Homecoming

Last week, the MIT class of 2012 graduated. The graduation speaker advised the new grads to imagine they had reached the end of their lives and had been given the opportunity to go back and do it over. It got me thinking about how different my life is now from how I thought it would be sitting in Killan Court on June 5, 2009 and how lucky I am that those changes have come without much regret.

My first post-college year had some good moments (first job, first apartment, getting out of Boston, etc) but was dominated by near-devastating losses. First came my knee injury/surgery, which permanently altered my faith in my own body. Shortly after came the end of a three-and-a-half-year-long relationship around which I had built my sense of self, and in one fell swoop, I lost my partner, my dog, my house, an extended family, a handful of friends, and any sense of certainty about the future.

By the time I hit twenty-three, I had recovered enough to consciously embrace that ambiguity by vowing to act my age. I gave myself a “Hall Pass” for the year to do exactly what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it and generally try to better embody the cultural stereotypes of twenty-three-year-olds.

About seven months into my Hall Pass year, once the novelty of acting my age wore off, I started thinking about what it would look like to just act like me. I realized two things, nearly simultaneously: (1) I wanted to go back to school; (2) I wanted to travel first, since I might never again find myself so without ties and responsibilities. Within three weeks, I had a plane ticket and the Gap Year was born.

Before leaving for Nepal, I had lunch with a colleague who told me she thought I would never come back. Quite the opposite has happened. After 10 months of Gap Year, including 202 days abroad, all I want to do is be in Colorado. I spent the last two years intentionally trying to avoid roots, but they have snuck up on me. My childhood best friend moved in across the street (again) and reclaimed her title. My high school best friend started a life in Golden. I grew closer to both my parents. I began to develop adult relationships with my extended family, (nearly) all of whom live in Colorado. I rediscovered my love for the city of Denver and the mountains around it. And somewhere along the line, I fell for a cute Colorado transplant with a bike and a frisbee.

I am moving to Claremont to start school in the fall, that hasn’t changed. But I am also done trying to deny that my heart strings are firmly planted in the Rockies. And so it seems most appropriate that starting June 21^st, I spend the final two months of my Gap Year with the people and places I love, back home in Colorado.