See you in December - Elena Olsen
"Over the following turbulent months of that first semester, I struggled to attain a sense of direction and "at-homeness". From the weirdly old-fashioned air-raid siren which was used to alert the community's volunteer firemen and which woke me up at all hours of the night, to my feeling trapped inside Bryn Mawr's turreted, gargoyled buildings, not knowing how to find a grocery store outside this grey fortress, to my growing awareness that perhaps Bryn Mawr was not the Perfect Place for Me, life at this Eastern institution began to convince me that my high school's counselor's warning of culture shock was not so ridiculous. I was continually reminded that going to school three thousand miles away from home meant not only that my parents could not catch me with my boyfriend or a beer at 3am but also that they could not meet my freshman-year advisor and realize how horrible she was. They could not tell me just to go to bed and not worry about finishing my homework; they could not be sitting in their favourite chairs in the living room every night, telling me how proud they were of all I was doing, and that they would find a way to fix all my problems...
For the first several weeks of school my roommate, who lived forty-five minutes away, would, after her last calss on Fridays, flee home to her own bedroom and kitchen, despite brave resolutions to "stick it out". Not being able to retreat to familarity, I mooned around alone in my room with my new Indigo Girls CD and my journal, or I went bizzare parties where I talked for hours about the virtues of bras or Sylvia plath. I made courageous efforts to bond with my fellow Mawrters by participating in mindnight skinny-dipping excursions to a fountain behind the library, but ended up running away, neither world-wise enough nor high enough to appreciate the transcendent bliss of this experience.
I am now in the end of my spring semester, junior year, at Bryn Mawr College, and still do not feel comfortable stripping down in the middle of campus, but I am aware, perhaps more profoundly that during my first year, that the immense distance between myself and my home can be both liberating and disorienting. When I hear about but not see my brother's tennis victories and new girlfriend, I realise that the August morning in the airport three years ago did indeed mark my going-away-and-never-to-return... Home to me now is my form room with three years' worth of books, posters, pictures, wineglasses, or my friends' rooms, more familar to me than the living room at my family's house.
The life I live here, among friends, professors, and total strangers, constititues my "home", however alien and even hostile it sometimes seems. Importantly, weekends spent with total strangers, lonely nights spent sitting on my hands to keep them from picking up the phone, parties where I listened, mute, to others' stories about their world travels, have taught me that amid life's never-ending uprootings, I cannot, ultimately, turn to anyone but myself for direction and affirmation."
"Over the following turbulent months of that first semester, I struggled to attain a sense of direction and "at-homeness". From the weirdly old-fashioned air-raid siren which was used to alert the community's volunteer firemen and which woke me up at all hours of the night, to my feeling trapped inside Bryn Mawr's turreted, gargoyled buildings, not knowing how to find a grocery store outside this grey fortress, to my growing awareness that perhaps Bryn Mawr was not the Perfect Place for Me, life at this Eastern institution began to convince me that my high school's counselor's warning of culture shock was not so ridiculous. I was continually reminded that going to school three thousand miles away from home meant not only that my parents could not catch me with my boyfriend or a beer at 3am but also that they could not meet my freshman-year advisor and realize how horrible she was. They could not tell me just to go to bed and not worry about finishing my homework; they could not be sitting in their favourite chairs in the living room every night, telling me how proud they were of all I was doing, and that they would find a way to fix all my problems...
For the first several weeks of school my roommate, who lived forty-five minutes away, would, after her last calss on Fridays, flee home to her own bedroom and kitchen, despite brave resolutions to "stick it out". Not being able to retreat to familarity, I mooned around alone in my room with my new Indigo Girls CD and my journal, or I went bizzare parties where I talked for hours about the virtues of bras or Sylvia plath. I made courageous efforts to bond with my fellow Mawrters by participating in mindnight skinny-dipping excursions to a fountain behind the library, but ended up running away, neither world-wise enough nor high enough to appreciate the transcendent bliss of this experience.
I am now in the end of my spring semester, junior year, at Bryn Mawr College, and still do not feel comfortable stripping down in the middle of campus, but I am aware, perhaps more profoundly that during my first year, that the immense distance between myself and my home can be both liberating and disorienting. When I hear about but not see my brother's tennis victories and new girlfriend, I realise that the August morning in the airport three years ago did indeed mark my going-away-and-never-to-return... Home to me now is my form room with three years' worth of books, posters, pictures, wineglasses, or my friends' rooms, more familar to me than the living room at my family's house.
The life I live here, among friends, professors, and total strangers, constititues my "home", however alien and even hostile it sometimes seems. Importantly, weekends spent with total strangers, lonely nights spent sitting on my hands to keep them from picking up the phone, parties where I listened, mute, to others' stories about their world travels, have taught me that amid life's never-ending uprootings, I cannot, ultimately, turn to anyone but myself for direction and affirmation."