I dread commencement because I know how it's going to play out.
The vision is for the seniors to gather in perfect formation in Wallace Wade for one frozen hour, before re-scattering into a dynamic new pattern stretching to the farthest reaches of the globe. But between now and then will be the struggle to juggle goodbyes and pressing obligations, to carve up our time between visiting family members and departing friends. Symbolic last-chances and sentimental goodbyes will be cut short by the humdrum urgency of finals and packing. Before anyone's the wiser, we will be crammed onto planes or into our parents' minivans with four years' books and clothes, never to return as Duke students. Most of our class we will never see again.
Cue anticlimax.
Understandably, seniors want some guarantee of closure while all this comes to pass. It seems To Do lists are a popular method for attaining it. You've seen these. They include anywhere from 10 to 100 items, ranging from the five graduation requirements to trying every LocoPops flavor.
I don't have a list. It probably wouldn't help my particular fix. A quick prod at the raw chambers of my heart exposes my unreasonable sadness at things like the prospect of being cut off from the people I regularly see but barely know.
It's not just about finding comfort in familiar faces. The idea of permanently parting with peers I've always meant but failed to better get to know serves as a grand reminder that the end of college spells the death of all kinds of possibilities-interrelational, intellectual and otherwise personal. It's the classic closed door, with a twist. We graduating seniors may have gathered some sense of what lies ahead-but suddenly I feel I lack a clear grasp of what exactly I'm leaving behind.
Luckily, your last semester has a way of affirming what is worthwhile about your college experience and giving you a reality check about what isn't. It's hard not to read into things, even though the madness that is senior year means these things change drastically from day to day. Recently my relationships with three people I considered close friends shattered in the span of three weeks. I have faith one friendship will knit back together; two cannot. The upsetting part is how relatively quickly I'm rebounding.
Researchers at Northwestern University found in a 2007 study that people tend to overestimate how miserable they would be following a romantic breakup. It's a phenomenon that Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, describes as part of the wider human tendency to overestimate the prospective pain of distressing events.
I have no doubt this applies to the way many of us feel about graduation. We fret now, despite knowing our lives will soon fill up with some new context and the faces to round it out, making us unlikely to fret later. This is what I find terrifying, the knowledge that the people and issues figuring so prominently in our lives now won't matter nearly so much to us in the future.
I'm convinced this amounts to leaving some shadow of our selves behind.
In short, I am not just clinging to Duke. I am clinging to the version of me unprepared to leave Duke. I am clinging to me as I know me today: grateful me, inexperienced me, oft-times absurd and unreasonable me. Idealistic me, embarrassing me. The me who is quick to make mistakes, eager to recover, willing to pick fights I cannot win, prone to tumble on the quad and pretend I meant to do that.
In Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," fresh-faced Esther Greenwood, fast-tracked to yuppiehood, finds herself unable to enjoy what is supposed to be "the time of her life." She reflects instead on "how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside..."
Some of us will walk away at least temporarily able to tot up our spoils, so to speak-friends, post-grad prospects, great memories. Others of us will walk away feeling a little more naked and alone. But all of us will leave as something other than what we were when we arrived, and, I think, something other than what we expected to become. There is something quietly amazing about that.
As for my part, though my successes may be few, I find comfort in the idea that I have more or less retained the idealistic, embarrassing me. Here is a "closure" mechanism I will use to start my own To Do list. I've had a little crush on someone for a while. He has no idea. I'll confess before May 10. Columnists, too, can walk the talk.
I wish you luck in achieving your own (healthy) closure. Here's hoping you seize the day. Take it from a senior with only 26 left: every one is worth it.
Jane Chong is a Trinity senior. This is her last column. She is happy to say she never used the phrase "senior column" to describe her feelings about it.
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