Emily Hoeven | Brave new worlds

Growing Pains | The freedom of being in between

By Emily Hoeven 01/25/16 10:49pm

I remember my first night in the Quadrangle, lying on a hard and slightly stained mattress, surrounded by four intimidatingly blank walls and listening to the heartbeat of an unfamiliar city outside my window. I felt very small. It was as if I had literally been transported into another world, and in a way I had: One day I had been at home in the suburban town where I’d lived for 18 years and knew everyone, and the next day I had moved into a tiny room in a huge city across the country where I didn’t know anyone. I had always thought there would be a neat transition between my previous self and my college self, but it turns out identity is more complex than that.

It was strange to feel my past life almost drop away as I entered this new phase of my life. I didn’t know how to define myself during my first couple of months at Penn because everything that defined me was back in California. I felt disconnected from my college friends because they only knew the college me. How could they really know me without knowing what Mission Boulevard looked like late at night with the Niles hills silhouetted in the background? How could they know me without knowing the friends who I’d journeyed to Japan with or the friends I’d gone to school with since kindergarten? How could they know me if they hadn’t met my family? How could they know me, or I them, if we didn’t know one another’s formative experiences?

Having now been a college student for a year and a half, I still spend a lot of time trying to reconcile this feeling of double identity. College me versus home me. College friends versus home friends. Activities in Philadelphia versus activities in Fremont. And this sensation of double identity and double worlds sometimes leaves me feeling uprooted, like I’m drifting along in the wind, lacking any stable foothold.

Who am I, and where do I belong? As college students, we exist in a unique state of limbo. We bounce back and forth between home and school, but most of us won’t be living at either of those places in a couple of years. We’ll be forging new lives for ourselves, working in unforeseen places, acquainting ourselves with the vibrancies of different cities and easing ourselves into the rhythm of other worlds populated with other people.

As we attempt to bridge the gap between who we were and who we’re becoming, we must come to terms with the fact that there is only one constant in the many-variabled equation of our lives, and that is our selves. We are the only people that we are with day in and day out. We are the only people who we’re going to have for our whole lives. We are the only ones who know all of our experiences, all of our feelings, who can replay all of our memories, who have been with ourselves in all of the places that we’ve been and know all the people we know. We are our own common denominator — the only common denominator. There is a certain poignancy that is felt in realizing this, in watching our identities become more individual and more distinct from the factors that originally shaped them.

And college is the time when this autonomy becomes most apparent. It is a four-year period that is sandwiched between an 18-year period of living with family and post-college life, which generally involves an eventual settling down with a job, life partner and family. College is the transient space between those two worlds, but it is also a world unto itself. It is the time in our lives when we are the most free to not belong — to not completely belong to anything or anyone or any place, but to ourselves and the blossoming independence of our identities.

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