Someone once intelligently observed, “People don’t change, they just become who they are really meant to be.” Half of March is gone from the calendar and the air of summer is sweeping through my veins. I become dumbfounded when I think of my first days in Athens at a very young 18, filled with negativity at a life I had to part with and accepting the one I wasn’t in the mood to begin.
I can’t give a list of the numerous ways that I’ve changed throughout my year at school. I can only tell you that each day has been abundant with an alteration in the thoughts I think as well as an air of freedom that I’ve given myself. In one of my classes, I read about uncertainty in argumentation and debate but didn’t quite understand the true meaning of the definition until a talk with my professor after class. She told me that once she had been robbed twice within the same month and around the same time she had to end a four-year relationship. After that, she surrendered herself to that level of uncertainty that’s inevitable in life and she’s been happier ever since.
Uncertainty and change runs wild through my state of being, and at once it was perceived as something I had to panic over and spend the day in bed to think about. Today, I wake up and find myself excited at the mere thought of something in my day being unpredictable, for what else gives our lives flavor? I can’t find myself to be stressed over school, because each day makes room for a time of progress, even if that progress arrives in small increments.
Tuesday marked the first day of spring, and life is slowly making its way back into nature, and the same goes for me. Thoughts of being reunited with a time of learning from experience as opposed to the classroom make my heart race. Spending every night in a different form of outdoor activity has worked its way into my dreams, and though concentration becomes a problem as the lightness in my body grows bigger than myself, the remaining six weeks of the semester assure me that I have little time left to spend in my dorm without my hometown friends and family. Having the ability to observe how they’ve become more of the person they’re meant to be will prove to be a steady time of observation and smiling, for the uncertainty of all that’s happened and remains to happen in these upcoming months pervades.
I find no use in reflecting on myself a year ago; everything I was is the result of who I’ve become today, and finding peace in that fact provides the courage to walk out my door each morning and surrender myself to the uncertainty of the changes I’ll undergo in the next 24 hours.
Garrett Lemery is a freshman studying journalism and a columnist for The Post. How have you changed since you started college? Email Garrett at gl496111@ohiou.edu.
