I often catch myself wishing there was a way to turn back time, sit myself down and teach myself some things. Like to not take that class, try harder in that other class, find that person I met too late here earlier, laugh more. It's normal to regret. College is like one long test, of our patience, morals, endurance and sense of humor. It's inevitable, and probably necessary, that we fail, make dumb decisions and then pick ourselves up, change course, realize important things about ourselves.
So when I do catch myself staring out a window wishing myself back to last night or last year to change that little thing, know that big thing, save myself some trivial awkwardness or some significant sadness, I stop myself. Next time, I think. Next time I'll know better, I'll be better.
But I haven't always regretted, or appreciated regretting, the way I do now. When I arrived at college, I was a strange mixture of overly confident and comically insecure. While I still think of myself as a pretty even blend of that contradiction, my freshman self was largely unwilling to admit, even to myself, regret, failure or error. I was stubborn and idealistic, readily critical but rarely self-critical. I was also scared to admit some truths, or possible truths: that I may have picked the wrong school, the wrong class or the wrong friends. Self-knowledge to me was knowing that I believed in progressive tax rates and gun control. I prided myself on having a clear sense of right and wrong, morally and politically, in a sort of detached way. I was my values, my ideas, my ambitions.
It took some freshman year discomfort the panicky feeling of loneliness, the disappointment of unfulfilled expectations for me to realize that I might need to reconsider what gives me comfort in the first place. It was that question, "So, how much do you LOVE Dartmouth?!" tossed at me incessantly over freshman winter break that backed me into the corner of my well-crafted box of self-denial. There's something about speaking an untruth aloud that effortlessly erases all doubt of its untruthfulness. So with the growing recognition that I might lack people and places at Dartmouth that fit me, I hesitantly set out to figure out what "fitting me" meant.
I soon realized that everyone needs friends. Not just people to fill the space in your physical Rolodex. To be whole, to find meaning in a place and to fit you have to have real friends. But you don't accumulate these relationships passively. My little sister said it best during her first weeks of college two years later, when she told me that she wished all the people who would make great friends had signs pinned to their shirts. But passive selection, allowing markers to initiate friendship, doesn't lead to real friends. Instead, it's our individual task to sift through the sea of smiles, acquaintances, freshman floormates and Collis lunch dates to find the people that fit us.
And that was where self-knowledge came in. How do you find human beings to complement you, challenge you, make you laugh, excite you and sometimes hold your hand when you don't know who you are? To anyone but my freshman self, that would seem like an obvious question. To me, this was the question. And the answer, I was realizing, was that you can't, you don't. The logical conclusion to this insight was that I needed to know myself, not only the kinds of people and places I fit, but how to make decisions that fit me.
My freshman spring I decided to go on a run. My history with running had been bleak. Basically I didn't do it, except when forced when attempting to catch a train or playing tennis. I didn't run to run because it was painful, hard and boring. My jogging habits had changed for the better that term when a group of running-enthusiast friends repeatedly peer-pressured me into group runs on sunny days and my guilty conscience weakened me enough to give in. But that spring day I decided I wanted to go it alone. So off I went, just me and my iPod. I decided to try a new route and soon enough I found myself vaguely lost on some steep side street in Norwich. Tired and stomach-cramped, I needed a break. So I lay down. In a field under a tree by myself I realized I was alone, and at peace. I realized I was happy to be alone, for the first time in a while.
Because my revelations are largely unoriginal, I've realized that it's not what you learn but how well you learn it. You can know something, about yourself, the world, or you can know something. Moreover, there's a way of knowing yourself and learning about yourself that makes regret feel good, like turning a new page in the surprisingly riveting book of self-knowledge. What's exciting about that regret is the knowledge that we've changed, we've learned and we have this new potential to act differently in the future.
I've decided to give my gut more of a say. It constantly reminds me that my instincts are almost never wrong. Or at least that there's something about them, some part of what they're saying, that's very right. So if I dare to dream that I've changed for the better over the past three-and-a-half years, I hope it's because I've become a little more honest and, as a result, have grasped a little more of that ever-elusive self-knowledge.
