this is good.

notes from the day before i leave for college

I am feeling fragile. Not like glass, but like a stone sculpture, chipped down to a slim little beam by everything that is to come. For the last three days I’ve cried in my car. I hear a song and it truly deeply hits.

I had to do my little orientation courses, my applications, pack my clothes, buy books, buy scarves and beanies. So many things to purchase, so much to prepare for. In my mind I’m writing stories about things that don’t exist, people and assignments and parties and illnesses--every single one ends in someone failing me, or me failing them. I almost cried because some guy on the BU class of 2026 page left me on opened. 

What exactly I am preparing for is so foreign, an unfamiliar future of snow and homework and strangers. All the specifics, like changing my address on the student link, signing up for discussion group 1A, my new sleep schedule, finding the right translation of textbooks, the details of my social encounters (that are certain to go terribly, right?) add into an overwhelming, nebulous wave that inhibits my ability to do anything at all. I think about the instagram guy, then the clubs, then who I’m sitting next to in class, then my absurd number of units, and all of a sudden I’m ragdolling underwater, laying on the floor of a Target.

When things get too much I like to be still. In the face of danger, some fly, some fight, I like to freeze. On the floor of Target’s beanie section I saw a little girl that used to come to my work almost everyday with her parents. At her elementary school’s auction fundraiser, her dad got drunk and bought a latte everyday for a year. He’s from Boston and likes the same TV as me, so we got along very well. Her mom works at Adobe, and I’d always show her my newest photoshop projects. They met at Syracuse and were so excited for me to be on the east coast. So much more excited than I was. 

I would have said hi to Grace and her grandma, If I wasn’t lying on the carpet groaning about it all being too much. I thought about how I would have explained myself if she had seen me, and I think it would have gone like this:

“Grace! I’m getting worried because I’m moving away. I’m just being silly and dramatic. Sometimes it’s scary for things to change, but change can be a really good thing too.” 

I think I really do believe that. 

I think I do.

I think a lot of things, I’ve been thinking so many things about the next few weeks.

I think about unabashed, false proclamations of strength:

the performance of calm for a child,

for my grandparents.

My sister saying “this is good.”, 

the lyrics that are making me cry in my car:

“I’m not afraid of going back to school…

“My whole world’s turning upside down and somehow I’m alright…

I love these statements. I do not believe them with my heart. I think I’ll be alright, I think college will be super positive, but I don’t feel that in my nervous system. I feel too much, I feel too many details of possible failure, intricacies of who I will miss and who I will not and why, so many tiny itty bitty things that are weighing me down. 

But if I scream these contradictions, maybe I could let the weight of my personal anxieties go and float to the surface. I could let the real, material waves hit me without drowning in them.

I cry because I am inspired by the person who says these contradictions with their heart. Saying it now makes me think for just a moment, that I will become them one day. The distance feels so far, the time and pain and homework and failures that it will take to believe that

“this is good.”

But I will get there. I will so get there. I am there! I am great, I am excited, I am capable. I’m not afraid of going back to school. I’m not afraid of anything at all.