Breathing Through the Early Decision Season
Yes, it’s that oh-so-tense time of year again; when Mariah Carey becomes the soundtrack to our lives and high school seniors hear for the first time from the colleges of their dreams. That’s right: it’s early decision season.
I still remember this time in my own life.
Fall term was coming to an angsty close, frost prickled the early winter air, and our imaginations were all filled up with the biggest question yet of our young lives: “who’s getting in and who isn’t?” And, of course, “is it going to be me?”
For those of you with eggs in the early decision season basket, I know this moment can feel cataclysmic. Like the news, you’ll receive marks the end of a long road branching into two forks only: success or failure. It’s certainly natural to feel this way. But if I have mined a single nugget of wisdom over four years of advising students in the college admissions game, it’s this: the road is long, and makes a thousand forking paths, and even if the bad news hits, you, my dear, will be ok.
I want to share a story with you from the other side of fear; one that I hope will soothe the swarming thoughts of students and parents awaiting letters this month with the weighty sense of destiny.
I was rejected from the school I’d built my vision of the future on.
Not deferred or waitlisted, but flat out, red-stamped, sayonara, bye-bye, rejected. I had dreamed of going to this school from the time I could spell it. And for a long few days during the limbo of early decision season, all I could think was: “If I’ve failed at this goal I was so sure of, what else do I have to look forward to but more failure?”
Something curious began to happen about a week later. After I’d cried myself into a puddle with my parents and mentally ripped in half every imagined snapshot of my future happiness, a kind of calm seeped through me that I’d never felt before. I was suddenly reminded of something Woody Allen said once in an interview: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” You don’t have to be a fan of Woody Allen — or God, for that matter — to appreciate the truth in this: life is just more magical, and less frustrating, when we leave it open to the inevitable forces of flux.
So I got back to the daily joys and sorrows of living.
I filled out more college apps. Then, I learned about schools I hadn’t previously given the time of day. I went on visits to schools all across the country and saw whole worlds of possibility never before on my radar screen. And, eventually, after several more rejections and a few acceptances, I ended up enrolled at a college that had waitlisted me for over a month, a school I had hardly even heard of.
And I loved it.
I became myself there. I made friends who will be in my wedding party, discovered the great passion of my life, made mistakes, fell in love, read the best books and plays ever written, and all in a beautiful place. It is even more difficult now for me to imagine my life if I’d gone to my dream school than it was, six years ago, to imagine literally any other possibility. It’s funny, isn’t it? How wrong we can be.
My sister is one of you all waiting right now for the Big News. She’s right in the midst of early decision season. What do I tell her when she calls me stressed out of her wits? I share with her another favorite bit of knowledge. This one from poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and his sublime poem, Ulysses: “that which we are, we are.” No matter where the plotline of our lives zags us, whatever turns it takes we didn’t authorize, we should remember that we alone contain the truth of ourselves. I ask her to honor that. To believe that she will grow into whatever place she ends up going. Be generous with yourself, I tell her. Breathe.
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