I have no words.
For the first time in my entire life, I am finding it impossible to come up with something to say.
I finally have the opportunity to express myself on a public stage, to write about my journey at Duke and my feelings towards graduation—on a medium where potentially hundreds of people will read it—and yet I can’t. I don’t even know where to begin.
This is rarely ever the case for me. I’ve always been a writer and a chronicler, constantly documenting every aspect of life. Growing up, I would lock myself in my room for hours on end and write poems and short stories. I posted on my online blog regularly, composing clever and detailed descriptions of my life, my friends, my opinions on the latest political scandal or the most recent book I read. In my classes, I always preferred writing a final paper over taking an exam. I even kept a journal, writing an entry every single night after my 12th birthday.
When I came to Duke, I stopped writing. My blog started to see fewer posts, and my short stories fell into the depths of my computer files. I still kept my journal, but my entries became less creative and more expository. My only pieces of writing that were seen by other people were the essays that I wrote for class assignments. I never even got around to taking that creative writing class I wanted to try.
Freshman year, when I passed by the table for The Chronicle at the student activities fair, I decided to sign up for the list-serv and go to the first meeting. But instead of joining the news department or attempting to write about sports, I decided to try my hand at photography. I knew a little bit about shutter speed and aperture from a photojournalism class I had taken one summer, so I was basically already an expert. For the next four years, I spent all my time in the photo hall of the Chronicle office, only ever entering the news or sports halls when I wanted to bother Yeshwanth or Danielle or Carleigh or Amrith, eat someone’s food or say hi to the attractive sports writers. And despite my constant desire to cover a news story or start my own opinion column, I never got around to doing it.
So maybe that’s the reason I’m struggling so much to write this senior column. I’ve lost my ability to translate my thoughts and emotions into cohesive, logical sentences. And yet I’ve prepared for this moment for months, if not years. One column to summarize my experience at Duke, to write about memories from freshman year and to discuss how much I’ve changed over the past four years. I’ve obsessed over finding the best topic, the perfect metaphor, the one story or lesson that will capture everything I want to convey and be sufficiently sentimental without being too cheesy or cliché.
Maybe there are just too many things I could write about. I could tell the story of why I ended up at Duke—how I had never heard of it until a friend in high school asked me to write a peer letter of recommendation for his Early Decision application, and how I ended up adding Duke to the list of colleges on my Common App approximately two hours before it was due. I could write about Blue Devil Days and how just one day on campus spent learning about Focus and DukeEngage, eating in Marketplace, seeing Cameron Indoor Stadium and K-Ville, laughing at a DUI show and falling in love with the Pitchforks, visiting the Nasher, eating dinner at Plate and Pitchfork (RIP) and meeting students was enough to convince me to come here. I could write about my journal entry on that day, April 15, 2011, when I wrote, “I love Duke. I love everything about it. Walking through campus, I already feel like a student here.”
I almost wrote my senior column about all of my favorite places on campus. I thought about describing all my different homes at Duke, from my tiny room in Blackwell to my not much bigger room in Mirecourt section in Craven to my apartment in DG section on Central and now Yellow House, the most perfect little house on the corner of Buchanan and Markham. The late nights in the Coffeehouse and Vondy, the early morning classes in Sanford in Trent, the hundreds of hours spent standing in Wallace Wade and Cameron Indoor Stadium. I could write about living in K-Ville during my freshman and senior year, spending every Friday evening at the Freeman Center and every Sunday in 301 Flowers. And I could write about my favorite cherry tree on campus, the one between the BC and the chapel that everyone always Instagrams during the two weeks in the spring that it’s in bloom.
Or I could have written about the senior year bucket list I made with my housemates and how hard we have worked these past few weeks to check everything off. I went to a show at DPAC, a Durham Bulls game, the Farmers Market in the pouring rain, and I even ate at the McDonalds on campus for the first time ever just to check off all the campus eateries. My senior column could’ve been about the lessons I learned from keeping that bucket list, something about how life isn’t about checking things off but it’s about the experiences and the people along the way. I could’ve turned that into a lesson about having a plan, and the importance of being flexible and open-minded and allowing yourself to deviate from that plan. As someone who has maintained a detailed roadmap of her entire life but still has no idea what I’m doing after I graduate in exactly two weeks, I think that might be the most important lesson of all.
All of those brilliant ideas, and yet here I am. Sitting in the basement of Bostock on a Sunday night surrounded by students studying for finals even though I finished everything almost a week ago and even tweeted this morning about never going to the library again in my life. I have literally nothing else to do other than write this column, and yet I’m about to submit it two days past the deadline.
So perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here. It’s not just my inability to write that is keeping me from finishing this column. Maybe some things just can’t be described in words. Maybe it’s simply not possible to summarize four years of lessons and memories in one newspaper column. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to look back on my time at Duke without having to read through every journal entry or look at every photograph. I just need to turn off the part of myself that needs to chronicle everything, and let life happen. And for once, I think I might actually be okay with that.
Nicole Savage is a Trinity senior and current photographer for The Chronicle. She is also the former Social Media Editor for the photo department, a position entirely made up just so that she could be on masthead without actually having any responsibilities. She would like to thank Esu, Bri, Jmay, Yeoyeo,Tseuc, Dall and all the Chron photogs who have changed her life in ways they probably will never comprehend. And her family and friends for all their support (especially KB).
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