If you could travel back in time to see yourself as a 19-year-old, would you do it? I recently caught a glimpse of myself at 19, courtesy of my college transcripts.
At my alma mater,1 instructors provided written evaluations in lieu of grades. Our classes (and honestly the entire college at that point) were extremely small, so the evals were very specific and very personal. Reading through them was a very thorough tour of all the work I did in college, and my first inclination was to shiver into a fatal, full-body cringe as I contemplated some of my 19-year-old self’s choices.
What was I doing writing papers about sex and torture vis-a-vis existentialism?? Who did I think I was to critique D.H. Lawrence’s characters as being “almost uniformly reckless in their speech”??? The hits kept on coming as I leafed through PAGE AFTER PAGE of the transcripts, like a very detailed train wreck I couldn’t look away from. After reading through the whole thing, I shoved the transcript away, my cheeks burning.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and me, and college. I couldn’t stop thinking about the person my professors wrote about, and the person I am now, and the strange experience of being turned loose for four years to try literally anything, to explore whatever came into my mind and pursue it, even if that pursuit was clumsy and half-baked.
It is humbling to see how seriously this tender, fumbling work was taken by my professors. And it hurts my vanity to read the forecasts woven in to my professors’ evaluations of me. One professor described me as “an exciting young writer in embryo … bristling with possibilities for the future.” Another wrote, “I want to be there when her writing breaks bond with gravity, and flies.”
This last statement brought tears to my eyes, because more than 20 years later, I feel uncomfortably as though I have remained earthbound, failing to live up to the potential my professors saw in me. In my transcript, I can see them pointing the way toward a future that I desired, but could not find a way to catch hold of.
I knew so little at 19, or even at 21. I knew I liked writing; editing even more so. I had almost no concept of how to turn that into something that could pay my bills. In fact, I had only two ideas of how to do it, and I didn’t want to do either of those things.
One way, I thought, would have been to join many of my classmates and move to New York City, share a tiny apartment with a bunch of other people, and live off popcorn and free hors d’oeuvres while fighting for an entry-level position at a magazine. The other would have been to apply to graduate school.
In the intervening decades since college, I have sometimes been angry with my younger self for not choosing one of these paths. Why wasn’t I bold enough or strong enough or driven enough to try? If I had gone to graduate school, could I have taken flight? Would the New York City publishing world have nurtured my embryonic writer self into something more?
But I was burned out by the time I graduated college. I felt strongly the need to retreat, as though I had used up my reservoir of striving. So instead of moving to New York City or applying to graduate school, I moved back to Oregon and got a temp job sorting mail in an office building.
I have sometimes been angry with my younger self for not choosing one of these paths. Why wasn’t I bold enough or strong enough or driven enough to try?
Going to Bennington was, in some ways, a weird choice of school for a student like me. I had always been good at doing school. No test anxiety, no problem getting my homework done, no issues paying attention in class. If the teacher said to get a red binder with three dividers and college-ruled loose-leaf paper, that was what I did. And my grades reflected it.
So it would not have been uncharacteristic for me to go to a college that actually had grades — some place where I could have tried to get onto the dean’s list, or graduate with a “cum laude” after my name. (Not saying I would have achieved either of these things, but it would not have been weird if I had tried.)
But a couple different factors steered me to this tiny, unconventional college on the other side of the country — a place I had never visited or even heard of before I got a small postcard in the mail from them. Unlike some colleges, who wanted me to fill out a form, Bennington sent a blank card and invited me to fill it with anything — words, drawings, diagrams, or anything I wanted. That charmed me.
What vaulted Bennington to the top of my list, though, was more prosaic. I applied to four colleges altogether (not smart! Always choose a safety school, kids). I got rejected by one and wait-listed by another. That left two acceptances. One financial aid package was skimpy, and mostly loans; the other was more generous. That was Bennington.2
So off I went to southern Vermont to study (checks notes) literature, and history, and costume design, and piano (??!?!), and poetry, and biology (??!?!?!?!), and psychology, without any of the guardrails that had previously defined my academic career.
Reading my Bennington evaluations showed me a lot I hadn’t understood about my younger self, and maybe my now self too. I suppose in a way, we can never really see ourselves as others see us, especially when we are 19 or 20 and far from home and deeply, painfully unsure of ourselves and our place in the world and what we’re capable of.
My evaluations describe someone who was prone to diving in headfirst; who had trouble stopping to think, to question her own perspectives and assumptions, to challenge her own ideas. In many ways, this is still me. I still think out loud, opening my mouth while the idea is still being formed in my mind — sometimes to my detriment, or embarrassment. But at the end of my freshman year, one professor also wrote, “I felt in her a solid interest and wish for improvement, a cheerful attitude, and an unusual degree of steadiness,” which is as good a description of me as I can imagine.
I feel compassion toward my 19-year-old self, clumsily writing about D.H. Lawrence and sex and torture; I also envy her, and wonder if I owe her an apology. I have not broken bond with gravity — not yet. But perhaps it is not too late.
A decade after the Tartt/BEE years and only a couple years after this magazine cover. It was an interesting time to be there.
See the above footnote for clues as to why the college was particularly keen to court students