In the coming months, this space will be filled with descriptions of trips to Buddhist temples tucked into the foothills of the Himalayas, explanations of southwestern Chinese cultural politics, and narratives detailing the sub-Tibetan countryside. I’m headed to China to study anthropology for the semester, and I plan to write about it here, but I can’t do that yet. And that’s kind of my point.
Chinese New Year is based on the Lunar Calendar, so it moves around: this year it fell on Feb. 18, but the festivities will take up most of this week. During the celebration, there are, with no exaggeration, one billion people traveling, as the New Year is one of the only times that Chinese migrant workers return to from whence they came. No sensible study abroad program would start in the midst of that kind of upheaval, which brings me to how I ended up living at home for ten weeks.
When I first arrived back in my parents’ house during late December, I felt only unbridled glee at the prospect of ten empty weeks. Seventy whole days seemed beautifully vast, and I was ready to dive in: burnt out as I was from endless discussions of modernism, post-modernism, and post-post modernism, this ocean of vacation promised to be incredibly freeing. I thought it would be like summer vacation in the middle of winter. And it was—for five weeks.
The thing about being a junior in college at home after the third week of January is that you are suddenly, emphatically reminded that this is really not summer vacation. The weather is awful; some of your friends, back at their respective schools, are now busily posting pictures of themselves participating in various acts of debauchery on Facebook; the rest are off gallivanting abroad, also posting pictures of themselves partaking in debauchery, but with the Coliseum/the Eiffel Tower/a pack of running giraffes in the background.
The last days of January were the worst for me. Once my companions departed, the prospect of five more blank, featureless weeks was overwhelming. I couldn’t sit still, thinking about all those empty hours. The prospect of so much time spent doing so little was both foreign and frightening. Days filled with repetitive office work, family arguments, the gym, and no ironic T-shirts, Nietschze, or PBR to be had—I could barely imagine how I might function in a life like that. I felt restless and confused. Wasn’t this supposed to be a gift?
I became the girl who organizes her bookshelves by height, then author, then height again, who watches bad movies alone in the theater on bargain Tuesday nights just to get out of the house. In the haze of TV repeats and endless family dinners, I found myself missing the modernism, post modernism, and, yes, post-post modernism. My snickers at the expense of friends with 9 a.m. classes turned to whimpers as the days stretched on, and I contemplated, in moments of more severe gloominess, drowning myself in the ink from my idle, unused highlighters. As I attempted to construct a routine that didn’t involve office supply-related suicide, I started to ponder the source of this bored desperation. Here is what I realized:
Where I grew up, college was not so much a goal as a destination. It was assumed that everyone would go to college, and that most people would go to a “good” school. College was made into such an end in itself that once I got there I hardly knew what to do. I could barely wrap my brain around the fact that I had arrived, and for the first semester I couldn’t shake the feeling that one day someone who was a Real College Student would stop me and demand to know who I thought I was fooling. I had been on my way to college for so long that I didn’t know how to be there in the present tense.
Now that I’m a junior, I’m afraid that the same thing has happened. I left campus last semester prepared to return, in several months, as a senior, but I hadn’t really begun to think about the enormous gray area that is After Graduation. Beyond occasional mentions of grad school, my friends and I were more focused on the immediacy of the reading response due at midnight or the next Eclectic party. In the end, it has been too easy for us, for me, in my transition to college, to get caught up in the Wesleyan maelstrom. It has been almost effortless to remain studiously blind to everything but campus issues; to concentrate on navigating the maze of papers, presentations, and exams or having endless discussions about religion/philosophy/privilege/Project Runway. Sitting in a holding pattern at the eye of the storm, I can see that I’ve come perilously close to forgetting that there’s anything beyond college. Without realizing it, my student identity has slowly infiltrated my sense of self, silently depriving the other parts of me of oxygen.
It took a vacation that morphed into a form of intellectual unemployment (I do, after all, put “student” under the “occupation” category of my taxes) for me to wake up to this different kind of identity theft. Who am I without my college experience? Who are you, who are we, if not students? Can, or should, we be anything but? What are we missing out on?
All hard questions. Luckily, I’ve had ten weeks to mull them over.
Leave a Reply