"This Above All, To Thine Own Self Be True"

When I began this blog, I swore honesty. It's hard to write honestly, mostly because it's hard to face the truth yourself.

College is not what I was planning on it being. I was expecting glorious higher education, living with people that shared some interests but had different backgrounds. I was looking foward to intelligent discussion about world affairs over coffee. I was looking foward to meeting all kinds of people that were in the same place because they had similar goals and ambitions to mine. People that were here because of their initiative and gusto and clear priorities. I knew that the transition would be hard, but I've done harder things. This should have been a breeze.

Well, I don't go to Yale. I am a freshman at a state school. I'm not living in the honors building, I'm taking general ed courses. And, shocker, people don't magically age five years in one summer. The claim to adulthood that most people have here is getting drunk off of cheap, frat keg beer and getting laid every weekend. (Weekends range from Wednesday night to Monday afternoon.) It's exactly like high school, only cruder and more blatant.

There's the kind of lonliness where you're in a strange place with strange faces, and everyone you know and love is miles away. Then there's the feeling you get when you know that you are the only person of your kind. When every single person(excepting five - no joke) that you talk to in the course of a month is cut out of the exact same mold, and you aren't. It feels like you are the only human being surrounded by cardboard cutouts. I am the language that no one understands. I am the quiet religious girl, the frigid, sober prude. I don't know how to have fun, I don't know what life is about.

It's hard. It's painful, and sometimes I wonder if I really am insane. But this month, as long and as lonely as it has been, I have learned so much about myself that I couldn't begin to expain it all. It's like reading the Qu'ran parallel to reading the Bible; suddenly your own faith is defined in completely new and powerful ways, just by the contrast.

When all that's left is what I believe, it is enough. When everyone says that I'm wrong, I am right. The life I choose is a good one, the biggest parts of me are the best. Life has pain and lonliness and fear, and I can take it. Life has big questions, and I ask them. Life has wonderful possibilities, and I demand them. Life has truth hidden away in it, and I pull it out and display it to the world. I am radiant, I am whole, I am precious and I am strong. I take chances, I hope when I shouldn't, I carry on long after I should quit. I am unstoppable. I am winning, and I will win. I won this morning when I woke up and decided to be myself.

So what, you may ask. So what if you have your white plume of honor if all it gets you is a Friday night with Remember the Titans and a bowl of popcorn? It's true that life right now is lonely and hard and I don't like it. But it is life, big and real, and I'm not hiding or running away from anything. My quiet weekends are wilder and more rebellious and far more grown-up than any party. There are 4,000 people on this campus. It will be long and hard work, but I will find the select few that came out of my mold. I will find people that take no less than they ask for, people that I can share my big, wild and fulfilling life with. I will meet people that know and love who they are. We will start friendships that shatter whatever half-relationships I was supposed to settle for. And until then, I can survive on my own. It is worth it, and I am enough.