When I was 18, I learned how to cry alone. Sitting on the edge of O’Hill’s student garden, I silently wept. I started, tentatively, to let my eyes squeeze shut, my nose scrunch up, my mouth fall into itself. For the first time in my life I felt alone in my failure; I found solace in the mulch, the mounds of dirt, the promise of something growing beneath me. Three and a half years ago, I learned my first college lesson: if you must cry, do it alone, in the dark, while pretending to cultivate the ground below you.
After writing this column once every two weeks for the past eight semesters, I find myself struggling with the finality of these sentences. I am afraid that my last words will not be enough, and that no pithy pieces of wisdom, nor rambling reflections on my experiences will be sufficient. I do not know what I will say in my final column. But I do know that I will cry. I’m crying right now. I left the library to sit in the mulch outside.
I think I could stay here forever. I could cry myself into a muddy, mulchy rut, thinking about all of the goodbyes I have to say. Eventually, though, I must find the strength to pull myself out, holding strong to the daffodil stems above me. I will wipe my eyes, catch my breath and say what I need you to hear. Of everything I know, and everything I think I know, I want you to remember one thing: do not leave college until you have learned how to cry — for that is when you have learned how to feel.
Last year I went at least six months without crying. For six months I laughed when I was happy and I shouted when I was angry. I’m pretty sure my spurts of rage and ridiculous expressions of joy made plenty of people cry from fear and confusion, respectively. For some reason, though, I never shed a tear. I felt things, sure, but only in a comfortable way. I never let myself sink into the joy or the frustration; I was too afraid of losing the euphoria, and of being stuck in the sadness. I had forgotten my first college lesson.
Eventually I cracked and learned my hundreth college lesson: crying in front of the people you love pulls them into you in a way that laughing and shouting never will. I wonder now, as I hesitatingly type out these final words, if I cried enough, and if there is still time for me to cry a little more.
Of course I don’t think that weeping must stop when college ends. But I do believe you should get really good at it before you leave. There is something special about the kind of crying one does in college — alone in a dorm room, or surrounded by friends at a bar. The crying feels as powerful, and as temporary, as the four years in which it takes place.
Unfortunately, we have trained ourselves not to cry. We’re so busy trying to “work hard, play hard” that we’ve forgotten how to cry hard as well. My hope for us as University students, graduating or not, is that we decide to cry. We decide to come and stay at the University of Virginia not just to learn, not just to have fun, not just to make lasting friendships: we come to cry loudly and powerfully, so that the world may know of our failures and successes.
With each tear that drops on these Grounds, we come and we stay, and in this way we may never really leave. For each tear represents a precious or difficult moment in our lives. And these tear-dropped moments cultivate the earth below us, allowing something new to grow even when we are gone.
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