March 23, 2020
Returning to College as a More Mature Me
I had a dream last night that I had just returned to my senior year of college, but this time with all the confidence and knowledge and world experience that I have now. Always before, and I dream a lot about going back to school, my dreams have been filled with stress and the feeling of being completely out of my depth. But this is the first time I dreamt that I could handle whatever I encountered. I dreamt that my first stop in returning to school was to check out my upcoming class schedule and sit down and make a plan. What a novel idea! Every other year I went to school, I did not make a plan with my schedule. I always flew by the seat of my pants. At the beginning of classes, I was more interested in spending social time with my classmates than with getting a handle on what I was going to be studying. In the dream, I was even interacting with adults on a peer-to-peer level which I never would’ve done in real life. I would’ve considered that terrifying and disrespectful - even when I was 22 years old.
My life would have been so much easier, I now realize, if I had just done these few things:
Had less scrupulosity in activities
Had more self-confidence in relationships
Had less anxiety with food and class
Had more honest interaction with me and the adults around me
Worried less over everybody else’s state of mental health and emotional functioning.
A part of me wishes I could go back and take on my school years as the self-possessed person I am now. How much easier my life could’ve been! How much calmer and more peaceful, filled with grace and purpose. I would’ve known better how to study, how to react to other people‘s judgments, and how to not go crazy on a campus where we were more or less quarantined in the winter months. (We lived at the top of mountain, and very few students had cars. We were too small a school to have a bus, and even if we had one, the nearest town was 20 minutes away. Being stuck inside with snow in the ground feels eerily familiar.)
But that’s not how life works. We don’t get to skip the hard parts. If I did, I wouldn’t appreciate the progress I have made, because I won’t have known how difficult it could’ve been. These good moments come to us, emerge for us, out of the confusion and immaturity that existed before because we knew we had to get better. It is our very brokenness that challenges us to overcome our broken parts.
I am relieved that my subconscious mind, at least, got to revisit a place that was a source of so much anxiety for me, and got to do so without that anxiety. In a way, that is the closest I will ever get to reclaiming that time and confusion of young adult me. It’s nice to know that we can continue to grow and develop and gain more tools for life, even if that knowledge comes to us only through a dream.