I don’t remember most of my junior winter. When I force myself to summon up the term, to find some memory that validates it, I am usually hit with desperation instead. I flip through old Facebook photos, my classes on Blackboard, emails and Spotify playlists sorted by term — grasping at straws to cut through the amnesia. I find snippets: long nights in Robinson Hall as I acclimated to my editorial position at The D, my friends making fun of me as I passed them balancing a tower of books for a final paper, humming along as a crush played me Joni Mitchell songs on his guitar. It’s a pathetic harvest for 10 weeks of active memory storage. Wasn’t I experiencing some mix of academic enlightenment, college debauchery and adventure? Did I really never go skiing once?
There’s probably something neurological at work that explains why, for a handful of my terms at Dartmouth, I was basically blacked out, consciously living through my days with my long-term memory deactivated. But since I only ever took Bio 2, I have arrived at a singular conclusion — all fault lies in my iCal. It’s a pretty clear pattern: the more my days were segmented into perfect colored blocks of commitments, the less I remember them. Instead, the terms blur into exhaustion and routine.
Being busy is such a comfort. It is an affirmation of worth, a parade of commitments that block off the typical traffic of self-doubt and self-consciousness. Throughout my time at Dartmouth, I’ve overfilled my days so I’d be too busy and exhausted to be by myself, because loneliness at Dartmouth is a terrifying thing. At a school where even being in the library is a social activity, where is a person supposed to eat alone, study alone, exercise alone, without feeling even a little on display? The only solution I found was rarely being alone, or making sure I was drowning in work when I was.
My frenetic schedule of lunch plans and dinner plans and nights editing at The D and every other group and club meeting, plus finding time for classes and homework, intoxicated me. I believed that my packed schedule meant I was doing Dartmouth right, because those who do Dartmouth wrong eat alone on the second floor of FoCo and spend too much time in the library out of boredom. I remember being shocked whenever a friend texted me for a meal “@now” — didn’t she have plans? Did she really think that I was just free? I was addicted to my sure-fire method of avoiding self-consciousness (read: introspection).
I quit scheduling cold turkey at the end of my senior fall, when my directorate handed over our positions to the Class of 2015. I lost my crutch.
What was I supposed to do with all of my time? I enrolled myself in my most challenging academic term at Dartmouth: a notoriously demanding government seminar, a writing workshop and a class that blew through scores of novels. Altogether, I wrote over one hundred pages and actually completed all of my reading (a first since freshman fall, undoubtedly). But, without The D, I simply couldn’t fill all of my time with pressing tasks and commitments.
It was disorienting to say yes to spontaneous walks around Occom Pond with friends, finally taking the time to parse their emotional turbulences in a way Collis lunch dates don’t allow. I felt unmoored spending a weekend in New York City in the middle of the term. I spent entire days sitting in Sanborn and pouring myself into creative writing for the first time since high school. Sometimes I ate lunch alone or texted out to see if friends were spontaneously free. Someone always was.
The terms that I remember most clearly from my time at Dartmouth are those in which I let myself drift away from the rigmarole of Dartmouth’s over-scheduled, over-socialized culture. Those are the terms I quit my iCal.
This is the part where senior columns, already a deathtrap for clichés, tend to go off the rails. Here is My Dartmouth Experience, wrapped in a piece of advice and tied with a bow. Somehow, it never reads as sincerely as it writes.
Humor me.
On Saturday night of this year’s Green Key weekend, I spontaneously drove off campus with two good friends. We wound through empty Vermont roads to Gile Mountain, and after giving up on finding the trailhead to the fire tower, parked on the gravel shoulder. We stood in the center of the pavement, the glowing butts of our cigarettes like little light flares in the dense blackness beneath the canopy of trees.
It was so quiet that my ears strained, picking out each smoky exhale and the whispering of an invisible brook. Our phones were useless, beyond the reach of service and 3G. We stared at the stars, but mostly talked about ways to incapacitate the hypothetical rapist, kidnapper or serial killer. (Apparently, it’s easier than you might think to rip off a guy’s earlobe.) We were so helplessly alone, self-conscious of our own fear, that we reveled in it. Each time a car approached, we held our breaths praying it wouldn’t stop. When it passed, we laughed giddily, exhilarated by our irrational fear and the bravery of our isolation. It’s weird. But I know that next year, when I’m thumbing through my memories of this place to reconstruct some lost feeling, this night will come through sharply, still smelling a little like clove cigarettes.
So, all I’m really trying to say is, don’t black out. There’s too much to do, too many experiences to be had with your eyes open, to let it all succumb to the tyranny of overcommitment. Trust yourself to be alone.
