Last First Week of Classes in the Last Best Semester at Macalester

There is something I really enjoy about combing last and first in a sentence when talking about my current state of mind. I feel like it accurately sums up the rather confusing nature of being at the end of my academic career and the beginning of "the rest of my life."

The last first week of classes didn't leave me much time for introspection or reflection. Its a worrying feeling when you realize that you spent the first weekend of the semester spending just as much time at Dunn Bros doing homework then you did during the last weekend of the previous semester. The only thing that made this better was knowing three of my five closest friends were sitting right next to me doing the exact same thing.

Yet, even with all of my day to day homework, my capstone, and the job search, I do still want to make sure that I am aware of surrealism that surrounds every thing I do now.

This semester began with me running through the Dublin International Airport last Saturday; an odd culmination of a return trip to Scotland.  This direct jump (tinged with the fear about being stranded ala December 2010) from Edinburgh to Macalester is simultaneously eerily similar to last year yet so distinctively different that I'm struggling to understand exactly how I feel. I keep coming back to the word "healthy" in my mind. Maybe its because leaving people and a place the second time is easier then the first, maybe its the difference between visiting and living somewhere. Potentially it was absence of the January suck, the three weeks of darkness, cold, and utmost apathy that have routinely brought me down. Probably it was in the details of the experience itself--who I spent time with, what I did, and how everything played out. Or maybe its me, maybe I am just healthier now, growing up has strengthened me.

I do know rather then spend this past week thinking about my four years at Macalester, the approaching finish line, or the seemingly insurmountable obstacles in between me and freedom, I just spent this week waiting. Waiting for the crash, the fall from feeling fine. I just waited and feared for that moment with then emotions of leaving what I left behind in Scotland combined with the knowledge that every day here is one last day with my girls, that moment when these emotions become too strong and I become the shaking mess that everyone around me lived with last spring.

But, it hasn't hit me yet. Maybe it won't. Maybe I'm ready, for all of this. I am hopeful that I will continue to feel fine, that this fear of desperate sadness will remain simply irrationally meta. Because if there is anything I know to be true of the next phase of my life--leaving isn't losing.  And missing someone just shows me how much I loved them.