Decisions, Decisions

I guess sometimes it takes late nights in the library with one of my best friend to make me realize how hilariously ridiculous my life and my friends are. 

Tonight I sort of came to the realization that it’s possible to relate almost every moment of “every day” college life to a meme. One brief example, after Kate chose to put hand lotion on after a long day of working she began to “attempt” to highlight the rest of her reading only to learn that slippery hands completely incapacitate her from being able to highlight, so of course, as a way to avoid doing any sort of ACTUAL work I decided to make a meme out of it…and this is the result:

I'm so sorry if you don't get it, or don't think it's funny--cause it is.

It’s funny that something this simple can make the looming 30 pages of writing and 3 finals that are going to arrive in the next two weeks seem like they just float away…but at the same time I began to think that I realized that it wasn’t this one meme, or this one night of unproductive madness in the library, that was making everything suddenly feel “alright”—it’s the constant feeling of being surrounded by these “people” that have become increasingly more important in my life.

As I said in the first post, I never expected to find any sort of comfort or “ease” during my time here at Dartmouth, nor did I really expect to have that much time here at all. But whenever I come back to what it was about the people here that made me suddenly one day realize that I could somehow make all of this work and one person specifically behind it wall was my pre-determined roommate Kate.

Fall 2009

Kate will love this, and I’m pretty sure that I have told her this multiple times, but when I first “facebook stalked” her after receiving the room-assignment, my initial reaction was “hmm, New Yorker, blonde—completely opposite of my newly-brunette, homegrown, west coast appearance”…I had no idea if we’d get along, if we’d hangout, or if we’d be one of those freshman-year-roommate-horror stories that everyone secretly fears but never admits actually exists when coming to school.

At this point I think I speak for both of us when I say, we were pleasantly surprised with our similarities.

In the first year we shared dealing with being away from home—typical first year college woes, dealing with the multitude of “joys” and “pitfalls” associated with long-distance boyfriends (oh that was an experience), siblings at home, and everything else in between.

I think, even more than my best friends and family from home, she has seen me cry and go crazy more times in the period of one year than anyone may ever see. Ever. I don't cry, that's just not a thing.

Spring term of sophomore year--after being roommates sophomore fall, then both off in the Winter (Kate in Barcelona and I spending time back home)—I think we helped each other through moments that secretly we never actually acknowledged as being “possible”.

Kate, elegant as usual had archived distance from the "issue" via a quarter abroad, but I had spent a quarter living with the “ex” (see what I did, issue=ex, clever I know). That quarter, with everything good that came from it, taught me a lot about growing up and a lot more about what I needed to do about everything that had shaped what I narrow-mindedly saw as my “life”. I had let, and believe me when I say that this is not something that I was always ready to admit, one person completely alter my perception on what I wanted for my self. I think a mix of senior year high school euphoria, mixed with the traumatizing experience of attending college across the country, helped to glaze over the “relationship” that I thought would shape my entire life, in this crazy little utopia that I saw as my future.

Nothing against “him”—it truly was fun while it lasted—but knowing myself as “well” as I do now I think it took the shock-and-awe factor away when I realized that I really wasn’t thinking for myself anymore, I wasn’t making decisions for myself, and I definitely wasn’t living for myself—and that bothered me and ate away at me for weeks after returning to school for spring term.

It literally all came down to one moment of Kate writing down this ridiculously colorful (which if you know me, I love bright exciting colors) list of pros and cons about being in a relationship---and its incredible how many pros one person can come up with in a matter of seconds, she literally didn’t give it a second thought--kinda like she had been plotting it to be honest, haha. And the second I looked at the list, I started crying—she knew me better than I had known myself for the past two years—I had lost myself in this whirlwind of chaos that was entirely self-inflicted. I had let myself shut out so many important people in my life solely for my own goal of convincing myself (completely in denial obviously) that I knew what I wanted and could never be told otherwise.

But it took a compilation of my family, friends from home, and the one person at Dartmouth that I think truly understood who I was—to tell me that I literally needed to get my shit together and realize that I had led myself down a road that I never meant for myself to follow, and it took making what at that moment I thought was the “hardest decision” (obviously overreacting looking back, clearly haha) that I had made in my life, to make me snap back into myself.

Winter 2012

Since then, I’ve flip-flopped between decisions I made during my life, and decisions that I knew I would have to make, and so on, but what has made every decision since then easier—knowing that I had the ability to make the decision in the first place. The knowledge that it’s people who are with you day to day to day that sometimes can be that last little peak into yourself that you need to get that little glimpse of a light to lead you back onto your right path—whatever that may really be, really I haven’t figured it out yet, ha. 

This post wasn’t meant to be a long ramble about poor decisions I’ve made or took too long to make, or whatever, I guess I just wanted to somehow make a point to say that it’s surprising how one thing can snowball into the defining factor in your life so far, and that has been my close friendships that I’ve made here. I think also, though, what brought this post to be,was the intention of it to serve as a sort of sign that your life, whatever you think it is right now, really could be something entirely different tomorrow. In the past term, I've watched some of the strongest women in my life falter because they seemed to have lost track of who they are, seemed to have fallen under the "shadow" of the umbrella that they've labeled as their lives, and almost lost themselves entirely. I think I realized that it's important at some point every-so-often to stop and think about, not necessarily exactly what it is you want, but maybe think about what direction you want to move in--because I promise you I really don't know at all where I am going, but I have a slight idea of how I'm going to go about getting there.  

I guess to end it without reaching that point of utter rambling, unless that’s already been reached, I just wanted to say thank you to my freshman/sophomore/junior roommate and best friend Kate, floor mates from Bissell Three, sisters of KKG, softball girls, the Room 7 Crew, every single friend and family member from home, Dartmouth and AHS classmates, and everyone else in between—even the cheesiest of “thank you lines” can’t serve as enough.

As stated before, and not to be entirely like a typical “blogger” but I’ll end it with a quote as promised:

“The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity” Ulysses S. Grant

That sort of just sums it up. 

The Beginning

“Change is the only constant”—a statement my closest friend Hayley has probably had to tell me hundreds of times over the past few months—and every single time she reminds me not to be afraid of change because being afraid robs you of the ability to control how you react--and that's really all that life is, a never-ending string of changes and reactions.

Where I started

I decided to begin this blog, not because it’s my first year of college—cause no matter how much I don’t want to believe it, I’m halfway through my third—or because something significantly life altering happened, or because I have a deep desire that everyone reads every single thought I post. Its just sort of is something I think I should do, because as some close friends have been telling me lately, I have somewhat of a strong opinion and my multiple rants and comments are almost too cluttered to handle—and this would work as a way to jumble them all together into some sort of continuous train of thought.

"A friend is one who believes in you when you have ceased to believe in yourself." 

After graduating high school, I don’t think I realized how quickly my life would change in the following three years--and I can tell you that I especially didn't see my life turning out the way it is today. Freshman year was tumultuous to say the least—between the days of the constant ache for home, retiring from the sport I’d spent years playing, not knowing if I’d stay at Dartmouth, then at the very end making the final, yet still hesitant, choice to stay—I think I  came to the same conclusion that I probably should've always had; Dartmouth was home, and I just had to embrace that. 

Ever since then I’ve been trying harder and harder to grasp what “home” was every day that I’m here. Since making that decision, I used to think that I had  "given up" a lot:  the person I thought I’d be with for life (immaturely but surely thought so…), the chance to be closer to home, and lost some distant friends along the way. But how I’ve learned that I need to look nothing was a loss, and that with every decision I've made there’s been something else gained, such as;  a stronger relationship with my family, especially my dad and my sister (if you only knew what high school was like, haha), opportunities that I could’ve never imagined, met some of the most outstanding people and made some of the best friendships, and most of all I gave myself a chance to experience one of the richest college experiences I could have ever asked for—so I guess I’m still waiting to see how that works out.

Where I am today

Now that my junior winter is coming to a quick close, just got a job in the gorgeous San Juan Islands for the summer, and I’m slowly approaching my 21^st birthday (slowly but SURELY)—sh*t is getting way too real. Maybe that’s why I’ve decided to begin this blog, or maybe it’s not, but either way I’m going to start to write about all the crazy sh*t that goes on day to day in my life, in my families, in my friends—everything and anything that I can think of I guess.

I think what I’m going to try to do is probably not post everyday but just post when I have something somewhat meaningful (or what I think is at least) to say or ramble on about, and try to end with somewhat of a quote that pertains to what I said in the post.

So here we go, there’s post one and here’s quote one:

"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes"

As my brief statements above probably let you know, I haven't always (and still don't) have a "path" that I'm following, or really any direction at all. I used to have a hard time looking at mistakes I’ve made as anything else but dumb choices that I’ve made yet wish I hadn’t—now I see them as “lessons” or in this case what Oscar Wilde would consider “experiences”. I’ve also slowly realized that every experience that I’ve had, every person that I’ve lost or gained, every choice that I’ve made—has deeply contributed to who I am—who that is, I don’t really know  yet, but I know eventually I’ll figure it out, emphasis on eventually.