fifteen songs rings true. It’s comforting to remind myself that I’ve felt these feelings before, that the world can feel really big and leaving behind things you love is hard. But everything is okay on the other side. Life is so much better now than I ever could have dreamed.

And now, as a begin my last year, I am aware of a shift, that this is the beginning of the end. I’ve fallen in love with this city, even though I hated it for so long, like the third act of a rom-com. I know I’m leaving this apartment in the spring, and I’ve slept in this bed for three years. That’s longer than I’ve been most places, and that matters to me. It feels weird that the last year of my college experience won’t happen the way I expected. So many lasts have already happened. This season of my life will end without me being able to do things I wanted to do. That’s a very particular kind of grief that I don’t quite know what to do with yet. Maybe I’ll make another playlist.

I don’t want to write about transition because I want to live it and get through it.

This is also a hallmark of transition: learning to love the new normal and figuring out how to thrive in it. I didn’t get closure with the normalcy of the pre-pandemic world. That stings, some days, when I think about the way it felt to be in a crowd. But there are things I love about right now, too: I like the intentionality required to see and talk to people. I like the quieter pace. I like the way everyone is beginning to realize that perhaps running really fast and getting things achieved isn’t the way we were built.

No one’s asking, but that’s where I am in the transition cycle: I am feeling all of the feelings and feeling them hard. I’m training myself to embrace what life is right now and create routines, and frankly, I fail more than I succeed. But I can appreciate the new season, and that’s the first step.

I am delighting in the fact that I am allowed to expect less from myself. These days are slower and weirder and I am allowed to change my habits to accommodate that. I am learning to take breaks and to take myself less seriously. I am figuring out how to “waste time” on good things and trust that somehow, the biggest things will take care of themselves.

This is the first time in my life where the next step isn’t prescribed at all. I knew in advance where I would go next by September 98% of my life. I knew I was going to go to college in America, which was an easy enough paint by numbers. Now, I have no idea what comes next. I could stay in Orlando or I could not, and there is virtually no limit to where I could go. My career could go in a million different directions and there is too much turmoil in the world right now to even begin to predict what might happen. I don’t know. I really, really don’t.

A year ago, that would’ve been the scariest thing you could tell me. It is close to antithetical to my personality to have no idea what my life will look like in just a few short months.

But now? There’s something surprisingly freeing in that. I don’t have to have the answers. There are so many things I could do. I don’t have to commit to anything yet. I don’t need to jump the shark and look for the next thing. I can drink this cup of coffee, do the next set of readings, make the next choice.

Things universally feel really dark and really hard right now. That is unavoidable and undeniable. This worldwide uprooting and severe transition has shaken all of us to our core. There’s a lot happening. It’s scary and uncomfortable and a lot of it feels evil and I wish it weren’t happening. Sincerely. I wish the virus didn’t exist, racism didn’t exist in any form, politics weren’t the mess that it is, and that true justice would win swiftly.

But at the end of the day, maybe a global pandemic and one of the most volatile socio-political moments in American history in my senior year of college is the catalyst for me learning how to hold everything in my life a little more loosely, to have more grace for myself and for the world, to take it one day at a time and not let transition, no matter how sudden, spin me out. Maybe this is the season I learn to expect a little bit less from myself and pursue worthy things and to be present in the moment, walking in the ways I know to bear good fruit, and making good playlists.

I think that’s all I can do.