I had a lot that I wanted to say back then, and I mean that seriously—I wrote thirty drafts of that speech and I still have all of them. I wrote them over the course of the year, so they’re all different, but it took me from September to April of my senior year of high school to decide what it was that I wanted to share with the community.
The text of that speech is on my Facebook, if you scroll back a long way, but the contents of it really aren’t important at this point. That speech was what I needed to share then, and as one might expect, I have some other things that I’d like to share now.
I went back to campus a little over a week ago. I had a motive—I needed moral character references for a form I have to submit to sit for the CPA exam in Pennsylvania and they needed to have known me for at least three years, so it was just easier to ask some old teachers of mine than to try to find people at Pitt to do it—but I also did it because I’ve made a bit of a habit out of going back. I don’t do it a ton, but I do it more than most of my classmates—a couple times a year, usually, not over breaks or homecoming, but on random days when I decide that I just want to go back to school.
I do this for a lot of reasons. Early on in college it was to remind myself that it was real, that I didn’t misremember it, that it was a part of me. Now it’s less a nostalgia trip (though it still is one) and more of a reminder of who I used to be and how far I’ve come. It’s also a thank-you, because there aren’t that many of my teachers left there anymore—it’s amazing how few people I recognize when I walk around campus—but there are still some incredibly important ones and I like to make sure that they know how I’m doing.
It’s less about the academics than it is about how I’m doing in my personal life. Academic excellence from me doesn’t surprise them—they expected it from me well before I ever learned to see it in myself—but who I am as I walk those halls now is a lot different from who I was four years ago when I was in my final months as a student there, and I want them to know that because they were the first people who I felt believed in me because they wanted to, not because they had a moral obligation due to being related to me.
There’s a lot that I don’t know how to forget—that I don’t want to forget—from my time there. Mr. Smith asked me if I remembered the Charlie Brown song, when the last time I heard it was (and then proceeded to explain the concept to half the history department, because it was something he started doing my junior year and it still doesn’t make sense to anyone else and I know it won’t make sense to any of you reading this except for Mr. Weiss, maybe), and I just laughed and said “Of course, I couldn’t forget that, I don’t think I’ve heard it since the last time I was here,” because it’s really not something that I can forget. I can’t forget something that let me laugh at how sad I was, that gave me a chance to step outside of myself for a moment, and I may not have those Charlie Brown moments often anymore, but it’s not something that I’m ever going to leave behind either.
There’s this idea that I’ve heard repeated a number of times recently, for some reason—you should never compare yourself to other people, because you can’t. The only person you can compare yourself to is who you were yesterday.
I go back to Shady Side not to reminisce over my glory days, because they weren’t my glory days by any stretch of the imagination. I go back to Shady Side because walking those halls again, wandering around campus, looking at all of those kids, is a way of helping myself remember just how far I’ve come since I was there every day and sitting in class with those teachers and trying to figure out who I was going to be. It makes me wish that I could go back and give my younger self some advice—not advice for my younger schoolmates, like my Senior Sage was, but advice for the person I was at the time.
I wish I could go back and tell my fourteen-year-old self that it’s going to be hard and it’s going to take a long time, but one day she’s going to learn how to untangle who she is from eight years of internalized self-hatred, that she’ll figure out that there’s no more wrong with her than there is with anyone else on this planet and she’s no less deserving of people who care about her than anyone else is. I wish I could go back and tell my fifteen-year-old self that it’s going to be painful while it’s happening but one day she’s going to relearn how to love some of the people who hurt her, because when someone is important you learn how to forgive them, even if it takes a while.
I wish I could go back and tell my sixteen-year-old self that she’s going to meet this girl at the barn one day and over the course of countless car rides and lessons and a year sharing an apartment, they’re going to become best friends for every reason other than horses and she’ll finally get what it means to have that friend to hang out with on Saturday nights and text about anything at all hours (and drag into her most recent obsessions—sorry, Allie). I wish I could go back and tell my seventeen-year-old self that Prize Day and Cum Laude designations in high school have no bearing on how smart she is or what she’ll do in the future and one day she’s going to have three honor societies, two degrees, one honors thesis, eight semesters of Dean’s List, and a Summa Cum Laude designation to prove it.
Landreth told me back in the fall that I’m one of the few people who seems to have reflected on my time there and actually learned something from it beyond what I was taught in the classroom (following his statement about my lack of tolerance for bullshit from anyone and everyone, which is also true). He’s not wrong. I’m uniquely positioned to reflect on it because I don’t come from that world, but also because, unlike most people I know, I’ve been chronicling my own mental state on a blog for the last seven years.
It’s a lot easier to reflect when you can look back and know exactly how you felt at any given time—this time four years ago (plus a day), I had the following thoughts: “i hate everything,” “it’s a beautiful day outside and i feel like shit this is fun ^.^,” “i just want to be half as decent of a person as my brother is. that’s all i’m asking for. he’s the best i know.” (don’t tell him seventeen-year-old me said that), and “okay i’m giving a speech tomorrow and i get terribly nervous when i speak in public but i really need to not psych myself out about this because it’s really important to me but sPEECH AND PUBLIC SPEAKING HELP.”
I can walk through my worst nights whenever I want. I can walk through good days, little things that my friends did that made me happy, the moments when I didn’t know why I was doing any of it but kept doing it anyway. I look back and I reflect not because it’s easy, not because I think owe it to anyone, but because it’s four years later and I still don’t know how I ever convinced myself that it was going to be okay. I stood up on that stage and I talked about the things that got me through, but looking back, I don’t know how I ever learned to open myself to those things in the first place.
I owe that school a lot, and I owe my parents a lot for the sacrifices they made and the choice that they made to send me there. My mom says it’s hard for her to think about my years there because she knows how miserable I was, but part of that reflecting process has involved me learning how to separate the parts of me that were miserable just because I was miserable from school and my experience there. It wasn’t easy for me—Mr. Smith wasn’t wrong that time he told me that he always knew that college would be better for me than high school ever was—but it gave me a chance to be someone different, to be someone new. Looking back, I’m not sure how much I like who that girl was, but it was the first time since I was six years old that I wasn’t surrounded by people with preconceived notions of who I was on the first day of school.
That school was where I learned all manner of useful skills. It’s where I learned how to talk to adults and communicate professionally—it was not my business communications class which taught me those things, I’m sorry—and how to shake hands and maintain eye contact. It’s where I learned how to write a four-page paper in forty-five minutes and still make it sound like I know what I’m talking about. It’s where I learned how to develop the façade of a pretentious, sarcastic asshole and wear it like armor, and also where I learned to smile and laugh and be charismatic even when I’m deeply uncomfortable (which is most of the time because I’m an introvert and incredibly shy even if I don’t come across that way).
I’ve learned a lot more since then, though. I’ve learned to stop being so cynical, to trust the process a little more, to believe in my own intelligence and my own abilities without needing anyone to force that knowledge on me like I did in high school. I’ve learned that I really am okay with never being part of a group, with having friends from all over the place, of all different ages, who all do different things, because I don’t need to be able to spend time with all of them at once for those relationships to be meaningful. I’ve learned that maybe, just maybe, all those promises that I made to myself during the worst days of my life may have been necessary to get me through them, but that doesn’t mean I have to hold myself to them anymore. I’ve learned that I may be an adult but sometimes I really just have to listen to my mother because she knows me and she knows when I’m miserable even when I don’t.
I’ve learned that I’m still just as grateful—and possibly even more—for some of my high school teachers as I was back then, that you never know who’s going to walk into your life on a rainy morning in a coffee shop and decide to stay there, that sometimes it’s the most unexpected people who stick around—I told Cam over the summer that I never expected us to stay friends after we graduated, to be those people who go and get dinner after work and catch up like actual adults, and he seemed surprised, but it was the honest truth. I didn’t expect that or my regular ten-minute rendezvous with Max between classes most Tuesdays and Thursdays, where he fills me on what he learned in international politics, I tell him what I didn’t learn in finance, and we reminisce over #JustShadySideThings that you can’t understand if you didn’t go through them, because being a student at that school is an experience unlike any other.
I’ve learned that sometimes you grow apart from people and it doesn’t have to mean anything other than that your lives went in different directions and you became different people, that the formation of distance doesn’t mean that those relationships weren’t important at one time, that it’s okay to change in opposite ways and not have the same things in common as you used to. I’ve learned that there’s something extra wonderful about sitting there and discussing music without someone else who knows exactly how a song makes you feel, whose default response to certain things is the same as yours because there are some songs that are just so fitting for certain moments and places that it’s impossible to separate them (I’m looking at you, 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)).
I’ve learned that while dealing with my shin splints is an ongoing challenge (guess who’s starting a round of prescribed physical therapy on Tuesday, folks), I actually do love running in a way that I never thought I would. I’ve learned that it’s okay to outgrow things that you used to love, that sometimes there comes a point where what you’re sacrificing isn’t worth the results you’re getting and it’s okay to let go because it’ll always be there if you decide you want to come back to it (long story short, I’m not riding right now and don’t know when I will again and strangely enough, I’m okay with that). I’ve learned that I get what Christian Borle meant when he spoke at my graduation and told us that Hillman taunts him, because I feel the exact same way about that new science building and probably always will—who knows, maybe I actually would’ve have gone through with becoming a chemist if it had existed when I was there.
I've learned that while Mr. Weiss was right about a lot of things all those times that we sat there and he talked me down from that cliff, he was right about one thing especially—there are people who care more about where they end up than they do about how they get there, and then there are people who care more about the journey that they go on than they do about where they end up. He told me that the first kind of people live sad lives and that I'm the second kind, and he's right. There's been a lot in my life that hasn't gone the way I'd hoped, that turned out to be something completely different than what I was expecting, but at the end of the day, I wouldn't change it, because I'm stronger for those things and better for them and I wouldn't be where I am now if they hadn't happened. I wouldn't be able to appreciate how content I am now if I didn't know how miserable I used to be.
I’ve also learned that there’s a lot more that I don’t know and I may have a lot of things that I wish I could tell my teenaged self, but twenty-five-year-old Anna is probably going to have a lot of things that she’ll wish she could tell me, and maybe that’s the point. When I was seventeen I felt like I knew everything, and now I feel like I don’t really know much at all—to quote a line from my favorite U2 song, “The more you see, the less you know, the less you find out as you go, I knew much more then than I do now.”
The last four years (really, three and a half) have gone by more quickly than I would have expected. It feels like I was just a freshman yesterday, even though I’ll be walking in my first graduation ceremony two weeks from today. On day one of college, I never could have predicted that I’d be where I am right now. I never could have predicted that I’d be getting an anthropology degree, that I’d be facing down a job at a public accounting firm with something that is more akin to excitement than it is to trepidation, that I’d belong to multiple honor societies or have written a thesis about communication patterns on Tumblr or be friends with that one kid that I met in honors Seminar in Composition on our very first day of classes and have somehow managed to stick with for pretty much the entirety of our college careers (shout out to Billy for putting up with me for this long, he deserves a medal at this point).
I don’t know where I’m going from here, honestly. This is the first time in my life where I haven’t had a serious plan. I don’t know if I’m going to be a public accountant for the rest of my life, if I’ll one day decide to go corporate, if I’ll go back to school and get a PhD or MBA or JD—that was another nice thing about my visit to campus last week, actually. Mr. Smith asked me how I felt about graduation and I told him that I’m excited but I’m also not because I don’t feel ready to be done with school, because there’s still so much I want to learn and I’m not done yet, and he just laughed and said “That’s why people become teachers.” I’m just trying to enjoy myself, to enjoy being in my early twenties at the beginnings of a reasonably lucrative career, to enjoy the fact that seventeen-year-old me never could’ve predicted that I’d wind up here, but I did.
A lot of things have changed since this day four years ago, and even more so since four years before that. I’ve changed a lot, to the point where my childhood best friend’s mother doesn’t recognize me when we cross paths on campus. I’m trying to get better about giving other people the space to be different, to not be who they’ve been in my mind for years, and it’s hard when there are no apologies for hurt feelings and isolation, but I’m working on it because I want them to do the same thing for me. I want to give myself room to grow, to come back four years from now and have a different outlook on life because we’re all changing all the time and the only way you can really realize that is by looking back on who you were (and thanking the people who have helped you to figure out who you are).
I ended my Senior Sage with a quote from Doctor Who—“Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way or another.” I’m going to end this with one too, even though my mother is now more caught up with Doctor Who than I am, because I still love Eleven and Amy Pond and his final episode always gets to me—"We all change, when you think about it, we're all different people, all through our lives, and that's okay, that's good, you've gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this, not one day, I swear.”
I really won’t. That much I do know. I write everything down now, because I’ve spent enough of my life regretting that I have no proof of how I felt or what I thought about things at a particular moment, so how could I forget?
Until next time x
