DONE! Finished: turned in my last paper, had my last final —  DONE! It is done. 

I’m looking forward to welcoming what comes in the vast space of being-done—the lifting of the hot pressure and the neverending rush of “what’s next?” into my brain. I want to welcome and respect the space, as I hold and respect all of the different ways I’ve felt and been here.

***

The oppressive, dark, writhing misery has lifted. The emptiness is strange and sad and painful and foreign. 

***

This was hard. This was really fucking hard. 

***

My friend and I are talking in the car to Vermont about why we feel so awful. Just a few days ago, we were folded up on their couch, trying to type words of thesis through the miasma of misery, burnout and stress stretching us into a dead-silent tautness. Now it’s not sweet relief. It’s existential sadness. 

We try out some metaphors. 

• It’s like breaking up with your abusive friend or romantic partner. When I had to do that, I knew something was deeply wrong in the relationship, I felt it deep in my body, minute by minute. But when I finally did what I needed to do and ended it, it didn’t feel like relief or lightness or recovery of coherency. It felt awful. I cried so much, I gaslit myself; I gaslit myself about gaslighting myself; I said surely it was all my fault. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I had made different choices. Similarly, we’re not going to feel immediate relief upon finishing Yale—we’re gonna feel horrible, and wrong, and dissociated, and gaslighting ourselves (if I just made different choices it would have been better!). But we will grow into our new (healthier) realities and realize new (healthier) ways of being. 
• Being at Yale was like standing in a river fighting a strong current, trying to stay upright, sticks and logs and debris slamming into you and scraping and bruising you. When the current suddenly stops or the river disappears, you feel disoriented. You know how your arms float up when weight is removed? Your body is still pushing in the absence of resistance. Now that you’re not locked into fight/survival mode, you relax, your cuts, gashes, and bruises call your attention, and utter exhaustion settles in. 

***

I can already feel the pull of nostalgia making me want to forget, or at least paper over, the horrible things. 

How do I respect the good things, and also respect the bad things? Respect the relationships, all of them, the lessons in the Catskills on how to be a good person, the feeling of walking into the dining hall and being known, the singing, the dancing, the hats, the 3 a.m. conversations, the tree shadows on the wall of the law school, the moments in class my blood tingle-rushed to my head at the click of a new idea. And also respect the bad things. Respect the time dripping through an hourglass during a bad class, the never-enough, the darkness, the bad 3 a.m. conversations, the feeling that pervaded my last two years here, which I described to friends as sinking into the bottom of the ocean with metal coils winding into my body, compressing me from the inside. The violence.

When I was a first-year, I was energized by the current, I worked diagonally with it. By the end, I was against it. How do I respect all of that?

***

I love these people so much. 

***

A year ago, a friend was telling me that they’d been learning about the power of not ascribing meaning to things. Dispositionally, they noted, they and I had always felt the power in ascribing meaning to things, making sense of them through narrative and feeling the Stakes. But there’s a real power in not assigning meaning. Of not processing something into a narrative, of letting it be. Only recently am I feeling this. 

***

Last year, my friend Mackenzie beautifully described Yale as “a walkable community of potential friends.”  Everywhere I go I want to hold myself widely open to all people as potential friends, people I could love, people I could come to depend on. I want to. 

***

Today I sat in my common room looking at the bird painting, and I felt a sadness that draws all my weight into my chest and aches. 

***

Today I spent a long time laying on Cross Campus, and I sang some songs with some friends and felt light and happy. It was a good day.

Isabella Zou is a graduating senior in Timothy Dwight College. She formerly served as co-editor in chief of the Yale Daily News Magazine.