I have missed a few days and given that nothing is happening vis a vis transition, there is probably not much to say anymore, and certainly not enough of interest to warrant a daily blog. So I shall switch to weekly and see how that goes.
Maybe things could change in the future and I will have more to share, but for that to work, I would need to be actually doing something.
I have been continuing to grapple with understanding why any time I visit a university campus, I am plunged into weeks of despair and feelings of hopelessness.
A huge part of it is looking back on the past and remembering the happier times. Not that I probably was that happy in truth, just the benefit of rose-tinted memory, but the clear implication is that however real it was, it was still better than how I feel now. The thing is though, most of the time, I don’t notice that much whether I’m happy or not, life is so busy that I’m just doing all the time and have limited time to evaluate. Campus tours give me a little time to reflect and that is when I realise what I’m missing and how I feel.
University is a time of learning about yourself and the opportunity to escape the constraints of how people you know see you and their expectations of who you are. It’s a chance to reinvent who you are and to be the person you potentially could be, or wish to be.
For me, this is also tinged with regret because I didn’t know enough of who I was nor have the information or courage to do anything about it and there is a whole different world of what might have been. There are possibilities now which I could have taken that weren’t really available in my time. If I were eighteen now, would I have the courage to take that opportunity? I don’t know. My failure to do anything at all now would suggest not. So maybe I’m regretting something that never could have been real anyway.
I suppose the other thing about visiting universities that I find hard is the feeling of potential and endless possibilities. For students starting out there are so many opportunities. Choice of campus, of course, whether to go abroad, placements, careers after, it’s all still open and everything is up for grabs. But each decision that you take narrows the field of possibilities a bit further. And the older one gets, again choices get narrower until now I feel like life is really limited and I have hardly any options. It’s something else that I don’t notice day to day, but when confronted with it I feel very keenly.
Maybe there is also an element of regret that perhaps I could have made more of the opportunities and possibilities that I had open to me at that time. I would be much better at being a student now with the life experience that I have, than I was back then when I was young! I would have more fun than I did, that is for sure.
That might sum it up actually, feeling I missed out on some stuff, and now it feels too late because the choices available have narrowed.
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