Freshman Year

How do you compress a freshman year into a single blog post?  That’s the challenge I find myself facing today, after bailing on the blog so many months ago when I wanted to spare my daughter — who was reading DFTN faithfully at the time — the agony of my own agonies.  I think you give up any hope of being complete and simply focus on the essence of the experience: the sense of throwing your first (and only) born off a cliff and then realizing that it’s you who are rocketing into the abyss, arms flailing for purchase, while she stands on terra firma and gets on with her life.  And then realizing that your job for the year is scrambling your way back to where you were, only to find yourself on a different continent overlooking a foreign sea.  The challenge for all of us in this position, I think, is to become joyful travelers, to suspend our fear of the unknown and our suspicion of what might be lurking there and trek on.

And what aboutFlora?  What did she learn in this incredible year of learning?  That you can like your roommates even if you end  up having very little in common with them.  That there are friends waiting to be discovered beneath the facades of strangers.  That doing things on your own can be terrifying and exhilarating, often at the same time.  That you are stronger than you ever imagined, and occasionally weaker as well.  That you are a work in progress.  That your mother will pretend to be awake when you text her at one in the morning.  That she will pretend not to be concerned when you send her anxious emails, but that she can no longer fool you when she does.  That you will continue to amaze your parents, sometimes in ways that they don’t appreciate.  That sharing a bathroom with two dozen other people is, in general, an experience that you don’t care to repeat, ever.  That you can overcome your shyness to critique your classmates’ work in a way that earns you praise from your professors.  That you can be critiqued without being blasted into a pile of dust.  That you always wanted to live an interesting life and damned if that isn’t exactly what you’re in the middle of doing.

You go, girl.

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