What does antithetical even mean?

While the dictionary can define it, I would suggest the summation of a college experience encapsulates the word better than any definition.

And as I approach the rest of this piece, I find that when articulating one’s college experience, it is ideal to start with the self.

I imagine the ‘self’ like a rope — wanting more, becoming more, striving for more. A rope is only able to become more by first coming apart. And yet it’s difficult to tie together what you feel missing; to retie each part of you that has slipped; to understand when your time is up or when the rope snaps.

I write this as a reflection of my time at Stanford as a senior who will soon be an alum in two weeks’ time.

For me, it’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that, as we all walk and receive our diploma, time forecloses our desires for just that — more. Whatever you want, whatever you wish to accomplish at this University collapses down into the past. You just need to hope that you found yourself before the real world inevitably comes.

Perhaps it was your major, where you transitioned from political science into symbolic systems and computer science, that loosened your first knot.

Or perhaps it was giving up on your childhood dream of attending law school — for a manufactured career-driven future painted by those Stanford students who came before you — that loosened your next.

And slowly; and slowly; your rope becomes looser, knot by knot, undone by an urge for more.

Yet, as you approach new experiences throughout your four years here, slowly; and slowly; your rope starts to tighten.

Perhaps it was your philosophy class that reinvigorated your love for rhetoric and tied back a knot you’d let slip: the first argument you’d woven carefully enough to be proud of since high school, a feeling you were sure had left you.

Or perhaps it was your internship in Washington, D.C., where one conversation, about why a forgotten law protecting wild sheep might outlive everyone who passed it, awoke an interest that had gone dormant, and fashioned a tighter knot.

By the end, your rope has changed. Most of it is retied from the same pieces you’d loosened, but it holds the way it always did.

And as I jump back to reality, closing the tie on my first, last and only four undergraduate years, I no longer feel the need for more. While I was cut by failures that led me to lose my way, only to be tied back by successes, it’s the combination of these seemingly contradictory outcomes that leaves me satisfied.

And as my time comes to a close, that does not mean it’s the end of seeking out new successes, new paths and even new losses.

So I hope you thank yourself, for allowing yourself to experience all these antithetical experiences.