It was the last day of sophomore year of college—or my last day, at least. I had opted to leave nearly a week early to start my summer job and was sorely regretting it. (How was I supposed to know, after two semesters of the worst pandemic-infested freshman year on record, when everyone escaped home as soon as classes ended, that after all that I would actually start having a good time?) I wanted to feel some wave of epiphany at the closure of my sophomore era, but instead I just felt anxious about whether my luggage was overweight.

I am constantly looking for moments to be like, “Aha! There! This is the perfect picture of me in the prime of my youth! This is the happiest I will be, and I will remember this feeling of eternally being young and free and having my whole life ahead of me for the rest of time! I will never forget these people or this place or what it all felt like!” Unfortunately, the reality is that I am usually worrying more about things like making my thirty-minute plane connection by sprinting between airport terminals and less about the discoveries about my inner self I have gained in the last couple of months. Sometimes, for me, anxiety does this thing where it won’t let me get emotional if it feels like I have bigger things to worry about. In this case, it was getting home, starting work the next day, and still having time to start and finish three final papers.

I’ve never been good at getting emotional on cue in real life. Movies and books are the exception: the cinematic formula that structures a plot around getting you to shed tears for random characters works on me nearly every time. I bawl at any movie where the dog dies, and I was inconsolable during the last sequence in “La La Land”—the first time I saw it, that is, before I got bitter that they gave two non-singers the musical roles of a lifetime. When someone’s lover or little sister dies in the book I am reading, I will sob as if I didn’t just read all the foreshadowing that told me this was coming.

Unfortunately, when it comes to emotions in my own life, I often feel inadequate, as if I am missing something and can’t quite fully come to terms with the situation. Most of my high school extracurriculars had goodbye rituals to offer some sort of closure. My dance studio had the juniors give the seniors flowers and speeches at their last performance ever in front of the audience, right before we did the final number and all danced together for the last time. I performed in plays and musicals, and we would do a senior circle before our final show where those graduating imparted their wisdom while standing in the middle of the circle, surrounded by the rest of us. My choir did a road trip tour at the end of the year where we performed in churches and for various retirement communities and, as was tradition, took over our hotel’s conference room to do a similar confessional-type conversation. 

As absolutely corny and culty as these customs sound, I loved them. Even though it always felt like literally everyone was crying by the end of these things, I never felt like I could recklessly let loose like everyone else did. I could never freely give myself over to my emotions in front of a large crowd of people, even if they were a community I felt comfortable around. I always thought it would be different when it was my turn to graduate and leave all these groups, but then the pandemic came around and those closure rituals never happened, so now I’ll never know.

Maybe it’s because I’ve always been rather guarded with my own emotions that I can’t seem to donate them to others at a moment’s notice. After these customary culmination ceremonies were over and everyone went home, I often wondered when it would hit me. Sometimes it never really did. Other times I would journal for an hour and get overly existential about it all in the way only teenagers with a certain lack of perspective can. But most of the time it seems like it was distance that really did the trick, realizing what was good way too late, when my mind had already filtered those old worlds into something digestible. At that point, I could call on those experiences and think, “Ah yes, that’s what it was like at the time,” when really that’s not what it was like at all. Sometimes I find myself reading old journal entries in order to go back in time only to find that they often describe a completely alternate reality.

It’s easy to idealize who you were a few years ago in order to convince yourself that high school was a cool, fun time. It’s also very easy to write off an entire era of yourself as a colossal waste of time. It’s much harder to really try to remember who you were as a person then and who you thought you might become. I feel like I am at a time in my life when everything feels extremely future-oriented. As young people, we approach the phases of life as if we’ll eventually reach some long stage of maturity where everything is pretty stagnant, but upon being asked recently what that future actually looks like—not in general terms but in as specific detail as possible—I was unable to do it. Perhaps this is why I am also unable to fully grasp the end of a period of time when it’s over—because I am unable to really picture what’s coming next until it starts materializing.

I won’t be on campus next semester (I’m studying abroad, but I won’t talk about it, I promise), so now, yet again, I feel in the back of my mind that something is ending and a big, new thing is beginning. But everything is going way too fast for me to sit down and process it. I’m sure I’ll catch my breath eventually; for now, though, I am content to be patient and let my emotions take their time.

Emma Kendall can be reached at erkendall@wesleyan.edu.