I visited my alma mater, Furman, for Homecoming this past weekend for the first time in over a year. I was very anxious leading up to it and almost had to force myself to go. When I parked in my old Freshman dorm parking lot, I sat in the car with the engine turned off, seriously contemplating turning around and going back home. But I knew that I had to go. Whatever my feelings were at the present, and actually because of those feelings, I knew that I needed to reconcile with that place, that time in my life. I was anxious because I couldn’t predict how being there would make me feel, and I didn’t want to deal with a wave of powerful emotions. Walking through the campus that had cradled me for four years would be like walking through a mine field; I didn’t know what holy ground I might step over that would explode with memories unforeseen, for good or bad. I was anxious because I didn’t know who would be happy to see me again. I was anxious because I knew in my heart what I’ve been afraid to say out-loud: it wasn’t the best four years of my life. It was just life. It was a series of immense joys and devastating upsets and an extraordinary amount of mundane. It came, and then it went. I was still trying to figure it all out by the time I left. Nothing was static, people were fleeting. I was relentlessly trying to figure out the right way to do college; I was trying to find that “sweet-spot”: my flow, my groove, my niche. But I ran out of time.
When I look back on those years I don’t feel overwhelming, fuzzy contentment but unease, regret, wounded nostalgia, and longing, for what could have been and should have been. If only I’d taken path A instead of path B, if only I’d joined this sorority, if only I’d taken this class and dropped that other one, if only I’d reached out to this person and kept my distance from that person, if only I’d realized sooner that I was in the wrong major. The whole lot of it doesn’t sit well with me. This is quite a sad predicament, because these feelings are not indicative of my four years there, and I can recognize that on a logical level. I can recall countless fond memories with friends that send warmth and joy flooding through me. But it is my expectation for what the “college experience” should have been that distorts these memories and sees them as scattered and detached.
Somewhere along the road of life I was told that these would be the best four years of my life, and I would always look back on that time and miss it. I believe this is true to an extent. The Furman bubble (you might only know what this means if you’re an alumn or have heard an alumn grumble with both disgust and affection towards the bubble) is a special space that I will never be able to re-create. And this is a sobering fact not because it was a glorious time of living on top of the world, but because the time in the bubble was heart-wrenching in every way imaginable. It had the power to both break my heart and then put it back together again. So I mean it when I say that Furman and I have a very complicated relationship. I’m angry with the school (as if it could bear my anger), and I’m angry with myself that it wasn’t the best four years of my life. I’m angry with the world that I can’t do it all over again. And I’m angry that despite this vague and disorienting anger, I still miss it, without being sure what exactly I miss. It was my life, and it was home.
I don’t know how my recently graduated Furman colleagues think about their four years. I wonder if we all keep our truths to ourselves for fear of what these truths might mean the for the ideal life we’d like to lead. My anxiety-ridden image of my college years is one that I am working on recreating and healing. Through time, space, and perspective, I’ll be able to weave my memories together and turn them into a coherent narrative, certainly not leaving out the negative memories, but not allowing them to take the center stage of my narrative. Because those four years weren’t a smoothly operated puppet play of a life I have unfairly idealized for myself. They were my life, my beautiful struggle of a life, bare and real, with my flawed character trying to make the most of what I had. That was then, and that’s what it will always be, and I am not afraid of the life that is ahead, that will always beckon me to remember the life that has passed.