Writing this column has been shamelessly self-indulgent, but I’d be remiss to define my final semester of college in any other way.
I’m really, really terrible at being alone. I’m an extrovert—not necessarily outgoing, but I need interactions with other people to make sense of my world. I’m pretty terrible at living inside my own head because I have no way to organize what’s happening in there. Lately I’ve used writing as a proxy for the depth of conversation necessary to make sense of this last semester; I pour out pages of jumbled thoughts and then painstakingly search for a point buried in the rambling. So I have The Chronicle to thank for my lucidity these last few months. Forcing myself to articulate something for an audience every two weeks has been an outlet that has made me hold myself accountable to some of my most personal thoughts.
Here, in my final column, I originally felt an immense pressure to come up with something sufficiently wise or conclusive enough to wrap up four rich years cleanly with a bow, giving closure to any unsettled business.
At the same time, I don’t think the Duke we’ve lived in these last four years is any place for closure.
I spent my last day at home before leaving to start freshman year on a sort of goodbye tour, paying tearful house visits to my closest friends. A high school teacher had instilled a sense of impending doom in me; she warned me that there would come a point where these people were no longer the most important people in my life, where they’d be replaced with new people and new, shared experiences that would somehow be more meaningful than the past eighteen years.
I was scared, awaiting an abstract but massive change in my world. I liked things the way they were. I liked who I was, what I had, who I had. I didn’t get why things had to change.
Four years later, as I face graduation and a whole new cycle of massive change, I’m stuck thinking about this again. My high school teacher was mostly wrong. No one got replaced. My world just got bigger and my limits pushed to accommodate a larger physical and emotional space rather than replacing one world with a newer one.
I don’t think it’s fair to think of leaving in terms of loss. Change is not zero-sum. We’ve gotten too much from this place to think of graduation as leaving anything behind.
Walk around campus and you’re immersed in a gothic wonderland in flux. We got here as freshmen, impressionable and wide-eyed, and spent a year or so learning our new worlds. The layout. The blueprints. How to navigate the spaces and relationships. How things work around here. How nice things were in our new and different world.
Then suddenly, we started seeing cranes. Bits and pieces of everyday life were cleaved out for renovation, parts we considered central to our experience dissolved indefinitely. The permanence we came in expecting was replaced by a persistent feeling of ephemerality and change. The most vulnerable parts got hidden behind a wall and then covered with stone-patterned wallpaper—an administration-sponsored façade to hide the fact that there was an imperfection within. It’s a good thing we don’t take personal cues from campus-wide construction.
Once we realize that this is the way things are now—that we will not see the completion of this project of a campus in flux—we accept that we will not get closure from something so outside our control.
We separated our closeness to each other from our closeness to the physical space long ago. We had to. So as a class, though we’re soon to be replaced, we don’t need the school to feel connected to each other. The inevitable scattering and distancing that’s about to happen is not destructive to what holds us together because we’re bonded together by something deeper and more abstract.
I’ve found myself inspired, more than usual these days, by this place and the people that inhabit it. Suddenly everything warrants a photo; suddenly everything is infused with a special kind of urgency and thrill.
I’ve had more difficulty spending time alone lately—the guilt of not doing something productive, social and bucket-list-y sets in and the silence and space give me the opportunity to feel scary things.
But then I’m reminded of the privilege I’ve just had to meet everyone I’ve met in four years here, and I’m inspired by the incredible things everyone has already done to the world.
Thank you everyone for being the beautiful humans you are and for giving me the privilege to think out loud for you.
Elissa Levine is a Trinity senior. She is currently a columnist and a photographer. Formerly, she was an Associate Photography Editor and a business account executive.
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