Twenty-Five Years Later: My Thoughts on College, Then and Now
Vassar’s main library
Just last weekend, I attended my 25th college reunion.
It was fun. It was hard, even painful, to contemplate going again, but it was fun. Why hard? Well … college wasn’t my best time in life. I wonder if it really is for anyone, but the way folks talk about their college years — the friends they make for life, sometimes the spouses they meet and fall in love with, the sports, frats and sororities, the amazing good times that can never be replicated again — I do sometimes wonder if I wasn’t alone in feeling, mostly, bereft, adrift and confused all throughout my college years.
I went to Vassar College (which some of you may know as I’ve written about my alma mater before). My parents didn’t complete college. My grandparents — well, three out of four of them — didn’t even go to high school, so it’s not as though I am from a long line of collegiates. My sister went before me, but transferred to a school closer to home halfway through. I came from a medium-to-large-ish, homogenous, sheltered suburban high school.
It was a given that I’d be going to college, but it wasn’t a given that I’d be going away, or to a school like Vassar. Nothing was a given, it was all open wide and it was all new. I knew nothing about life, nothing. And yet I was sure, for no reason I could possibly put a finger on then — or even really now — that this school, this campus, this experience, was what I wanted.
I was standing right here in this archway:
Blodgett Hall, Vassar College
…when I made the decision that I had to go here, when I was visiting a high school friend who’d gone to Vassar the year before me. Everyone looked interesting, different, curious, intelligent, worldly, and nothing like me. I remember a young woman (with whom I later became friendly) walking up to the building on that crisp, perfect, blue-sky fall day wearing a purple felt beret and that sealed it. The day I got my acceptance letter (and the day I found out I’d gotten enough financial aid to afford it) was a highlight of my life to that date.
Then I got there, and I realized this: Everything I had ever thought about anything in my life was all wrong, and I would have to start from scratch.
That education, separate from the actual classes I took in my four years, was my real one, my lasting one, and getting it hurt. I wasn’t sure who my friends were all the time; in fact, though I found several good friends in my time there, it wasn’t the same group the whole time, and there were times I was terribly let down by people I thought loved me. I never had a good romantic relationship. I was often lonely, even though I was busy and went to parties and lectures and hung out in dorm rooms and apartments and all the rest. When I felt my worst, I’d take long walks around the campus, which is beautiful, to remind myself of that first feeling I had about the place. What I never felt, ever, was homesick, though I did miss my family and my mother’s food. I never thought going home or transferring were options.
This may sound contradictory, but I loved it there.
Perhaps predictably, my senior year — free of romantic attachments and busier academically — was my best, most comfortable year.
As soon as I signed up for Reunion, the anxiety dreams began. I had no friends. I couldn’t remember where Rockefeller Hall was, and I had an exam there that I hadn’t prepared for. Over and over, the dreams came. What kept me from cancelling was the notion that part of the reason I was going was to bring my husband and sons there. Particularly for my boys: I wanted them to see it.
I wanted them to know, as best they could understand at this point, that it was often hard and painful and lonely, to know that sometimes that’s how it feels to forge a life that’s different from the one you’ve had handed to you for the first 17 or 18 years of your life. Because I want my kids to feel that way. I don’t want them to make safe choices. They may not end up at Vassar, of course, but I don’t want them taking the easiest option, the place that looks and feels the most like high school, or is the closest in either proximity or atmosphere, to their home.
I want them to know in their bones, as I did, that everything leading up to the high school diploma is barely the beginning of their minds opening and growing. That there is great value and no shame in coming home again (though I’ve lived in a lot of places since college, I now live about 10 miles from where I grew up), but there’s much greater and more lasting value in leaving first.
And that it hurts.
Coming back (even though I cried when I drove onto campus and cried again when I left) ended up feeling pretty good. I reconnected with some friends, even though those few close friends I had either weren’t in my class year or didn’t attend reunion. Significantly, I connected with some classmates I didn’t even know in school (and it’s not a big school) beyond a name and a face in the yearbook. I enjoyed every conversation. I healed a couple of old wounds.
And hey, I even sold a couple of books — what a thrill to see some copies of Mean Moms Rule at the College Bookstore, and meet other Vassar-alum authors.
I wrote on our class’ Facebook page yesterday that I wish I could take my 47-year-old sensibility and stuff it into my 18- to 21-year-old self, and do it over again. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
Turns out, I wasn’t alone after all.
June 13, 2013 @ 2:16 pm
JE-SUS! Get out of my head. I have a similar experience to you. I guess, in the end, many people do.
June 13, 2013 @ 2:19 pm
Beautiful post, Denise! I understood and/or related to every word. It was wonderful to see you after all this time.
June 13, 2013 @ 2:57 pm
You too, Leslie!
June 13, 2013 @ 3:57 pm
No, you weren’t alone Denise. And I really wish we had gotten to know each other on campus all those years ago.
I was so lucky to be on a hallway in Main our freshman year with some women who turned out to be great friends all the way through Vassar. We keep in touch still (though I wouldn’t call us close as a group, some in the group still are) and it is great to share those memories.
I came from blue-collar Brooklyn and my dad had just died the year before and my mom was not dealing with it well at all. After 18 years of great parental support I was adrift, sad…though frankly, I was glad to be out of a house where my mom was wandering from room to room and wailing. It was bad, and Vassar was a sanctuary of sorts.
We were all thrown together on that hallway, 4-South, and two of my friends had lost their fathers (one of them just after we all got to Vassar) and the counseling center started a grief group and I made it through that freshman year…barely, and with a suicide attempt, but I made it through.
I learned and grew so much in those four years. Met people whose family wealth was so staggering and out of the frame of my reality…and realized they were just people. They still had to do the work I had to do, still had theses and papers and had to get their assess to classes. They just had better clothes and cars and plans for break.
I learned about my limits with various chemicals I played with, realized I was a lesbian, learned how to study and write and research, and developed a love of old buildings and their history. I learned about who I was and who I was in relation to the world around me. Those four years were some of the most important in my life.
For the first time I felt part of a real tradition (something that didn’t exist in my family, something not felt going to a public HS), something bigger than myself, that was there well before me and that would go on long after I was gone. Vassar was and will always be very special to me.
It really hurt not to be able to be there for Reunion. That group of friends took a picture with one them having her arm extended at the end of the line of them…my place…where I would have been if I had been there. They held space for me.
I asked the friend I am closest to, well how was it? And she said, well, IMO you didn’t miss much, but we sure missed you. I am tearing up here…because I missed you all, not just that group of friends, but all of you in my extended Vassar family in the Class of ’88.
No Denise, you weren’t alone then, and you’re not alone now either…we’ll always be Vassar College Class of 1988 – together.
June 15, 2013 @ 4:13 pm
Jill, thank you so, so much for your comment (which I just rescued from spam! Glad I checked and found it there among the incomprehensible “comments” about fake Oakley sunglasses). I wish I had had that group of friends you talk about, and seeing photos of groups of girlfriends at reunion did still give me a pang — amazing how those feelings never really go away!. That’s another reason I didn’t want to go alone and took my family; with little kids, I didn’t have to feel left out when everyone went to the Mug. How silly is that? And yet, I agree with you about how those years at VC literally formed me. It was all worth the pain. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.
Salve,
Denise
June 13, 2013 @ 8:32 pm
Me three! Thanks for writing this. Sorry to have missed reunion and reconnecting with you. Best Wishes!
June 13, 2013 @ 10:06 pm
Hi, Krista!
June 13, 2013 @ 11:58 pm
College was a tough time for me too. I wish I had known then what I know now. BTW, when I read “25-year college reunion,” I thought you meant “25-year high school reunion.” But then I had a reality check. Are we really getting that old??
June 15, 2013 @ 1:33 pm
That last bit, about wishing you could take your current sensibility and self and jam it into your 18 yr. old self and do it again — yeah, that.
I didn’t feel comfortable in college either. I had no confidence, no sense of self and felt so unmoored. And because I felt like that, I kept to myself, kept my head down, didn’t get involved, etc. I give you a ton of credit for going to the reunion.
June 15, 2013 @ 6:31 pm
So I’ve tried to reply several times and always end up crying and deleting whatever I wrote. Obviously, I chose not to go to reunion, and you so nicely articulate so many of the reasons why. I was lost then, of course — how can two lost people ever really connect properly, right? — and I’m not sure I’m all that much better now.
In a lot of ways, I was a casualty of Vassar’s housing policy. Although “could get a single room” was the main reason I selected Vassar — never having visited the Blodgett arch while in high school — I also never had an opportunity to develop a close relationship with a roommate, and we all spent so much time alone. Maybe just the process of being forced to pick a roommate each year would have reminded us that we all had more in common than simply living on the same floor and taking English 105 or Religion 130, and living together and sharing more experiences might have alleviated the loneliness; it’s harder to withdraw when you’re in each other’s space. And the dorm draw process certainly didn’t help to resolve the issue of whether I had found the “right” Group — the last thing I wanted to do was end up in a single room in a dorm where I didn’t even KNOW anybody.
Anyway, maybe it will make you feel better, a bit, to know how much I wish it had been different in Raymond Hovse for us. I am glad you went, proud of you for going, and impressed, as always, with the woman you’ve become.
June 18, 2013 @ 1:25 am
I really enjoyed reading this! My years at Vassar were formative as well…I remember the moment I decided to go there as well…it felt like a jump into the unknown and freedom all at once. Scary and exhilarating.