By Kai Godsey
What will we take when we leave college? As I am quick to tell anyone who will listen, I am about to graduate in May. I will bring with me a Roberts apartment-worth of small furniture and knick knacks, a reasonable ability to manage a Google Calendar, an appreciation for henna as hair dye and a Bachelor of Arts degree with two majors. I have a working knowledge of Adobe InDesign, the Ninth Amendment and how to roll a joint.
I also have four years of profoundly uncomfortable experiences.
Like many of you, I have avoided exes around campus, fought bitterly with friends, read disturbing things in classes, agonized over drama, experienced rejection and have been cold, hungry and hungover. It has been imprinted upon me that life as a young adult, while free of some responsibilities and blessed with many freedoms, is not easy.
While I have no scholarly source to cite, I feel assured in my assumption that many of us who have not yet achieved enlightenment chafe at discomfort. This Opinion section alone, not to mention the culture of college campus life, makes no secret of the dislikes and displeasures of students asking why their situation cannot be remedied. To many of us, the worst negative emotion we regularly face is discomfort.
I am not telling you to accept and tolerate all discomfort. You are allowed to be excused from experiences that make you feel bad. I, myself, repeatedly fail to take the advice I am about to offer as I do not wish to be uncomfortable. Yet I offer it anyway as when I succeed in taking it I, personally, think I gain a great deal.
No freezing College Outdoors tent or heart-stopping response to a text has ever, once in my life, been a waste. Parents who tell us “suffering builds character” everywhere can rejoice and say “I told you so.” We learn from adversity when we raise our hands in a silent classroom to answer a question we are not sure is correct. We grow when we face that space outside of our comfort zone not as an enemy but as a challenging fact of life.
To accept discomfort does not mean one does not feel it. I know when I am feeling something I do not wish to feel, and I have never once seemed to be able to fully wish it away. Radical acceptance of that presence does not send it away either. It simply stops it from getting worse.
College is profoundly uncomfortable for us all, yet often in ways we have power and agency over. Rain requires a jacket. Romance requires honesty. We have learned so much from the rapid and deeply difficult growth these four years are to us all, and that is a gift. We learn what we like, need and desire. We learn how to meet the needs and expectations of others, too.
Still, I sometimes fail to accept being uncomfortable. I failed yesterday. I made a profound failure on the day this was written. I will fail tomorrow. I will hurt my friends’ feelings when my own get out of control and let a professor stare at a blank wall of faces who did not read the textbook.
Failure gives me the opportunity to learn and grow. It prompts me to make the equally uncomfortable decision to be frightened or to put myself out there, to address distress in a way that avoids it in the future. To experience the growing pains of life.
Then, hopefully, I will grow. The hurt will fade, the discipline will increase, the trust will build. I will earn a good life by putting myself out there and feeling all of it. If you want a full adulthood, I trust you will too. We have come so far and we have a ways to go, and the more you try to experience at the end of the day, the more you can be assured you did everything you could.
To those who suffer for my discomfort, especially the young freshman me who still lives in my soul, I am sorry. It will not always hurt. It does get better. And when it gets better for you, it gets just that little bit better for those around you too.
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