#i might just kll myself after i graduate actually. they can remember me like that if they want

[lisafranknstein]

i have fucked myself over massively. i wanted an easy last semester. so i took a jterm course. that i thought would be easy. it feels physically impossible to finish in 4 weeks. theres 10 modules. 2 full length novels to read hours upon hours of lectures and assignments and assigned films to watch. what and where is the enjoyment of reading and watching films if it is like THIS ? it's ridiculous. this will be the first time (despite the many professors ive disliked) that i give ANY course negative feedback. and the feedback will be negative. ill tell you that much.

this was only done so that i could take 3 credits next semester instead of the usual 4. i have had this planned for months now. and today. TODAY. a week before the payment is due they tell me i need to take at least 3.75 credits to get the financial aid amount they have been telling me i will get. i check what it is now?. A THOUSAND DOLLARS MORE. so i go back and i add .75 worth of credits. fuck my whole schedule up. all 5 days of the week. fucking 8 am classes . go FUCK yourselves. thank god im graduating because they also sent an email about a 4% tuition increase for the 24-25 school year.

i have also decided that since i am graduating. and not going to grad school. i will cool it. for my own sake. i am not stressing about this jterm class. despite how the whole first paragraph i wrote went. i have seen much stupider people try much less than i have and get a grade much too similar for what any stress is worth. everyone involved in these situations can GO FUCK THEMSELVES !!!!!!! myself included

[klinletters]

“The College Self,” one year out

Dear Kristin,

Firstly, lovely column - I really enjoyed reading your comments on the post about entering college. Hope you keep up the positive vibes and continue to tackle tough problems. I'd like to chat about post-college life and specifically how you think we ought to interact with elements of our past college selves. Since graduating I've been a bit ashamed by how my college experience went. I'm starting to realize what a tremendous luxury four years of academic insulation was and am upset at both my past self and friends for not displaying more maturity there. Anyways, I often think of distancing myself from the university and "starting fresh." I'm wondering: how do you feel about your relationship with your college self and what do you think would be a healthy way to move on from it?

Thanks, Phoenix phan

Dear Phoenix,

At the end of each quarter, one of my writing professors would always offer us the same final word of advice: “Work all your life to develop an ethical relationship with your memory.” I scribbled this into my notebook the first time I heard it (now three years ago), and the line now floats into my stream of consciousness every once in a while. I guess I’ve never been quite sure what an “ethical relationship with your memory” might encompass. Honesty certainly seems to be a part of the equation, but is that really the only quality we should strive toward? Memory is not the monolith of true events we believe it to be. So if we don’t fully trust the truth-value of our memories, what ought we do with them?

Maybe the question doesn’t even matter if memory is all we have to keep some things alive. I always relish (albeit sheepishly) in the bittersweet wistfulness of reminiscing the good old college days. It happens surprisingly often for someone who has only been out of college for a year. There are the times when, looking out at a large body of water, I sit with the feeling of seeing the blue curve of Lake Michigan for the first time. Or, upon feeling the warmth of being surrounded by friends out here, I think back to the one and many times I cooked dinner with friends on cold nights, or felt the embrace of the indoors after walking blocks and blocks in the wind chill.

From my happiest memories I think I’ve learned about the kind of life I want to continue seeking for myself. So my first response to your question of what kind of relationship I have to my college self is that I try to embrace and cherish the parts of college that did go right, holding them with equal sanctity that I do when scrutinize (and scrutinize I do!) all the lesser parts.

With that qualification tucked away, you’re probably asking about how to handle the lesser parts anyway—what manifests, at least for me, as the conviction that if I had “simply” led a “better” life—gotten better grades or made more friends or did more things—that maybe I would be happier now. It’s part regret, part insecurity, and I’m sure almost entirely unreasonable to hold this belief, and yet it seems to sneak itself into any conception I have of my current self, wading through the uncertainty of post-grad life.

While I haven’t drawn many grand conclusions from my own (low key harrowing and still very much lived) experience making sense of my own regret, I can share some practical advice as to what has worked quite well, which is to constantly remind myself that the past holds the same factors of complexity as the present. We often hold this naïve belief that life “back then” was simpler or easier, when really our memories just have a monopoly on our meaning making, providing the only materials we have to make sense of our lives (and, in the process, reducing everything it deems worthy of its embrace to the visual specificity of a Monet). Put quite simply, the way we remember our lives almost never aligns precisely with how they actually unfolded. I always have to remind myself that the same kind of ambivalence that imbues my life right here and right now was always there and always will be.

More particularly, exercising this awareness of complexity is how I (try to) shatter my delusion of what a perfect college life should have been. It’s easy to blame yourself for not doing better with hindsight as a sidekick. But think about right now—how much you don’t know about your life and yourself. How can you kick yourself for not knowing better when you quite literally do not? Actually living through life is always much more difficult than thinking of all the ways that you ought to be doing so—and I think a healthy relationship with your past ought to include some recognition of this.

With that, I will say that I very much share the kind of academic regret that you write about in your letter, and I still find myself wishing that I had just worked a little harder or applied myself a little more. It’s probably healthy to feel some sense of that regret, but even then I think it’s important to remember that being able to do so may have been harder than it seems in the present. Whenever I flip back on my college journal entries, I am reminded of how life was much messier than what I usually recall. It’s not always a satisfactory explanation to my present self, but sometimes it at least helps ease the sense of urgency I feel to try and “fix” who I was.

And finally, recognizing that how you lived out the past doesn’t dictate how you will live out the future is my third piece of advice for how to think about your college self. Perhaps the most important piece of an “ethical relationship” with your memory is the conviction that subscribing to it is not submitting yourself to some sort of destiny. No matter how you decide to think about your college years, you always have the opportunity to change—even if you’re no longer in the same environment in which you lived out your regrets. If, for example, you wish you had committed more of your time to school, you still have plenty of ways to exercise your intellectual curiosity. Read everything you were supposed to in college (haha!); go to public lectures; take an online course. It’s possible to create a learning environment for yourself outside of school. It may not be as comprehensive or as complete, but at least it’s something!

What I’m trying to say is that you were human in college; you are human now; you always will be human, even as you try to learn from your past. And that very fact should complicate how you choose to remember your past, as well as how you choose to pave your way now and in the future. If all else fails, remember: grad school is always an option ;)

Yours, KLL