No Home To Go To

I remember thinking towards the end of senior year that it was going to be impossible to go back and recapture all that had gone on in my life that year. So much had happened. From the intellectual backflips and contortions of writing a very personal thesis, to my worldview caught naked and unprepared in the bright lights of the real world, there had been many emotional and intellectual changes with no time to process. I was totally overstimulated, so much was just constantly happening.

So in planning out my post-graduate year, I decided to pursue a working fellowship--not a conventional job and not graduate school--so I could “take time off” from whatever it was I was living in, and reflect, and write, and “rediscover” myself. Instead of always running after someone else’s dream or wracking my brain to arrange complex social theory, my brain and I would have space for my own thoughts. Then I would be able to write again, to write--as I remember telling one of my professors--not “this social science stuff” but to really write like I used to do.

I am beginning to realize that this is not a year of rediscovery, but of continuing to change.

For the past few months, I have been continuously disappointed at not being able to arrive at this state of resolution and happiness which I had vested in my rediscovered self. My rediscovered self, I thought, would not have these confusions about life direction, my rediscovered self would be internally motivated and judging rather than externally impacted. With it, I believed I could return to that state of my life where I had been able to deflect and defy the world’s material desires. (I had been disarmed by the events of senior year, I had fallen out of my dreams, I had fallen out of myself.) If only I could get away from those Harvard kids with the suits on, I would return to my former self, could fit in and fill out my own skin again.

That has not happened, and I am finally grasping at why. There is no home to go to. My life has changed, and I could not help but change with it.

In the past I have always resisted this admission of change. For me, college has been a transformative experience, but I've always been frustrated by old friends or family’s accusation that I “had changed”. What did this mean? No, I insisted to my friends that although I went to Harvard I did not change. It was just that at college, my ideals discovered expression; the core of my person had always been there, the essential beliefs have never shifted. By the end of senior year in college, this desire for firmness and stability reached a new height. I could not wait to get out of Harvard and run home to suburbia to be surrounded not by yapping college students but by silent and impersonal cars. Slowly, subtly, my brain oriented itself towards one direction, to seek a return to my former self, to discover and stand again on those immutable grounds.

But (like many a sophomoric scholars), I had studied social science but failed to apply this training to my own transition from college to the "real" world. I'd failed to recognize that the socioeconomic structure surrounding me was changing. By this I do not mean the U.S. economy, but my personal socioeconomic situation of having to produce and provide the basic necessities of life for myself. I used to waltz into a dining hall and just eat whenever I pleased, now I make grocery lists, cook and wash dishes. I used to sleep in class, now I must stay awake at a job for 9 straight hours. My use of money used to be an occasional non-dining hall meal, now it has multiplied one hundredfold. All the daily practices of life have changed. And as you know, my friend, once what you do changes, what you think will follow suit.

This leads me, in a retrospective turn, to recognize that I was never defying the world in the first place. In those times, the world I lived in (no dishes to do, no rent to pay) was in fact what enabled me to commit to purely "ideal" thoughts and works. I wasn’t defying the world, I was folding right into it. Let us be clear, though, that this is not a matter of being "idealistic" then versus being "realistic" now; those words carry heavy connotations. Instead, it is simply a matter of what I knew. When you do not know an alternative, what you are and how you live feel genuine. When you do learn a different way to live, your life is suddenly exposed. You may wish you never learned that alternative but there it is, once you know you cannot un-know, you cannot return to the state where you did not know. At this point, the immutable emerges as temporary.

And it is not even that ignorance is bliss, but change is what life is, especially for those of us who insist on moving and seeing and knowing. And we accept this life, with all its imperfections and its fickle changes, "full weight".

I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's not your fault that you cannot go back there.