Each year, academic campuses brace for the onslaught of students whose lifespans are increasingly distinct and distant from those who teach and advise them. Often lists of data are compiled ("This year's freshmen..."). But sometimes I have to pause and think about where I was at twenty or twenty-one to get my head around where my students are at and what I can expect of them. Thinking back, I am more than simply temporally distinct from the person I was at twenty-one: my life has spanned disparate geographies, trials, losses, wonders since that time. And yet, had I not managed to live through that era and its particular challenges and triumphs, there'd be no one here typing right now. Trippy, eh?
When I was twenty-one:
- My hair was a rosey shade of plum. Then bright red. Then striped.
- I worked a lot--about 25 hours a week in addition to school: 2 jobs at the computer center, one at the art library, babysitting.
- I had a misdiagnosed mood disorder for which I was improperly medicated.
- I took advanced courses in my chosen field but didn't really take all they had to offer in--I wanted to but I struggled.
- My parents were separated and my mother had left my father and the country.
- I was financially dependent on others.
- My best friends were geeks, artists, stoners and the like. They meant the world to me.
- I spent my twenty-first birthday drinking with librarians.
- I chose to spend the holidays at school working rather than return to my family's home.
- I had an aquarium full of fish, plus one rubber carp that saved my life.
- I had begun to cultivate tastes: music (folk-pop), art (contemporary, modern), films (American indie), food (thai), coffee (latte) that I largely still have today. But it was the cultivation of these tastes--trips to museums, urban areas, beaux arts movie theaters, that mattered to me so much at the time.
- I cried a lot, probably cried more than the average Bear.
- I lived in a renovated Howard Johnson-esque motel.
- I was (silently, mostly passively) in love with a close friend who is still a close friend. He and his husband have now been happily together for many years. But at the time, some facts were unknown.
- I was clinically depressed but trying to read Derrida. Why do those two elements seem so linked in my mind?
- I thought the greatest thing I could ever become was a professor as wonderful as the ones who took the time and patience to deal with me. I still think that.
- I was still learning how to process, filter, talk, keep silent, be a grown-up. I still am. But for someone who is occasionally hyper-verbal, this led to problems for me.
- When I think back, my life was so much less stable, so much more uncertain and unknown it is remarkable to me that things worked out (or not) as they did.
I guess maybe this is why I am the professor who tends to error on the side of faith and belief in my students, even if I sometimes get burned by it. Mostly I believe they try, in the ways that they are capable of, with everything else they have going on and are going through. Because if there is one thing I do remember, most of the time when I was twenty-one I was trying with all my might to make it through each day, onto what was next: to the time when my life felt less like I was standing on a precipice.
The next year, when I graduated from college, my therapist (a woman who helped me save myself) gave me a beautiful art-glass mirror. She told me to hold it up to myself whenever I felt lost and I would see who I was and how far I'd come. Sometimes I wish I could hold up a mirror to my own students, to show them how remarkable their present selves are.
Yet all too often I forget and think instead about late papers, excuses, missed classes, busy stuff. I started writing this because I was so disappointed in someone else's unreasonable expectations of a student. But writing it has reminded me how it is our own expectations that often catch us offguard. When we're twenty-one or thirty-seven or sixty...
