I’m in Boston for a couple days for work. This marks my first return to the city since 1993, when I was a freshman at Emerson College. It was not a happy time. I came to Boston with my hopes high: I still (stupidly) believed that the best students went to private colleges as far away from home as possible, so I headed to Boston confident that everything was going to be awesome for me.

Ariel @ Emerson, 1993It wasn’t, though. I hated the Musical Theater program I was in (bleah: the Linklater technique was not for me) and didn’t really like the school (too many rich kids trying to act poor, and poor kids trying to act rich). I found Boston too big and cold and mean, and I was totally confused by New England’s personality, which was too reserved for my West Coast hippie-kid tastes.

The transition into college is bumpy for many freshman trying to break into the “real world” … but I definitely had an extremely rough time of it. I was an only child who was raised tucked away in the woods. My parents did their best to shelter me from popular culture and mainstream America, and even though my hometown is a half-hour ferry ride from downtown Seattle, I almost never ventured into the big city. At 18, I had almost no street smarts and none of the callouses needed to survive in an urban environment. I tried to be adventurous and head to a big Eastern city, and almost immediately realized that adventure be-damned, I’d made a mistake and was on the wrong coast, in the wrong program, at the wrong school.

…Also (this is the embarrassing part) I had a boyfriend in Seattle who I was madly in love with, despite his habit of dumping me over and over again. (Oh hi there, dysfunctional relationship.) I couldn’t really afford the private college I’d so badly wanted to attend, and with the exception of a couple awesome dorm buddies, there was pretty much nothing to hold me in Boston. At the end of fall ‘93 semester, I packed up my bags, admitted defeat, and flew back to Seattle.

A partial list of things that have happened since I left Boston:

  • That boyfriend and I stayed together/broke up at least a half dozen more times before finally breaking up for good (and I do mean GOOD) in fall of 1995.
  • My college savings (half of which I’d spent on one semester in Boston) lasted me for the remaining 3.5 years of my college career at the University of Washington.
  • I figured out how to live in cities (or at least West Coast cities) fell deeply in love with Seattle and also spent chunks of time in SF and LA.
  • I stopped singing. That’s sort of sad. (Although I did sing a few words of a Howard Jones song at the Salon of Shame Tuesday night!)
  • Got my Ivy League cred at Columbia University summer of 2001.
  • Established my writing career.
  • Wrote a book.
  • Tons of other stuff, bla bla bla

I don’t have any regrets about leaving Boston. It was a financially smart, even if the decision was more about yearning for my dysfunctional boyfriend than it was about money. But in some alternate universe, I kicked that boy to the curb in 1993 and stayed in Boston, graduating from Emerson with a $75k student loan debt and amazing vocal techniques. I probably would have ended up working in tech anyway (Boston’s dotcom scene is hot!) but it would have been a very different life.

I plan to do some walking around Back Bay today and see if I can catch any ghosts of my alternate self wandering around.