Holder Hall

i am so happy. i had so much fun.

Twenty-one years ago I showed up at Princeton University, ready to start college. I was coming from the UK, where I’d been going to a boarding school that was sort of a saving grace after another boarding school that I went to that turned out to be sort of a reform school, which obviously turned me into a bad kid. Within four weeks I’d had my first cigarette, my first joint, my first sip of alcohol, which I believe was a straight shot of Malibu at eleven am. My parents were confused that I’d gone from this sort of sweet nerdy Canadian girl into a hard-Benson & Hedges-ing British renegade and fought over whether I deserved a second chance at this more expensive school, or if I was just like, a washout. Surprise! Both were true. 

I’d been in England for two years before college and then before that I’d spent five years in Canada and before that I’d lived mostly in Germany, so I was pretty dissociated from US culture by the time I got to college. I understood that it was a big deal to go to an Ivy but also everyone in my family went to Ivies and then got PhD’s and law degrees so truly, this was just the water I swam in. It literally did not occur to me that I wouldn’t get into one of the Ivies that I applied to. If this makes you hate me, I am sorry! I am just describing what it was like to grow up in my particular slice of educational and financial privilege. 

I showed up and had been randomly assigned to Holder Hall in Rockefeller College but then the first introductory night the Housemaster was like “they SAY you’ve been randomly assigned but actually you’ve been CHOSEN, you are the BEST,” and anyway it’s taken a lot of therapy and time to unlearn the idea that being chosen and being the best is the only thing that matters. 

I loved living in Holder. I loved college. I had been bullied in high school for having a weird accent and being weird in general and liking Shakespeare, but I got to college and no one knew how weird and bullied I’d been and I got to do one of my favorite things, which is to reinvent myself. Freshman year I had big glasses and brown hair and then sophomore year I had contacts and blonde hair and then junior year I got really into Adderall and blow and partying and it was amazing! It was the best time ever. I was an architecture major and spent all my time in studio and had a really nice boyfriend who was in a fraternity and so I made friends with all his fraternity brothers, some of whom I’d actually known since I’d lived in Holder, and I dunno what to tell you man, it was great. 

Of course at the time I thought it was so stressful and that no one understood the pressures of being in architecture school and I kept wanting to get out and get into the “real world,” whatever that is, let me know if you find it, and I couldn’t wait to graduate and move to New York, where I knew my life would really begin!!! I was a terrible architecture student and I couldn’t draw or design anything but I figured out eventually that I was able to write about architecture so I took my massive chip on my shoulder and just graduated and moved to New York and wrote about architecture. 

This weekend I saw a bunch of my old college friends and on the way home from dinner I kept saying to P, “I am so happy, I had so much fun.” I think there’s nothing like shooting the shit with a bunch of people you’ve known since you were moving into a dorm and believed that you were the most special and the most chosen. We’ve known each other through jobs and relationships and marriages and kids and divorces and career changes and we’ve known each other through distance and alcoholism and recovery and disconnection and reconnection but mostly what I noticed is that we didn’t talk about any of that, we just talked about the most random shit, I can’t even remember, but is there anything better or worse than being seen for who you are now and who you were then and all the people you’ve been in between? 

P asked me on the drive home if I’d been glad that he was there and I said of course, everything is better when he’s there, but I was also glad because it felt like I was able to merge worlds, bring my old life into my new life, make them one consistent life, stitch them together. I feel like the thing that’s different now is I’m not waiting for my life to start anymore, it’s just happening. I am so happy. I had so much fun.