It is the second month of my second year of college, and for the first time in a long time, things are quiet.
Freshman year was noise. Neon lights bleeding through basement windows. Sticky floors that pulled at my shoes like the night was trying to keep me there. Music loud enough to blur the edges of awareness. Loud enough to drown out the inane humming shrouding my every thought. I didn’t know who I was. And if the music ever stopped, someone else might notice too. I tried to become a version of myself I believed people would love: reckless, effortless, untouchable. I thought if I leaned far enough into chaos, it would feel like freedom. I thought if I felt everything loudly enough, I would stop feeling empty.
I kept telling myself I was living. In reality, I was running. Shoes untied. Chest burning. Sweat-blind. Not toward something, but away. From stillness. But stillness has a way of catching up. It waits at the end of every party, every morning after, every silence between songs.
Over the summer, my Instagram account was permanently suspended.
The phone became a small black mirror that showed me only my own face. The illusion of connection disappeared overnight. No more stories at 2 a.m., phone propped against a pillow, cycling through other people’s Saturday nights like proof the world still included me.
And when the DMs stopped and the tags dried up and my name fell out of people’s mouths, the silence didn’t feel peaceful. It felt like the room emptying without anyone telling me to leave.
Without it, I had to sit with myself.
Who am I when I am not curating myself for anyone?
The answer, at first, was no one I wanted to know.
Going home from college has a way of collapsing time. The room is the same, but I am not. Or maybe the terrifying thing is that I am.
My bedroom never quite accumulated history the way other people’s did. I moved too much for that. There are no faded posters on the walls, no middle school notes tucked into drawers, no soft relics of who I used to be. Just a desk. A bed frame. And the skeletons of my old insecurities. Not buried where I left them, but sitting upright on the mattress like they had been waiting.
Every new school was the same. Be invisible first. Learn the room. Then become whatever it asked for.
I got good at it.
There was never a baseline. No thread to follow back to myself. I didn’t know my own values the way other people seemed to. Didn’t know what I wanted, what I believed, who I’d choose if no one was watching. So she ran. Through every door that looked like an answer. Every friend group, every reinvention, every version of herself she thought might finally stick.
None of them did.
But here is what running through every door eventually gives you: you run out of doors.
And when the noise stopped, there was only one door left. The one I’d been avoiding.
I walked through it because I had nothing else.
What I found wasn’t a self I recognized. It was an amalgam. Every room I’d ever been in, every version I’d ever tried, every door that didn’t work. I thought that was failure. I’m starting to think it was the method.
I didn’t find myself despite becoming twenty different people.
I found myself because of it.
She still shows up. In the way I cross my arms before I’ve registered the room. In the way I stand a little straighter when I’m most afraid. In the selfie camera I open without meaning to, checking, adjusting, closing. In the peas I pick out of everything — methodical, automatic, the small control I take when the larger ones feel out of reach. In the way I go completely still when something hurts, not because I’m fine, but because stillness is the only thing that feels safe. In the performance of confidence in rooms where I’m terrified. In the not-crying. In the wanting to be alone with it.
She is very good at looking like she isn’t there.
So am I.
And I am starting to realize that maybe she was never meant to be erased.
Maybe the past is not something you eliminate. Maybe it is something you carry forward with more compassion.
She made the best decisions she could with the information she had. She survived the only way she knew how. And instead of trying to distance myself from her, I am learning to offer her grace.
Because she was never the enemy. She was just me. Unfinished.
I used to see people in fragments and fill in the rest myself. A thoughtful comment in class. The way someone held the door a beat longer than they needed to. A single conversation that felt like it meant more than it did.
I would replay moments in my head and expand them, polishing them until they felt intentional. I mistook my own depth for theirs. I assumed that because I was thinking carefully, they must be too.
I told myself I had outgrown that, that I was no longer the girl who built futures out of fragments.
But I found a quieter version of it.
I would meet someone and quietly place my own emotional vocabulary onto them. My own capacity for reflection. My own willingness to sit with discomfort. I lent them my own light, then mistook the glow for theirs.
Maybe I wasn’t falling for them. Maybe I was falling for my own hope reflected back at me.
If that’s true, then at least I know this: the light was mine to begin with.
I spent a year becoming someone new. I am spending this one learning to stay.
And staying means learning how to sit in a quiet room long enough for the walls to stop feeling like they’re closing in, and recognize the person sitting there.
Just you. The one sitting on the bed in the room with no posters. Breathing. Still here.