So, we’ve been in college for a bit.
Everyone’s life is different, but you’ve been hearing about mine for like 3 years, so here’s a little bit more about me, specifically.
I didn’t go to a college with many other smathers. As far as I know, I am actually the only one on campus.
At first, I thought smath ruined me.
I can’t talk to these people. These normal people, who play lacrosse and football and major in Economics and don’t get my quantum mechanics jokes, who think that this is a challenging workload and are adjusting to living away from home and can’t share space. These are normal people, and I’m not normal, and it’s like we speak two different languages and Rosetta forgot to come out with a stone edition.
Well, that’s not true, strictly speaking. I can talk to them. I do talk to them. I have friends.
I just don’t like them the way I like my smath friends. The way I liked my smath friends. It feels wrong to even call these people my friends.
It’s actually really weird. Even though I don’t go to school with them, I stay in contact with my fellow unicorns. We videochat, we text, we call, we skype. We still talk about things going on at NCSSM, about whether it’d be weird for us to visit now, about the politics of the school and the school in politics (west campus is coming, no matter how much we alums think the money should just go to expanding east campus because west campus would be so much worse and there’s a mental health crisis but we aren’t a mental health hospital we’re a school and apparently so and so professor is doing this and that and this student is going to that college and oh my gosh we HAVE to go back for graduation but oh no I’m busy that weekend and so on).
So, my first assumption was that NCSSM ruined us. Two years clumped together, and suddenly, we no longer fit into the outside world. The ones who go to school with other smathers seem to hang out with each other. I, alone, try to use technology to retain that connection. We had been turned into outcasts, comfortable only among ourselves. We had unintentionally pushed out that part of us that makes us human in an attempt to squeeze in enough to call ourselves unicorns.
And then I realized the truth.
This is what my friendships felt like before. In 9th and 10th grade. This is what it felt like – when they were my friends, but I hated them. When I spoke and they didn’t understand. When I laughed until I cried and then realized that I was the only one laughing.
I realized that NCSSM did not ruin me.
It was just a special place, where my weirdly shaped piece fit with other weirdly shaped pieces to make a weirdly shaped puzzle that I called beautiful. And that isn’t all smathers, that’s me. There are a lot who are now happy where they are. There are those who are fitting in perfectly. There are many who are learning how to fit in, and are changing, bit by bit, as they need to. I’m like that. My shape remains weird, but it’s beginning to twist in new places. It’s learning to bend where others bend, to fit in and make a rectangular puzzle.
What’s good in the past, my memory makes beautiful, and what’s bad, my memory makes tragic. As I look back, I don’t believe that I would ever give up those two years. I would not give up the friendships I made, the classes I took, the stress, the roommate conflicts, the check calls and loops and 4th west and sweat raining from the ceiling and absurdly named clubs. From the outside, I’m fitting in pretty well. I’m doing fine in my classes, I’m engaged in extracurriculars, and I don’t want to go back to smath. I don’t miss it.
But I look back at it, and I love it. I know that I made the right choice to come. And a lot of wrong choices there, and a lot of wrong choices before, and I’ve made a LOT of wrong choices at college. But those two years were great years.
But hey, if you don’t believe my memory, read for yourself.
Oh, I almost forgot.
Congratulations, NCSSM Class of 2018, and Happy (Belated) Welcome Day.
A NCSSM Journey 