Some days I feel I’m finally growing up, while others I’m grasping to the memories of my high school days. I never told my high school friends all of the cliché promises that are often broken. Those promises of “but we’ll talk every week,” or “email me everyday.” Maybe I’ve been too busy to take time to reconnect with them. Truth is that I feel bad because I have been making so many friends up here that I feel I have almost neglected those who walked the halls of my old high school. My days here have been spent lying in the last bit of warming sunshine with and frequently sitting around the cancer hut with my new friends, even though I do not smoke. Lately the hill in front of Ellis hall has been the place to chill. Just the other day I was hanging with Shea, Eric, Ian, Jen, Julie and Chris, whose number is available on demand. We all laid in the sunshine on what seems to be one of the last days of warm weather before the impending cold that Vermont winters tend to bring. We laughed and listened to some Bob Dylan. As he bellowed the tune “Times they are A-Changing,” one of my favorite songs of his, I thought to myself that there was no truer words to me at that moment.

Everything has changed, and I believe that I have too. Rather, I have not changed but adapted. Even if I am adapting, though, I can’t soon forget my old high school friends. I looked around at my friends here and thought, “I wonder who they were in high school, who they left behind and what they carried with them.” We are no longer the immature students with a naive outlook on the world, flying under the radar of a parental influence. We are growing, and we are changing. We are at a crucial point in our lives where we need to be who we always wanted to be.

Since I’ve been here, I have felt freer. I have felt more at ease with who I am and I am not as influenced by who my peers expect me to be. In a way I have not changed, but I am getting to know myself a whole lot better right now.