College Adventures

So my freshman year of collage is over. My dorm room is packed, and all I have left to do is pack it all into my mom's station wagon and get it back to New Hampshire. Of the four occupants of my "suite" only two of us are left. There's a weird sense of finality to it, despite knowing that, in theory, I'm going to be back here again in a few months and that everyone I've met and grown close to is going to be here as well. This isn't the end, but I suppose every "last day of school" feels like it is.

This has been an unbelievably bizarre year. To say that it was weird doesn't really cover it, nor does calling it random, though both descriptions are actually pretty accurate. To a degree, your first year of college is supposed to be an "adventure" since it's your first taste of being almost completely on your own, but I'm almost positive that when most people think of the "college adventure" it doesn't really go the way this year went.

In general, college-type adventures are seen as either one of two things:

1.) A journey of intense self discovery, in which being on your own gives you the chance to try new things on your own terms and discover things about yourself you never knew existed. This is usually life affirming and uplifting.

Or:

2.) Wild, crazy, toga-covered hijinks, in which everyone gets horribly drunk, someone loses their virginity, everyone randomly goes on a road trip, and we all wake up the next morning on someone else's lawn covered in toilet paper and crushed up fritos. I believe this is also somehow supposed to be life affirming and uplifting.

While this year certainly had elements of both - I am psychologically in a far different place than I was when I moved in, and there were a few wild, though ultimately nerdy parties that went down in here - it really can't be purely defined as one, the other, or both. It just kind of was.

When I moved into the room I'm now sitting in the middle of, it look about the same as it does now. It was off-white, blank, generic, imposing, all those things a dorm room is supposed to be. My roommate had already shown up at the time, and the two of us bonded as we added things to the dusty blankness we both tentatively called home. Over the course of the year, things were added and removed, our DVD collection grew, our posters became more numerous, I finally disconnected that clock I never used. It never really became the most attractive place to live, but we made it look "lived in" which is really all we needed.

But of course, we weren't the only ones. Our dorm - called a "suite" - consisted of two bedrooms, a common room, and a bathroom. Each bedroom held two people, meaning that, yes, we had roommates. Or rather "suitemates" as it came to be called. Though we initially stayed in our own rooms, my roommate and I having quickly bonded tended to stay to ourselves, a day eventually came when we invited one of our suitemates to come to the mall with us. For some reason, that was it. The three of us bonded almost instantly, and suddenly, we were a group of three.

I started the year as a bit of a shell. Halfway through my final year of high school I had taken a downward spiral into a depression I hadn't really been able to pull myself out of yet. It was a combination of a long standing inferiority complex with a lot of confidence, perception, and stress issues that for some reason picked the second half of my senior year to come to foray. By the time I started college, things had gotten a bit better, but were by no means gone. I was utterly convinced that I was inferior to basically everyone I came in contact with and was pretty sure that any personality or unique-ness I may have once had in me was long gone.

This was, of course, all crazy. However, add this all the fact that, when I started the year, I was a drama major. Yeah. A person who instantly thought that they were inferior to everyone they ever came in contact with was trying to pursue a degree in something that thrives in competition and, ultimately, rejection. You can probably guess how well that was going.

So naturally, in response, I went to the city, ran into Bernadette Peters, was pushed over by a five-year-old in Rockefeller Center, did some bizarre dating, went to Israel, rode a camel, wrote a play about someone chopping someone's hand off, went to both a Shabbat and a Mass, watched my suitemate nearly die from a freak brain aneurysm, got sent to Florida, had two people inexplicably vanish in the same week, met Joey Fatone from Nsync (seriously, WTF?), aced a Philosophy exam without even trying, met the Doctor at an Apple store in SoHo, and somewhere in there dyed my hair neon pink.

Yeah.

There are really few things that can accurately describe the weirdness that went down during this school year. It was like someone had found this bag of old TV plot twists and just dumped them on us. Just when things were starting to look normal, something completely inexplicable would happen out of nowhere and we'd all be left standing around asking "What just happened?"

I'm not going to lie, it wasn't exactly pleasant. Not all of it, at least. Some of it was fun, some of it was tragic, but somehow, in the end, it all ended up working out. We all survived, which for some was a lot harder than others, but despite all the completely random things that kept getting thrown at us, despite the unbelievably ridiculous circumstances we kept finding ourselves in, we all survived.

And, you know what, if this year has taught me anything, it's taught me that. Shit happens. Anything, no matter how crazy it seems, can happen. But we keep going anyway. Suddenly, as more and more madness kept happening to me and around me, the whole "am I as good as everyone else?" question sort of faded away. It just didn't matter anymore. I went to Israel, for God's sake, I wrote a play about severed hands, why on Earth would I ever think I wasn't interesting?

Plus, there were greater concerns at hand. At the age of eighteen, there is a million in one chance that a person would suddenly have a ruptured brain aneurysm. Somehow, that one person turned out to be my suitemate, in what was probably one of the most traumatic WTF moments to ever happen to a bunch of college freshmen. There was no rhyme or reason for it, no lead in, nothing. It just happened. As everything else had just happened. And we suddenly found ourselves spending more time than anyone should have to hanging out in a Neuro ICU.

Luckily, because she's her, she stubbornly refused to die, and is now standing happy and healthy, though with a gigantic scar on her head, in my near empty room.

This is crazy. There is a million in one chance that this would happen anyway, and then a ten million to one chance that she would live. 60% of the people who go through this die instantly when it happens, and yet somehow, she lived.

So when I looked down at myself and realized that somehow, inexplicably, I was really unhappy in the major that I had one year earlier been so rampantly passionate about, I was finally able to just shrug my shoulders and move on. I finally able to just stop worrying, let myself go, and see where things took me.

Because, you know what? Life is insane. Things just happen. Great things and horrible things. Sometimes all at once. There's no telling when things are going to happen, and there's no way to know what's coming up. You just have to let things happen.

In one year I've traveled halfway across the world and watched my friend survive something all statistics said she shouldn't have.

And so now, I'm sitting here on the desk in my practically empty room, waiting for my family to come and officially move me out. There are no posters on the wall anymore, no DVDs, no papers covering the floor, just boxes of packed up stuff. In a few hours, it'll be like no one was ever hear. And in a few months, when everything reopens for the new semester, a whole new foursome of freshmen will move in here, and make this empty room their home. Who knows if their stay will be as crazy, random, tragic, insightful, and just flat out weird as ours was. We'll probably never know.

But in spite of it, despite the empty walls and lingering last words, as I said earlier, this isn't the end. It never is. Even if something else happens to us, as we spend the summer in our separate corners of the country, it won't be the end.

To everyone I met this year, have an epic summer. Go on an adventure. Have fun.

*Nelly*