By Robert Ramnauth (Editor-in-Chief)
Robert Ramnauth, Media Arts student
Change is an interesting beast.
It’s probably the thing people long for the most in life, yet when faced with it, people often become afraid of it. Change can relate to anything.
Moving from somewhere you’ve grown attached to; ending a bad relationship; or even simply giving up hope that one day you’ll walk into the dorm bathrooms and there won’t be urine all over the toilet seats.
Up until recent years, I was extremely apprehensive toward any change. The biggest change after high school was moving into the dorms. I was looking forward to it, but more than anything I was worried about being on my own. Even with my family right around the corner.
Yeah, I was a child, I know. Make fun later.
The past two years have been pretty much an endless stream of changes in my life. Aside from the hailstorm of crazy that’s been going on within my family, I’ve also experienced a lot of events, both positive and negative, that have led me to take a firm hand in changing myself into who I’ve wanted to be for a long time.
Not all change is for the better, of course.
I’ve made friends with more than a few people that I probably shouldn’t have: people who have tried to change me for the worse; people who weren’t really trying to but almost did it anyway.
In a lot of ways, college is almost like going through those early teenage years again—the changes come out of nowhere and are absolutely relentless, and if you’re not careful you could easily walk of the experience completely bitter and burnt out.
It’s not so much a matter of what you experience, but how you take those experiences and learn from them.
The difference between the cute girl with the happy-go-lucky attitude that everyone adores and the girl who fell into a nasty drug habit isn’t necessarily that the former never experienced any challenges or life-changing events; it could just as easily be that she refused to be victim of her bad experiences.
It’s not hard, really. It just takes some practice.
It’s a change I went through that worked out for the best. Instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself when something goes wrong, I try to take it with a grain of salt, suck it up and move on.
Personally, it keeps me from being miserable or going crazy. The effect is that those close to me feel less apprehensive when I’m in a bad mood. Yeah, I can still be a really moody person, but it’s less frequent now.
Being able to roll with changes also keeps you from getting old and grumpy. Every time I see an older person who is passionless and boring, I can’t help but wonder what the hell went wrong. No one starts off like that, but too many people end up there. It’s one thing that drives me to keep changing and refusing to settle for anything less than what I want.
We change not according to the events we experience in life, but how we react to those events.
Maybe a lot of these are just the naïve, random and over-enthusiastic ramblings of someone who’s too young to know any better. But it’s an idea worth following through. At worst, I learn something new. At best, I’m not miserable when I’m older.
The changes haven’t stopped for me yet. After I graduate I’m going to throw myself to the wolves of the working class until I get into grad school. After that, who knows. It’s something I would have been dreading before, but now it’s kind of exciting.
Knowing that I’m strong enough to deal with change versus wondering if the upcoming changes are going to eat me alive is pretty comforting when everything around you is transforming.
