I was not ready for graduation. I told everyone that I was, just like I told myself, but the truth is that I was terrified. I had fallen in love with not only Duke, but also the larger notion of what Duke—of what college—was supposed to be: bright-eyed students walking a turret-lined campus and thinking about “things that matter,” having 3:00 a.m. conversations, befriending professors—that sort of thing. Whether this actually happened was beside the point: I was majorly crushing on this thing called the liberal arts, and the breakup was going to be bad. I craved lunchtime epiphanies and life-changing lectures and ideas so beautiful they hurt, and, so, as May barreled in, I could not help but wonder, when will I ever feel this aware and alive and electric again?
When I was a sophomore, one of my favorite professors told me about an English major who, in her first week of medical school, attended a lecture that included an image of a cancerous versus noncancerous lung. One was labeled “patient’s lung” and the other was labeled “doctor’s lung.” The student read the labels and asked herself, “What kind of message is this sending me? Why is it telling me that the doctor’s body is perfect? And what kind of divide might this message place between me and a patient?”
When I heard that story three years ago, two thoughts came to mind. First, that is an awful lot to think about during your first week of medical school, and, second, that is what I want college to do to me: I want to see things differently. I want the everyday to be not just experienced, but also examined—to be made meaningful. I want to do what the former English major did: see the raw stuff of life as a text to be read.
Artists do this all the time. A good poet can make the curl of an orange peel the most important image you will ever see. A good novelist can make a day in the life of a 70-year-old woman a window into humanity’s greatest concerns. Artists tease significance from the ordinary material of human experience. They press upon the edges of the everyday and out rushes something like truth or terror or beauty. How? They ask the right questions, and I ought to be doing the same.
The end of college hit me with nostalgia and sadness—anxiety and excitement—but in this punched-gut-riot-stew of feelings, I realize now that I had forgotten to feel curious. I saw college as some indisputable epitome of intellectual inquiry, and I feared that, when I left, I would never find a place so dynamic and interesting and full. But I am cheating myself if inquiry ends on Graduation Sunday. We leave Duke not because we are done learning, but because there is more for us to learn.
Do I miss Duke? Yes. Do I wish I were back? Occasionally. The last six months have been chock-full of joy, but, at various points, I have also been lonely, confused and clueless. Yet I have also begun to see how utterly fascinating post-grad life can be—I cannot make it constantly comfortable or agreeable or exhilarating, but I can make it interesting. It is all about asking the right questions. And there will always be more questions to ask, questions I could never answer—or even articulate—at Duke. Questions like: How do I leave college without losing community? How do I measure my work without grades? What are my responsibilities as a privileged citizen—an educated adult, a grown-up daughter? And perhaps, later on, what does marriage mean? How will my forties feel? What is aging like?
These questions are scary because they poke into the unknown. They skirt along the surface of my deepest anxieties—that I will lose touch with friends, hurt others, be irresponsible, get bored or become boring. But the unknown is exactly what is worth investigating, and the fact that I get to keep asking questions—and ask them at every stage of this now-foreign, soon-familiar post-grad life—means that the kind of curiosity we are supposed to hone at Duke is the most important trait we will take away from it.
I have been living at a children’s cancer center since July, and, by now, I have become accustomed to the routine. Hospital rides, chemo regimens, dishwashing, floor-mopping and story-telling—this is a new kind of normal. And every once in a while, amidst everything ordinary, something world-cracking—mind-shattering, heart-breaking—happens in the lives of the people with whom I live.
Sam Wells, former dean of Duke Chapel, used to say, “If you can’t make it happy, make it beautiful.” There is a lot here that is not happy. Some of it is ordinary. Some of it is tragic. But I am learning how to ask the right questions of it all—questions like, “How do daily practices knit together a community?” or “How do we respond to horror and find healing?” These are questions to which I might never find full answers. But in asking them, I am stumbling across something that makes me feel aware, alive and electric—something that looks a lot like beauty.
Jocelyn Streid, Trinity ’13, a former Robertson Scholar, is a Hart Fellow conducting pediatric palliative care research at a children’s cancer center in Kuching, Malaysia. This column is the thirteenth installment in a semester-long series of weekly columns written on the gap year experience, as well as the diverse ways Duke graduates can pursue and engage with the field of medicine outside the classroom. Send the columnists a message on Twitter @MindTheGapDuke.
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