Well, the first round of classes have now ended. I guess I’m not new to this anymore. After a final day of performance class, and some bowling with some classmates afterwards, I am trying to have a new outlook on how I go about my new life here. I cannot live it the way I lived my previous life, otherwise I will find myself trapped in a box of nostalgia. During this first round, I have (hopefully) made some new friends, gained some new views on the world and myself, and learned which voices in my head to listen to primarily. I have seen that my fellow cinema majors are a lot like me in many ways, some that I wasn’t prepared for. However, we are still individuals, each with different styles and backgrounds, yet we have all ended up here. Our roads leading here are very different, yet we meet here at this intersection for however short a time, and hope to pick up some set of skills which will guide us on the rest of our travels. Not all those skills can be learned in a classroom. Some come to us in the form of experiences. Experiences like talking to a classmate about hard drive failures for twenty minutes straight, or walking out of your room on a Saturday night to find a floormate cooking bacon in a George Foreman, or when you go on a McDonalds run late at night with some people and they play music with the dirtiest lyrics they could find, and then immediately play Jesus music to “cleanse themselves”.
Moving forward, I must attempt to have these experiences without getting pushed back by how I used to be and how I want things to be. Opening my mind is one of the greater challenges of college life, something that a community college cannot give you. This is a challenge I accept going forward. A new life awaits me. It’s here now. Time to embrace it.