If this is your first year away from home: Congratulations! Though it may not feel like it as you’re walking home from your first CHM 115 lecture with 50 practice problems, you’ve just signed on for a truly liberating experience. The truth of the matter is: you’re autonomous now. Unlike high school, neither the state, nor your parents, can legally coerce you into going to your classes. Your actions are your own responsibility, for better or for worse. But the coolest consequence of autonomy in a new place is: you have a second chance to become whoever it is you’d like to become.

You see, high school inhibits self-reinvention because you’re stuck with the same pool of students from kindergarten to senior year. High school hallways are filled with the existential “eye of the other.”

Floating between you and the other students is their abstract preconception of “who you are.” Three lockers down stands the cute boy who rejected you at one of your junior high dances. In gym class, you’re forced to perform calve stretches with the girl you peed your pants in front of in first grade. Trying to become someone new in high school is akin to switching seats half way through the semester (a word to the wise: don’t try it). You’ve broken one of the intangible commandments of the status quo and soon expect someone to turn around and glare at you with that look that says, “You obviously don’t know how things work around here, do you?”

But as you walk to your first classes at GVSU, you will be, to every passerby, a tabula rasa, a blank slate. This means, you have the opportunity to shed whatever skin you wore before and put on a new mask. If you’ve ever wanted to grow in a new direction, but felt restrained by the walls of your own social stratosphere, now is the time to flourish. The college experience cultivates the ideal soil for reinvention of the self.

This reinvention can manifest itself in many ways. If you were a caricature of the Socially Awkward Penguin meme in high school, nobody will know the wiser if you flip the switch to your Socially
Awesome counterpart. I can’t tell you how many of my friends have disclosed, “You wouldn’t have even recognized me in high school; I was a totally different person.”

Without the “eye of the other” holding you down, you can experiment with your clothing style, your religion, or your sexuality. Not confident in your intellect in high school? Work hard, read your textbooks, and pipe up in class; you’d be surprised how far it will take you. Join a new club, immerse yourself in new points of view, travel to a country where the culture is totally different.

Self-actualization isn’t far off if you can muster up that initial bout of bravery.

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