It's Nice To Be Here And Not In College

On revisiting your college town, rare comets, Gregory Alan Isokov, and breaking the cycle of self-destruction

❣️ Content warning: This post contains references to disordered eating and sexual assault. Please proceed with caution and know that if these themes have impacted your life in any way, I see and support you.❣️

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The 101 South was snarled with San Jose commuter traffic, but we made the drive anyway: my friend Chloe and I in her Hyundai Elantra, the trunk packed full with camping supplies and cowboy boots. Both of us were brimming with a silent, anxious anticipation, but we didn’t talk about it. We listened to the chaotic thrashing of drum and bass from the speaker instead, quipped about the weather, agreed that we needed to get our hands on the coveted SloDoCo donuts at least once over the weekend.

We were driving down to San Luis Obispo—SLO to Californians—the small coastal enclave where we’d both attended college several years prior. The happiest city in America, according to Oprah and other media pundits. Just saying the name would elicit wide-eyed grins from the well-meaning adults in my life who’d ask me about college.

“Oh, Cal Poly! Don’t you love it?” they’d chime, excited to be talking to a college freshman with the whole world ahead of them, and I would sigh and tell them no and watch their faces sag despite my best efforts at mincing my words politely.

“I didn’t really imagine myself going to school in a small town,” I’d explain, trying to resuscitate the conversation and my own rapidly plunging likability. “I grew up in Oakland. I think it’s probably just culture shock.” This seemed like a good enough answer, and they’d nod and look at me with large, sad eyes before shuffling away, and I would tell myself I was doing the Lord’s work by upending the ridiculous narrative that a place like SLO could possibly be the happiest city in America. Especially for a homesick, self-loathing college student like me.

Do you remember when Shrek and Donkey pull up to Duloc to meet Lord Farquaad in the first movie, and they’re greeted by that creepy puppet show singing about how Duloc is a perfect place? And Shrek and Donkey are just standing there looking on with mouths agape and wondering if this could possibly be real? That’s how I felt like a lot of these interactions would go.

We pulled into town around 10 p.m. on Friday evening. The breeze hit me first—cool crystals of coastal air mixed with the familiar soft, damp scent of cow manure sliding off the hills. I braced myself at the side of the car, ready for the wave of familiar college-era feelings to hit me.

This was not the happiest city in America, at least not for me when I lived here. Throughout my four years, I’d resented myself wholly for having chosen the easy route: staying in California and studying journalism instead of leaving the state for a bigger city, maybe a more prestigious institution. I’d had the option to do so and decided to play it safe. SLO always felt too small, too cramped in by all the mountains. The lack of skyscrapers or even a single bar that could pass as relatively cool confounded me.

But beyond that, SLO—and Cal Poly especially—felt like a world in which embodying the worst of our culture’s values was the norm. It served as social currency. Here, people only amounted to anything if they were thin, blonde, rich, probably in business school—everything that I was not.

February of senior year, pink balayage included 😩

This was a society dominated by the frat bros who didn’t know how to do anything useful except play beer die on their front lawns and throw parties in their dilapidated trap houses, who’d hang up Confederate flags and signs outside their windows on freshman move-in day: “Parents, drop your daughters off here!” Let’s not even get into the shit that happened within the four sticky walls of those frat parties—for my own sake, I try to forget.

This was the place where hundreds of youth groups embarking on their small missions around campus would descend upon you, unabashedly inviting you to find God with them as you sat alone at a picnic table in the main plaza, feeling the 9 a.m. sun already pricking sweat into your armpits and your backpack already too heavy, wondering if the singular apple and black coffee you had for breakfast had somehow put too many calories into your body that morning.

It was not uncommon to constantly weigh questions like this. The pervasive obsession with thinness was one of the most sinister byproducts of Cal Poly’s happy, healthy lifestyle culture, and I know I’m not the only one who got to campus and decided she needed to lose 20 pounds instantly. We all fell victim to striving for the “Poly dolly” image, so much so that experts worried about the growing trend of exercise-induced anorexia on campus. (Shoutout to Kristine for writing this Mustang News article, I hope you’re well.)

This was the place where I’d let the toxicity of this fitness-and-frat-forward culture eat me alive. I’d watched myself ping pong between cycles of starvation and binge eating, waxing and waning from nearly skeletal to bloated and moon-faced. I’d developed bruises on my hipbones from constantly touching them to make sure my belly didn’t roll over them when I sat down. This was the place I’d once allowed myself half a Lärabar as a “treat” after acing a midterm. (If you’ve ever eaten a Lärabar before, you understand how utterly ridiculous this is.) This was the place I’d punished myself hard on the rec center’s indoor track for daring to have a body, sprinting lap after lap on an empty stomach, where I’d discovered that alcohol was the only thing that actually made me feel like I could deal with the place and people around me, and chiefly myself.

This was the place where I learned to lean hard into self-isolation, never able to fully immerse myself into the clubs and organizations I’d signed myself up for for fear of something, I’m not sure what.

Happiest city in America. It felt like it was filled with a bunch of puppets singing Duloc is a perfect place, and I was the ogre looking in from the outside.

I waited for the memories of what it felt like to be in college to come rushing back to me as I started unloading the car. But to my grateful surprise, they didn’t. The smell of the breeze was pleasant. I was excited to spend a weekend away with Chloe. All I could think about was how I couldn’t wait to get to the beach and eat a High Street Deli sandwich tomorrow.

* * *

As the weekend went on, my suspicions were confirmed: college was a miserable time because of who I was, not where I was.

I’m not saying that to be mean, and of course, there were deeply serious issues at Cal Poly that would have affected me regardless of my mindset. I do still think that some people are a little delusional when they call SLO the “happiest city in America” without addressing its seedy underbelly. But walking through SLO again as a mostly content 29-year-old, Anaïs Nin’s voice rang through my head: we don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.

In college, I saw SLO through eyes that burned with guilt and shame. I hated myself for having made a choice I knew I’d regret. It had driven me into cycles of self-destruction that didn’t just ruin my gut, but my self-esteem. I wanted to hide from the world and mostly myself. I’d felt like an outsider all four years because I never allowed others to bring me into the fold, despite their genuine efforts to do so (looking at all the wonderful people in Mustang News). I clipped my own wings before I’d even gotten a chance to lift off the ground.

This weekend, I saw SLO as I am now. I’m not saying I approve of all of my past choices or that I’m always happy with where I’m at. But at the very least, I’ve put years between me and the person I used to be. I can see through the eyes of a person who’s decided to make peace with her body instead of always trying to escape from it. I saw SLO through the eyes of a published writer who knows that, without her alma mater, she wouldn’t have the career she has now. I saw it through the eyes of a grown woman who knows that the grass is greener where you water it, and that despite my inner turmoil, Cal Poly did give me an outstanding education, plus some lifelong friends to boot. SLO is objectively a stunning place—those mountains no longer make me feel like I’m being suffocated in shrink-wrap, maybe because I’m not suffocating myself through self-destructive habits.

Chloe and I floated around our old haunts with supremely peaceful energy about us. We got lattes at Scout Coffee, ate breakfast at Linnaea’s, drank cheap cocktails and listened to live music at Frog & Peach. We watched the Morro Bay otters crack open crabs and mollusks on their little bellies. I got my High Street sandwich even though the wait time was an hour. We picked up donuts and ate them on the dunes at Montaña de Oro; I devoured mine without thinking about its sugar content or offsetting it with exercise. I watched the fog blanket the violent sea below us and was happy to be there.

We made it to Cal Poly’s campus, too—my first time back since I’d graduated. We started at the architecture building and realized that a bench Chloe had built in one of her classes was still standing there. We wandered over to the graphic arts building, home of the journalism department. I thought about the newsroom, the one place on this campus where I felt I did belong, even if all I did was work alone in a corner a lot of the time. I thought about the sign hanging above the clock: “Where’s the story?” I wondered if it was still there. I picked up a copy of Mustang News and hoped the kids running the paper now knew I was proud of them.

“It’s nice to be back here and be happier,” Chloe said as we admired the view from the roof of the architecture building, and I toasted my High Street sandwich to that.

As we walked past the electrical engineering building, Chloe told me she’d been imagining running into her former self here. It made me think of a song by Gregory Alan Isakov that goes,

Weightlessness, no gravity
Were we somewhere in-between

I'm a ghost of you, you're a ghost of me
A bird's-eye view of San Luis

He might not even be talking about San Luis Obispo, California, but to me he is. I couldn’t imagine running into college Cecilia here. I’m pretty sure she’s dead and gone—I’m a ghost of her, she’s a ghost of me. And thank God I let my college self die, because even though I forgive her for everything, I’m glad my present self is behind the wheel.

Our return drive to Oakland was marred by several mechanical failures of the Hyundai, including a flat tire. We stayed in SLO much longer than anticipated and finally drove home in the dark.

We had just pulled off the highway so I could switch into the driver’s seat. As I pulled back on the 101, Chloe gasped and said, “Oh my god, there’s a comet!”

I looked up through the windshield and there it was: high above the bridge of the overpass, a huge fist of light burning a magnificent arc through the sky, its tail behind it like a whip carving the darkness in two.

It was Comet A3, we discovered later through a Google search. A comet that wouldn’t make an appearance Earthside for another 80,000 years. Had we not gone to SLO that weekend, we wouldn’t have seen it. More likely, had we not run into a million technical issues trying to leave SLO on Sunday, we wouldn’t have seen it.

I thought about it the whole drive back. And for the first time, I wanted to thank SLO for everything it had given me, even if my years there had nearly broken me, even if all I had to show for my struggle was a little bit of perspective ten years later and a comet sighting on the way home.