Alumna Reflection

Iris Wu ’23 (Opinions Editor, 142nd Board) in Opinions | February 23, 2024

I’ve always liked to keep diaries, but I’ve never journaled as often as I did during my senior year at Lawrenceville. Fueled by an intense need to preserve the present moment, I journaled nearly every day. The closer I got to graduation, the more feverishly I wrote. My sentences were tinted with fear, and a shadow of desperation hung behind every word.

I’ve always seen writing as a pursuit of perfect accuracy. Yet this becomes a problem when I’m trying to describe something as complex as my feelings about graduating. As I wrote, I would frequently find myself dropping my pen and miming the shapes of the feelings that I couldn’t transcribe into words. I would try to combine this sentence structure with that exact tone, take this word from that phrase to try and build the perfect container for my feelings. Yet no matter how many combinations of words, phrases, and tones I used, I couldn’t capture my emotions, let alone preserve them for my future self.

It was frightening to watch the days slip by me and to worry that I would one day never recall them again. Whenever phases of my life begin to reach their end, I find myself wishing, irrationally, that they would continue on forever.

I’d be lying if I said I no longer experience this tendency to wish for permanency. But think about it: Nobody enjoys the feeling of being stuck. It’s only because Lawrenceville had a definite ending that I was able to value my time there. I dread endings when, in reality, without them, I’d be miserable. Impermanence affords us the space to appreciate the beauty of transient moments.

Whenever I start to feel sad about endings, I try to remind myself that it is the existence of an ending that makes an experience so beautiful. And I would encourage you to do the same.

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Alumna Reflection