Anticipation is the worst. All of the planning, the hopes, the doubts, the worries—it’s more than exhausting. College, especially in the spring, is full of anticipation. Students are constantly in the mode of planning—they’re in thick with expectation for courses, for majors, for extracurriculars, for potential jobs.

I think there is a misnomer among students and the older adults who no longer remember being 22—the idea that somehow by the time you are graduating college you have yourself pretty well figured out. That even if you don’t have the right job offer now, you are pursuing it and you know what it is. And your thoughts on religion: you understand them and they make sense to you. Maybe marriage, maybe you have a plan for that too. You have a vision for the future and you are on the road to attaining it.

Well. I don’t have a vision. I graduate in two weeks, and my dreams are different every day. Some mornings I wake up determined to go to law school, other mornings I want to go into journalism or academia. Sometimes I want to live in a big city, or not live anywhere and just travel, while other times I simply want to go back home to Fairbanks. Sometimes I need God, sometimes I don’t.

I don’t really have anything much figured out. “Hi, I’m Olivia. I like to run, to hike, to write poetry, to read and I like coffee and wine, but not together.” This about the extent of my self-knowledge as of today, May 13, 2011.

This fact has paralyzed me for weeks. There is a lot of anxiety behind not knowing yourself. I think the natural inclination, for me at any rate, is to rush it. I want to make rapid fire decisions that will give me a sense of identity without digging too deeply. I seem to think to myself “Even if I don’t like it, if I say I like it maybe it will come true.”

I wish, for my last Weekly column, I had some advice to impart to you. I would like to tell you to read more or to listen to a lot of live music when you have the chance. But I don’t know you. I don’t know what’s good for you. I hardly know me.

In interior Alaska, the vegetation seems really drab. It’s a lot of spindly birch trees and black spruce that attract little notice, but survive sixty below winters for many decades. Once a year, however, we get a bright pink flower called Fireweed. They are everywhere, and for two weeks the town is fuchsia. But only for two weeks. The late August rains turn them to dust and the world becomes dark green then brown and then white.

For this reason I have always preferred the black spruce. They take their time, they don’t need to invite a lot of attention. I think I will have to take my cue from them. Don’t anticipate so much. Take my time. Grow Slow.