Each week, Amy examines a small group of students in order to understand the individual Dartmouth experience as part of a whole. This week, Amy reflects on her own Dartmouth experience.
If you know me at all, you know that I have a penchant for J.D. Salinger. When I started to write this column, I couldn't shake an image from the beginning of "Franny and Zooey" from my head: Buddy writes a long-winded, pedantic, parsimonious letter to his youngest brother Zooey, and four years later, Zooey's still smoothing the wrinkles and reading it in the bath, carefully avoiding water droplets and cigarette ash.
I doubt anyone will clip and hold onto this column, and I really hope no one's reading it in the bathtub, but I still want to gift you this, dear reader: something a little too preachy, probably overwhelmingly sentimental, and yet, filled with enough love that you'll be able to graciously overlook all of that.
I feel like each column I've written has not only touched on someone else's Dartmouth experience, but also illuminated, however faintly, a page of my own. Yet there are some things that I've never covered, and I'd like to use this space to explore those as much as possible.
My freshman year was rough. I got sick that winter, had to take a medical leave and felt like I was playing catch-up in each succeeding term. And each year after that had a rough patch, sometimes so much so that my whole life felt like sand paper. Although the Pollyanna part of my brain said that I was really very lucky and should make the most of my opportunities, I still couldn't figure out how to be happy.
I've submarined my way through college. If happiness was the water level, I was always just below the surface, occasionally pushing up above it but knowing that doing so would mean a recoil submerge later, with the bends following soon after. And everyone around me was bobbing around on smooth-coursed catamaran yachts of contentment, or at least that's how it seemed.
But here's the big news: plenty of people feel the same way that I do. We've all had a tough term, a tough year, hell, maybe even a tough life. But in a campus population that resembles the little birds in Cinderella, it is sometimes difficult to remember that just about everybody's got issues. I don't know why it makes things better to know that everyone has their own baggage even those who bleed green but it does.
Which brings me to my next issue: facetime. We bandy around the term with abandon, but I think that facetime is indicative of a problem on campus. We're all high-strung, achievement-oriented and overscheduled, and in our social lives, this manifests as facetime. Why see five people when you can interact with 60 or 70 in just an hour or two? While you're at it, maximize your time and spend it speed socializing, drinking heavily to take the edge off of your social awkwardness, but rarely creating a worthwhile bond.
Sometimes I really feel like I really do know everyone, and I think just about every senior I know is in this position. But I also realize that I know a lot fewer people than I used to. There was a time when I knew almost every brother in certain houses, knew every girl that hung out at those houses and knew every sister in the sorority I had just joined. I had people I went out with, people I ate lunch with, people I went to the gym with and people I went to cultural programming with. But if I just wanted to sit in bed, not saying a word, I'd have to do that on my own.
The Dartmouth experience encourages social butterflying, but after four years of it, I'm realizing it is maybe the most exhausting thing I can think of. I wish that making real, true, life-long friends was more important to others on this campus.
Sure, by junior year I was well on the way to making meaningful, soul-pleasing friendships, and I think the first two years of social frenzy helped me to realize how important these bonds would become to me. But I still feel like someone needs to give us all a wake-up call. Just like you cannot subsist on beer and treadmilling, you can't emotionally sustain yourself with pong buddies and dinner dates.
I won't say "take advantage of everything while you still can," because honestly, I don't think you can fully tap the resources of this campus when you aren't ready to. But how about this: remember that one day, probably really soon, you'll be sitting in your room saying, "I'm only starting to grasp what Dartmouth can offer me, and they're kicking me out."
I'm just ready to start learning, my brain has only just begun to combine and process the information that was being dumped in it. My mom has always told me that college is wasted on the young. All of a sudden I feel like I'm in the position to start saying this. And dude, it sucks.
So here are my parting words: please, for my sake, never be too cool to get excited about the work you're doing. Go to the Hop and watch some of the amazing, bizarre foreign films that come through. And for God's sake, please bring back the phrase "Get your D wet."
