summer@home

Well, readers, I've been a terrible reciprocator. You, checking my blog for updates; me, reclined on my couch making my bleary way through seasons upon seasons of Showtime dramadies. I suppose my lack of blogging comes from two things: one, a lack of content, and two, a lack of desire to face that lack of content. In other words, I haven't had anything to say, which, for a writer, is the most terrifying feeling of all. But as summer draws to a close and the inevitable nostalgia of leaving home sets in, a few ideas have come to mind. After this post, I promise more to come about details of my adventures outside of Dartmouth, but for now, some thoughts on summer:

By the end of spring term, I was fairly excited to go home and see my childhood friends. I drove to their houses, to parks, to playgrounds and restaurants and theatres, and we talked and laughed, struggling to relate about college, but unheroically falling back to the only thing we had in common any more: other people. As summer wore on, I found myself more and more often involved in conversations about people we went to high school with, their personal lives, their own private dramas that somehow still seemed to be on display. My efforts to steer conversations back into the present, or even the future, were mostly ignored.

Eventually, and I suppose I should've seen it coming, I became one of those staged, relatable people - one of these conversation-fillers who is talked about in their absence, reviewed and scrutinized, in an attempt at what, I don't know. As this gradually unfolded, I began to hear what my friends truly had started to think of me. "You've changed so much since going to college, Alexis." The same refrain, over and over; the adjectives "selfish," "unpleasant", and "egotistical" sprinkled in for good measure.

As much as it hurt that the people I'd considered my friends since the age of six decided that they were better off without me, I was also strangely relieved. I realized it was because I had learned something about friendship at Dartmouth that I never managed to pick up at home: friends are people on whom you can rely and who can rely on you; those with whom you have a mutual trust and understanding that there is something of value not only in each of you as individuals, but something greater created by your friendship; those who will love you in all moods, who don't judge you, but support you. All of these things are true about the wonderful people I consider my friends at Dartmouth, but true about only a handful of people at home. It dawned on me that my childhood friends seemed better suited to be acquaintances, since I'd never really trusted them enough to be anything more.

This is not to say that once you leave home, you should leave your friends behind - true friendships will endure through college and beyond, regardless of when they were formed. But it is to say that a natural drifting-apart, or the realization that your friendships weren't what you thought they were, is conducive to positive growth. You will be presented with so many opportunities at Dartmouth to expand and change who you are as a person - for better and for worse. It's up to you to choose which of those to take advantage of, and what friends you might gain and let go in the process.