Naomi Girson | opinions editor

I’m barely justifying college, to be honest.

It’s expensive, but I’m managing. It’s hard work, but I’m not drowning in my studies. It’s alright, but I really hope this won’t end up being the best time of my life.

Commitment day is May 1, and yet I was unattached to a plan until June of my senior year. It was too daunting of an undertaking for me to start to see my future laid out. It took everything in me to get through high school, and suddenly I had to start all over again.

In the spring months of my senior year of high school, my choices were Duquesne, community college or a gap year, and I truly had no idea what my future held for me.

I spent my final high school days wandering the halls of the place I was sure to leave soon, arguing with my psychology teacher, completely convinced I had no other decision but to go to college. He always claimed he was a true hippie, growing up on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus in the sixties, both his parents being professors, but his mindset was too bleak for me.

College was all he had ever known, how could he possibly know if something else would be a better fit for me. He wanted me to “live up to my potential,” to go to college as was my duty, as a smart, curious young lady, essentially.

I always kept the cons of college in the forefront of my mind; the endless debt, the inability to find a job in certain markets regardless of your accolades, but I had no other plan in mind. College at least gave me an excuse to postpone my entrance into the “real world” by at least four years.

Before May 1, my mother reached out to Duquesne and asked them to extend my commitment due date, which they did gracefully. Finally, after a month spent in the dreadful moratorium of my own spiral of insanity, my decision came to, simply, “I guess I should.”

One of my favorite teachers at the time went to Duquesne for grad school, and he knew it was the only option I had left. He wanted me to go to do something with my life, and my mom knew he wanted me to go, and started encouraging it more.

Sometimes it feels like I didn’t even make a decision, I was just pushed in the direction and fell asleep at the wheel.

Now, I’m halfway through my undergraduate studies and everything is perfectly adequate. I just became an editor for The Duke, I’ve made dean’s list every semester. My resume is abundant with internships and jobs and activities. And yet my favorite question that will never escape keeps returning in the back of my mind.

“So what?” It feels like the big, looming question I cannot answer. I don’t see what I’m supposed to be seeing up ahead, on the horizon. In fact I don’t see anything at all.

The way I see it — the way I have always seen it —I get my work done to get it done. I want my work done more than I want it to be perfect.

For essays, I didn’t write rough drafts. The first try was always my last. I would breeze through standardized tests never checking my work, I would barely do a once-over before handing it in.

Turning them in was like being released from a set of shackles.

“Here, take it, it’s finished.”

But now, it’s not just so I can get my book out and read while everyone finishes checking their work. It’s like I’m trying to get done with my whole bucket list.

I have always been a “doomsdayer.” That sense of impending dread you may have heard of, it lives deep in the depths of my mind, swirling behind my eyelids and clouding my whole life.

Still, somehow I manage these feelings enough to work two jobs, to do all my homework and to write. I want it to all be out of the way.

That’s why I try to keep myself busy now, do everything I can, write as many articles as possible. Because I want to hit the imaginary quota, I want to be all done. I used to make fake due dates for long-term assignments, essays and projects.

I always wanted a day or two of padding, and I would always get things done early, just in case I became “incapacitated” before I could finish.

I would hate for something unexpected to happen. I just want everything done, out of the way. So I went to college right out of high school, because, “If not now, when?”

Later, perhaps, but then…“If not later, when?” Whatever “later” is.

College was not what I wanted to do, but I’m justifying its existence. It’s not all it’s made out to be, but it’s something. Something that has given me friends and ways to fill my days and spend my time and at least start to test if any aspirations I had for a fleeting moment as a child are worth pursuing any further.

Without college, I would still be doing something, but I wouldn’t be moving toward anything in particular. I can see something ahead now, I can see a degree and a ceremony and a slightly tacky cap and gown.

And that’s enough to get me through what I somehow pushed halfway through already.

Naomi Girson can be reached at girsonn@duq.edu