The distillation of human experience into easily identifiable and quantifiable rates and modes of change is a crackpot fantasy perfect self-knowledge is a dream whose attainability is more impossible than immortality itself. It has long been my fervent belief that we will achieve perfect mastery over the human body before we will ever understand even a sliver of the mechanisms of our minds, and I don't mean strictly our brains. I mean the interaction of a single person's constantly fluctuating spectra of emotion, perspective and rationale with the outside world and that person's subsequent understanding of her own place in this always-fleeting collection of moments.
To ask how Dartmouth changes us or much less how Dartmouth has changed just me is to ask an infinite number of questions at once. How does losing your virginity change you? How does getting drunk for the first time change you? How does learning how to do your laundry, budget your own bills, manage several part-time jobs while attending class, schmoozing with professors and other so-called elites, having your heart broken for the first time, making your first grave mistake, losing your first loved one or your childhood dog, spending six months of your year in a gray, snowy wasteland, dealing with rejection, worrying about attaining the perfect career and all of the implications of being forced to visualize the bare untilled tracts of your future years all stretched out before you, and wondering which seeds to scatter how do any or all of these experiences change a person? I haven't done all of those things in college, and they represent a somewhat arbitrary smattering of experiences I imagine college students like me are going through all over the country. But they only scratch the surface of the monumental question I now have leering at me, dangling over my column like a cartoon anvil on a splintering rope.
Perhaps my anxiety stems fundamentally from my persistent fear that I have not changed at all, that I in fact don't change. I'm still the stubborn five-year-old who used to turn in every single kindergarten assignment with an arrow pointing to my last name and a word bubble that said, "This is Mayer not Mayor." I'm a terrible narcissist but I bristle at the thought of saying I'm better than anyone (yes, even serial killers). I still talk too much and fill silences with unnecessary commentary. I still overanalyze everything and argue for the sake of argument alone. I still use humor to get people to like me, and I still think my big brother is the coolest person in the world, and show more deference to him than to both of my parents combined. Adults I don't know, shiny girls and asking for help all intimidate me as much as ever, and dead dogs make me cry. I still write to explain my own thoughts to myself, and I still choose to adjust to any upsetting situation instead of being upset.
On some level, I'm playing dumb with you. I could go into a thoroughly superficial breakdown of the Dartmouth experience as we've already explained it to ourselves in the pages of The Mirror and in the FoCo conversations we've had for years. You know, the Dartmouth X? The "no-turning-back" threshold of sophomore Summer? The way the D-Plan forces us to constantly renew and re-evaluate friendships and relationships? Pledge term? Society tapping? I've got a whole grab bag of flattened and impersonal scout badges for each development stage of the archetypal (read: snoringly typical) Dartmouth student's growth or regression at this school. We like these easy categories and step-by-step universalities, as if anyone's life can fit comfortably into a pamphlet among the glossy smiles of hand-picked, clean-cut and racially diverse college kids.
We can mark our lives by the terms that pass us by, and in fact we do. We collect our pictures in albums titled 11FriendsForever or 11SoLongCollege:( because time is quantifiable in a way that relationships and our own self-perceptions of change are not. Dartmouth changes us. Life changes us. Seeing some of your friends go through the hardest times of their lives or sharing some of the most memorable moments you will ever have together, or maybe just sitting with them at night by the observatory and looking out towards the Green and realizing how unrealistically lucky it is that you're all there any significant moment changes us. We may not sense it at first, or be able to quantify exactly how or to what extent we have been changed, and we may not be able to attribute the ever-elusive nature of the self to any combination of occurrences or influences. But the relentless desire to understand in formulaic detail how some relatively arbitrary commonality like attendance at the same Ivy League college has lent us some meaningful and identifiable universal experience, at our fingertips to dissect, is at heart a dread-driven urge to reconcile quantifiable time with an unquantifiable and at times incoherent existence.
You may not be able to map your changes in rise-and-fall rhythm, full of denouement, summed up neatly at the end of your life by the tidy conclusion of an obituary. It may terrify you to face a looming end that exists imminently on a chronological scale but which is completely at odds with your lack of any sense of having reached a conclusion on a personal scale. But you will change you will always change. If you don't, you'll be stagnant, quietly desperate, forever looking for album titles or calendar boxes to make sense of living.
