EIC, at home in the Voice office.
This morning I awoke to my own voice mumbling, “Wake up. Wake up.” My dream was nightmarish: I was sitting in a fancy dress, drinking wine at a graduation party on the night of May 22nd. Members of my graduating middle school class were walking around with adult bodies and kid faces. My friends from the class of 2012 had just won an Emmy for their award-winning television show, and my fellow graduates were wandering aimlessly, bumping into walls. Everyone collapsed drunk and tired on the floor of the same bedroom, and the next morning, still in my dream, I was trying to stir them awake. “Wake up!” I was yelling at them. “What are we going to do today? What are we going to do tomorrow?”
I have heard several times too many that graduating college means entering the “real world,” a world “outside the gates” that is bigger and broader than this one. This exhausts me. It suggests that we’ve taken a four-year departure from reality and will be shoved mercilessly back into it, sheltered and undefined. It suggests that the day after graduation, we will enter a world more real than the one we’ve experienced so far. Granted, there are many aspects of life at Connecticut College that contribute to the surreal sensation of living in an aspiring utopia. We live amidst an impeccably maintained arboretum, on an oval campus with set boundaries. Our buildings face in towards the center like the common green of a puritan village. We have been hand-chosen to pursue a shared goal of intellectual development, and so find ourselves bound up in the unspoken understanding that we will all be active members of this community. Thus our speech is littered with trademark terms like Napkin Notes and Camel Cookies, acronyms like CELS and CAT, the AC, KB, JA, ’41, ’62, and SAC. The trajectories of our days align: class time’s till four, often interrupted for lunch around 11:40 or 1:05, gym’s after 4, Harris floods at 6:30, the library overloads around 9. From the Conntact to the Can, we are constantly faced with invitations to involvement, and in turn prompted to reevaluate our relationship to this college and to each other. Here, in this graspable-sized community, we have a safe place to try on different roles—leader, activist, athlete, scholar. It’s insular on purpose.
What counts as the real world, anyway? Surely the time before college wasn’t the real world either – we were sheltered by home and high school. When we start raising families, we’ll be creating a comfort zone for ourselves, busy sheltering others. When we’re old and diapered, we’ll be sheltered by retirement homes and grandchildren. The cliché “when you step out into the real world,” should really be “when you step out into this transitional period that will probably only last between five and fifteen years,” but then, that doesn’t sound nearly as sexy or dangerous. The hardest part for me is the shift in title, not lifestyle: I’ve defined myself as a student since before I could read. That part of my identity will be gone, at least for now.
To use the term “real world” fails to do justice to the depth and breadth of our experiences at Connecticut College. In this oval village I’ve felt worried, proud, overwhelmed, in love, unsafe, stagnant and stimulated. We are living, breathing participants of this world, and have hardly been immune to the tumult, confusion and span of emotions native to the broader one at large. Our experiences here at Conn have been as real to us as next year and the year after and the year after will be. We are functionally prepared for what is just a transition into a different, but equally real, period of our lives.
The next issue of the College Voice will be led by next year’s Editor-in-Chief, the talented and passionately determined Jazmine Hughes. She, like I, joined the Voice as a freshman, and I remember her as a young face with big ideas and a confident writing voice. I’m proud of our staff, and the things we’ve accomplished this year: we publish twelve pages week after week, full of well-written, well-designed content. We blog and tweet and copy edit like it’s our job. Our office is bustling on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays, and we have fun together. Our contributors are curious, talented students, not working for credit or for pay. And I have no doubt that Jazmine will take the paper to bigger places.
Although I still get nervous about leaving, it’s easy to predict my reality the morning after graduation. I’ll wake up in my childhood bed in my parents’ house. I’ll read the front page of the Times, watch music videos and make scrambled eggs. Whatever comes next, I can handle after breakfast.
’Til next time,
Lilah
