Lilly

The world goes in and out of focus.

I declare my major one day—it is a triumph, a commitment, something that I am equally intimidated by and overjoyed about and do not regret one bit—and spend the next 48 hours with a splitting headache, like my brain revolting against the tidy routine I’ve developed over the past few weeks. I find myself lethargic, lazy, easily lost in distractions that I’ve been able to ignore for the past couple of months.

It’s not often that a college student will look forward to the start of the week more so than the weekend, but I find solace in my studies, feel safest doing my homework in the physics wing or crammed into a lecture hall for a colloquium or explaining an astronomy concept to a friend as we walk to lunch. I am living in the present only enough to focus on what needs to be done now—the rest of my awareness is cast far ahead, already formulating schedules for next semester and summer internship plans and a budding desire to do research abroad in a few years. But as divided as I am between the present and the future, I am not looking into the past, at all. That might be more of a relief than anything else—that I finally am beginning to separate myself from the face I put on in high school. That I can finally be true to myself, living in a world where people only know me how I make myself known.

Have I completely disengaged from my high-school self? No. I still struggle with asking for help. It still feels like a weakness, like I’m baring my throat to a hungry world. But it’s getting better. I can’t expect myself to know everything. If I did, I wouldn’t be here anyway. ♦