This summer, I decided to make one of the most drastic—but also one of the most fruitful—decisions in my life so far. It was a hard decision to make, because it is not a common decision at Kenyon to take a semester off (let alone the semester before your senior year), but I am so glad that I did. I had a really difficult, loss-filled junior year, and so I have been using this semester to recover and grow.
Last November, my parents’ house burned down. No one was home, but we lost our cat, all of my parents’ clothes and belongings, and most of our family’s sentimental possessions. I had lived in that house for my whole life, and it was (and still is) difficult to wrap my head around the fact that the place where so much of my life took place is completely gone.
Right after it happened, I went home for a few days to be with my parents, but then I had to come back to school. That semester, I really struggled to return to Kenyon, and wound up isolated and struggling to function. A few people at Kenyon suggested that I take off the following semester, but at the time, my parents were living out of a hotel room with a few possessions that were either paid for by the insurance company or given to them by generous friends and so I wouldn’t have had anywhere to go.
Spring semester, I found myself wishing that I had decided to take the semester off, when my uncle died suddenly, and then my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and died. The whole semester, I was miserable at Kenyon, because I didn’t know how to grieve, I struggled to balance the pressures of schoolwork with my already struggling emotional health, and I longed to be with my family.
Yet, when it came time to choose courses for this semester, it never really crossed my mind to take time off now. In fact, it wasn’t until I had some time to step back and rest that I finally realized that it was time to press pause.
In June, I attended the Hillside Worship Intensive, a two-week summer program for church musicians to hone their craft, gain leadership skills, and focus on personal growth. There, I had the chance to see how unhealthy my lifestyle of ignoring my pain had become, and i realized that I just needed to slow down.
By the end of the school, I dreaded returning to Kenyon. I spent an afternoon journaling about it, and I discovered that I had been using the pursuit of my academic goals to distract myself from what was really going on in my heart. I had been running from my grief, hoping that it would go away. I had drawn back from my most important relationships, and so I was lonely. I had always allowed my success in school to determine my value, and so I had neglected my emotional needs to get the grade. If I wanted to be happy and healthy again, I needed to make something needed to change in my life.
So I made a radical choice: I stopped.
I mean, first, I emailed a few mentors, called my parents, and checked in with Kenyon to make sure that it wasn’t too late, but then I decided. I decided that I needed to escape the breakneck pace of college life, the extraordinary pressure to succeed, and the comfortable escapism of my routines if I wanted to get healing.
This semester, instead of being at Kenyon, I am attending the School of the Heart, a three-month Christian discipleship school that focuses on developing emotional, spiritual, and relational health. Here, I am learning how to deal with my grief, how to have vulnerable, deep relationships, and how to truly live out the faith that is so important to me.
It’s really different from anything that I had been learning at Kenyon. Instead of classes on the Ottoman Empire or Greek Poetry, we have classes on communicating in conflict, cultivating creativity, understanding your value, discovering your purpose in life, and embodying virtues like patience and kindness. Students help to cook and clean up after meals as part of our character development, and we spend time each week doing community service in a disadvantaged community. We live in very close quarters and share everything from inside jokes to things that we’ve never told anyone before, and it’s all part of the curriculum.
I love it. I’ve gotten to experience completely new things, like spending 36 hours in total silence in the Pocono Mountains, do things that scare me, like crying in front of everyone, and learn to love things that I hated, like doing the dishes. I’ve learned to be a better friend, to love myself more than I ever have before, and to face whatever situation is in front of me with courage and faith.
I am so glad that I took a semester off from Kenyon to get the healing that I could not get there. It was a scary decision to step away from academia to focus on personal growth, but I am so glad that I did. I am learning priceless lessons that will enrich my last two semesters at Kenyon and the rest of my life. My semester is definitely an unconventional one, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Image credits: Maggie Griffin