During my freshman year of college, I consumed way too many iced coffees, slept in way too many times and procrastinated on way too many homework assignments. I spent hours studying in libraries, dancing in basements and journaling on benches in the Back Bay Fens, even when the river was frozen over. I learned how to navigate public transportation, changed my major (three times) and joined a sorority. After the year’s end, my playlists had more songs on them, my phone had more contacts in it and my journal had more words filling its pages.
Reflecting on the college experience evokes many feelings, and I hypothesize that it is especially emotional for introspective girls like me who left our suburban hometowns to escape to the city. I came to Boston filled with hope and longing — for new friends, new experiences, new passions and a new place to call my home. I yearned for change in my life and in myself, to ascend from the stagnant pond of my hometown and leap into the ocean. However, I soon realized that in the middle of an ocean, your feet can’t touch the bottom. It’s more exciting than a pond, but much harder to swim in.
When I first arrived at Northeastern University, I was desperate to satisfy my expectations of what college should look like. My friend group at home is perfect, and I expected to immediately replicate that here. I had developed such amazing relationships with my teachers in high school, and again, I expected these same relationships to appear at my fingertips in college. I desired a flourishing garden without planting the seeds first. Impatiently treading water, I was lost in the waves of the ocean that I had so achingly hungered to swim in. My problem then was that I had an external locus of control. In psychology, this refers to a lack of perceived command over one’s own fate. This was a product of my flawed perception of time and free will.
Different cultures understand time in different ways. Western cultures tend to view time as linear, with a clear beginning and end, while Eastern cultures view it as cyclical: “Every day, the sun rises and sets, one season follows another, people grow old and die, but their children reiterate the process.” I used to conceptualize time the Western way; I saw college as an irreversible turning point, leaving the familiarity of the life I had always known to enter the mysterious realm of my future. The two sides of this crossroads represented a distinct dichotomy within the progression of my life, and after it, I would never be the same again. In my senior year English class, we studied “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell, which proposes that in every story, the protagonist follows a universal story template. In the protagonist’s journey, there is a point called “crossing the threshold,” where the main character leaves their ordinary world to embark on an adventure. Since childhood, I have read books that conform to this model, and I always imagined college as that point in mine.
I soon learned that this belief was the product of my inability to live from a first-person point of view. I always zoom out to the big picture, watching from above, visionary to a fault and unable to focus on the moment I reside in because I am constantly analyzing how it relates to all the others. Since I viewed my high school self and college self as a strict binary, I had unrealistic expectations of how I would present myself without actually putting in the work to change anything. In her song “F*ck it I love you,” Lana Del Rey says that “everywhere you go, you take yourself, that’s not a lie.” I learned that the hard way. Moving to Boston won’t change me if I don’t actively take steps to change myself. My journey is not a predetermined template laid out by Campbell’s monomyth; I determine where I go based on the choices I make. My life is not a story written by someone else on a set timeline to convey a premeditated message; it is happening right now, and I am writing it myself. This realization has helped me to regain my internal locus of control. Now, I view time as a combination of linear and cyclical elements. Time occurs in cycles, each season and year resurfacing familiar yet unpredictable feelings and second chances, but discrete changes can occur between cycles: lessons learned, emotional breakthroughs, moments where just enough courage is gathered to change the angle of the spinning wheel.
My adjusted perception of time and control is the biggest lesson freshman year taught me, and after realizing it, I entered my sophomore year with an open mind and an open heart. I have begun to live my life intentionally, rather than passively watching it unfold from above. It is futile to conform to an illusory story when the pages are empty and you hold the pen.