September means burial. It is an unconventional ceremony, to say the least, but no less real -- the weight of pages upon pages of words and answers to questions never-before-considered sweeping millions of students underground to wait for the decision of a few strangers in a room hundreds of miles away. In other words, it’s college application season.
Noting the entirety of four years of my life in lists and pages, in a strange way, is meditative. Watching the hours of effort and sleep lost to my greatest accomplishments stripped to their essence in thirty words or less puts things into perspective. Everyone I know is doing the same. I take my life and zoom out to paint from it a big picture, blindfolded, hoping that sentence fragments will make it into something beautiful.
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As I zoom out further, I start to notice the ways in which the whispers in the halls dictate the painting before I’ve even started it. The unchallenged argument has always been that all that I’ve done in my four years here culminates in the moment when strangers in a distant room read my thirty-word fragments, see my blindfolded painting, and decide that I’m worth a shot. The adage echoes -- do it because it looks good, and maybe you’ll find that you like it, too.
This is the culture that dominates the world of the high schooler, a crescendo of pressure to do more with less passion and convince ourselves that it’s what we really want. That culture has bred a generation of students convinced that their experiences culminate in a decision letter and that the value of their time is only as encompassing as the brand name of a college. They do it -- we do it -- because it gets us somewhere else. Everything learned is a means to an end; no value is inherent except in the context of an application. We take every class, join every club, learn everything, for a five-minute shot in the dark. And we do well; sometimes we open that coveted letter and are consumed by that brief joy born of the belief that all we have done is not worthless. We have cleared the first hurdle and face open road to run.
But the very same traits that we write off in essays that admit us to the most brilliant of schools become invented illusions by the emptiness of our searches. The simple truth is this: there comes a point in life where there will be no more schools for which to apply. There will not always be an end to justify the futility of our means. We are a group lost in the pursuit of something grander, competitors in a race formed only by a series of finish lines. We have forgotten how to run for the sake of running.
So here comes September; here comes the burial of millions under mountains of paperwork in pursuit of validation. We want the best for ourselves so badly, want the most beautiful schools and the deepest knowledge we can find, so we throw ourselves at them with everything we have. We throw our lives at the pursuit of entrance into gates that we have deified, and once we walk through them, we get lost. That is the price of doing it for college, doing it for the job, doing it for something else -- we forget what it means to do for ourselves, to learn for the sake of learning, to seek out direction. Thirty words can never capture that, no matter how beautifully they are written. We cannot make up for a deficit of direction by inventing it for the sake of strangers in a distant room. The only way to fill that space is by casting those strangers to the wind, by living on independent terms. Because once September ends, we have to live with the decisions of those strangers upon whom we have placed the entirety of our lives, regardless of what they turn out to be.
If we can come to learn for ourselves, to find direction in what we love instead of who loves us, we will redefine ourselves in the context of assurance, rather than uncertainty. We won’t always be happy. But we will be boundless.
