It's always expectations that lead to disappointment

When I arrived at Gordon College on August 19^th 2011 I thought for sure I had found my home. Coming to a place where no one knew my name would be the chance I had so longed for to start again. I was able to navigate the world free from the restraints of my parents and my small town. It was a chance to explore new interests and find out the type of person I really was. I would make friendships that, unlike those I had in high school, would be rich and life giving and go far beyond just the superficial. And those friends would last a lifetime. I thought I would find a community that not only embraced who I was but celebrated it. I would be allowed the grace and the forgiveness to learn how to be graceful and forgiving. I would discover what it really meant to live for Christ and take up my cross daily. I would take classes in things both in and out of my field of study and in tandem those courses would offer me a holistic and well-rounded worldview.

And my first year, all of these things began to fall into place. I was blessed early on with a group of friends I believed to be those “friends for life” everyone is always talking about. I was given the chance to live amongst a great group of girls and share a Christ-like community with them. I fell in love for the first time to the person I thought for sure would make me his wife one day. The classes I took stretched my mind and began to open my heart to the world beyond my semi-sheltered bubble. It all was going so well, I was receiving one blessing after another and I was truly, completely joyful and thankful and happy.

            But by my second year things began to change. Not quickly, and not even noticeably. First was the break-up. The one person who had promised to never give up on me did. But that was okay; I understood why that had to end, why it was never meant to work out in the first place. But soon after, those friends I had made began to leave me, too. And once they were gone, new friends took their place, only to soon disappear as quickly as they had come.

And with the start of my third year at Gordon I felt as though I had been given the blessing of yet another fresh start. The chance to learn from the mistakes I had made and move forward as a new and better version of my past self. I took hold of the newly bestowed reigns and began again, again. A semester passed and all of the joy I had initially felt here at Gordon slowly began to come back to me. I saw glimpses of peace and harmony and grace fill in the voids and I, at times, began to believe it was possible to get back on my feet after having been knocked down so many times. But it wasn’t long into spring semester that the tables turned (for lack of a better expression) and I was being dealt those oh so familiar and stinging cards of rejection and defeat. The new friendship I’d made soon began to fail. The damage done so bad that the outcome was inevitable and any chance of reconciliation was gone. Another year, another loss, and another group of people who I’d failed and who, because of circumstance alone, were driven apart.

So as I sit here on September 9, 2014 at the beginning of my fourth and final year at this school that was supposed to be my home I realize how uncomfortable I am here. Though I’ve been again blessed with a group of wonderful friends and the prospect of a relationship on the horizon, I can’t seem to allow myself to be content. Maybe out of fear of history repeating itself, I’m finding it impossible to let others in, fully in, the way I ought to in order to have those rich, life-giving relationships. I’m finding that I have no trust, for myself, for others, for circumstance. I’m finding that Gordon is no longer the safe place I so badly wanted to call home, but rather a reminder of all the loss and all the pain and all the heartache I’ve had to face here. That every path I walk, every building I enter, every corner I round is stained with the unforgettable memories I shared with my once friends. But beyond that, it is by the sheer number of people I pass on my way each day that I have to look in the eye and say hello to, wondering if they will say hello back, or how, or if it will hurt them to see me, or if they are still angry with me, or if they still hate me, or if they still see me as a burden to them, that I feel Gordon is not my home. Daily I am reminded that to the majority of people whose paths have, at one time, run parallel with mine, I was nothing more than a burdensome load that they had to carry. Like ghost stories written in the walls, this campus has come to haunt me, and I’m trying so hard to reconcile the idea I had in my head of how college was going to be with the reality that has unfolded around me the past three years.

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