Junior year. Year 3. So much is the same, but it all feels drastically different. I'm in the upper half of my middle years of college. I have to start thinking about what's next. There are a lot of factors that totally freak me out and make me feel old. Here are a few.
During Legally Blonde, a friend of mine said something that is proving truer and truer. The brother of the director graduated my freshman year, and we worked on a few shows together, and thus became friends. He said to me that in junior year I'm going to start realizing that the people who were older than me when I was a n00b aren't actually as cool as I thought they were. That was his phrasing, but as I'm experiencing it, I'm finding that it really means that we become authoritative as we age by virtue of having more experience than the younger students and we have more autonomy as a result. In the moment, I felt like this really applied to how I had freshmen production assistants tape the cables to the ground instead of doing the despised task myself, but it's starting to be more pervasive than that.
The chronologically next manifestation of this "growing up" thing came in my dorm. Since I've done this university thing in this place for three years now, I know the system. I know what is feasible to handle extracurricularly, and I know what to expect from classes and grades. It takes time to figure it out. So, when I was hanging out in public spaces (or with younger people more generally) during midterms and such, they all started telling me about how they're going to fail their classes based on getting Bs and Cs on midterm exams. The thing about midterms is, you base your performance for the rest of the quarter on those grades and they are a small percentage of the final. I once calculated that I was going to get a B in a class and ended up getting an A because of the way intangible factors played into the final grading of the class. My conversations have been a lot of "it's going to be okay."
Also in the dorm, I have friends who are taking on too many extracurricular responsibilities and falling into a vicious cycle of being too busy to sleep and getting sick emotionally and physically as a result. Been there. Now I'm the one coaching others on how to say no to things. (I know; so hypocritical since it is a skill I only mastered this year)
Moving back to the realm of theater, I got an e-mail last week from a freshman who was asking to be my assistant on Wrestlepocalypse this coming May. I met with him, and he really wants to learn lighting. I left the meeting feeling pretty excited about the team I had built for this show, and then didn't think much about it during class. Then, as I was leaving class, I realized that I am now the age that one of my good friends and mentors was when I met him and what if this freshman and I end up working together on tons of stuff and have an awesome friendship as a result and I'm the friend and mentor to him that my friend was to me...Which led me to thinking about how stuff will go in January on the big show and who will take the roles of whom based on how things were when I started. It's just a cycle of thinking about replacing the people I still think of as here and having to be them and it's scary.
Then, finally, the major freak out was when a senior friend called me from another tech week to ask how to set up a tech table in the space. It wasn't so much that someone had a question to ask me, but more who was doing the asking, because this friend is someone I would ask a question of and I never expected her to call me. It was weirdly cool and freaky all at once.
I'm also really getting serious about internship and job research, applications, and interviews, so it's making me realize that I know how to do school well, but after school, I have to learn how to do work well, and that's a whole new game. Sure, I'm gaining transferable skills and whatnot, but it's a whole new game to have to learn the rules to. I'm feeling a little neutral on this one since I've done school for my entire life and am getting ready for the next step. However, I'm also trying to keep myself from having a finish line mentality so I can continue to enjoy school. Feelings. Sigh.
I think everybody always freaks out about their age because each new year brings new responsibilities and challenges and landmarks that you place on others and never yourself until someone else, who is in the position you were one or two years ago, places them on you. And then you freak out. And then you get over it. I'm still working on the getting over it, but it'll be fine. There are ways I can escape the pressures.
Today is awesome because I got to sleep in a bit.
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