Emily Hoeven |It's complicated

Growing Pains | Or, my ten-minute response to the question “How’s school going?”

By Emily Hoeven 11/28/16 9:45pm

“So how’s school going?”

After the hellos and how-are-yous, those are probably the first words you hear from everybody you see when you go home for break. The automatic response to this question is “Good! Everything’s going well. Classes are hard, you know, but everything’s good.” This is my standard reply whenever I run into someone from high school at the grocery store or see a neighbor on the street.

After all, these are not ideal locations for going into a long speech about the ups and downs of college and exposing your personal feelings. Nor do your acquaintances from high school or your neighbor probably want to know all the intricacies and intimacies of your experience. The “how’s school going” question is one that can be satisfied by a surface-level answer — “Good” — and as such, a deeper and more nuanced reply can often seem out of place.

I often hesitate when asked this question because I don’t know how I should answer. Part of me wants to say what they most likely want to hear. “Good” is simple and clean and understandable. It means that you’re having a good time. It means that your college experience is everything that your Facebook album and Instagram posts say it is and more. It means you’ve made close friends, are doing well in your classes and are involved in meaningful activities.

Yet the standard reply of “Good” always feels inadequate — evasive — to me whenever I use it. Because the truth is, my college experience has not always been good. I have had some of the most difficult periods of my life in college. I didn’t always feel like I had a place at Penn. It took me a while to make close friends here, people whom I trust and who understand me like my friends from home do.

There were days when I questioned if I’d made the right choice in coming to a school across the country from my family. There were days when I felt so much anxiety I was afraid I’d stop functioning both academically and socially. In short, my college experience — my Penn experience — has given me both gifts and baggage. And to ignore the baggage — to gloss over it when my friends and relatives ask me about school — somehow feels wrong.

At my family’s Thanksgiving dinner this year, my uncle asked me how I’ve liked Penn thus far, if I felt like I’d made the right choice in going there. I took a breath and then found myself spouting off an answer similar to what is written above. There were 11 family members sitting around the table, and I was very conscious of the fact that all of them were looking at and listening to me. I was afraid of sounding ungrateful, or cynical, or jaded or appearing anything other than 100 percent happy. But when I finished talking, my cousin said, “Emily, you know these feelings are perfectly natural,” and my uncle said, “I don’t doubt that you’ve become a stronger person because of all of these things.”

It occurred to me then that the response I had just given my family was not any more disappointing than the reply “Good, everything’s going great” — that, in fact, no one had been expecting me to say that everything was great all the time, because they too had gone through college, had gone through life. And the realities of both college and life are such that they cannot be encompassed in the one word — “Good.” This is a self-evident truth. However, it is a truth that we need to constantly remind ourselves of. It is a truth that we need to allow ourselves to experience — give ourselves permission to feel.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean you have to bare your soul to every person who asks you how you’re doing or how school is going. But what it does mean is that when we give ourselves space to admit that things aren’t going perfectly — when we begin to view the roadblocks and difficulties in our lives not as things that we ought to avoid speaking about, but rather as things that we can learn from and which allow us to form bonds with other people — we get one step closer to conquering those roadblocks and difficulties. And we get one step closer to understanding that no one expects us to show up to every social gathering with only giant smiles on our faces and immaculate stories to tell.