Every day, middle school me spent hours practicing tennis alone against a backboard, with only my imagination to keep me company. At the time, all I focused on was perfecting my form, not realizing that I was also inadvertently training something even more important: the ability to daydream.
I feel most like myself when I’m walking across campus at 2:00 a.m. on a Monday, when Gasson’s bells stop chiming, the buses stop huffing and puffing their way around campus, and the Quad’s sprinklers soak the bottoms of my jeans if I don’t maneuver around them swiftly enough.
You are wonderful. And I’m going to prove it to you. You, yes you, are wonderful and infinitely valuable. If you just read those words and thought, “No way, not me. Wonderful is not the word I’d use. What do I have to offer that someone else can’t do better?” Make no mistake, all the world needs you to be is yourself.
I have a LinkedIn, and it feels apocalyptic. For those who don’t know, LinkedIn is the social networking website for professional development. Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook or X, LinkedIn unpretentiously admits in its vision statement that it seeks to provide economic opportunity for its users—not social utility.
If I had to pick a favorite month of the year, December would take the cake. It’s not exactly a controversial take. By Dec. 1 (or earlier for some of us), Mariah Carey has begun singing her familiar whistle notes, and Andy Williams has begun to proudly declare that “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!”
At the beginning of the school year, I felt lost. I needed to completely rearrange my classes, apply to jobs I was uncertain about, rediscover my place at Boston College after six months abroad, make amends with someone, and spend time with the friends I love while also trying to meet new people.
“Who decides what comfort is, anyway?” I find myself asking this when one of the students from Upper makes fun of my current living situation.
For as long as I’ve known how to, I’ve loved reading. In middle school, I always joined my school’s annual competition to see who could read the most books over the summer. The last week of school, I would roam the Barnes and Nobles in my neighborhood, accumulating a pile of books taller than I was and paying for them with the B&N gift cards I received every Christmas from my relatives. In September, after a long summer of reading, I was always crowned one of the winners.
The first thing I noticed without my headphones was how dependent I am on the distraction of music. I live in a quaint and homey Mod, and even something as simple as walking to the Walsh laundry room—a one-and-a-half minute journey, at most—always required my AirPods. I grew uncomfortable doing so without them. The walk was shorter than the length of a song, yet I loved the reassurance that I would not have to talk to anyone I ran into.
I have always been a planner. My notes app is filled with to-do lists, reminders, and anecdotes—a tangible, terrifyingly disorganized snapshot of the inside of my brain. I came to college with a set plan—a political science major on a pre-medical track, setting myself up to go to medical school.
