Beginning to write my psenti-speak feels like some sort of full-circle moment. Not because I’m laying to rest as a hardworking member of the English Press Club—far from it, really—but because of how I feel at the mere prospect of actually writing and publishing this: like some sort of fake, “pretend” fourth yearite. The imposter syndrome is absolutely off the charts with this one. I call this full circle because I remember feeling a version of this while writing EPC articles in my first year; back then, I felt like a fake, “pretend” good writer. The difference, of course, is that I definitely was pretending back then, and now, much as I would like to deny it, I am in fact actually in my final year.

I understand that the generally accepted purpose of a psenti-speak is to pass on some sort of advice to one’s juniors, but my only piece of advice is to not do what I did, which is an awfully small amount of content for an article. So instead, I am going to use this space to ramble semi-coherently about what I took away from campus life, and subject any unfortunate reader to the task of deciphering it. Fittingly, this is extremely similar to what having a conversation with me was like in my final semester.

My friends and I often refer to campus as ‘the rectangle’. I always saw it as a sort of trial, or “pretend” world—it had all the components of the real world, just lesser in number and significantly smaller. I treated campus life as an experimental real life—I tried to “test” everything I would want to do later in life in real cities with real responsibilities, but in that safe, protected rectangle, where nothing was real and my actions did not have consequences. Naturally, I learned over time that actions do have consequences and that any real life experience cannot be equated to a “practice” one, regardless of what I liked to tell myself. 

So now, I ask, what is the consequence of treating my two-point-something years of college life (shoutout to the COVID batch) as something that was an experiment, “just pretend”, a game? On one hand, I was not entirely wrong about the testing-things-out idea. I am very glad I learned how to take care of myself on campus, where things were easy and most responsibilities that I’d have to handle by myself when living alone were taken care of. On the other hand, it definitely was not all just pretence. It feels disingenuous to all my campus experiences to describe them with such a word.

I truly believe I have experienced and displayed my full range of emotion while on campus. I have been an absolutely rude, hateful person to some and loved others with my whole heart. Somehow, I have emerged from that with the most amazing set of friends anyone could imagine, something which I am incredibly grateful for. What I think about often now, however, is the large set of people who I did not experience either of these extremes of emotion with, but still spoke to and interacted with more or less regularly. College was a unique time in life when I was surrounded 24/7 by people I knew and had a lot in common with. Despite that, not all acquaintances bloom into close friendships, and I know I will inevitably fall out of touch with so many people who have been a constant in my life for so long. It’s a sad thought which I had even during my college life and fueled my idea that it was all just pretend—if I wouldn’t remember them, and they wouldn’t remember me, did that connection ever mean anything? I now realise that it did, though, because those casual interactions were a huge factor in what made campus life what it was. An isolated close group of friends would not have left the same impact on me without the surrounding environment of constant companionship. I am thankful for every person I ever spoke to and am sorry if my presence was unpleasant. 

There is a scene in a video game that I love where, towards the end of the story, you look into a mirror and the narrator tells you that despite everything, it’s still you. That effectively summarises what I learned throughout the last three years. Any persona I displayed, anything I did, any experience I had, was still me, regardless of how authentic I felt while doing it. The feeling of inauthenticity is authentic in its own right. Even if I was “testing” an experience in an isolated rectangle, the experience had an impact on me and others by virtue of the fact that it happened and I was an active actor in it. My choices did matter, actually. 

As any self-proclaimed writer, my self-assigned mirror is the Google Doc into which I type. I stand before you, a real fourth yearite, shouldering the consequences of the last phase of my life and buoyed by its successes, and ready to move on to the next.