We're Still Fighting It
i just got off the phone with a former college roommate. she graduated a year after me and it was really surreal to hear her talking about her last year of school. i felt a small sharp stab of...something. it wasn't really jealousy. it was more like the feeling that your friends have outgrown you. that you are now a thing of the past. it is strange for me to think about college because in my head it is forever frozen in time. it would be like carefully writing a story and then coming back to it a year later only to find that someone else had rewritten the ending and changed all the characters. HEY THAT'S MINE. that's what i want to yell. hearing a close friend nostalgically refer to a perfect senior year somehow made my senior year seem inferior. aw, crap. Crap, crap. it made me want to go back…only if it could be exactly the way I left it. I usually hear myself raving about how great “real life” is in comparison to college, but there are some things that I miss a lot, or at least wish I could be a part of. I think the reason why all of this is so painful is that most of my time in college was difficult. I only really began to enjoy it that last year. and unlike most of my friends (who said their last semester couldn’t have been better), my college career ended in basically the worst way possible. I think it is hard for me not to be a little bitter.
The good thing is that I actually really like my life right now. I love my job, love my roommates and apartment, and love the people in my community. And maybe the real problem is not that my college friends have outgrown me. Maybe the problem is that they have not grown along with me. it is hard to share life with people who don’t live it with you. when it comes down to it, I wouldn’t trade my life experiences for anything. That’s what let’s me turn my stereo on full blast and spend an afternoon with ben folds as the years go on and we’re still fighting it. It sucks to grow up.
