Click above if you want to hear Iris read the piece herself!
I’m Iris, originally from Seattle and currently in London on my year-long study abroad program at the London School of Economics. I’ll be graduating Georgetown in December 2023. At this juncture in my life, I’ve been thinking about coming of age by writing, aiming to capture paradigm-shifting stories, conversations, and lessons learned in the relentless pursuit of what it means to live exceptionally.
After seventeen years, summer is ending. No more blissfully lazy afternoons dozing off in uncut grass fields; popping open the freezer for yet another popsicle; drifting through the week without an awareness of what day it is. This three month period when I felt like a character in a Studio Ghibli film motivated me to get through the menial, repetitive grind of school. For seventeen years, I could slink back from my responsibilities and exist as a kid again.
Consequently, I thought of my life in terms of academic years. I felt more different from June to September of the same calendar year than from August to May of the next year. Each summer, from debate camp to marketing internships in Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Cambridge, and D.C., I have added another place to my alphabetical list of homes.
But next year, I’ll reach the stage in my life when I don’t know what I will be doing or what I need to be preparing for. I will no longer have Georgetown’s Main Campus Academic Calendar dictating when and where I need to move. Summer as a social construct will begin to fade; it will just be that time of the year when I wear breezier clothing, put on more sunscreen, and eat salads instead of harvest bowls from Sweetgreen.
Instead of each day fading into the next, entire years will blend together. In fact, it’s already starting to happen; I still say I’m nineteen even though I’m twenty one.
I’ll start dividing my life into three to four year chunks, referring to this time as my “early twenties,” even though a decade ago, my twelve and fourteen year old selves could not have been any more different.
I’ll start dividing my life into three to four year chunks, referring to this time as my “early twenties,” even though a decade ago, my twelve and fourteen year old selves could not have been any more different.
As the concept of time slips from my fingers, now I focus on what is in my control: creating memories. In my last summer, I will not be adding a new city to my address book. After being in London since September, at last I am returning to the U.S. But I’ve come to realize that I find my home in people rather than physical locations. I have close friends in New York, Boston, and D.C., which have all become homes in a way. This could be my last chance to see some of them before we all break off to mold our own places in this world.
With physically not enough days between my internship to fit all the social interactions I crave, I’ll have to make worlds collide. If not to prove to myself, then to others that social circles don't have to be separate bubbles, that a transition from one place to another doesn't have to be a leap into a new reality.
These friends all know me from different parts of my timeline, and that means there is nothing I can hide. Puzzled together, my high school toxicity, unflinching discipline at Georgetown, and outgoing London era form the entire topography of my personality. It will be messy, it will be be bittersweet—but that’s just the nature of character growth.
To all my fellow graduating seniors, how will you make your last summer count?
Iris writes too! Here’s her Substack “Midday Musings”
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