Isabel
Yesterday I started packing up my dorm room. I took the Harry Potter posters off my wall rolled them up and stuck them in a brown box to send back to Florida. I folded pretty dresses I never even wore into a gigantic suitcase that I will later have to lug to the airport. As I sat on my overflowing luggage trying to zip it up, I told myself that I started packing this earlier because I didn’t want to do it during finals. But there is something very cathartic about moving my possessions back home.
I’ve thought a lot recently about my first year at Emerson. It hasn’t been what I expected it to be when I first moved in on that chaotic day. I guess I was just under the impression that I was a different person, I assumed I knew who I was or at least had a working knowledge of my values, but I was wrong. I lost a lot of things here at college: I can no longer win “Never Have I Ever” so easily, I lost contact with many high school friends and I misplaced my Lilo and Stitch lanyard with my keys on it many a time.
Through all this though, I gained a better understanding of myself. I have always been a very rule-abiding person, not because I believed in all the rules, but because I feared getting in trouble. Emerson has made me realize that sometimes rules are really just suggestive guidelines, and when you follow them too well you end up in your dorm room on Saturday night while everyone else is out at some party. It’s okay to spend most of your weekends watching Gossip Girl on Netflix and eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey if that’s what you want to do. But I’ve learned that closing yourself off from new experiences by following all the rules makes you really regretful.
I think that what I’m trying to say here is that, if you have the opportunity to try something new that you’ve never experienced before don’t pass that up. In fact, I think you should go to class in a onesie if you want to, eat breakfast at three in the morning if you want to, be a child and build a snowman in the Commons if you want to, and dance like a crazy person around your dorm room if you want to, even if no one will join you. Because none of us came here with the intent of following our boring old routine.
My dorm room looks so much emptier now when there are no more posters hanging up by a bit of poster putty and a whole lot of willpower. My roommate came back later that night and proclaimed it to be “too depressing.” But staring at the white walls right now I think that losing things leaves room to realize what you have left, and for me that’s a pretty good first year college experience and the hope for a more exciting second one.