I Knew Happiness When I Saw It

The summer after my senior year of high school, right before we all headed off to college, my best friends and I would go on these long drives. Mostly, we’d fantasize what the next four years would be for us, and we’ would always come back to the fear we’d become such radically different people. The fear that one day we wouldn’t know each other anymore. We were always told by our parents that “college changes you,” and we swore to each other we would never let such a thing happen. 

And of course, three years later, we did change. I don’t talk to most of those friends anymore and, in fact, I’ve probably lost more friends than I can count since then. I always thought it would be some big catastrophic event, like one day you just wake up a completely different person. Suddenly, all of your old friends are gone, and your face looks different. But you don’t know how any of it happened. This fear of change haunted me for the majority of my time at college until recently. I stressed over every little detail of my friendships and relationships, constantly fearing that little change in the time-space continuum would finally occur and that would be it — suddenly I had grown apart from the people around me, and we would be strangers again. I spent every month wondering when the magic of freshman year would wear off, when college would begin feeling different because of new classes and new dorms and, inevitably, new friend groups. I was so scared that change would ruin the good parts of my life, and there’d be nothing I could do to control it.

 In reality, I spent so much time constantly preparing myself for the loss of a former version of myself, and in doing so, probably held on to parts of myself that should have been let go a long time ago. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this notion that college changes you. I always thought I would be sad when it happened, but now, I think I’ve realized it isn’t this huge dramatic change that occurs in the blink of an eye. Maybe one month you lose an old friend, and the next you start styling your hair differently, and then you add new staple words to your vocabulary, and a few more months go by before you realize something about yourself has changed. Maybe it’s a series of small changes that feel significant in the moment, but fade away so quickly that you forget within a few weeks. Maybe college is the space that forces you to grow little by little, until one day you look back on the person you used to be not with sadness, but with gratitude.  

Nothing, and no one, is permanent. Your freshman year at college is drastically different than your senior year of high school, and the following years after that also present new chapters in your life, whether you like it or not. Recently, I’ve found that there’s a sense of comfort in acknowledging that impermanence exists in every aspect of your life. There is a high school in central Jersey that I’ll likely never step foot in again, despite spending so much of my time there for multiple years. There are people who have changed my life for the better, even if I may never see them again. There are so many old friends who I think about all the time, whose stories I share with my current loved ones now, even though we stopped being friends a long time ago. And I don’t remember any of these past parts of my life with sadness anymore. Instead, I appreciate how they shaped me into who I am now. I’m really, really happy with the current version of myself, as well as all the amazing people I have in my life now. I hope they stick around, but if not, well, that’s okay too. There’s beauty in that, too.

TLDR: songs to celebrate and appreciate life’s impermanence. 

— Mikayla