My First Year of College

     It is May 6th today. In 13 days I will have officially completed my freshman year at SUNY New Paltz. I feel the need to dispatch a little reflection on the past ten months of my life, as they have been strange and, I think, important.

Making alginate molds in Sculpture

    I'm writing from Peregrine Dining Hall. A moment ago, out the window to my left, a red-tailed hawk glided past with what I think was a mouse hanging from its talons. Outside it is very green and very blue, and I can see my dorm building but not my bedroom window because it's hidden behind a tree. 

    College life is about obsessing over the simple facts of your environment. I feel like I complain a lot in casual conversations, whether it is about the food here, my workload, or my tendency to complain about those things. My focal point is the campus, and even when I stray a mile so out on a walk my mind recenters on a class or where I might go to get some work done. I don't think this is ultimately bad if you accept it... Going away for college is like an extended field trip or vocational summer camp. It is a residence for the purpose of study. (Not that I "study" but I do think I learn better in this atmosphere). 

    I spend the vast majority of my time alone here, and I like that. It has been an adjustment (coming from life at home, and high school friends, and of course my girlfriend who I always cling to) but in this setting I do think I prefer solitude to social life. I tried casual-group-friendship in my first semester and it exhausted me. All those expectations without a sense of connection, without that pull I have toward the few people I desire conversation with... I was not a fan. Right now I rarely see anyone other than my roommate at night and one friend I have meals with every so often, yet I feel more fulfilled than when I was trying to seek friendship. I really like being free to dictate my own days. I plan to my heart's content and adjust as needed. I talk to myself a little bit. My inner life is my outer life because I am the arbiter of every choice I make. 

    I also feel like my general friendlessness has allowed me to connect with my classes on an emotional level as well as intellectually. This semester I took Black Sociology, Intro to British Literature, and Intro to Sculpture (Italian and Math were not as affecting) and these all had rippling impacts on my self-perception and general thinking. Black Sociology is a class I felt distinctly comfortable participating in, which is rare for me. I loved how direct the implications of the lessons were on us as students- the professor unabashedly pointed to me once, saying "See, you're lightskinned, but look at your hair," in relation to colorism and featurism in the Black community. Maybe it sounds strange, but I liked how honestly we spoke about perceptions and social realities. And I liked that I had to read essays by Audre Lorde. 

    Sculpture class brought me these profound moments of pride and contentment: I started the class wholly believing I could not compose a sculpture. I watched my professor and TA give woodcutting and MIG welding demos while I drowned in the feeling that I was incapable of ever correctly using such tools. I was petrified, and yet I did it. I don't know what the particular anxiety I had around this class comes from, because it wasn't even a fear of making bad work, but a genuine belief that I couldn't make anything, as if my brain would hit a physical wall as I stepped up to the ripsaw. I was unbelievably nervous on that first day of woodworking. Thankfully, my professor saw that and was reassuring and patient. I checked that my setup was right, double-checked, looked to him for a third confirmation, and finally slid the plank of ash wood past the blade, (about three times slower than my classmates, who were all looking on) and succeeded. I was burning with embarrassment but proud and my professor said I did perfectly. I hid away and actually cried.

       And British Lit. I can't adequately express how brain-altering this class has been. I took it with the same professor I had for an elective, Great Books Western, last semester, and he is exactly the kind of academic I want to be. I don't know how to put it, I guess he just seems to live in the books and know them very intimately and he teaches them with an intense focus that is thrilling. Reading traditional English verse and Romantic poets was almost a perverse pleasure. Rounding the semester off with Frankenstein and To the Lighthouse has been a different kind of amazement for me- with gay themes and meditations on womanhood and family strife that outdo anything modern I've read. I can't tell whether I should be sad that all the beautiful work has been written already or be hopeful because there is so much opportunity for composing life-changing literature seemingly from the air. From floating sensations and thoughts and observations. Perhaps the strangest part of all this is how I, like someone from a Victorian novel, find myself randomly reciting a fragment from a poem that looms large in my mind: "Five years have past; five summers with the length/ Of five long winters!" (Wordsworth).

    I also secured a student assistant job at the library on campus, which has been lovely. I learned how to read Library of Congress call numbers! And I get to sit at a desk, checking out books and study room keys to other students while idly reading or daydreaming. We make pins sometimes: my employee lanyard is decked out with buttons I made of Dykes to Watch Out For and Dante and Virgil. 

    I've been a vegetarian with minimal slip-ups for nearly ten months, and it feels right. My favorite restaurant in New Paltz is a very crunchy vegan café called Karma Road. I take walks, I watch rabbits, and there is a snapping turtle in the pond here. Yet I spend my dining dollars on Starbucks; I use my phone too much. This is my freshman year, 2023 in the idyllic Hudson Valley.