Gradually Graduating

So tonight I was walking home right around that mysterious moment when days switch, lost in fog. For the past couple weeks, I've been processing that I'm about to graduate, and that I'm getting married, and that I'll be moving and starting a new job and…life. As a result, I've been mulling over my four years here, and who I've been throughout it all. Fog is always super special; my first kiss was in fog, and I think it makes the world magical. Anyway……as I was walking back, I passed a bridge, a bridge I crossed that day, that wretched, beautiful, ending beginning day. And the year between that day and the summer after came flooding back; agony, hopelessness, devastation.

And then I had this moment where I realized I was gazing straight at my younger self of three years ago, standing on that bridge, a hundred yards away. In my memory, my younger self stared back at me, broken, aching, destroyed too thoroughly for words, begging her future for some scrap of hope. And I smiled at her warmly and said, "Take strength, little one, all will be ok; you will find meaning once again. You will discover that you are a human, and when you soon begin asking yourself, 'Why prolong my existence?', you will, after many vast failures, find an answer. You will embrace the purpose that is intrinsic to humankind and know beyond doubt that it's perfectly ok to be that…human…and nothing less and nothing more. Your pain is overwhelming at this moment, but at the end lies great reward, when you get to spend the rest of your life discovering what humanity truly entails."

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I'm at the last few pages of the Olivet book; that point where you know everything has to get wrapped up somehow, and quick, even if the author still has a little trick or two left to spring. Well, here's my trick: somehow in the midst of this weird time loop — something healed. It was as though I became my own redeemer, validating familiar old pain. Is that sacrilege even possible? Can dopamine bathe the miserable neurons of deeply painful memories and soothe them, making them sweeter for the contrast?


Enh, maybe it was just the fog.

Support

Finding your world view shattered on the ground isn't exactly fun. But for an extrovert, infinitely worse was feeling as though I were a fish out of water on a sweltering desert island in a sea of well-intentioned sharks. Overstatement? Sometimes. But only sometimes.

My parents didn't get it. My mom was devastated, and my relationship with my dad deteriorated into long arguments. They warned me not to talk to my cousins because I was "such a good role model" for them. My counselor, dean, and professors were very supportive of my questioning—up to and until I stopped arriving at the correct answers. (I've found that such answers, of the sort which are also used in Bible studies and devotional books, can be terribly mundane once one has mastered the various formulae.) After many months of supporting me, my boyfriend (understandably) came very close to ending our relationship. One friend informed me that our friendship was over unless I wanted to continue listening to his views on the topic. After that I mostly stopped talking to people about it.

But there were a couple distinctly bright spots.