semester 5/8

my fifth semester of college ended at 4:37 p.m. on Friday in the middle of my kitchen as i submitted my final paper which was basically me trying to persuade my professor to add my favorite book to the LGBTQ+ Literature syllabus. not exactly where i expected it to end, in all honesty. regardless, it’s over and i’m more than halfway done with college which is actually very disconcerting to type out.

it goes without saying that this semester has been my absolute favorite semester yet.

after what i would consider a dark summer, i couldn’t wait to get the hell out of my town. i so desperately needed a change of scenery that i moved back to campus two weeks early.

my mom and i hauled my stuff up to the third floor of my sorority house, and on the last trip i made the declaration that things were going to take a turn for the better. it was my first time starting a new school year as a single girl, and after ending my little summer fling, i was fully detached from anyone. released from the shackles, if you will.

that’s not to say i was relinquished from anxiety. oh no! the first few nights, i woke up around 3am and had to scroll on Pinterest for an hour or two until i could fall back asleep. as with every new beginning, i stressed. my new roommate would be moving in soon, and i felt like i was starting over from freshman year. you have to remember that i was coming off of a semester where i had two twin XLs pushed together in a corner room where i couldn’t really bother anyone if i tried. i stressed about going back to in-person classes, i stressed about being over involved, i stressed about whatever and whoever.

it took me a hot minute to shake the weird mood that seemed to follow me all the way down highway 231. all i choose to remember from august to mid-september is an incident with some mulch at Sigma Chi and getting a major reality check in my geoscience class. (if you saw me carrying a box of rocks all over campus for like 2 weeks…no you didn’t) i spent a lot of this time getting two weeks ahead in my classes so i could fully enjoy NYC. i distinctly remember coming out of my “funk” from the summer on my morning pilgrimage to Starbucks. what triggered this? an obese beagle straining at his leash to greet me on the sidewalk. just don’t ask.

anyways.

this year, my birthday fell on a saturday. naturally, i booked a flight to New York City so i could turn 21 in manhattan. i had written in my “20” journal that i was going to turn 21 in new york. i’m not much, but i AM a woman of her word! while i had visions of spending my birthday alone on the streets of Manhattan, my mom was shitting her pants at the thought. in hindsight, i don’t blame her. so she tagged along and we made it a cutesy mother-daughter weekend trip. my first legal drink was an overpriced cocktail in a high-rise rooftop bar at midnight, and i went back to my hotel room where my mom surprised me with a bottle of oliver wine. like mother, like daughter! on september 19, i floundered around The Met in awe, and nearly cried too many times than i care to admit. i laid in sheep’s meadow in central park and people-watched before going to a bar. i was in bed by 10 o’clock on my 21st birthday, but i did the thing. i hate saying i love my birthday because i feel like you’re not supposed to like your birthday for some reason. “XIX” isn’t shoddily tattooed on my forearm for nothing, though!

honestly, the semester up until i went to New York was a blur because i was fully just going through the motions. i was so ready to be far away from Greencastle and the confines of the DePauw bubble that the day-to-day monotony didn’t even register in my head. i wanted out so so so badly and i think that’s okay, looking back.

i’d love to sit here and tell you that escaping small town life to the Big Apple triggered some huge revelation that made me turn my mindset around. but i’d be a big fat liar. don’t get me wrong, i had a great time and i’m so grateful that i got to spend that time with my mom. i did have the realization that i seem to always have when i escape DePauw, even if just to Indy, and that’s that there’s more to the world, more to life, than whatever the hell happens on campus.

“Well, yeah, no shit Mackenzie.”

i know. but i think that it is so easy to get wrapped up in it all. i was living from weekend to weekend, surviving the weekdays just to get by. a Weekend Warrior if you will. i felt like i’d done everything and checked all the boxes, even as a junior.

i love DePauw, and i’m so grateful to have the opportunity to get my degree. but sometimes, it feels like high school in the sense that you see so many people you know on the daily. i can’t walk across campus without seeing at least five people i know. there’s cliques and popularity and stereotypes whether you play into it or not. DePauw is too small sometimes, and that’s something that i really had to face this semester. i daydreamed about what it would be like to go somewhere where no one knew me, as cliché as it sounds.

i’d love to tell you that i came back from New York and didn’t find myself musing aloud to my best friend, “what the hell am i even doing here?” but i actually think i asked him and myself that question even more. i had caught a sliver of something new and something different, and coming back to my familiar lifestyle was not appealing at all. i still wanted out, maybe more than ever.

i think fall break is when this stir-crazy feeling reached a fever pitch. going back and forth from one small town for school and my small hometown offered no relief from this feeling whatsoever. i really spiraled when i ran into an ex-situationship at the gym (i have the worst luck in these scenarios, ask my friends). as my stepmom drove me to get coffee, i spun my wheels in the passenger seat and confided these feelings of “stuckness” to her.

“Leah, i’m losing my mind here and i don’t know what to do about it! i feel like i’m just stuck in this cycle of nothingness and i don’t know what to do to get out of it. i feel so…bored. THAT’S WHAT THE PROBLEM IS–I’M JUST BORED!”

you probably reached that conclusion before i did.

here’s the thing, though. it’s not like i was bored in a little kid way where you’ve already played with your barbies, performed surgery on a few hapless earthworms, and now you’ve resorted to telling your mom that you’re bored only to hear her say “well, i’ll give you something to do!”

no, not like that. i had plenty to keep me occupied. i was working two part-time jobs and balancing extracurriculars (& my sanity). bored on a larger scale.

i’ve figured out that my key to life is to have something to look forward to, no matter how small. i’m a pro at really scrounging for anything to look forward to. it’s both a blessing and a curse. in the timeline described above, i was living from big thing to big thing which was necessary for the headspace i was experiencing. when the excitement of a new semester wore off, i looked to NYC to serve as an anchor. over fall break, my anchor was a spontaneous Chicago trip with my best friend.

one of my hot takes is that Chicago and Indianapolis are some sort of Midwestern liminal space. literally in the sense that they’re like portals to the rest of the country. figuratively in the sense that i always seem to come back from one of these cities feeling a little differently than when i went. liminal space is one of my favorite topics to talk about.

i could go on and on about this random Chicago trip in which i froze my little tushy off, but i won’t. i’ll save it for another time. all you need to know right now is that i was grotesquely unsettled for some reason and i tried several times explaining this to my friend who is so used to my ramblings by this time that i don’t think he thought much of it. Chicago was exactly what i needed, i just didn’t know it at the time. as we drove home in the rain, with the heat on full blast and Hozier playing softly, i felt whole. there are few things that i love more than having an all-around great day in the city with my best friend.

i had bought a book in a bookstore we’d stumbled into in an attempt to thaw our hands in the warmth which says a lot because i never buy books. i always just wait to go to the local library, but this time it couldn’t wait. i shelled out four hours worth of work at my part-time job for Matthew McConaughey’s book Greenlights and now I think it’s my new favorite book. i finished it in a day, and I swear that it was my turning point. my main takeaway from the book was to prioritize fun.

so that’s what i did. i added, “what the hell are you doing if you’re not having fun???” to my vernacular and i ran with it. anything that wasn’t a whole lotta fun by default (exams, meetings), i made fun. by doing what, you ask? by giving myself something to look forward to. i remember explaining to my mom how i had planned to get dinner with a friend that was transferring after this semester and i called it a celebration. she said, “oh, right. a celebration because he’s transferring?”

“well yeah i guess, but i’m celebrating the fact that i finished my exam…” she laughed, thank goodness. anything is a celebration if you make it one.

anything that went wrong after my “come-to-Jesus” moment was just good for the plot. the fun wasn’t all my doing though. i have to give my roommate some credit. together, we indulge each other and drag all our friends into our ideas. from making something out of nothing at my favorite frat to designating a random Wednesday as our shower party day, we made it work and we kept it interesting.

i applied the logic of “greenlights” to my misfortunes of the semester. study abroad got cancelled?? greenlight: defer it, spend your last semester causing trouble with your roommate, celebrate most of your friends’ 21st birthdays, hopefully experience your first Little 5. the list goes on.

i feel like that was a lot of build-up for me just to say that i had fun. there’s no secret, though. ain’t nothin’ to it. i hate saying it’s a mindset thing, but it is. but i also know that you can’t really just flip that switch even if you try your hardest. for me, it took an odd day in the middle of Chicago to change my ways.

here’s something i’ll leave you with: you can’t have fun if your work’s not done. say it with me now, work hard play harder! much to my parents’ surprise, i indeed did still go to class and i’ll still be on the Dean’s List. how’s the saying go? “find you a girl who can do both”?!

so that’s it! a long-winded recap of my semester that i could never replicate in a ten-slide carousel on Instagram.

here’s to a semester of countless $5 iced coffees, a few new friends, two Kermits, and one too many splintered tables.

here’s the playlist that got me through the semester