You Can Reinvent Yourself

Reflecting on his college years, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo, author of “Empire Falls,” wrote, “College, after all, is where we go to  reinvent ourselves, to sever our ties with the past, to become the person we always wanted to be and were prevented from being by people who knew better.” 

Russo compared college to “entering the witness-protection program. You’re supposed to try on a new identity or two. Indeed, it would not only defeat the purpose, it would be downright dangerous to leave the program easily recognizable as the person who’d entered it.” 

Think back to your senior year in high school. 

I’d venture to say that applying to college is the first time that you felt you exercised some  control over your future. Although you were aware that the process was rigidly shaped by a cartel of  guidance 

counselors, testing companies, and college admissions officers (not to mention your parents), you were nonetheless running the show, at the age of eighteen. 

You assessed your strengths and weaknesses. You answered basic questions to set the criteria for the schools: distance, size, prestige, selectivity, social life, climate, cost, financial aid, and other factors. You chose how many schools to apply to. You wrote the essays and secured the recommendations. Then you waited for a decision. If your third or fourth choice college offered significantly better financial aid than your top choice, you adapted, either by solving the cost issue (taking out loans and working your way through college) or settling for the less appealing school and taking the money. 

In a worst-case scenario, if disaster struck and you were shut out by all your top choices except your safety school, you learned how quickly you can accept and make  peace with the “tragedy” of being offered only one choice. It is a lesson in taking lemons and making lemonade and your introduction to the agency that comes from having no choice. 

Then you matriculated and discovered that whether you were the prom queen or class clown in high school, the socialite or brainy geek, college was your opportunity to delete your adolescence and write a new script. As Russo suggests, you could accurately measure the success or failure of your college years by how recognizable you were at graduation compared to the person who had entered the scene four years earlier. You did it once; you can do it again. 

As life goes on, many people let go of that expansive sense of possibility. They rein in their imaginations because they believe their paths are set, or they have accumulated obligations that force them to take certain actions. They lose the imaginative freedom of dreaming big.