Encounter with the past

On Saturday I ran into a classmate of mine from senior year of my undergraduate degree. It's funny to be reminded about your former self sometimes. It was four years ago that I was a computer science major and this classmate and I had to endure a torturous class called Software Engineering. We reminisced about the amount of hell we went through for that class. It involved spending nights and every Saturday at the computer lab and working under the direction of a grouchy, tough-to-please professor. This then led to a "where are they now?" gossip session about professors. I was surprised how easily the computer lingo came back to me. HCI and parallel computing and software and semantics. I still remember. Sometimes I think I'm forgetting how to add. But it's all back there, somewhere.

I'm usually kind of afraid of running into people from that time, since I'm afraid they'll judge me for the decisions I've made since. But I ended up talking to this person anyway and was relieved that his reaction was more of curiosity than judgment. What would possess a person who was doing well in a computer science program to finish her degree and then make a complete 180 and get a master's degree in English? I muddled my way through an explanation. I just couldn't stop talking; I kept layering on the reasons, and I don't know whether I made any sense at all. No one asks me these questions. Maybe I jumped at the chance to try to explain, to both him and myself.

I don't know if I was entirely truthful, though. It's too easy to say that it just wasn't me, that computers didn't suit me and one day I woke up and wanted to be a writer. Not true. I think I've always wanted to be a writer, and it has been a strong pull. But the fact that I chose computer science and stayed with it so many years and was able to do well in it, while really wanting to do something else, says something about me, too.

Something I kind of talked around was the fact that I wasn't very happy back then. In fact, the words that come to mind are cynical, brittle, and lonely. I think about myself now and maybe I'm not Ms. Sunshine and Happiness, but compared to that time, I'm really a different person. I'm much more optimistic, more ambitious, more confident. Maybe I'm the kind of person I'd actually want to hang out with now. Back then, not so much.

For one thing, back then I was still in the depths of being painfully shy. As evidence of how much I've changed, Saturday I didn't have much hesitation going up to this person and talking to him. I wanted to find out what had happened in the old department in the past few years, so I just struck up a conversation and asked. In contrast, when I was in the class four years ago, over two semesters, I never had even one real conversation with him, even though it was always in the back of my mind that he might be a smart and interesting person to talk to. I think he once asked me if he could borrow a quarter, and I said about two words and got all embarrassed about it. That was the extent of my shyness. It was ugly.

But even greater than getting over my shyness is the difference in my attitude--my whole attitude about life has changed. I was cynical to the point of self-hurt back then. I don't think what I was studying had anything to do with it. I was convinced that there was no way I could succeed at what I really wanted to do, which was to write. I was sure that the future was going to be full of drudgery and there was absolutely nothing I could do to change that. Thus I had no real goals or ambitions. I didn't think about school in terms of my long-term plans, and I had no great respect for what I was learning. I got decent grades, but I didn't think much about how valuable the knowledge was that I was receiving. It was more like, let's just get through the system as soon as possible. Make it through a mountain of drudgery in school, then on to more drudgery in the workplace. At least with a computer science degree I might have a shot at getting a decent-paying job. That was my view of life.

Four years ago, life was survivable, but it wasn't good. I was angry because the world wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be. I was grumpy due to spending so much time in computer labs. I was shy and therefore lonely. I was purposeless and I didn't care. Honestly, I don't think many people realize the extent of my cynicism at the time. Surely, the above-mentioned classmate didn't know. But I know, and I know how different things are now.

Sometime in the past four years the window opened and the sunshine came flooding in. At some point I shed the bad attitude and now, shockingly, I'm actually looking forward to the future (at least some aspects of it, anyway.) Maybe because I've worked at a place like the newspaper and I've seen some of the possibilities that are out there. Maybe because I'm actually doing OK socially now whereas before I always thought that I could never get over my shyness enough to thrive in the real world. Maybe because I realized the valueless, purposeless, ambitionless life wasn't working out too well for me. Maybe the past four years haven't been easy, but somehow their lessons have transformed me, and so I'm glad for what I've been through.