I've been home from NYU for exactly one month today (June 16), so I figured it was about time I wrapped the year up with a blog post. This past month has flown by, actually. Coming home wasn't all that easy at first, and it took some time to get back into a routine. Once I figured things out though, life got better again. I've got a new routine: I wake up early, I go to work, I come home around 5-6, I go out or stay home for dinner, I repeat the next day. It's my new normal, no matter how temporary. While the summer already seems to be ticking away all to quickly, New York and the year I had there almost seem like a dream. It feels like just yesterday I was studying for finals, but at the same time it feels like it was a lifetime ago. A complete contradiction, I realize. But something I realized during my first semester was that my entire life was a contradiction. Okay, maybe not my entire life, but a lot of things in my life are contradictory. Take New York City as an example: it's a huge city with millions of people, yet at the same time you can still feel completely by yourself and it's extremely compact and easy to navigate. A lot of things in my life lately seem to be contradictions like this, and instead of sitting there thinking about how crazy they are or how it doesn't make a lot of sense, I've learned to just sort of embrace it. There's a beauty in something being able to be one thing but at the same time to be something completely opposite. A few days before I left the city, I spent time with my cousin Dalton and his friend Seth. We stayed up into the wee hours of the morning just talking about life, and one of the things we did was we went around and said five things that we'd learned this year (the school year for me, 2014 for them). It's been over a month since that night, so I don't remember the exact five things I shared that night, but I do remember a few, plus a few extras that I've come up with.
1. Life is a contradiction. Embrace it.
2. Everything happens for a reason. I've always lived by this, whether I knew it or not. Senior year of high school I realized just how much, for better or worse, I believed in this fact and I soon decided that it was a large part of who I was. Several times this past year, however, I found myself losing sight of it and getting caught up in the stress and anxiety of all the change I was facing. Which only made things worse, realizing that something I'd believed so strongly in had been replaced with fear. I'm getting it back, though. The changes haven't stopped, however. If anything, there are more with only more to come. But that's okay, because each one has purpose.
3. Life has no rule book. Just because society says that something has to play out a certain way doesn't mean you have to do it that way. Do whatever you want, and don't let anyone tell you can't. You can do things your own way, no matter how unpopular or unheard of.
4. New York is for me, too. Being at NYU, as much as I love it, can be difficult at times. From the beginning, I found myself surrounded by students who had always known where they'd wanted to go, who had made it to their dream school, who had a passion, who knew exactly what they wanted out of their education and out of life. None of these applied to me. I found out about NYU by chance during a random conversation at my cousin's wedding in November of my senior year. I sent in my application the day of the deadline. I visited the campus for the first time February of 2013, not having been in New York since before I was a teenager. I knew what I wanted to study, and I ended up liking it a lot, but I still don't know exactly what I want to be or exactly how I want to apply my degree. I worried about all of these things for a very long time, and I still do. But over time I realized that NYU is as much my university as it is the other 80,000 students that attend there, and that New York can be as much mine as it is anyone else's.
That's really all of the points I can recall from that night / think of at the moment. It's getting late, and I have to get up early. I guess, to sum up my first year of college, I'd have to say it was a challenge. Words like "good" or "bad" don't really do it justice, because I don't think it was either of those things. It had bits of good, chunks of bad, some of the same, and a ton of change. Overall, it was ... a contradiction.
Love, Madilyn
