You’re in the movie theater and the lights dim. A Norah Jones song plays, slowly tugging at your heart strings. A montage of a boy, a girl, a love story. You swear you’ve already seen this movie a thousand times, and you might have just seen the entirety of the flick – or what it’s worth – in that three minute trailer. Yet, you’re intrigued. The title fades out, and there it is, “Based on the bestseller by Nicholas Sparks.”
Let me just start off by saying I love – so much so that they could make a romance movie just based off of my love for – romantic movies, all rom-coms, rom-drams, or straight up roms, and yes, Nicholas Sparks seems to be a genius in that field. I’ll freely admit I have seen all his movies, most of them multiple times, but I never understood the movie The Notebook (cue every other girl gasping at this sentence). To give you a brief summary (**spoilers**), the main character Allie rediscovers her first love, Noah, or you may know him as Ryan Gosling, and abandons her fiancée, Lon. The end. (I’m not doing the movie justice. There are more details that make this plot go on for two hours, but for the sake of this article’s length, we’re sticking with that synopsis.) I swear I have a romantic bone in my body, but I always thought Allie made the wrong choice by dumping poor Lon. He was the more financially stable, practical choice, but fine, Allie, choose love over security.
I never understood The Notebook, that is, until I chose Notre Dame.
My whole life I have chosen the Lon of the situation, as I’m sure many ND students have. We choose to study for a test instead of going to a party. We take the hardest classes instead of slacking off. Instead of a free schedule, we juggle a zillion extracurriculars until we are so well-rounded, we start to resemble a circle. We choose practicality over carefree fun because that feels safe. Do the work and then you know you’re guaranteed to succeed.
By the time my senior year rolled around, you could say I fell head over heels for “Lon.” I studied, but this time I was studying for the ACT through my school’s homecoming football game. I skipped parties to work on the weekends. I had college interviews during class events. Last year, I wasn’t just a typical senior in high school, losing sleep, but also losing a part of myself while trying to be someone I barely recognized. That sleep deprived, coffee addict workaholic was one side of me that unknowingly took over my whole life.
I was so focused on tiptoeing through life with safe, measured steps, I forgot how to run.
My measured steps led me to a decision between Notre Dame and another school. The other school was of a higher prestige and had a program that better suited my major. As one of my friends put it, this should have been a no-brainer decision. But my brain wasn’t holding me back. It was my heart. For the first time in my life I didn’t want to be reasonable. I wanted the school that I had grown up with and had filled my childhood wardrobe with spirit wear, where I had gone to football games every year, where I had learned the term community can be witnessed in the student section of a Notre Dame game, The Basilica on any given day, in the dining hall, anywhere on that home they call a campus.
Screw practicality, I wanted my childhood love, my Ryan Gosling – Notre Dame. At every other school, I could see the type of person I would become there, but at Notre Dame, the future is unclear, and that is beautiful.
Sometimes, in a life so precise and predictable, you need spontaneity to save your sanity.
I don’t regret working as hard as I did in high school because it’s the reason I am here at Notre Dame writing this article now, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want change.
Life is full of Lons and Noahs, work and play. And most of the time, you will choose Lon, but here’s the thing: we have spent our whole lives working. Working to please parents, friends, admissions officers, teachers. At the start of this new chapter in my life, I don’t have to choose one. I can have both, as long as I find a balance and consciously make an effort to keep that balance. I choose whether or not to be a workaholic shut out from sociality, a partier who might pick up a degree along the way or better yet, a happy medium in between.
It’s time to shed the weight of my workaholics suit and throw on some Fighting Irish apparel. Because that’s what Notre Dame is. It’s not a place of work, but of fight. You are never labored with the work of school; you choose to take on a fight to follow what you believe in with a passion.
So, Domers, what will you fight for?
As an incoming freshman, I fought for my spot in the class of 2018. All Notre Dame students, past and present, fought to meet and surpass the standards to which the world holds us. And how appropriate that Notre Dame alum, Nicholas Sparks, writes of this same fight in his characters Allie and Noah.
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Images: 1, 2 (provided by author), 3 (provided by author), 4