Welcome back, twice over. This is the final part of the whole college application series, and certainly, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you all for supporting this project, maybe finding comfort in its prose, or finding something else, finding whatever—because I’ve certainly gained much from writing it.
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As of now, nearly all the decisions are in. All those students who wanted off to manage the stress of March 26th can rest easy knowing that it’s all behind us. That, for the most part, what’s done is done. As if we’ve left the real tender part of senior year and reached the rough blubber that extends through the rest of it all. The comfortable, but somewhat fatty, somewhat ambivalent, somewhat unnerving portion that brings us together to be nostalgic—and at the same time stretches and strings densely forth through whatever’s left of our time at South Brunswick High School.
Reflection feels unnerving because it sometimes seems like an indulgence—because we’ve long looked back at the comfortable moments in our past as such; we’re used to it. The forward-facing tension of uncertainty which long gripped our lives has gone. We can savor our lipidic remaining months in a way that, paradoxically, for most of us is not much different from what we’ve always been doing—just far more comfortable. This “fatty” period is the last time we are able to exist as a single organism before being trimmed away into our own separate lives. It’s only the power of context, whether communal or individualistic, that grounds us as anything at all.
So come on, let’s be indulgent, let’s get one more college admissions piece in before our great exit.
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There’s something very individualistic about college admissions that previously I’d only hinted at. There’s a great likelihood that this is the last chance to see the people you’ve seen for thirteen years before everyone leaves for whichever place suits them best, which they’ve self selected. In fifth grade you knew your whole grade would go to middle school and join up with a few other elementary schools, and the population of your year would get bigger. In eighth grade, you knew that the next year there’d be double as many people in your grade as there are now. The enlarging was one of those things you could take for granted, and you can’t do that anymore. Of course you’d known this day would come, even back then in elementary and middle school—but you didn’t expect it to arrive as it did. And now it feels so close to you. That’s the context. Final separation day still isn’t here, just as it wasn’t back then, yet the context still terrifies you. We as people probably care for the context of things more than we care for the things themselves.
We shouldn’t take that as some sort of sin—just because we took it for granted and didn’t think about it. We take many things for granted, it’s in our nature. And to turn individualism into communalism, we all thought the same way. We grew up together. Senior spring is playing cards in A.P. classes instead of learning the material, just like we used to do back in sixth grade when none of it mattered.
That’s probably another reason for the perceived indulgence of it all. It’s like we all deal with the growing pressure of individualism by pretending we haven’t aged, when we really have. Even during our college admissions, filling out forms, we never thought about it, just because we couldn’t afford to think about it. And now that we are thinking about it, just thinking about it feels indulgent too. We’ve got so little of what we’ve always had left. The whole college applications process was really one of those searches for the self that was thrust upon everyone all at once. Now that we’re here, we can notice how different we all really are—maybe how we always were. Maybe that’s fine.
By that measure, it really is all about you. Senior spring can be about nothing else. All the enlarging ends just like that. Some people will get great colleges, but they’ll only be thinking about themselves too. Some people will call themselves “mediocre,” or something similar, and fret. And that’s just them thinking about themselves, having absorbed the past twelve years of knowing people and judging themselves as they assume other people do…when other people actually don’t. The context still terrifies them.
Mediocrity and greatness—which we’re so obsessed with—are just words, but words that hit harder now that we are in the freest time of our lives. You’re free to choose between those colleges you freely applied to—even if under duress—that the others didn’t. Who decided those things for you? No one did, it was always you—just you—even if you hadn’t realized it yet in that context. You are free to pretend, even if you aren’t that kid anymore. Your adjectives are in your power. The mediocrity is inside you in the same chamber as the greatness, in the same remaining fatty portion of our year. Don’t rush; don’t let it fall past you. Absorb it as you’ve absorbed everything else. As you’ve absorbed the expansion of the grade. As you’ve absorbed every moment of the past few years that led to this. Absorb it. It was you. It was always you. And now you know for sure.
But there’s everyone else too. It was always them as well. They’re free as you are. In this moment, when you’re all free and the communalism is slowly disappearing, you can embrace it. We only have a few more months to play cards. The individualism has come, and it will continue to come, inevitably, but in these next few months you’ll also inevitably lose the communalism you’ve had for the past years. Does it feel indulgent to hang on? A little, of course. But so does the rest of it. It feels fleeting. Even when it’s dribbling off so quickly, you’ve still got time to let it be lazy. You’ve still got the time. You’re still in the present. You’ve always been in the present, and in this last moment of the future feeling far away, do something.
The coming scattering is melancholic, especially after so much growth, but it was always going to happen one day. You’ve got to embrace and absorb that indulgence while you still can. If it’s all going to feel indulgent nonetheless, seize it all. Go out with your friends, make some art, do something stupid, fall in and out of love. Because that’s all inside you too, it’s inside us, and it’s always been. It’s not being thrust upon us like college applications, it’s not forcing us to grow, but we have the time, and in context can savor it all if only we wish.
Be free. Be indulgent. That’s all. If only so that when you’re a much older version of yourself, looking back on your final year of high school, you’ll still feel a part of it with you.
