Hey Margaret, it’s me, Margaret! Things are going to be okay. I love you! XO, Marg
5 semesters at Tulane, 2 summers in New Orleans, 1 semester abroad, and 0 ideas of what I will be doing with my sluggish sandwich self after I trip and get dragged kicking and screaming across the stage at graduation in May lead me to where and who I am today: a jumpy, loud 21 year old woman-person sitting in my weird creaky bed inside my wonderfully squishy college home writing my last first Her Campus article. Ever.
In typical tornado-like fashion I have a capstone paper open in another tab and a photo collage I’m making for a friend’s birthday next week open on my phone after a brief identity crisis at 3 am on Saturday. I realized that I don’t wish ANYONE happy birthday with a photoshopped image anymore. (who am I????) There is a ¾ eaten plate of pasta on the floor from earlier today and there is a packet of information about the GRE I will not be taking in October near the door. There is a to-do list as long as the length of my house in an XL crazy person planner next to me. I’m drinking water from a pink straw inside a free Yulman stadium cup I got in 2014 at the first tailgate on campus. It’s 3 am, and I am tired. I’m looking at my guitar and thinking about how it’s been a long time since I’ve played it but I’m also looking at the pictures on the wall across from me and thinking about the time my freshman year roommate and I played Vanessa Carlton on my broken 2010 iHome and stood on top of our Sharp 6 desks throwing beads into the baby pool in the middle of our room that we both slept, cried, and dumped our mud soaked fluorescent Mardi Gras clothes in. I’m reading a Man Repeller article and it’s making me laugh. What a time to be alive.
I often think of college as a sort of balancing act between crying on the floor of your hallway without underwear on and jumping on top of a pool table to swing from a metal bar attached to the ceiling into a crowd of adoring peers. A lot of times, it seems like four years of the tip top of the seesaw moment where you sit, balanced precariously between the air and your now teeny tiny friend, alone and quiet with your thoughts and a feeling of calm and infinity that feels like it will last forever (thus the nature of feeling infinite). Your friend is pitted by you and by gravity to sit with their knees awkwardly bent in a crouched position gazing up at you from below with admiration and acknowledgment of the way life works – checks and balances, ups and downs, Beyonce self titled and Lemonade. Tomorrow, or maybe in 5 minutes, you and the friend will switch and you will get to watch in swimmy eyed admiration as your friend flies and achieves in epic proportions. Empowered women empower women, or whatever Michelle Obama says that makes me melt most days. But sometimes you get jealous, or sometimes the person on the tip top of the seesaw is not actually a friend but an enemy who tried to push you around or toots their own horn just a little too much or made your friend cry and you want to propel yourself so strongly from the bottom of that see saw that you shoot into space and forget another person even exists.
I am much too old to use the excuse of “figuring my life out” or being angsty or feisty and I sure as hell am too young to know basically anything about life, so I’m not really sure what this beginning of senior year article or whatever you call this is. My heart is still a black hole full of 16 year old angst and I kick desks over all the time in my head. As my text books remind me, the entirety of my brain isn’t even fully developed yet. Isn’t that crazy, that we are graduating from a four year major research institution in a few months and we don’t even have security clearance into our fully functioning adult brains that could potentially one day wear a pant suit or pay a mortgage or buy a house in the suburbs in a neighborhood with a monochromatic dress code and a PTA president named Gwendolyn that lives in the house at the front of the cul-de-sac with a pool and a refrigerator that spews out water, ice, AND sweet tea????
Are you panicking yet?????!??! (you meaning me)
HEY!
It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.
This year, I will give myself the gift of forgiveness.
I will be late sometimes, I will have to ask for extensions, I will probably cry in a bathroom that is not my own and I will NOT be stoic or nice to those that are palpably inauthentic and do not understand what it means to be me. However, I will promise to at least make an effort to make myself known to them first.
I will have patience with the humans who ask me what my ten year plan is (someone actually knew me zero enough to ask me this) but I will also give myself the moments of a long stare and 5 minute explanation about how someone becomes a circus ring master (takes less than 10 years so take that business school consultants).
I love how it feels to sit here writing this and hear my friends laughing and enjoying each others’ company in another room and it seems stupid to think about anything else. I love how it feels to write even though it’s painful and I love how it feels to tap my foot to the release radar playlist on my spotify.
This year I will put other girls on my shoulders to perfect the perfect pyramid stunt but I will not be afraid to do cartwheels and backflips in public just for the sake of the way it feels.
So here’s to another year of Her Campus and to another year of writing about nothing.
In conclusion!
Hey Margaret, it’s me Margaret! It’s going to be okay. I love you. XO, Marg.