Wednesday, March 18, 2020 // The Statement
2B

Managing Statement Editor

Magdalena Mihaylova

Deputy Editors

Emily Stillman

Marisa Wright

Associate Editor

Reece Meyhoefer

 Designers

 Liz Bigham

 Kate Glad

 Copy Editors

 Madison Gagne 

 Sadia Jiban

 

Photo Editor 

Keemya Esmael

Editor in Chief

Elizabeth Lawrence

Managing Editor

Erin White

M

y feet were up on the dashboard of the 
passenger seat in my roommate Kevin’s 2015 
Subaru Forester. The sun was beginning 

to set as we drove back from Atlanta. We were listening 
to a crime podcast, an iced coffee by my side. We were 
somewhere in rural Ohio, a few hours from a return to 
Ann Arbor for the final semester of college, a time that 
is supposed to be pure, unencumbered by worry, loosely 
jovial. It’s the time — the last time — to live and learn 
before reality smacks you in the face like a stiff board.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through Twitter 

and came across an article written for the University of 
Missouri website by Wright Thompson, one of the greatest 
writers on this planet. As I was reading through the piece, 
I came across a line that blew me away.

I read it once. Paused. Took a breath. Looked up. Then I 

read it a few more times:

Sometimes it feels like we spend 45 percent of our lives 

trying to be something, 10 percent of our lives being it and 
45 percent having been it.

I thought about the prescience of reading that during 

my trip back up to Ann Arbor for the last round of the 
happiest era of my life. I thought about the call to action 
that phrase inadvertently makes: to live deliberately but 
conscientiously, to strive for more but appreciate what’s 
right there, to allow a healthy dose of nostalgia without 
letting it consume you, to appreciate who you are instead 
of obsessing over who — or what — you’d like to be. 

Thinking back to that moment now, there is a cruel 

irony in how everything has unfolded. This was supposed 
to be a self-reflective piece about the anxiety of constantly 
living in search of a destination. It was meant to be a sober 
confrontation of how we live our lives and what we value. 
I was going to delve into my personal fears about life after 
college, finding the right career and landing on my feet. I 
wanted to explore this flawed instinct we have to always 
set goals and how that breeds a lack of appreciation for the 
present. These were my primary worries no less than a 
week ago.

That irony is cruel because this past week we had our 

final moments of college ripped away from us due to the 
coronavirus outbreak: our last stretch of classes, our final 
months with friends, social gatherings, livelihoods and 
our graduation — all gone.

I have tears welled up in my eyes as I’m writing this. I 

don’t know which of my friends I’ve possibly seen for the 
last time. My family doesn’t get to come to the Big House 
and take pictures with me in my cap and gown. Instead 
of triumph, the best four years of my life are ending with 
an inauspicious, premature departure from a deserted 
campus, as I abide by an encouraged evacuation of a place 
I will always call home.

I was supposed to write this about the dichotomy of 

marrying our short-term aspirations with the macro 

visions we have for our lives. 

But sometimes, life happens.
I 

didn’t know I had anxiety 
until I came to college. I was 
dumped into a pool of 40,000 

people and was told to swim, and 
for a while I merely treaded water. 
I know I’m not alone in that — if 
anything, that makes my experience 
quite consistent with the student 
body.

I suppose that discomfort teaches 

you how to find yourself. That’s 
the only way to discover who you 
are. We must venture into that big, 
bold unknown to emerge a more 
complete person. 

These idealistic cliches are both 

true and supremely unhelpful for 
a lonely freshman searching for 
purpose. We’re told this romantic 
tale 
about 
what 
college 
was 

supposed to be and so I grew increasingly frustrated by 
the stagnation of my personal growth. Why isn’t this what 
it needs to be? My brain became flooded with thoughts 
and doubts and confusion, and that began to cripple me. 

I came to the University of Michigan knowing one 

person on campus, and even he was relatively new to 
my life. I didn’t know what I wanted to study or what I 
wanted to become. Having grown up in small, tight-knit 
communities all my life, I secretly harbored fears that I 
wouldn’t cut it outside those bubbles. I joined a fraternity 
to quell some of the lurking social anxiety I wasn’t truly 
ready to confront and I worried that Greek life would 
change who I was. I missed home. I longed, quietly and 
unassumingly, for the comforts of what I knew.

It feels peculiar, then, to be writing this next to my 

girlfriend and my four-year roommate in an off-campus 
coffee shop — completely heartbroken that, three and a 
half years later, it’s over. Just like that, it’s over. The people, 
the places, the city that made this the best four years of 
my life. All of it now lurks as a past tense in the narrative 
of my life. 

Nostalgia is healthy. But man, I just wasn’t ready for it 

yet.

Thompson’s words pierced me on that drive. They still 

do. I worry that as my peers and I strive for these high-
achieving, high-minded lives, we miss the forest for the 
trees. 

We miss the days we spent hanging out on the couch 

watching “The Bachelor” over a few beers. We miss the 
evenings in the library spent cracking jokes instead of 
studying. We miss the nights spent at 420 Maynard St., 
talking about life and University of Michigan sports and 

everything and nothing at all. We’d lose track of how many 
games of euchre we’d played and pretended to bemoan 
waking up early for our 8:30 a.m. classes the next day, as if 
we weren’t eager to do the same thing the very next night. 
We miss the road trips to far-off Big Ten cities, driving 
through the night as we played the most obscure music 
in our Spotify library — then stealing some dumb prop 
from the bowels of a football stadium and carrying it to 
the rental car like a goddamn trophy. We miss the meals 
shared. We miss the nights out. We miss those first days 
of spring after a long winter, the first day we get the “all-
clear” to wear shorts. And we’d take the grill out of the 
garage. We’d play music and toss a football. We didn’t have 
a care in the world.

Instead, we strain over internships and jobs. We 

complain about drama with friends. We bitch and moan 
and stress. Anything to get the grade. Anything to keep 
moving in a direction we’re told is “forward.” We get 
so bogged down in the stressors of a life we know to be 
brutally unpredictable.

Nothing is a better reminder of that fragility than a 

global pandemic taking over the world, upending our daily 
lives and threatening our health. The past few days have 
forced a kind of reflection I wasn’t prepared for. I’m sure 
many of my fellow seniors would say the same.

I don’t want to spend 45 percent of my life trying to 

be something and the other 45 percent having been 
something. But in order to spend 100 percent of our lives 
being ourselves, we have to become comfortable with the 
imperfections and incongruities life will bring. We have 
to dare to live optimistically and without fear. In this long 
journey of life, we have to find the beauty in the ordinary.

statement

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | MARCH 18 , 2020

BY MAX MARCOVITCH, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
How Michigan taught me to live

ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE

