The Past as Placeholder
Recently, I went up to Berkeley for a weekend, and was perversely weirded out by how unweird the whole experience was. I was bracing myself for that shock of loss, the consciousness of a gaping void where things used to be. The hours I spent trekking through old haunts with old friends, however, were surprisingly free of emotional turmoil. I had a bagel at Noah's, wandered into the Main Stacks, hiked up the big hill leading to the chemistry plaza, and essentially traced out the familiar routes I took to and from and between classes for years, stopping for lunch at the Free Speech Movement café (and actually landing a table inside). Following my graduation at the end of May, I hadn't set foot in the Bay Area until this recent trip, a span of just about seven months. But for all I registered, I might have been returning from winter break, whiling away some time on campus waiting for my next class to begin.
It's a little alarming, actually. I think that I have yet to achieve the necessary degrees of separation to view college as a part of my past; I can't enter nostalgia proper because I haven't accepted the passage of time. This is a muddled theory, however, because I understand nostalgia as a longing for an idealized version of the past, and certainly my memories of college are pleasantly cloaked in idealization. I recall the stress and scheduling and lack of sleep with a fondness that can only be accessed after the fact. And yet, there is no relinquishment of the experience: I feel like it is still mine to live and breathe, even as I live and breathe something entirely different.
Perhaps in order to mourn the past and move on, we need to replace it with a concrete present. I have been existing in limbo these months, indulging in the escapism of novels and movies and TV shows and waiting for life (read: school) to begin again; my failure to let go of Berkeley is akin to using it as a placeholder. But this stopgap mindset is problematic in itself, suggesting as it does that I have learned to recognize only some tasks/events/experiences as life, dismissing all the rest as breaks. Basically, I'm still running on the academic calendar, which raises the question of what will happen when I finally emerge from the cocoon of academia and into the so-called "real world." Will I perpetually be waiting to return to school?
This is all very worrisome, but time is on my side right now (or I am on the right side of time). Thank goodness for higher education! It can more or less fit into the mold left by undergraduate studies, preserving the structure until school is finally, finally done. I am a firm proponent of avoidance as a legitimate approach to facing problems (or not facing them, as the case may be). That trickier transition to the working world, the complete reorganization of life and outlook, and the inevitable forced confrontation with the meaning of it all, I'll deal with when I have to. (And of course, I could always be a professor.)