By Kaylee Johnson
Campus News
In college, there are people so clean cut, I could see their entire timeline in the way they moved their eyes from one fixed object to the other in sanitized classrooms. There were others who were less predictable – unhinged or disorganized, but still young and likely to grow into their own with time and diligence. There was a character who sat on the steps of the shared SUNY and Saint Rose dorm building steps smoking pot and reading every evening, or the music student who tried out new hair colors every week and hung communist posters all over the faculty posting boards. I often wondered how my classmates would present in twenty or thirty years? I hoped they would not lose their sense of outrageousness with reality induced whiplash and aging.
I have only been out of undergrad for a year, and I am starting to feel the awkward effects of adulthood, especially on social media. Some classmates are announcing engagements with staged photo shoots in sunflower fields with captions like “I said yes!” My feed is a mixture of bridal fittings and blurred party shots from a dive bar in Upstate, New York. About half of my friends are still in college and as a result, still living in that curly, bees knees headspace, while some are working jobs that require ties and blazers. The friends that are still enrolled in undergrad don’t always understand how my thinking patterns have evolved from residential driving to highway driving – I am not just navigating basic turns to get from point A to point B now, I am constantly changing lanes and making decisions to avoid a catastrophic accident.
I sometimes look at the couples announcing their big wedding plans on Facebook and think about how, only a year ago, they were causing a ruckus at house parties on campus, and how time is such a different force when a person is young than when they are older. At least on the surface level, my parents have not radically changed in decades, and yet, it is completely normal, even expected to go through many varied phases and paint over one’s identity multiple times in early adulthood.
Social media allows us to “keep in touch” with people we kind of knew in our younger years, whether we liked them or not. Every once in a while, I will receive a friend request from a person who I did not get along with in high school and wonder what drove them to click the send button, but social media makes a lot more sense when it is treated like something completely detached from authentic, traditional socialization. A few months ago I changed my relationship status on Facebook, and people I had not spoken to in years expressed their overwhelming excitement for me. At the beginning of the school year, I announced that I landed a job and high school field hockey teammates liked it – how strange.
With my social media being a hearty even mix of adulthood (weddings, pregnancies, buying houses, new cars, avid complaining about politics and the gas prices being too damn high, and sometimes, even funerals) and that last breath of childhood (parties, boxed mac and cheese dinners, memes, bras that offer no support, Twin XL beds, and Rate My Professor roast fests), I feel stuck between those two extremes. I have a professional career in my field of study, using my degree and learning more as I go, especially with the adversity that the pandemic has offered. In the fall, I will be starting graduate school, while still working in my field and gaining as much knowledge as possible. On the other hand, I am writing this article from a converted garage, listening to my partner’s artsy Boston band jam. I still sometimes wear my hair in pigtails and eat microwave popcorn for dinner. My cooking skills are so awful that I set off the fire alarms almost every time I attempt to try anything out of my comfort zone, and I have never ironed an article of clothing. This transitional period, my first year out of the cocoon that undergrad offered me, has been sheer in its own right. I no longer have academia trying to mold me, but I am left with the independence that college poured into my cupped hands. As a result, I have been combining the two most prominent parts of my personality – eccentric artist and educator. Maybe one day I will post a life-changing announcement on social media and receive a “congratulations” from the woman who commonly nodded her head at me in the music building, but never spoke.
Kaylee Johnson is a 2020 graduate of the College of Saint Rose in Albany.
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