Going into summer vacation after having completed my first year away at college, I knew I would find myself stretched between two (or more) social circles - my group of friends from home and my eclectic mix from college. Staying in touch has not been as hard as I thought it would be, and being between two assortments of people really isn't weird. It is just what happens.
The idea of "summer" is consistently romanticized. It is this thing that we crave. We want it, and when it's gone we are always nostalgic for it, even when it might not have been as magical as we hoped it would be. Last summer, the summer after high school graduation, I remember as the best summer of my life. I think it was because there was this impending sense of change. Something big was about to happen. My friends and I were about to move away and experience a shift in our relationship. We wouldn't see each other for months at a time, we would make new friends, and have new life experiences that would only ever be stories to each other. Last summer I remembered everything I'd ever loved about my high school and pre-high school life. As it began to end, I was horribly distraught over the idea that nothing would be like it was. Everyone tells you that change is a natural and essential part of life. Change shows you who you really are, who loves you, and what you want out of life. I understood this at the time, but I don't think I felt it.
A few nights ago, I was catching up with my home-friends. A few of them were remarking on the fact that it was so amazing that we could come home and act like we always have. When asked who was the most changed, most of us just laughed and said that no one had changed. Nothing had changed. We were laughing and yelling but for a split second I was hit with this sudden feeling that absolutely everything had changed. Everyone looks the same - no one came home from college with a brand new style and a flipped personality to match. We have the same senses of humor and the same old memories and jokes, so I couldn't pinpoint what made me suddenly feel so different. Did no one else pick up on it, the sudden shift in dynamic, the unsettling but strangely natural feeling that this was the beginning of actually growing up?
I've been thinking about this all week, this idea of the immediate and all-consuming realization that life can change in small ways that affect you drastically in such short periods of time. Growing up and coming into your own happens slowly and for almost nineteen years I have experienced it in very small waves. But already over a month into summer, it has hit me head on. This is the biggest wave of all, and somehow it is the least scary because it has crashed in all at once. The changes I am noticing in everyone I know, in the familiar dynamics that at times feel unfamiliar to me are direct results of something I have just now figured out.
I have changed.
I have very limited knowledge about who I want to be, and have managed to remain content in the fact that I will figure it out and things will work themselves out in the end. There are a lot of things I have yet to experience and learn, and all of that will come in time. There is both a relentless desire in me to grow up fast and figure everything out and a part of me that wishes everything would slow down. The things I've learned about myself are sometimes predictable, and sometimes surprising. I was at a party the other night trying hard to not analyze my own life in relation to others', and while everyone around me might have been a little bit drunk, I realized it is a very sobering thing to watch the people you've grown up with doing just that: growing up.
But, on a different side of things, if you had suggested to me last summer that I might move somewhere that ISN'T my home town one summer for a job or an internship, I would have shut that idea down immediately. Now, that idea is maybe a LITTLE scary, but ultimately something I want. I have done my time being afraid of change. It is still something that is going to loom over me, something that is inevitably going to frighten me, but something that requires being embraced every single time it happens. The part of me that feared independence or any type of separation from a group mentality has grown up. I've further discovered the fact that I like doing things for myself and often by myself. I love my friends as much as I love my independence, and I hope they know that. I hope they know that when we change, we are doing ourselves a favor. I hope they know that I love them without conditions, and when life forces us to move on and away, that is an essential part of our relationship. I hope they know that I love what they have taught me, even when it's 4 AM and we can't form coherent sentences.
I am going to keep going forward and meeting new people and moving to new places and trying new things. Everyone is. We are all supposed to change, and we're all supposed to be a little bit afraid. It seems fitting that it took me until after the biggest change I've experienced to understand, accept, and eventually rejoice in my own capacity for change. Sometimes change makes us feel like we don't quite fit right anywhere, like there is something else blocking where we once slid in so perfectly, but that is because we fit into different places in different ways for different reasons. Our shapes shift, and the shapes we fit into are always in motion.
I spend a lot of time not understanding myself when I'm trying to understand myself. I think it is because I am realizing that understanding myself is a lifelong process.
That is all I have to understand for now.
-Hannah
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