I
remember crying a lot during my senior year of high school. That was a new
thing for me, since I navigated tough times through most of my high school
career with dry eyes. It was initially a point of pride for me, that I could
weather anything and still keep my head about me, but I eventually became
worried that I was becoming desensitized to even the most tragic events.
Nevertheless, the floodgates opened up shortly before the start of the school
year when I saw Up with my mom (that montage is as big of a
tearjerker as I’ve come across), and reopened during a handful of times
throughout the year: saying goodbye to some of my youth group mentors and
friends at our leadership meeting and not knowing if I’d see them again,
leaving my last youth group convention, watching Toy Story 3 with my mom (there’s something about cartoon movies
that always get to me). Those were perhaps melodramatic, but good cries—while I
would feel bad in the moment, I felt good that there were things by which I was
so touched that to lose them or to witness them brought an impossibly heavy
lump to my throat and left me a teary-eyed, runny-nosed mess.
Yet when I think of myself
crying that year, my memory always turns back to one night in March. I had
applied to a scholarship program that winter that I’d really been gunning for—I’d
gotten cleared for an interview by my high school, spent all of Winter Break
writing and rewriting what I thought were two of the best essays I’d ever written,
and asked my favorite professors to write recommendations for me. I had it in
my mind that I’d be perfect for this program, and so despite the impossibly low
odds of acceptance I submitted my application to it with an air of confidence
and optimism. That night in March, I found out that I didn’t make even the
first cut. I remember going straight from reading the E-mail into my mother’s
arms, letting out sob after sob in an unrestrained display of shock and
disappointment. I was devastated—I felt as if not only my work on the
application was wasted, but also my entire high school experience was devalued.
I’m sure it wasn’t the worst state I’ve been in, but for a fatalistic,
self-doubting teenager, I was in as bad a state emotionally as I can remember.
I’ve struggled with this moment
a lot; as a rather even-keeled person, a moment of pure defeat such as that
isn’t easily overcome. Eventually I put it out of my mind—I got wrapped up in
the wide world of college and grew far too busy to worry about my hopes and
insecurities from high school. Yet my experience in Europe over the past few
months has given me the time and the perspective to think a bit more critically
about my experiences in high school and in college. I’d long ago reached
acceptance of my unsuccessful applications, but it wasn’t until the past few
weeks that I think I’ve really been able to come to an understanding about
them.
When I take away these convenient
titles I’ve accumulated at college over the past few years—co-director of this,
chair of that, and just look at the world as a college student trying to learn
more about himself, when I take away the comfortable milieu of my college town
and stretch my comfort zones, I find that I’m not as adept or as exceptional as
I often imagine. I’m very prone to making mistakes and sometimes not learning
from them, I’m often unwilling to take necessary risks, I struggle with taking
initiative from time to time, and I have yet to really make sacrifices for
things in which I believe. I’m far from perfect, and I didn’t deserve any
rewards from my high school career—I was smart, I did well in school, and I
tried to do the right thing, but that was about it. There’s a lot I still have
to learn, and I’m okay with that. I’m just lucky to have the opportunity to
travel the world and find out these things about myself. See, amidst all of
these reality checks and new understandings, I think I can improve myself along
the way and leave Europe a happier, more capable Jonathan than the Jonathan who
blogged about Crosby and Nash a couple months ago. That, by the way, really
does excite me.
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