"The hardest part isn't finding what you need to be, it's being content with who you are." — The Ataris

I said before that soon I would post a copy of the the talk I'll be giving on POW to a group of new first years this July. I was one of two people chosen to give a talk about relationships. If you know me, you know I've never really had a romantic relationship in my life...so what do I talk about? But the more I thought about it, I realized that "relationships" don't have to point to someone you're dating. We have so many other relationships - it doesn't even have to point to another person or persons. I wrote about my relationship with myself, which I think is the most important relationship of all. Since yesterday (April 14th) was my "one year anniversary" since I got my nose pierced and that's a big part of my relationship with myself, I wanted to post this to explain. This post might be a little long, but really... this is a good story! Also, I'll post a song at the end which was sort of my "theme" of last Spring semester and that I still really love. Maybe it could be considered my "wedding song." (Now you really have to read this to get it :) ).

My name is Sunny Masison, I’m a Spanish/history double major and I’m going to be a junior at Saint Mike’s. I came from a great high school in Massachusetts. The school was small, but not too small, there was an honest feeling of belonging and community among students and teachers and I felt like I was a part of something, I felt like I fit there. I wanted to find the same thing at college. In high school, things were going pretty well. I was involved, I usually did well in school and I strengthened my support systems over those four years. I have a wonderful group of friends and a great mom and little brother. However, when I got to Saint Mike’s, I was so excited to do something new and give up my life at home for this adventure. This was where I wanted to go, I was excited to live in Vermont, be away from everything great that I had created at home and learn to create it again at Saint Mike’s.

My first semester was a little shaky. In the first month of school, I started to panic about what would become of my great life at home. I became far too focused on what was happening at home, I became preoccupied with constantly “keeping in touch” and drilling into my friends and family that I loved them, cared about them and that I wanted them to call me…often. It was too much. I love my friends, and I’m sure you do too, and for as much as I love them I realized that for me, it’s wasn’t as important for us to tell each other every detail of every day. I do talk to my mom every day and I keep in fairly regular contact with my friends, but for me it’s most important to just share all the best things and make sure everyone is doing well. My preoccupation with keeping in touch and maintaining relationships at home turned into a preoccupation with building up my new relationships at school. I wanted so much to be friends with every person on my floor, every person I met and to be so friendly that I would be the one that they came to if they had something to talk about or needed help. I wanted to be superfriend and meet everyone I could, thinking that this was the best way to get used to college and really “be a part of it.” I decided I needed to be more involved, and started speaking up and doing more all over campus. I wanted my college life to be “perfect” – in doing so, I stretched myself thin and got frustrated and tired of the college situation before Christmas break.

My second semester started stressed, as I was taking more credits and still trying to please everyone. As I started to become more comfortable with a small set of friends and I stopped trying to placate everyone, and stopped pushing myself to be superfriend, the frustration of first semester began to vanish. With these new attitudes, I also learned to let go of home. I didn’t need to constantly keep up to date with my friends, I needed to move on to what the good things for me at Saint Mike’s were. My Leap weekend, which is a weekend of retreat put on by Campus Ministry, pushed me in this direction. This is going to sound silly: but I started to like myself more than I ever had. I mean, I had had this really sweet life at home, but I started to realize that without the independence and new experiences that college brought, I hadn’t been really being me before this point. I was being influenced by the likes and ideas of too many other friends and family, and I wasn’t taking my own likes and ideas with enough importance. But at Saint Mike’s, I was. Flying on this wave of enthusiasm, I applied to be an RA, kept up participation in the Leap community, was a class senator in the Student Association and these were all things I genuinely enjoyed doing for me. I was so comfortable with my friends that it felt like we had always known each other. For the first time, I was doing so well in school, I was surprising even myself. I got invited to the honors program. I cared about everything I was doing and was excited for every day, there was always something to look forward to.

As the semester continued, a few problems arose. My dad’s small business that I mentioned was becoming worse, and I came to the troubling truth that although my first year had been paid for by other means, my parents were about to get hit hard economically and there would be no funding for my tuition. I was going to be on my own, so it was up to me to decide where I would go. I was devastated, because I was finally feeling that I had found my place – Saint Mike’s was where I really belonged and I felt right being here. I went through two or three weeks where I was stressed, anxious and needed to figure out what to do. I applied to transfer to several state schools, but I knew that wasn’t what I really wanted to do. One night I was in my room alone in Lyons, my first year dorm in the quad, and it felt like everything was falling apart. I decided that night that Saint Mike’s was where I needed to be because it was where I felt like me, where I really liked myself. It came together and I knew that regardless of the struggles associated with paying for college by myself, including graduating with substantial debt, I needed to be here. I made pleas to financial aid, talked to different people and got a lot of support from my friends and family, at school and home. I ended up very lucky with my financial aid package and have been able to stay a student at Saint Mike’s.

The most important part of this for me was the empowerment I felt when I took this responsibility on. I was taking charge of what was happening in my own life and I was happy with everything I was doing. Things were coming together – I ended up getting an RA position, I got closer with my friends and made other ones that weren’t so forced as when I was superfriend, I continued to do well in school and besides getting good grades I felt like I was really learning and improving in almost all areas of my life. Things were good, and I had created it all by myself. On John Mayer’s live album “Where the Light Is”, he has an interlude in one of the songs where he talks to the crowd and he says “I made a lot of things happen for myself. That’s a really cool sentence when you’re in your twenties…I made a lot of things happen for myself.” This is how I felt. At home, my life had been great, but I never felt like I was doing anything for myself. All of the great parts of my life at Saint Mike’s were because I had worked for them and gotten myself there, not because of anyone else. I was really proud. Of all the people I met my first year, I felt like I had met my real self for the first time, and I really liked her. I didn’t feel obligated to anyone, I felt empowered and capable because of all I was accomplishing on my own.

When people are talking about marriage, a lot of the time they say, make sure that the other person is “the one” because that person is someone you’ll be with for the rest of your life, you need to be most comfortable and most loved by them. In my spring semester my first year, I started thinking about this and what I decided is that I disagree. I think the person you need to love the most is yourself, because regardless of who you marry or who you’re friends with or who you work with, while it’s important to get along with them, the person that you are really with forever is yourself, you can’t get away from you. I think that it’s most important that you love yourself. I came to this conclusion slowly over the course of the semester, but during Easter break of my first year it really culminated and I decided that, in a very un-selfish way, I really love myself. I think I’m great, partly because I know if I don’t think I’m great, it’s going to be a very long life with me, and who else is going to love me if I don’t even love me? I promised myself that regardless of what anyone else thought or how any of my other relationships came and went, I was sticking with myself. To symbolize this, and because I felt like I wanted to do something momentous so I could remember how I felt right then, when I got back from Easter, I got my nose pierced. I was never the kind of girl that did that kind of thing, but why not? I like to think of it as my wedding ring to myself, and because it’s right on my face, it’s a constant reminder of my independence, my empowerment, my love for me and how proud I am of how I changed over my first year. I look at it and remember all of the good decisions I've made and how I did make a lot of things happen for myself - how I am able to continue doing these good things. Now, it’s one of my favorite things about the me that I like so much.