The amount of irony in my life is astounding.
If anyone told me a couple of years ago that I would be at a school an hour away from my house, majoring in music and minoring in classics, living in an apartment on the far north end of campus with three athletes, two of which are STEM majors, AND totally loving the experience, I would’ve thought that they were crazy.
Most of my life, I’ve been hell-bent on leaving Ohio and exploring the world and doing something that would somehow qualify as “great.” I’ve been afraid that if I don’t achieve that “greatness,” my life won’t mean anything, and I will have failed. Moreover, I have convinced myself that if I don’t leave the Midwest immediately, I’ll be inevitably sucked back into the void and never escape.That, of course, is the more pessimistic side of things. I’ve had plenty of big dreams independent of this fear of failure, though still chiefly tied to my need for escape, and I’ve gone through many phases of having a clear picture of what I wanted my life to be like. I’ve wanted to be a Broadway performer, living in the heart of New York City, a writer housed in a yellow Victorian with a willow tree in a small town, an archaeologist in a dusty museum in Greece, a singer-songwriter touring across Europe, a tea farmer in Japan, and, never to forget, the latest addition to or long-lost member of some royal family. A little eclectic, and entirely fanciful, but so real in the moment that I could almost feel the sea breeze on my face or the silk slippers under my feet.Now, I look at myself and think back on how I got here. It’s definitely not what I imagined. When I was applying to colleges, I focused on New England and somehow convinced myself that if I couldn’t leave the country as soon as high school was over, it was my best bet for something new. So, I went on college visits, and there were places that I really liked and places that I really didn’t. Looking back, I think I liked the idea of certain schools and the escape they offered from what I knew better than the schools themselves. Then, I visited Kenyon not expecting to like it much at all, and I undeniably fell in love. Flash forward to rejection from the other two of my top three schools, and here we are.
I came to Kenyon thinking I’d be an English major, maybe an English, film double-major, and take some classics classes while doing music on the side. But, when I got here, I realized that music was actually what I cared about the most, and while I love to read and write, it’s not how I want to spend the bulk of the next four years. My priorities did a complete 180—music major, classics minor, some film/drama classes and writing as an extracurricular.Then, there are the little things—living in the apartments I had been condemning as “too far away from everything to be worth it,” having very close friends who are simultaneous athletes and STEM majors (a distinction that my artsy self-viewed as almost another species back in high school—though I did always like math), going gluten-free and vegetarian after swearing I could never handle the deprivation, getting a tattoo when I had once been sure nothing would matter to me enough to ink it on my skin, battling eating disorders and body dysmorphia with an utter love of cooking, and willfully subjecting myself to risky adventures after chronic illness convinced me I’d have to live the rest of my life with caution.I guess what I’m getting at is that we can never know what direction our lives are going to take, so the best way to ease the flow is to keep an open mind and stop trying to guess. I spend way too much time obsessing over theoretical situations and not enough time on what I can be doing in the present because it gives me an illusion of comfort when I feel like I have a plan. But, plans change. Where I once wanted fame and fortune, I’d now be more content with owning an allergy-accommodating tea and coffee shop, and rather than being in front of the camera, I’d happily compose the music in the background. And the more I go with the flow, the more in-touch I feel with the true version of myself that my dreams had been trying to cultivate all along.
Image Credits: Feature,1,2,3,4