By Miles Johnson
There is a track on Hilary Duff’s second album that instructs listeners to “cry at the end, cry because it all begins again.”
Ms. Duff’s lyricists and her own limited voice make it unclear to which “cry” they are referring. My four years at college are ending in a matter of days.
Am I supposed to weep over the death of the “good years?” Or should I shout with joy at what I’ve accomplished?
The answer to these questions really comes down to attitude. How do I want to frame my college experience? For sanity’s sake, I should see it as period of artistic and emotional growth that has prepared me for adulthood.
But my own self-effacing nature has me thinking of all the places where I could have made the time more meaningful.
For people like me, they created commencement speeches. Glenn Close or (cross your fingers) Steven Colbert come to SCAD to assuage our feelings of dissatisfaction and failure. They deliver a speech about how our college years have prepared us for a bright future. And it works, because these speakers don’t know any of us personally. They aren’t lying when they talk of our “great accomplishments,” since collectively did do some amazing things.
I’m not a cynic. I appreciate people that are willing to come to a college with the pure goal of making unsure students feel good. My friends were all smiles last year when they walked across the stage to collect their degrees.
For a day, at least, their worries had been put to rest by the encouraging support of friends, family and famous people.
But I’m not walking in the spring. There will be no fanfare to wash away my feelings of discontent. I have to tie that big yellow bow around my college career alone. And I don’t know if I can do that.
What I do know is that I don’t want to start my adult life with a bad attitude. I’ve realized over the last few months that I’m prone to self-defeating behavior. This is something I don’t need following me into my post-college years. Life is going to be hard enough without me constantly finding reasons to feel like a failure.
Here I stand with a senior thesis that has been all but accepted, a boyfriend who loves me and a resumé full of experience. No one is going to pat me on the back and shake my hand. It has to be me to decide that these last four years were worth it. Did I do everything I could have done? No. Does that matter? No it doesn’t. The only thing that’s important is that I feel satisfied with what I accomplished at college.
For now, I’ll say that I’m content for the sake of my own future well-being.
But you know what? That’s too weak. I did more than I ever thought I was capable of at SCAD and I’m proud of what I’ve done. So let me borrow your cap so I can throw it in the air, because I deserve it.