By Isobel Carnochan, Associate Lifestyle Editor
For the past month, I’ve spent more hours than I would care to admit staring at a blank page, trying to determine what can be said about change. ‘Change’ is so ubiquitous, inescapable, all encompassing. Yet, it’s allusive. Often, we won’t realise something has changed until after the fact: it doesn’t have the manners to announce itself at the door, waiting for a warm invitation. It pounces, it creeps, it lurks in the shadows like a poltergeist waiting to strike. The only promise it keeps faithfully is that it never stops, as much as we wish it would. University especially is considered to be a time when everything around you changes in the blink of an eye, but for the past two years, I, like many students, have tried to cling to consistency. Only recently have I learnt that, perhaps, plans and the past are better to be let go, and the inescapability of change embraced.
Now, nearing the end of my second year, I can say in full honesty that I am thankful to have ended up at Royal Holloway. The Isobel that I was on A-Level results day felt differently. I had spent six years with my heart set on the city my dad grew up in, which saw me visit family every Christmas and summer. In retrospect, I’m almost certain that my long lasting obsession with this city was more to do with escaping the confines of my small, meaningless and seemingly unlocatable childhood town, home to a greater population of cows than people, without having to move somewhere entirely foreign to me. I hadn’t realised how this bone deep desire was more for consistency than for the city itself. I also hadn’t realised how competitive of a university it was, until I was the only student at my sixth form to receive an offer from it. Truly, I don’t think the reality of that fact fully set in until I was staring at my results paper, one grade off from my offer. Needless to say, they weren’t willing to overlook it.
So my plans had changed. Every late July, it happens to eighteen year olds across the country. It really wasn’t that big of a deal – but, honestly? I don’t think I coped particularly well. I spent so much of first year boarded up in my room, trying to hide from the reality of my failed dreams. Rather than living in the long idealised city that I had always assumed I would one day call home, I was in Egham, of all places. Even now, though I love Royal Holloway, Egham itself remains somewhat of a disappointment to me.
The worst part of this whole endeavour wasn’t, really, the change in plan: it was the fact that I felt like my very identity had been shaken to its core. I suppose, in a way, it was. My pre-university self continues to dance in the back of my mind, both figuratively and literally: my enrollment at university saw , among other things, the abandonment of my years of ballet training. Yet, I can’t seem to reconcile the image of seventeen or eighteen year old me with the version of myself I am now. As things stand, I’m less carefree, less spontaneous, and much less talented at making friends in any and every situation than I once was. But, I’m more focused, and I actually work towards my ambitions now, rather than assuming the naïve position that wanting something as badly as I had wanted that city would guarantee its outcome. I’m more likely to be found at 2am in the hallowed lighting of the founders library than the dancefloor of a house party, a fact that my seventeen year old self would recoil to hear. In only two years, I have become someone almost entirely new. And, to be completely frank, it has absolutely terrified me.
Undeniably, the biggest change had taken place within me, and I couldn’t just escape it by drawing my curtains and blocking out the scenery of Surrey. I didn’t know what this change of personhood would mean for the identity I had spent eighteen years crafting. I couldn’t help but wonder if my loved ones would still enjoy spending time with me, or if they’d find me boring and unpleasant to be around. Even when I knew this to be ridiculous, there was nothing I wanted more than to go back to being the person I was in sixth form. The thought of being something new, unprecedented in myself, filled me for the best part of a year with unshakeable horror. How could I be certain about anything, if I couldn’t be certain about myself?
I wish I could offer solid and inscrutable step by step advice on how to stop feeling like this. I know, year after year as new generations of freshers take their first step onto campus, that this anxiety about internal change runs rampant. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a clear cut method for coping with it. All I can say is that, by now, I’ve accepted that seventeen year old me is gone – and probably for the better. Whatever university I studied at, whichever town or city I lived in, change was inevitable. There was no possible path I could have taken after sixth form that wouldn’t have changed me in some form or another. That is, sort of, the whole point of life: to change. I don’t think an existence with no variation, no evolution, nothing but a monotony of sameness over and over and over again is truly appealing to anyone, as much as it scares us to accept. Perhaps, accepting this fact is really the only way to cope with it.
As the summer of my penultimate year approaches, masters and grad schemes and the world of careers haunt every conversation, and the oncoming avalanche of even more change looms in the near future. My life as I know it will change. My plans might change – by my own volition or otherwise. I might change too. But, as horrifying and dizzying as all this change can be, I’m quite excited for it this time.
Getting to change means getting to live, a privilege that not everyone receives, even if my sixth-form self would’ve aggressively protested this fact. I’m sure many others will be protesting it too, but change is inevitable; trying to pretend otherwise won’t make it any easier. So, when the time comes that life around me is changing as I know it once again, maybe I’ll cope with it much better with this in mind.
Photo by Isobel Carnochan