Students pose with Chip during fall move in. (Image Courtesy of CU Connections)
Alexia: Hi! I’m Alexia Bailey, a junior here at the University of Colorado Boulder. Because I’ve been here and seen things, I’m here to share everything I’ve picked up so far, which is a surprising amount of information. “What’s Eating at Alexia” is my unofficial and unfiltered guide to some of the things that being a CU Boulder Buff brings. Think of it as your guide to navigating everything that makes CU Boulder, well, CU Boulder. Whether you’re a freshman finding your footing or a senior with “no body, no crime” level grievances about finals week, I’m here to share my takes, tips and honest observations on everything from the sometimes-unpredictable choices that CU Boulder makes to navigating online controversies that surround and impact college life. College is a wild, unforgettable ride, and “What’s eating at Alexia” is here to make sense of some of it, one opinion at a time.
My parents are still married, and yet, college makes me feel like a child of divorce.
Not in the traditional sense, but in the way that I have more friends in one place than the other, and every few months, I pack a bag of my prized possessions and beg my best friend’s dad for a ride to the airport. It feels like a piece of my heart is missing wherever I go, leaving me in a weird state of liminality. For those of us who didn’t take psychology for the gen ed science requirement, liminality is “the transitional phase individuals experience when moving between two distinct stages of life,” according to EBSCO.
No one knows more than my roommates how difficult it is for me to exist in that liminal space. They’ve watched me stay behind on weekends while they go home to their high school friends, leaving me alone in our apartment eating a sad bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and pretending that it qualifies as a “balanced meal.” However, dearest readers, this is by no means a sob story. It is because of their abandonment that I have learned to be comfortable in my own presence. To be at peace with being by myself.
Somewhere between the long, solemn weekends and the embarrassingly long walks around campus “just to get out of the house,” I realized the difference between solitude and loneliness. And that, maybe, just maybe, there’s a strange kind of freedom in learning how to exist without constantly needing to be perceived by other people. To take yourself out for coffee. To sit in silence. To realize that being alone does not automatically mean being unwanted, which is a lesson I wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t moved away from where I grew up.
I am quite happy with this knowledge; however, that doesn’t mean that moving away from your hometown and becoming a different person isn’t hard. It’s supposed to be hard. We do it because it’s hard. It’s lonely because we decided that, for whatever reason, there was more for us to experience than our hometown. When I applied to the University of Colorado Boulder as a VERY distant in-state student, it was because I knew that there had to be more to life than running into ex-friends in Target and circling the dying mall over and over again, just for a feeling of surprise to never come.
As I scrolled through all of the majors that CU Boulder had to offer, I had two choices: I could stay, go to the local college, and never really grow beyond the version of myself that existed in high school, or I could leave and, like Elsa, go into the unknown. You all can take a wild guess at what I chose.
So, to all of you incoming out-of-staters in the same position as I was two years ago, I want you to know that yes, it’s scary to leave somewhere you’ve always known for somewhere unfamiliar. And that people (like me) always have this habit of promising you that moving this far away is “worth it.” But I won’t promise that because it feels too cliché and too simple for something that can feel this complicated. What I can promise you is that one day, you’ll realize that your life has become too big to fit neatly into one place. You’ll miss people in both directions. Airports will start to feel oddly emotional. Going home will feel comforting and strange all at once and leaving school will hurt in ways you didn’t expect. But the ache is good because it means you built a life worth missing in more than one place.
On the last day of high school, my theatre teacher quoted Winnie the Pooh saying, “how lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” At 18, I thought it was corny in the way that all graduation quotes are corny. But somewhere between the airport goodbyes and crying to Phoebe Bridgers on the drive back to Boulder, I finally understood what he meant.
Reader, I cannot tell you whether you should stay or go, but I can admit my obvious bias: I chose University of Colorado Boulder, and because of that decision, I am sitting here writing this column with my amazingly cliche lifelong friends that I’ll make buy hideous bridesmaids dresses and pay for my expensive Bali bachelorette party later. I have made some regrettable decisions, but I have also seen those decisions transform into something beautiful in the form of all of the people I have met. I have become lucky enough that saying goodbye to Boulder will be as hard as it was to leave my hometown. To me, the decision to leave wasn’t simple or easy, but was immensely worth it, even if I didn’t feel that way when I was left alone in my freshman year dorm for the first time.
And, I mean, when in doubt, Be Boulder right?
Contact CU Independent Managing Editor Alexia Bailey at alexia.bailey@colorado.edu
