Reaching Up and Branching Out
As it turns out, when you’re writing
a brief memoir about your college experience, it is surprisingly hard to figure
out where to start when you’re nearing the end. I’m staring at a blank word
document page, trying to decide how to properly squeeze these three and a half
years of Baylor college experience out through my fingers and just type. Reassuring myself that this memoir
did not have to be the perfect memoir that bested all memoirs before it helps a
little. Of course, that is the way it has always been with me and writing – I’m
never satisfied with my own work, so it almost always comes as a surprise when
people actually enjoy what I write about. It’s been that way with everything I
write: essays, fiction, etc. Nothing is safe from that passionate but harsh and
doubting shadow lingering in my heart, murmuring critique at me as I type. I
don’t believe I truly hate it being there, since it makes me care, and makes me
want to do my best, but there have been times when I came really close to
hating it, because it used to be much bigger, meaner, and stronger. It used to
critique everything I did, and I tried to ignore it, and then I listened to it.
Baylor, BIC, and everyone I’ve met in these past three and a half years,
however, have forced me to confront it, and have helped me to strengthen my
heart against it. I’ve come out of this experience with many questions
answered, many trials conquered, and a newfound confidence to face the many
questions and trials I still have yet to go toe-to-toe with. With this newfound
confidence and a break from my usual, horrible procrastination, I’ll happily
write about the journey that Baylor and BIC have given to me.
In all honesty, my life before
coming to Baylor was nothing exciting. For the most part, I was perfectly
content, but a little bored. Most of the boredom was my fault, though. I never
really bothered with trying to do anything crazy or exciting. I used to be an exceedingly
energetic, troublesome, bossy kid who loved to get into and do everything. I
couldn’t focus and never listened. Eventually, I was diagnosed with ADHD and
was given prescription for it, and that changed a lot of things for me. My
grades and attention got a lot better, but my mood and appetite dropped, and pretty
much my whole world lost its bright color. It scared the crap out of my parents
to see their happy and hyper daughter basically turn robotic, so my
prescription and dosage were changed, but I still took it when necessary, which
was often. The medication might have had some part in it, but for various
reasons, I mellowed out quite a bit as I got older. I eventually got to the
point late in middle school where I hardly ever needed it to do really well in
school and not drive everyone up the wall.
My newfound love of books and video
games, and my suffering self-esteem, probably aided my withdrawal into myself
throughout the last of middle school and almost all of high school. I even read
the Twilight series all the way through once. That was a low point in my life. I
have a best friend, who is also a childhood friend, a grade below me, and we
were almost always together, so I didn’t feel the need for a lot of other
friends and didn’t really try branching out. I got along well enough with everybody,
and hid in the library during lunch with a group of guy friends that were kind
of the outsiders of our high school grade. I was just the quiet one in the back
of the class that got along with everyone but didn’t really socialize or stand
out. Save for a few classes, I never really felt challenged during high school,
and I didn’t feel the strong urge to try very hard. I was lazier back then than
I am now. There wasn’t particularly anything I felt passionate about, except
for writing. I wrote and daydreamed all the time, always wanting to practice
and get better. I only ever let my best friend read and critique them since she
was exceptionally smart and creative, and I loved and trusted her like a
sister. Aside from writing, I didn’t feel exceptionally strong about anything,
and I hadn’t experienced very much. Until I came to Baylor and became an
official member of the Baylor community bubble, I had always felt like one of
those people wandering around on the outside edge of everything.
I finally found a strong interest in
psychology during my junior year but had no idea what I wanted to do in it. I
wouldn’t have known what to do in any kind of writing major, and I was really
only interested in writing fiction anyway, something that I could do for fun in
my spare time. I had no particular schools in mind. I was automatically accepted
into UT, but, frankly, the idea of moving from the quiet, open country to a
busy city like Austin scared the crap out of me. Baylor was the next university
after UT, and I really liked its academics, and loved the way it looked and
sounded. I hadn’t even thought of Baylor until late into my senior year. I knew
I wanted to get into some kind of honors program, so when I searched around I
was happy to see I had options. Besides BIC being an honors program, I kind of
fell in love with the idea of a challenging but fun alternative to the general
courses that let you be in smaller, more integrated courses. I had always
enjoyed smaller classes and discussions. I wish I could give a better reason,
but I honestly just liked the way it sounded to me and was able to get in, and
that is all there was to it. I feel like the more important parts are the
reasons why I stayed with the BIC for all three and a half years.
My freshman year of college was
exhausting, amazing, and terrifying. I was the only one to go to Baylor in my
class, so I was completely alone, more alone than I was used to being. It
scared me, but it forced me to reach out, something I had never wanted or
needed to do before. When your high school grade is about 90 people that you’ve
pretty much grown up with, you already feel like you know everyone and how you
relate to them, like some kind of extended family. At Baylor, there were swarms
of people I didn’t know at all, and I didn’t even know where anything was. BIC,
welcome week, and my small group for Examined Life I really helped with that.
Not only did I get with a group of people that I liked and who helped me learn
where everything was, I got to know a group of people that I would know for an
entire semester through BIC. I also got to meet and know my first best friend
at Baylor in the small group. I even ended up in a three-person dorm room where
I got to know and befriend one of my roommates. I think she really started to
like me when I actually stayed with her during a fire evacuation because she
refused to get up and go down from our third-story floor at 2am, and I wasn’t
sure what to do but wanted to make sure nothing bad would actually happen to
her. I couldn’t blame her. It was the third late-night fire alarm that had gone
off that week because some girls couldn’t get it into their heads to watch what
they were microwaving. Her mom took a liking to me after that, too, and gave me
a big grapefruit-looking fruit as thanks. I still cannot remember what she said
it was. I dealt with the lack of privacy, something I had really relished
beforehand and found it hard to give up, and the community showers, but enjoyed
the people I got to know on my floor. I enjoyed Examined Life I, I loved World
Cultures I, especially because I got Dr. Hanks and a fun class, and I somehow
managed to make it through Rhetoric I. I didn’t hate that class, but I can
honestly say I’m very glad it and Rhetoric II are over.
Compared to everything before it, college
was a pretty good slap in the face. Classes were definitely harder, and not all
of them felt worth the effort. I had a pre-calculus class at 8am on Tuesdays
and Thursdays because apparently I’m a secret masochist deep down inside. I
still consider getting a BA instead of a BS one of the best personal moves in
my college career. Harder classes got me stressed and scared, but BIC helped me
want to face it and fight to do better for once. I didn’t really get the grades
I wanted during my freshman year, since quite a bit happened that took some
getting used to, but I could feel myself rising up out of whatever dusty, dirty
hole I had let myself burrow into over the years before coming to Baylor. The
thing about rising up and out into the open, however, is that you then suddenly
find yourself exposed and unprotected, and in my case exceptionally
self-conscious about many things that I had learned to bury and ignore long
ago. It was just easier and safer before. I started to feel self-conscious
about many things…how I acted, dressed, looked physically, how well I did in my
classes. These were things I never felt motivated to change before, and now it
was all coming to me in a wave and making me feel like I could look and act and
be someone better even though I had
no idea how. I was too big, my hair looked ridiculous, my grades could be
better, I was too socially awkward, etc. It was as if all the middle school
insecurity and low self-esteem that had been deeply suppressed was now digging
its way back out to the surface because I had disturbed and awoken its slumber,
and it didn’t feel good at all.
I didn’t know how to handle it, but I
tried and for the most part succeeded, and it made for a satisfying freshman
year. My ADHD wasn’t something I could ignore anymore once my classes became
harder, so I had to start keeping medication with me again, and I starting
going to OALA, and they helped with the academic adjustment. I had issues
sleeping, something I put up with before coming to Baylor since it didn’t interfere
with my life too much, but that wasn’t going to be something I finally tried to
do anything about until junior year. I went to career counseling and finalized
my determination to be a psychology major but now with an English minor to
satiate my lingering desire to read good books, discuss and write about them,
and learn more for my personal writing skill. That is also something I’m very
grateful to BIC for. I got to read so many different works that I know for a
fact I would never have bothered touching otherwise. I didn’t find all of them
fantastic, but I was happy to read and learn from them nonetheless. They helped
open new worlds and ideas for me. They fueled my imagination and my desire to
learn more about the world and the people in it. I’m also a bit of a sucker for
Greek and Roman mythology, so reading all those types of books my freshman year
was a happy time indeed. I learned that I wasn’t where I wanted to be
grade-wise and experience-wise, and by the end of my freshman year was
determined to start fixing that immediately. I think a part of me wanted to
make up for how I still felt lacking physically and socially by resorting to
grades and learning in order to find something to be proud of myself for, but
another part of me truly did just want to do better and learn more. Others
began dropping out after the first or second semester because BIC wasn’t for
them or they simply couldn’t make it work with their majors. I would hear them
talking about it amongst themselves, and all the while I would secretly tell
myself that I didn’t want to drop BIC at all. BIC, to me, was a much better
replacement for the other courses I would’ve had to take, it was full of people
I was going to get to know for several years, and it was teaching me about all kinds of things. I loved what it had
given me and was ready to take on the heap of courses I knew were coming
sophomore year.
Of course, midway through sophomore year
was when things took a bit of an unexpected drop emotionally and mentally for a
while. I actually made sure to join up with a couple of organizations during my
sophomore year, but they were nothing I found myself investing in. They were
easy, interesting, and didn’t demand too much of my time. In all honesty, one
of my biggest faults is most likely my general laziness for most things, which
tends to clash harshly with my tendency to also be highly self-critical of
myself. I attack myself for not being good enough in something, and then often feel
too lazy or nervous to do anything about it, or feel like I simply can’t do
anything about it, and then I berate myself for that, and it makes me feel worse about everything – and endless
cycle. I was able to overcome it for the most part academically. I started
doing really well in my classes, even in the World Cultures, Natural World
classes, and Social World classes. I was able to turn that stress and
self-doubt around and make it push me to be productive and ambitious with my
grades and with learning. I also mostly was able to get BIC professors that I liked
and who helped me to be interested in what I was studying. I wanted to listen,
to learn, and to show them that I was truly learning through exams, homework,
and essays when I found myself unable to show them through class discussions
because I just couldn’t bring myself to open my mouth most of the time. It was
as if every time I got ready to say something, an invisible leash would tighten
and tug me back by the neck and effectively silence me. Don’t say something stupid and make them think you’re stupid! You’re
smart, but that’s about all you have, so don’t ruin it! As overdramatic and
self-pitying as that might sound, that’s the basic summation of my thoughts as
time went by in my sophomore year. It was fine, though. I loved listening to
people, and then thinking about it to myself as I went along. I loved listening
to BIC students, especially. BIC was and is full of bright and open-minded
people, and many of the ones who were still here by their sophomore year were
the ones who were in it to learn and challenge themselves, like me. It was
another way I knew I made the right decision when I chose to stay in BIC.
Along with a couple of other
coincidences, BIC proved to be of help to me during a time when that something
unexpected that I mentioned happened halfway through sophomore year. My first
best friend that I had made through BIC and who I had grown very close to for
about a year and a half suddenly dropped out. The night I was busy studying for
my big Social World I exam was when I got the text that he was dropping out. He
knew I had that exam that night, and he hadn’t even hinted at the possibility
of him dropping out beforehand. It struck hard, really hard. Part of the way it
affected me was my fault, without a doubt. Because of my best and childhood
friend, I had grown up completely used to only needing one person to be really
close to and to rely on. I had carried that idea with me to Baylor, and when I
became friends with someone new, we became attached at the hip and did almost
everything together. I didn’t really try to reach out to anybody else, didn’t
feel the need to. It was enough to feel wanted and appreciated by this one
person that I knew really well. So, when my best friend was suddenly gone, I
was left on my own. It was like coming to Baylor all by myself all over again. My
two crutches at the time were academics and my best friend, two things I had
allowed myself to become dependent upon for my happiness and self-assurance, and
one of them had just been knocked out from under me and left me flailing. He
had his own important personal reasons for why he couldn’t be at Baylor
anymore. I understood that after a while, once I got over the waves of sadness,
loneliness, and anger, as justified or unjustified as they were. Now, though,
now I felt alone and unsure about what to do. Now, it suddenly felt like I had
nobody, and nobody wanted me or appreciated me. Nobody was interested in me for
any reason, and I started to blame myself for that. That dark shadow inside me
saw its golden opportunity and took it, and lashed out. Now, I was too boring,
too quiet, too fat, too average looking, too much of everything pathetic that
no amount of good grades could make up for.
You know, I only got in about a couple
hours of studying for that exam at most that night. Weirdly enough, though, I
still somehow made an A on it despite the mess I made of myself. I still felt
like I needed to make an A. I found it rather funny when I told my mom about it
later.
For a while, I was spiraling, even if I
didn’t show it to other people. I didn’t involve my parents any more than I
already had. Both of my parents have been so supportive of me, and I was silly
enough to let the idea of me screwing up enough to actually make them
disappointed in me scare me into keeping them out of this. As much as I hurt
myself over the idea of failing myself, it hurt just as much to imagine that I
might fail their belief in me. I tried to figure things out for myself. In the
end, I think my best friend leaving like that has helped me, in a way. It was
hard at first, and it hurt, because I was the one who kept damaging myself
unnecessarily. I felt more alone and exposed than ever, but it forced me to
become someone stronger, to hold myself up. I was finally starting to get the
idea that there were obviously some personal things I needed to work out and
properly deal with. I was beating myself up, blaming myself for everything, and
it wasn’t making things better. I was a psychology
major. I knew what I was doing to myself, and I knew it wasn’t healthy.
However, it’s one thing to read about something in a class, but it’s another
thing entirely to have to deal with it yourself. Personally feeling it is
something you could never get from a textbook or PowerPoint slide. I did know, however, how I could start
changing how I felt. I discovered what I had to do to move on and grow stronger
out of this entire ordeal.
Three things helped me with this over the
course of the end of my sophomore year and beginning of my junior year: BIC, a
new and developing personal outlook on things, and a new best friend, the last
one eventually becoming something I would come to appreciate for what it was
and regret for what it almost did to me later on. I used to think I didn’t need
other people all that much, and then I realized I did need good friends and
support, and now I had to figure out how to stay strong and healthy-minded
about it. The spring semester of my junior year was cold, sunny, and like
turning over a new leaf for me. My wardrobe started to change a bit, I brought
the natural dark curl back into my hair after messing it up with straighteners
and highlights, and I started to see a world of opportunity around me instead
of a happy world beyond my reach. In BIC, as I mentioned before, I enjoyed
listening to and getting to know the other students since they seemed to share
similar passions. I stuck my neck out, reached out to other people, talked
more, joked around with others, found others that were willing to listen to me. I didn’t become particularly close to
anyone, but I found myself actually fitting in. I was still pretty quiet and a
big introvert, but I allowed myself to take some chances and appreciate how
well I could do in my classes and around other people. I allowed myself to
learn and grow with my BIC classes. I enjoyed what I was learning in my
psychology and English courses, but BIC was something different for me. In BIC,
I felt surrounded by people more similar to me than when I was in my psychology
courses. In BIC, I was learning about politics, religion, science, the world,
the classics, anything and everything, and I soaked it up and let it expand my
mind. I felt more aware of the world I had withdrawn from and hadn’t bothered
to truly learn about for so long. I discovered that learning for learning’s
sake made me happy, because there is no end to the peculiarities and wonders
and horrors of our world. Why wouldn’t you want to learn as much as you can
while you still have the time and brain function to do so, even if you can’t
manage to put all of it to use? There is still so much to the world, the
universe, and us, and every single one of us is going to learn and take to
heart something different from it all, and it’s so fascinating and frustrating
because this is how new discoveries are made, wars are started, etc. I thought
about these things, and I still do, because BIC has honestly expanded my mind
and opened my eyes. I’ve met dedicated professors, determined and smart fellow
students, and long-deceased thinkers and writers in the BIC. I found myself
slowly but surely becoming brave enough to face that shadow in my heart, and
now I was able to fight it with fresh and stronger knowledge about others,
myself, and the world. My mindset about many things, particularly about myself,
was changing for the better.
My newly acquired best friend towards the
end of my junior year fall semester was one of the two things that almost set
me back in my growth. The other thing was the developing doubt about my future
that came with my new and expanded outlook on life (along with the knowledge
that I was getting closer to graduation). My new best friend was a girl that
had happened to move in with me and my other roommates at North Village during
the fall semester of my sophomore year. We didn’t speak to each other much at
all at first, but then, one night, we somehow ended up together in the living
room talking and laughing about all kinds of things for hours, and everything changed after that. Over Christmas break, she
had a bad falling out with one of the first friends she had made at Baylor.
Spring semester of my sophomore year came around, and I was still moving on
from my first friend suddenly leaving and picking myself back up from where I
had thrown myself down on the ground. She was now trying to move on from her
lost friendship. We were already living together, getting along really well,
and had just lost people we were close to. The coincidence of it all still kind
of gets to me even today. We found support in each other, and fed each other’s
happiness, laughter, and interests. She was sociable, fun, and crazy with a
loud laugh, but in a way that I liked and wanted at the time. I didn’t realize
yet what I was actually getting myself into. The falling-out with her last
friend and the subsequent falling-out with her now ex-boyfriend should have
been tip-offs. I won’t go into detail about everything that happened to cause
what can only be described as an avalanche of bad times towards the end,
because some things are just best left private between two people. The best way
to put it might be that she had and still has a lot of personal problems and a
lot of growing up to do, and her tendency to cause or be drawn into endless
drama doesn’t help anything. The main point is that during the spring semester
of my junior year, when things began to turn sour, I was able to realize quick
enough that the relationship was poisonous rather than mutually beneficial,
both because of her and because of what I was allowing to happen to myself
again by allowing her to continue hurting me. This time, though, I was better
prepared. Losing the closeness of my first friend, being able to successfully
move on from that, facing the harsh fears and self-criticism about myself, and
breaking out into a different and better person through the exploration of my
major and BIC’s teachings helped me to realize I was letting myself slide off
into somewhere I didn’t want to be, and I stopped it all. I broke away, and
freed myself, and it wasn’t all that easy this time either, but I did it. I
made my decision, finished the semester on as good of a note as I could, signed
up for an apartment on my own for this year, and moved on.
Throughout all of this, I prospered in my
grades. I finally acknowledged my sleeping problems and started taking medication
that would help me not stay up all night and to actually get a good sleep. I started
to focus and care more about doing my best academically alongside actually
enjoying what I’m being taught. Caring more and exploring my options then
brought on the question of what I even wanted to do after graduation. I hadn’t
put as much thought into it as I should have. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to
specifically pursue after graduation, though I was pretty sure I wanted to go
to grad school. I had ideas about some fields that I could look into, but
nothing really stood out to me like I was hoping, and that started to really
worry me. Why was there nothing I felt really excited to do? Psychology
interested me, I didn’t doubt that, but where was the love and passion? I definitely
found it in something I already had, though. During my spring semester of my
junior year, I took a creative writing course for my English minor. The entire
assignment for that class was to write a short story. As stressful as that was,
because of how much of a perfectionist I can become over my own work, it was
also something I really needed. It forced me to think up and write a random story
on a deadline, and I succeeded. I wrote a dark, fictional story that I even
still feel like I could’ve done better on, but it did fine for what it was.
When it was time to present the first page of our short stories, I was stricken
with fear over what others would say. I didn’t want them to be nice about it
and get my hopes up if they didn’t mean it, but I desperately wanted them to
actually like it, and they did! They
actually were intrigued by it! I walked out of class that day happier than I
had been in a long time, and it was only over one single page. My world was
bright, warm, and sunny inside. I wanted to just fall over and roll around on
the grass with a big smile on my face like an idiot. I was even happier when I
actually finished my story and people were still
saying they liked it. As I said before, I still felt like it could have been
better, but it was just reassuring to know that I actually have potential in
something that I love so much and was such a big part of my life growing up. If
I wasn’t already certain, then the way this class made me feel cemented it for
me. I loved to write, even if I never published and it was only ever for fun.
Even if I had to work another job and find time to write on the side, then I
would be fine. It was a part of me, a piece of my heart, and that was never
going away. With that known, and graduation drawing nearer, I now had to deal
with the problem of my future’s uncertainty as far as my psychology career
goes. I was finally figuring myself out, but now I had to figure out what to do
next.
Honestly, this semester couldn’t have
been a better end to my college experience if I tried. I don’t regret deciding
to graduate early. I’m ready to be done with Baylor. I became certain of this
last semester. As time went on, I took a breath to think about things. As much
as psychology probably fueled my tendency to be overly introspective about
myself and overly speculative about others, it has also opened my eyes to all
kinds of things about people and the world around me. In its own way, too, it
has helped me to better understand and properly deal with my thoughts and
feelings, and it has even helped me to better understand some people and why
they think and do what they do. There’s psychology in almost everything, and I
honestly like that. Knowing that, I’ve explored my options and interests, and I
have discovered that media psychology is actually a legitimate field of study
and could very well be something I would be satisfied with. I’ve also come to
realize that I’m not ready for grad school yet. There are still some things I
need to experience and finish figuring out first (work-wise and personally). I
wasn’t sure what this last semester was going to be like, and how I was going
to feel and think about it all. Taking a yoga class as my BIC capstone class
was a decision that I don’t regret in the least. In general, of course, it
helped with my back and digestion, but it did much more than that. It helped
calm and de-stress me, stretched out my tense and ill-used muscles, and left me
feeling so cheerful and good for the rest of the day. It encouraged me to wear
yoga pants, something I would never have dared to do before because of my
self-consciousness, and helped me in my progression towards accepting my body
and looks for what they were. There is nothing wrong with trying to be healthy,
but I’m finally starting to register the idea that I don’t need to be beautiful
and thin to be happy and accepted by others. I just needed more
self-confidence. I needed to accept myself. I’ve worn yoga pants all semester,
and I’ve worked in my classes to get a good grade, and I’ve earned the degree
that I’m about to get. Nobody will ever tell me otherwise.
As much as BIC, and the entirety of my
college experience has taught me, it has also showed me that I still have a lot
to learn, and there are still things about me that I’m learning about and learning
to accept and appreciate. Because of my English minor, I’ve read and discussed
so many fantastic books from American and British literature that I never would
have read otherwise, and I never would have experienced appreciation for my
writing in a creative writing class. Because of BIC, I’ve learned more than I
could have ever hoped for about the world around me. I’ve listened to, read
about, and talked about morals, politics, religion, culture, art, classic
literature, justice and injustice, and so much more. I’ve been challenged like
never before and have actually enjoyed it for once. I’ve especially loved the
World Cultures classes, for pretty much everything I’ve been shown and taught,
although I still think we might be able to do without World Cultures 3. I
honestly have very little to complain about when it comes to my experience with
BIC. Some courses were hard, and I had to make the schedule for my major and
minor work around my BIC schedule several times, but it all worked out fine in
the end. My procrastination, unfortunately, hasn’t gotten much better, but I’ve
figured out how to work around it and put it to good use. BIC, and all of its
field trips, have even started inspiring me to explore more and more of
America. I’ve so far traveled my parents on a road trips around states such as New
Mexico, Nevada, and California, and I intend to branch out even further as more
chances arise. This last BIC yoga class as a capstone course finished it off
wonderfully, giving me a true workout to shake off my laziness, surrounding me
with fun and open-minded people, finishing my college career off with a nice
de-stressor, and teaching me yet another way that I can be truly at peace with
myself. It is just nice to know that amongst all the self-imposed and media-imposed
low self-esteem issues, there are still such influential teachings and options
out there that just want you to feel good, find happiness within yourself, and
be a good person.
I’m still amazed with everything I’ve
gone through and learned in just three and a half years here. It was so much
more than I was expecting, and I definitely would not dare to change anything
about it. There’s no way I’ll stop here, either. Graduation, as intimidating as
it is, is only the end of this chapter and the start of a new one. I’m
intimidated, even scared, because almost nothing has hurt me more than feeling
like I have failed myself or someone important to me, but I’m excited to, and
hopeful. I want to go places, make experiences and memories happen, meet new people,
have fun, build up my self-confidence, and be a good person. I want to listen
to stories, tell stories, and write stories. I hope to make my life something
meaningful, something I can someday look back upon with a smile. So much has
happened and changed, and it’s all about to end; yet it is only the beginning. Cheesy,
I know, but it really is a cool feeling.
