Emily Hoeven | To be or not to be proud

Growing Pains | On coming to terms with the changes inherent in adulthood

By Emily Hoeven 08/23/16 9:17pm

At the end of this past school year, my mom and I were talking about the ups and downs of my college experience when she asked, “Are you proud of the person you’ve become?” Although taken by surprise, my first instinct was to say yes. After all, I had finished two years of college, lived across the country from my family, survived several East Coast winters, taken stimulating courses with incredible professors and learned from and been challenged by the students around me.

My two years at Penn have given me rare opportunities, lifelong memories and invaluable relationships with others. They helped cultivate my academic passions, taught me how to cook for myself and showed me the importance of practicing self-love. I have grown at Penn. But in some ways I feel that my time at Penn has caused me to regress and to develop qualities that I am not proud of.

So my answer to my mom’s question was, “Yes and no ... I don’t know.”

I have spent a lot of time trying to flesh out the complex and contradictory feelings evoked whenever I think about this question. One of the conclusions I have arrived at is that Penn is not necessarily at the root of this uncertainty, but rather adulthood itself. The 2015 movie “Inside Out,” which was heavily sourced from contemporary neurological research on emotion, helps explain this.

Near the end of the movie the protagonist, Riley, obtains a new “emotional dashboard” in her head. Many of Riley’s previous actions were governed by a single emotion (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger), but as she got older and encountered more complicated circumstances, her emotional dashboard was forced to adapt. It became three times the size of the original, the buttons composed of many different combinations of the preexisting emotions to signify that her emotions, actions and memories would now be more complex and nuanced.

My emotional dashboard has definitely tripled over the past several years — my experiences at Penn have caused me to feel a wider and deeper range of emotion than I could have imagined when I was younger. And perhaps it is the relative simplicity of the past that I miss. Because I don’t often feel anymore that things are simple. This contributes to the difficulty in ascertaining whether or not I am proud of the changes I’ve gone through in the past few years.

Firstly, I feel that my self-confidence has regressed. I have developed a sense of imposter syndrome that I never had before; I constantly compare myself to others and worry that I am not doing enough to keep up and am not of the same intellectual caliber of the students around me. Yet I am also aware that this feeling derives from my exposure to harder concepts in a more challenging academic environment. The more I learn, the more I feel overwhelmed by the complexity of every subject; the more time I spend in Van Pelt, the more I am aware of all the books I haven’t read. I am less sure of myself partially because I have realized that there are very few situations where I — or anyone — can actually be completely sure of the answer.

Furthermore, I detect cynicism in myself that was not present two years ago. Things I have seen and heard and experienced have chipped away at my innocence, causing me to view the world less through rose-colored lenses and with more of a jaded perspective. College, which was something I had looked forward to all my life, also turned out to be a place where students drink themselves into oblivion, where high-pressure circumstances and unreachable standards cause mental health to deteriorate, where sexual assault is on the front page of the newspaper almost every week. Call me naive, but I wasn’t prepared for these realities.

College reflects larger issues that must be confronted in adulthood, things that may have seemed distant to us as children but now are much more closely linked to our lives. An understanding and awareness of the complexities of the world, the people in it and their actions, both for good and for bad, is the curse and the gift of growing up. And although I may mourn the simplicity of younger years, I wouldn’t give up my journey into adulthood. I wouldn’t trade my emotional dashboard. It is a record of all that I have experienced, of all that I have felt, a map from there to here, and of that I am proud.

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