Given that I am the resident crown prince of tl;dr, I suppose it’s only fitting that the first draft of my last ever NYU Local post was over 1,800 words long. As a result, the powers that be elected that in the second draft I should divide it up into five parts to be spread over the course of my last week here, probably not realizing that would only compel me to expand it even further. I hope you guys will stick around to read the whole thing; if there’s one thing I’d like people to take away from my time here, it’s this.

Speaking of my time here: Last week, I told a fellow NYU student that I write about politics, and he asked me what field I was interested in. I was tired and not all there, but even so my response was pretty dumb. It something like: “I’m a Philosophy major, so I’m, uh, interested in ideas? And the, y’know, the progress of ideas.” Then I mumbled something about Nixonland.

The subject changed quickly, but the fact that I couldn’t answer the question properly kind of freaked me out. It stuck with me for the rest of the night, and so on the subway ride home I started asking myself a different question: Wait, so what have I been blogging about for the past two and a half years? This series of posts is an attempt to provide a satisfactory answer.

You’d think I would already know the answer, but keeping a blog is kind of a weird experience in that way–one that’s both uniquely comforting and uniquely terrifying. Comforting, because it’s a communal activity; good blogs form circles of commenters and like-minded bloggers. The work feels more organic, like a conversation, and there’s little of the creeping sense of loneliness you get from working on a long-form writing project in isolation.

But with those long-form projects, you can outline. Once the general form of it takes shape, you can go back and edit earlier passages to fit the whole. With a blog, you’re just stumbling along in the dark and hoping that eventually it will cohere into a meaningful statement. A thousand different bits of pieces of other thoughts go into it, and because you have nothing to rely on but your own instincts, it becomes a constantly shifting snapshot of who you are the time you write it. That’s the terrifying part: while all good and honest writers are fearless about presenting their unalloyed, naked selves to the readers, blogging is the only medium in which, fearless or not, you don’t really have a choice in the matter. Keep at it for long enough, and inevitably you’re going to show people more of yourself than you’d like.

That’s scary, but it’s also kind of useful. For one thing, it keeps you honest, or at least punishes dishonesty. Plus, when you write something in the heat of the moment, then go back and read it with the benefit of perspective, you find out some stuff about yourself that even you didn’t know. Paging through my author archives is kind of like reading the story of me: my emotional and intellectual development at one of the pivotal moments in my life.

That pivotal moment is, of course, college–which, oddly enough, shares some of blogging’s stumbling-through-woods quality. We show up at welcome week with pretty much no clue about what will be basic facts of our lives for the next 3-4 years. Then we pick courses and eventually a major that expresses, in one way or another, the person we expect to become upon graduation. When all the coursework is done and we’ve said goodbye to our classmates–and this is especially true for our Gallatin friends–we’ve got to construct a narrative in our minds about how it all fits together.

That narrative is bigger than a diploma–it is, more than anything else, what we’re going to walk out of this place with and carry around for every moment of every day of the rest of our lives. It’s the story of how we staggered into adulthood.

For me, NYU Local is part of that narrative. And because so much of college-me is in the posts I wrote for this site, the site itself turns into a sort of record of that narrative. NYU Local covers a lot of subjects, but the one it covers most intently–and yet the one that no one ever mentions aloud–is the story of how all of us here on staff get a little bit closer to becoming ourselves.

So who am I? And what the hell have I been writing about?

Photo by Wikipedia user David Shankbone used under a Creative Commons license.