Post Grad: Mythos and Inevitable Disenchantment
Graduation was supposed to be a tearful and reluctant parting complete with a promise to visit whenever the opportunity arose. That’s how I always imagined the finale of the “best four years” of my life. Instead, once I graduated I wanted nothing more than to insert maximum distance between myself and my time as an undergraduate. Not a frigid, absolute distance like something strictly forbidden. Rather, an exorbitantly personal type of distance like the one between you and a part of town to which you swore to never return after having been robbed at gunpoint. Being the perceptive individual that you are, you refuse to call it a “bad part of town” as plenty of humans who are just as valid and capable of love as you are happily call it home.
Do you know the Greek myth about the man named Procrustes? He was a smith who stretched or cut innocent travelers to fit on an iron bed. This is reminiscent of what academia does to those who like me were foolish enough to believe it would love them as much as they love learning. Every student entering an institution is splayed across the bedrock comprised of the prototypical pupil and every effort ever taken to exclude all others. My own alma mater had been very clear about its desire to educate strictly the “white inhabitants of Houston and Texas” upon the writing of its original charter in 1891. Obviously much has changed, but this history is ubiquitous and cannot be erased. It is the history of American higher education and it is the iron bed across which my body was spread and cut to fit. Cut, not stretched. My error lies in being more than what the academy can handle, never less. What a shame that the parts of my person that didn’t fit were the blackest, poorest, queerest, and most disabled.
Only the least minoritized make it out in some state approximating unscathed. It is these people who look back at their “best four years” with fondness and appreciation for the people they became. The rest of us often look on with longing and heightened appreciation for the people we once were.
Everyone realizes they don’t fit the Procrustean bed in a different way. I have no less than four friends who took semesters of leave to work on their mental health. I have no less than four friends who transferred completely because there weren’t enough people who looked like them. As for me, I experienced a medical crisis (I will spare you the details because they hurt) and failed to exhibit the correct response. When things beyond your control negatively impact your education, the proper response is to bounce back as if nothing happened at all, and then use your trauma to demonstrate the type of “grit” that makes your flawless record that much more impressive. I accidentally reacted like a human being instead.
Silly me.
I couldn’t instantly bounce back or move on. But I also didn’t have time to properly heal. I was saddled with the task of proving the existence of upward mobility by “breaking the cycle”. And I decided against heaping more trauma upon my trauma by staying longer with my parents who were nothing like me, and wouldn’t like the real me if I ever let them meet him. So I went back to school and turned off the part of me that felt. I moved through my remaining years of school, physically active but mentally and emotionally suspended in amber. I failed to adjust to my new normal. In my mind I was a figure skater who had fallen in the middle of my routine, but the music played on and on. My blood dripped crimson on the ice. People grimaced and whispered. No one came to my aid. My routine’s scores, in the form of a Grade Point Average, were awful. My self-perception imploded as my mind, the generator of my confidence and center of my identity, betrayed me. Pressure. Depression. Anxiety. Pressure. I didn’t know who I was anymore or even who I could be. By my last day as a student, if I had to spend one more hour in that place, every milliliter of salty water in my body would have leached out through my empty brown eyes. Upon graduation, upon freedom the last thing I ever wanted to do was return to the place to which I swore I’d never return. The place from which I finally managed to insert maximum distance.
I knew that I couldn’t sit on my mother’s couch for eight months straight. That’s where I had been since graduating, and I quickly remembered why my teenage years weren’t my favorite. There were people that I missed and I needed to get away. Coming up soon was an event that brings back hundreds of alumni, and I knew for a fact some of the people who help make me feel whole would be in attendance. I sighed and shook my head. I bought the tickets. I had gone back to that part of town I said I’d avoid. I still refused to call it “bad.”
Returning to campus was just as odd as I thought it would be. Knocking on doors because I could no longer let myself in. Reliving moments good and bad with people I liked and didn’t. I came home a raincloud, bursting with words that would either escape my fingers as prose or my tear ducts as raindrops. I chose to forgo crying and instead wrote:
Making my return to the place that broke me was destined to be emotional. What I hadn’t been prepared for was the feeling of those emotions slipping out of my ears and coagulating in front of me, angry at having been suppressed for so long. Distressed at being so misunderstood. I don’t know if you’ve ever confronted someone you didn’t intend to anger. This is what I encountered when apologizing to my dispositions for the years of irresponsibility. Intent, impact, I knew how it worked.
In truth, I was just as angry at my emotions as they were at me.
Somewhere between the time my feelings slid out of me and the time I put them back in my body for the long drive home, I realized the eggshells I thought I had been walking on were actually shards of my former selves. I trotted over the remnants of skins I had molted, humming to myself a requiem for each layer that I stripped away to continue survival.
I wondered if it was too late to put those old skins back on. They had rotted and torn to pieces, and I understood it was far too late. That’s not how change works. I don’t get to restore myself to what I once was, I can only reconcile my old self with the new. If I can bring myself to apologize to me for letting my old self fall apart to begin with, then even better.
Nothing could have prepared me for feeling like a man without a nation. My alma mater, the place that broke me, felt like a distant dream; it was no longer my home. My mother’s couch had offered solace since graduating, but no authentic version of myself could exist there. Time moved backwards living with my mother, and every day I became younger and smaller and more distant. Wandering around campus made me feel disembodied. I needed to be let in to buildings because I was an outsider. Buildings to which I was once tethered, places to which I once had obligations, are rendered meaningless. Each day I was reminded and terrified of my own agency; I was at a point in life where I could do anything that I wanted as I belonged to no one but myself. That kind of freedom is unsettling and something I have never had until now. I don’t believe I know what to do with it.
Even at the height of my misery while attending that institution, I enjoyed feeling like a part of something. Not until this moment had I ever felt truly and perpetually alone.
Hindsight does not see any one experience, but an aggregate of many, much as the eye observing white light. But do you know what happens when you shine white light through a prism? It is then that you can see individual colors. Rose-colored glasses are enticing when a period in your past is net-positive. The aggregate experience seems positive, so in hindsight you ask yourself if you were artificially inflating your own despair. But (un)fortunately, specific people and places serve as prisms through which to filter my past. When the composite experience disperses into all of its constituent colors and memories, I remember the full extent of my pain. I never exaggerated.
Reigniting feelings and memories and traumas was not a negative experience. It hurt in the way massaging a sore muscle hurts and begs to be done again. I miss people I never knew I missed. But now I am prepared and will bring a receptacle for the displaced stuff of my past the next time around. No, I don’t know what that looks like. Thanks for asking.
I sat on these words. I looked them over the way I can only imagine God may have looked at the Earth when it was made: a bit proud, a bit critical, a bit apprehensive, a bit enamored. But most of all with an overwhelming willingness to share.
After sharing this reflection, the words I received from friends in exchange for these words of my own were words like “powerful” and “stunning.” But most striking were the messages I received regarding how relatable my sentiments were. I was well aware that my experience is not universal, but I had been made aware that it is also not unique. There were many others who wished to insert maximum distance between themselves and their time as undergraduates, and returning to campus also roused parts of them they wished to let sleep. Even while I was visiting campus and seeing the people who make me feel whole, we agreed with a caustic sort of chuckle that visiting campus once was plenty. There was truly no need to do it again. This runs directly contrary to the “best four years” that every movie and television show prepared me for. Actually, for many of us with minoritized identities, college feels like loss. There is immense growth, but at a cost much higher than we anticipate. The financial cost is well known, but it is such an emotionally expensive endeavor that I can’t say with certainty that I broke even in the end. Even after graduation, once Procrustes returns what he took, there is still the matter of reattachment. What was severed can never be wholly restored; you will never be quite what you were before.
It would be disingenuous of me to make this about inclusivity. There is nothing I can say that hasn’t already been said on that front. Moreover, there are plenty of very capable and very knowledgeable people already working on this issue. But making higher education in America an experience that undulates and expands to meet people exactly where they are instead of pressing us to a mold and trimming away the excess constitutes many lifetimes worth of work. What I am requesting is much more immediate.
Stop propagating the notion of the “best four years.”
First of all, it isn’t always four. I took four and a half. Timelines are individual, and culturally enforcing a four year norm only serves to structurally alienate those whose humanity supersedes the mold. More importantly, there is no need to continue to sell a truth that is only selectively true. In American society, we insist on teaching the vast majority of children to aspire to college regardless of their wishes or social and economic realities. If we’re going to make kids feel as if college is their only path to success and fulfillment, and define the term “entry level” to reflect this in job applications, then the least we can give our youth is the unbiased truth about bias. There really are people who will view their college years as the “best four years” of their time on Earth. There will be people who are there solely to create memories and not opportunities, as opportunity was given to them by fortune. There really are people who will peak in the first quarter of their lives. Why is that something that anyone should aspire to?
To college students who feel that they do not fit: Most of your classmates feeling as alive as they’ve ever felt will be white and male and heterosexual and cisgender and able-bodied and wealthy. Remember this whenever you feel hollow. If you feel that your peers are constantly en route to some party to which no one thought to invite you, you are not alone in this. If you feel that your life is rife with challenges that the founders of your institution never envisioned, you are correct and you are not alone in this. Perhaps you’ve chosen a Historically Black College or University or a Hispanic Serving Institution. Perhaps you’ve joined an affinity group anticipating the necessity of community. Regardless, the fact remains that there is an overwhelming probability that you are not what anyone had in mind when your institution was founded, or when we built this culture that preaches college for all. Be it your race, gender, sexuality, ability status, socioeconomic status, or any number of factors, there is something about you that will require you to get creative about not losing yourself. There will need to be a conscious effort on your part not to become someone you despise or do not recognize. You are stretching the iron Procrustean bed with your bare hands, a battle fought administratively, institutionally, structurally, and culturally all at once. In the meantime, there will be parts of you that simply will not fit.
You will not lose yourself forever. Hopefully most of you will stay the same. You will have a lifetime to rediscover the bits of you placed on the chopping block and learn to love them more than ever. It is my hope and my prayer that you run across the finish line rather than half-limping and half-dragging your bruised and bloodied form, as I did.
Believe me, the change will be immeasurable. Some of it will be growth, and some of it will be loss.
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