Freshman year. Done. I can't believe it. I've only been home for a few days and it still feels like this is just another break, that I'll be going back on Monday for classes next week. It still hasn't hit me that it's summer.
As excited as I am for summer and friends and cookouts and bonfires and real food and nice showers and privacy and movies and Cedar Point and adventure, there are a lot of things I'll miss about this year. I made some amazing friends at school, people who are at once similar to me but different at the same time. I met fellow Whovians, people who shared my sense of humor (and people who didn't but liked me anyway), people who loved deeply and others who hid their feelings, people who lived in farmhouses in the middle of nowhere and people who called a big city their home, single people, students my age who were already married and had kids, actors, scientists, drunkards and geeks, kids who still play Magic and watch Netflix all day. And you know what? I'm friends with all of them. And you wanna know another thing? That's okay. I can be friends with all of them.
I know everyone laughs at the cliched versions of high school portrayed in movies like High School Musical and Mean Girls, but to be honest, they're really accurate in one respect. If you tried to be different, step out of your skin and the label the rest of your classmates placed on you, you were an outcast. Not necessarily a social outcast, because I sure wasn't. I had lots of friends. And I loved most of them. Still do. But no one associated me with one group of people. Even the group of people everyone else associated me with didn't always include me. I wasn't invited to all of the parties, all the dinners, the gatherings they had. I was standing on the edge of a huge Venn diagram, where I could touch all the edges of the circles but never step inside them.
So I guess at the beginning of this year I was a bit lost. I knew college was a time to reinvent yourself, but who did I want to become? The theater kid? The writer? The friend? The adventurer? The smarty pants? The goody-two-shoes? The bad girl? I had so many options, yet none appealed to me in the way I'd hoped.
But then I began to meet people. People from various walks of life. And as the people become more and more diverse, I began to realize that I was looking for the exact same thing I had tried to escape in high school: a label. I was looking to others to define me when I should've been discovering my own definition. My friends allowed me to be my weird and crazy self, and they accepted me for it. As a result, it is much easier for me to be my weird and crazy self around people I don't know, which is probably why I still don't have a boyfriend. But I trust that I will find someone someday. If Liz Lemon can find her perfect man, then so can I.
Sorry I keep going back to all this "labels" shit. I bet you're thinking to yourself, "Jesus, Heidi! Build a bridge and get over this already. You've made like 4 blog posts about it. Haven't you figured yourself out yet?"
Believe me, I ask myself this question all the time. And the answer is a definitive one. No, I have not figured myself out. Not even close. One of the greatest ironies in this world is that the person we think we know best is actually the hardest to figure out. We should know ourselves better than anyone else; after all, I'm constantly in my own head. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot always determine why I do the things I do. It's eye-opening to understand how little you actually know about yourself, or that your perception of yourself mostly comes from how other people see you.
This is why you should take psychology classes ladies and gents.
All in all this year was fantastic. There were many ups and downs, probably more downs than I would've liked, but that's life. And with every passing day, I realize how much mine seems to resemble a late-night sitcom.
Not Two and Half Men, however. More like the Big Bang Theory. But with dorky girls and way more Doctor Who references.
