Do you ever wake up with bruises and/or cuts that weren’t there when you went to sleep? Once, sophomore year, I woke up with a big bruise on my face. I went home to visit my family that weekend, and when they say the bruise, they asked what happened. I told them that I didn’t know, it had just appeared. They were convinced I had been in a barfight.
My family’s inclination to believe that I’ve been brawling with tavern toughs aside, my point is that I often wake up with scrapes that I don’t remember getting. There’s a scar on my shoulder from a cut that announced its presence one morning by getting blood all over my sheets. Yesterday, I woke up to a long cut on my thumb. It still stings, actually.
How can I not remember the source of all these injuries? There has to be a reason for them. Maybe I’m a sleepwalking prizefighter. Who knows.
My point in all this is that a lot of the time we don’t remember where our pain has come from, be that pain physical, mental, or emotional. Think about it. You know that in the months since graduation the things that irked you about Wellesley have faded a little bit. In a few years, most of the memories we’ll have of undergraduate life will be sunny step-singing smiles. That feeling of ennui that came with every gray February when your friends got on your nerves for no reason, the frustration with the administration’s longsighted inattention to the pressing concerns of now, exams, all that will be gone.
I don’t know if forgetting unpleasant experiences is a good or a bad thing. Certainly, we all have things we wish we could forget that we know we never will. But usually, those memories are the kinds of difficulties that help shape us. Does this mean that the frustrations I felt during college didn’t help me grow? That they were insignificant when compared to the positive?
Looking back at High School Rose, I feel that a number of her “problems” (especially junior and senior year), weren’t really worth all the attention she gave them. But, I mean, she was a teenager. Angst was practically her profession. Maybe College Rose wasn’t so different. And now, Twenty-Something Rose is dwelling on superficially metaphysical topics that will make Senior Citizen Rose blush with embarrassment.
~Rose-Ellen, ’09 VP
Wellesley College Class of 2009 