Graduation

I spent my last few days in Ohio staying with family in Toledo. I was able to see extended family that I had only seen a few times or never before. I left thinking that I would like to visit again and wishing our family was not as distant.

Me with extended family

This was a big day, I was graduating. Graduation was remote, so I saw little reason to stick around and wait for a symbolic ritual I was already feeling so detached from. I was on the road now for two weeks and I hadn’t felt continuously fulfilled, content, and happy since beginning college, let alone the start of the COVID pandemic. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed college, I learned so much, made great friends, and grew infinitely. But I was always daydreaming about what life could be or worrying about what life might become.

This is what I saw instead of walking down the stage during graduation.

Over four years before, I had been sitting on the cold tiled floor of my first-year basement dorm. The little light peeking through the small egress windows lit up the room. I didn’t know what I wanted to study, and I didn’t feel all that much closer to figuring it out, by doing what I was doing. I hadn’t even been there for a full semester, and I felt lost. After unsuccessfully trying to cut myself off my ADHD medication I had been taking since I was eight, I told my mother that I wanted to take a leave of absence. I recently had been more aware of the effects of my medication, I felt subdued and muted, but I never learned how to be academically successful without it. Feeling trapped, I craved to explore the world, go on a grand adventure, and be in nature. I didn’t have too much experience in any of those camps, but I still dreamed big, hoping to be successful without relying on my medication. My parents were very supportive and told me if it was something I needed to do, I should do it.

Maps and the internet fueled my dreams. My list of possible adventures got larger and larger, including trail maintenance for a season, hiking the Appalachian Trail, exploring southwestern China, and working and living on a farm. Not having the experience or the confidence for solo travel, these ideas inevitably fell through.

But one idea stuck with me. My bicycle gave me a taste of the freedom I craved. I began to think about the extent of this freedom, how far could my bicycle take me? I learned there was a ten-mile bike path from my college in Waltham to Boston, so that must be doable. I wondered if I would be able to make it to New Hampshire or back to my home in Rhode Island. I ambitiously googled ‘biking across America,’ and quickly discovered that I was in fact not the first person with this idea. Immediately biking across the states became a long-term goal for me.

I finished my first year with slightly more vision of the future than I started. My plans for a leave of absence fell through as what-I-thought-was reality hit me. I stuck with my studies. One of my friends, Tova, who was a senior and a peer mentor, told me about a 3D design and sculpting course she took that was incredible. I knew I needed a class outside of the box, the humanity classes I had taken were interesting but didn’t engage me in the way I hoped. The sculpting course provided me with the hands-on creativity that I was craving. Deciding to major in Studio Art, I finished my first year with a path, a foggy unknown path, but a path, nonetheless.

I returned the following year determined to make my path clearer. How could I use my interests in studio art to do something I am passionate about? Like throwing wet pasta at a ceiling to see what sticks, I enrolled in an introductory Computer Science course. In middle and high school, when many friends expressed interest in becoming a programmer when they were older, I would say “I could never get a job that places you in front of a computer all day.” I must have forgotten this when enrolling. It took a bit, but eventually, it clicked with my brain. The class came naturally, and I enjoyed the problem-solving elements. The professor convinced me to complete the major and fill the following semester's course load with coding classes.

As classes dragged on, I began to daydream of adventures once again. I sat on my sophomore twin bed, with ugly blue sheets and white polka dots. Laptop on my lap, and my best friend, Jeremy on speaker phone, we fantasized about adventure. I brought up the idea of biking across the country again, but he shut it down.

“I don’t want to be in America, I would much rather do a trip like this in Italy. Besides, I only have three weeks free. We could barely cover much of the country by that point,” Jeremy countered. Jeremy had lived in Italy for his first year of college and I had been studying Italian in hopes to study abroad there for my now-dropped Studio Arts degree. After a bit of back and forth, it was decided, we were going to bike across Italy!

Tickets were purchased within weeks and at the end of the following summer, we were off to Italy. Although a longer story for another time, Italy changed me. We arrived with very little clue of how our trip was going to work. We bargained to rent day bikes for 3 weeks and bought most of our gear there. I returned to school the night before my junior year with stories to share and pride in the adventure I took. This pride was mostly from the type two fun I experienced. Type two fun doesn’t feel fun at the time, but the memories apply retroactive fun to an often-unpleasant experience. I biked longer days than I had ever done before and camped in sketchy locations such as beaches with summer fiestas, not-so-abandoned docks, and farms with guard dogs barking in the distance. I went to bed most nights of the trip with pangs of anxiety as this was unfamiliar territory for me. I was ready for the trip to end when it did.

I returned more confident in myself and surer of adventure. I was living with good friends and was having more of “the college experience.” Schoolwork and relationship problems bogged down the year a bit, but overall, the year was looking up.

But then COVID hit. It turned my life on its head as it did to so many people. I was lucky enough to have no personal or physical loss, but the emotional toll it took on me was extreme. I fell into a pit of depression, worrying about anything I could worry about. I lacked new connections, physical touch, and a path I was excited about. The rest of my life was coming up fast. I didn’t feel like I had the proper space or time to transition since COVID took my senior year away from me. I needed to get a job in a field I wasn’t ready to spend the rest of my life in. Beginning to feel resentful for my education and the choices I made, I needed to do something different. Jeremy, after I gave much resistance, was able to convince me that a grand bike trip, like the one I had dreamed of since freshman year, was in order. And this was the best choice I had made. I stopped applying for jobs and started spending all my free time and dull remote classes planning a bike trip across the country.

There I was biking along the gravel rural road that connects Ohio to Michigan, a state I had never been to. Fields and farms surrounded the road as my name was announced for my remote graduation ceremony. All the resentment and confusion I felt, blew away into the Ohio fields as I entered Michigan feeling grateful for the path I was on. I loved adventure, I knew that then. I was happy, this was where I needed to be.