I debated in high school, and I was both incredibly annoying and blissfully unaware of that fact. The first tournament friend I made was skinny and loud, wore a suit that failed to cover both his wristwatch and his ankles, and didn’t care how annoying I was. I liked him instantly. To our joy, we found that we had both been accepted to Hillsdale. We vowed to meet up when we arrived, and did so on my first Friday night of college. I walked into a deafening house party and heard one voice, carrying over the din. “Ian, go home! You don’t want to be here!” Sticking out of the top of the crowd, my friend’s tousled head shook as he urged me out of what I couldn’t recognize as a bad situation. I made eye contact with him and, with all the asinine self-assurance in the world, I ignored him. It was the first of a legion of bad decisions I would make that fall.
I’m a senior now, and one of those guys everybody knows. But I don’t fit in perfectly anywhere. I tried to find an identity in a lot of areas, yet have somehow fallen short in all of them. I’m exceptionally unexceptional as an English major — I don’t spend quality time with all of the professors in their offices, and I’ve never submitted brilliant contributions to the scholarship on Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Faulkner. My freshman visions of academic perfection have never been realized. I dabbled in the music department, but never made big band, and couldn’t wrap my too-small hands around the double-bass quickly enough to make the teacher’s pet combo in the jazz department. I know every word to all the Irish songs we sing at the Donnybrook, but I’m not Catholic. I was a Delt, but I deactivated. My campus identity is fragmented. I attribute this in large part to the fact that while other freshmen adjusted to the pace and requirements of college life, I spent my freshman year screwing around.
I showed up on campus as an eager, arrogant kid with a big scholarship and an even bigger ego. I immediately began a full-scale hunt for as much trouble as I could find — I found plenty. I went down in a blaze of glory, pulling in a 2.4 my first semester and a 1.7 my second. They ought to have thrown me out on my ear — I have the warning letters to prove it. But instead, the college handed me something I didn’t deserve: grace. Although I’m not sure how, this college saw potential through my conceit. And so they let me stay.
At the end of my freshman year, I found myself small and bruised, and in debt to the college’s belief in my “potential.” I had failed utterly in every area of personal self-establishment. I was a fraud — not a real thinker, reader, writer, musician, or even a good friend. My self-centeredness had made me blind to all of those things, and I had tossed them aside in pursuit of my own image. Looking back, I think this moment marked the beginning of the most crucial part of my education: despite these harsh realities, I hadn’t lost myself. I had simply begun to lose my fabricated self-image. But I was still at Hillsdale, still taking English classes, still playing music and still singing around a bonfire behind the Donnybrook. I was still Ian. The truth of my identity rested somewhere besides my success. Allowing my pride in my accomplishments to die was the first and most important step to realizing that the accomplishments themselves were not what made me worthwhile, gave me security, gave me a place. Relationships did that. And those weren’t dependent on my performance. My friends didn’t care what my GPA was.
As I retreated into summer work, I yearned to go back to school in spite of my failure. My people were there, and, alongside them, an intoxicating reality to which I had been awakened. I saw myself, clearly, in need of repair and education. The pressure was off. I had failed, and so I was no longer afraid of failing. The terror of coming up short had been realized, and I had survived. God and everyone else still loved me. It was surreal, and somewhat painful, to realize that all my worrying had bought me nothing. But ever so gently, the instinct to perform to prove my worth began to peel away. I began thinking, reading, writing, singing, and loving because I wanted to, not to preserve my value as a person. I began to realize that I didn’t have to be perfect to be worthwhile. I began to be free. And I felt, for the first time, bliss in acknowledging my faults.
