A couple months before graduating elementary school, I asked God to save me from middle school. I was not afraid of the increased workload, bullying, or making new friends. I was afraid of getting lost in the hallways on my way to class. As a kid, I had a mature sort of way about me, but I never developed the ability to find my way around like my peers did — it’s a skill I have not mastered, even to this day.
As I enter the postgraduate phase, I am experiencing that same kind of fearful anxiety. It is a fear, not of getting lost, but of feeling lost, surrounded by doorways and unsure which holds the right next step.
So after I graduate, I’m going home for the summer. Not solely because of the normal postgrad fears that come with this season of life, but also because there are good things waiting for me there, and it is the only place, besides Hillsdale, I really know my way around right now.
I have four younger siblings: Micah, Liberty, Jackson, and Saylor. The title I hold dearest — right above editor- in-chief, of course — is older sister. Siblings don’t stop growing when you go off to college, I’ve learned, and my 8-year-old sister is actually 12 now, about to enter middle school. It is extraordinarily difficult to be a good big sister when you’ve missed out on four years of your siblings’ lives, especially formative years like 8–12 or 12–16. There is nothing wrong with starting a new life in a big city, but some of its excitement is lost to me when it makes people with whom I share DNA unfamiliar to me.
People at Hillsdale tend to value their families: It is not a horrible, lazy thing for those values to affect life postgrad. A gap summer, or even a gap year, working a job potentially unrelated to one’s degree, allows a lot of people to stay close to the most important people in their lives, a value closer to godliness than the pursuit of success or selfish ambition. There’s no job in The Woodlands, Texas, I am dying to apply for, but I’m happy to return to the same job I’ve had since high school if it means crashing on the couch with Saylor after a long day.
Going home is not right for everybody, and the increase in 20-somethings living with their parents likely doesn’t rely on the same family-first undertones I am attempting to promote. The next stage in self-governance for some, however, may be learning to rejoice in telling people they are “just going home” when asked for a rundown of their post-graduation plans.
I am not a stranger to doing uncomfortable, difficult things. I spent a semester in Washington, D.C., working 40 hours a week for free. I moved to an island by myself and spent the summer interviewing strangers. I took Jason Peters for Great Books I. But being uncomfortable is not a virtue in itself, and a bit of comfort is not such a bad cushion after I exit academia and life fundamentally changes.
What some of us may need more than a job right now is to slow down, spend some time with the people we’ve known since birth, and really think about the kind of door through which we want to enter.
Jillian Parks is a senior studying Rhetoric and Media.
