A few weeks ago, I participated in the procession for Founder’s Day Convocation. Processing is simple—you just walk in with a group of distinguished looking robed and hooded and hatted people while the Chapel’s organ makes you feel important.
If you have yet to graduate, the costume for the procession is the classic graduation cap and gown. I have yet to graduate, but the days while that statement remains true are dwindling. I spent the ceremony sitting uncomfortably, the cap’s tassel tickling the back of my neck. "The outfit means nothing," I told myself. "You have plenty of time."
With significant relief, I went back to the gown rental station after the ceremony and attempted to unburden myself of the weighty clothing.
But it was not to be. “Just keep it!” the woman in charge cheerily insisted. “You’ll be needing it again soon anyway!”
And I replied, without considering my words, surely sounding a bit manic. “Can you please take it back?”
She looked at me like I was having a psychotic break. I tried to explain. “It’s just—it’s a graduation robe. It’s scary. I can’t have it staring at me from my closet all year…”
She was unsurprisingly unsympathetic. “Put it in your friend’s closet?” she suggested, turning to help the next hopeful returner.
And so the robe made the walk back to Keohane with me. Even now, I can see the looming black specter hanging in my closet from my bed. I feel like I can see it even in the dark before I go to sleep. 7 months, it whispers.
7 months until there’s no longer such a thing as food points. 7 months until I get asked to make my first alumni donation. 7 months until I face, for the first time in my entire life, a future I cannot begin to predict.
My younger brother is a first-year in college. Before he left, I kept hearing people tell him that college will be the best four years of his life. What I heard was that the rest of my life, stretching out in front of me, is a guaranteed downgrade. Things get pretty miserable from here, they all seemed to imply.
It’s a cultural understanding, by now—we all know that youth is something you take for granted and then spend the rest of your life chasing. Youth, we’ve so often been told, is wasted on the young.
Recent graduates look at me with trauma-stricken eyes. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” they say, seeming to consider just how much of my blissful ignorance to preserve.
All told, there’s this sense of impending doom.
And while we all experience it, I do think it’s worse for women.
Generally, we’ve just experienced four years of getting less sexually desirable, whereas men have experienced the opposite trend. We all know about the ideal Freshman Girl and Senior Guy. It’s a microcosm of what’s about to happen in our lives.
Women in their young twenties will always be the traditional objects of sexual attraction. Men’s attractiveness to the outside world will often increase as their power does. But we peak now. This is our time.
And if we want to have kids but don’t necessarily feel a rush to date seriously and think actively about eventual marriage, the biological clock starts ticking too.
It all reinforces this idea that time is the enemy, that life has a trajectory and that trajectory begins steeply trending down...in seven months.
The robe is staring at me. The robe is ominous.
And I’m tired of it. So today, I’m making a decision.
I’m fine with the fact that the robe is terrifying. Stepping into such enormous unknown is scary, and it should be. I expect it to be.
But the prospect should be tinged with exhilaration, not doom. After we graduate, most of us really only need to scrounge up enough money to pay for shelter and food—and perhaps student loans. These costs are not so steep. If we ever really need money, there are a number of lucrative options available to us in a pinch simply by merit of being Duke graduates. We’re not going to starve.
Our obligations…barely exist. We can do whatever we want. We are some of the luckiest people on the entire planet. We have miles and miles of open doors and no particular requirement to choose any single one of them, no matter how much we or society or our parents may convince us otherwise. We have incredible friends and experiences already, and we just need to keep seeking them. It’s not actually that hard. In fact, I’m considering lately that it may even wind up being kind of fun.
The hot topic amongst my mother’s circle of friends lately is “aging gracefully.” To age gracefully is to stop fetishizing youth and instead embrace change and evolution. It’s to focus not on what different stages of life require giving up but instead on what they allow you to gain. It’s not to spend time mentally ranking life phases.
One day, as I heard them talking, it occurred to me--aging gracefully starts today, coming to terms not with wrinkles and hot flashes and grey hair but with utility bills and long commutes and cooking classes.
It starts with coming to terms with that damn robe. It may not happen today or even tomorrow. But hey—we still have 7 months.
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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