by Emma Bowen

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On January 13th, 2022, I typed two sentences in a note on my MacBook.

“One year from now, my life is going to be completely different than what I’ve always known. I don’t know if that’s comforting or the contrary.”

Sitting at the same laptop a year and a half later, I can confidently say this prophecy is entirely true and entirely false at the same time.

My notes app is littered with shopping lists, choreography ideas, and quotes too funny or special to be lost in the web of nineteen years’ worth of memories. Often, I resort to my notes app to relieve my brain of the pressure of who I am, who I want to be, and everything that goes into both personas. One could call it manifestation.

Did I manifest an entirely different life for myself? While not much has changed—my bedroom walls have been the same shade of turquoise since I moved in as a fifth grader—I feel entirely different. I find it stressful to go out with my mom on errands because, to the untrained eye, I’m just a girl with her mother. The strangers (whom I will most likely see again because I live in a small coastal town in New Hampshire) have no clue I just returned from the most transformative year of my life. It’s almost embarrassing to look back on a year when I should have changed a lot, only to recognize the face I see in the mirror.

I spent time reserved for studying and preparing for finals contemplating if I should get a septum piercing or where I should get my first tattoo. I reinvented my music taste and wasted hours on Pinterest like their joint power could have a Fairy Godmother effect on me. I wanted to wake up in a new body with a new brain and heart.

I look back on a year and a half full of decisions that shaped me into who I am today. Those eighteen months were full of good decisions, bad decisions, small ones, big ones, ones that were easy, and others that never were made. If the past year and a half had a fragrance, indecisiveness would be one of the strongest notes—being delusional would be the frontrunner on the list.

So many things have transformed my worldview and humbled me to my core that I cannot fathom unpacking them on my blog. At nineteen years old, I have never felt less equipped to deal with the world around me. By the end of the year, I will be twenty, graduating from my teenage years and the socially acceptable age to have never gotten a job or driver’s license.

Fundamentally, I am no different than I was in January 2022. I’ve seen what goes around come around and watched people outgrow me in front of my eyes. I’ve thought about all the ways I can change my identity to be someone I’m not, even though my friends fell in love with me, not the Pinterest version of me. I have tried to be in people’s lives and failed to cope with the doors shut in my face. I am fighting to be content with my independence and my dependence just as much.

Insecurity has hung over my head like a moody rain cloud about to burst. It influences the clothes I wear, like the weather forecast, and seems to always cut my sentences short in a silent room. If I’m my own worst enemy, insecurity is next in line.

When I realize how similar I am to the girl who wrote in her notes app that winter, I want to feel defeated. I go to a new city and experience just about everything you can experience in your first year of college, and have nothing to show for it.

As I sit with that disappointment, I realize that just because some things remain unchanged does not mean that change did not occur. I have returned home to the same high school drama I left behind as an observer instead of a participant. It’s almost endearing, listening to my friends complain about the same things I complained about a year prior; that alone proves to me that things have changed.

There are people who entered and left my life during this time who taught me valuable lessons and pushed my emotional threshold. I am so lucky to miss those who weren’t in my life then and aren’t in my life now. They left their mark in my notes app like a graveyard, with words I cannot delete and faces I cannot forget.

If I wear my heart on my sleeve, then my experiences are stamped across my forehead. I can attribute that to being candid or an open book, but maybe I just want to prove to myself and others that I did change after my first year of college. I grew up giggling about book characters and binge-watching early 2000s teen dramas. In short, I sensationalized the college experience and expected nothing less than an extensive redo of my entire being.

I am eternally guilty of talking myself in circles, ruminating on the same breadcrumb for hours, and employing myself as my biggest critic. That has not changed and will not change for the foreseeable future. Considering what has changed in the past year and a half, I find more comfort in the unknown of what’s ahead than what I am leaving behind. Cheers to another year and a half and everything after.

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© Emma Bowen

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Emma Bowen (she/her) A.K.A. Lulu is a student at Emerson College studying Writing, Literature, and Publishing, just dancing through life to her carefully curated Spotify playlist. Avid coffee fiend and lover of a good thrift haul.

Find out more on her blog or Instagram @emmab0wen.

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