The happy end of happy endings

I have a poor memory.

I forget even the birthdays of close friends, and I struggle to recall small details even about the best days of my life. My memory doesn’t fail me so badly that I can’t pass tests or remember the storylines of favorite books, but my patchwork of recollections still gives me pause: How does my mind determine what counts?

I remember lionizing my fifth grade teacher, esteeming her so highly that I wanted to become a teacher myself — I pictured lesson plans and name tags, books read aloud and science projects gone amiss. I don’t recall when I stopped wanting to be a teacher.

In middle school, I remember being so awed by “The West Wing” that I dreamed of a lifetime in public service. Throughout high school, I imagined running for office, hiring campaign staff, reading endless policy proposals and negotiating legislation late into the night.

In my first years of college, I recall clearly when my visions of politics faded into ambitions in theater, a passion I’d set aside for years but could ignore no longer. In the past few months, however, that dream has dissolved like the others. And now, momentarily void of direction and ambition, I am left with my remembered dreams.

Poring over my 21 years, one particular trait sticks in my memory: I desperately need happy endings. In fiction and reality, I recoil at story arcs that end in despair. To stay invested in any dream, any story — even one bereft of consequences — I need to believe it will stick the landing.

As I seek to find a pattern in my bygone aspirations, this lesson feels vital. I wonder if each ambition lasted only until it seemed unattainable; I wonder if my mounting misgivings made defeat seem certain and resistance seem futile. I am, after all, a slave to success, adhering to a diet of happy endings.

As I graduate college, however, these fears feel faulty. Perhaps when something starts, I fret about its end — I need to anticipate joy. But I forget things, and lately, my failure to remember strikes me more and more like the power to forget. Maybe my new dreams can be less concrete if I know I’ll move on from failure, forgetting unhappy endings without living to regret them.

When I graduate, I will be quarantined at home in the city of my birth, a place I have not lived in 15 years. Here, I am surrounded by people who recall me as a child but who live in a city I can barely remember. My memories here are few, and my time here is limited. Returning to my hometown seems more like an interregnum than the beginning of the rest of my life. And it feels, therefore, like a perfect time to paint a new figurative self-portrait of the artist as a young man — to decide anew who I think I am.

Above all, I hope to embody the best cocktail of my past selves. I want to reaffirm the optimism that served me so well as a child. I want to renew my faith in the enduring American project, to believe again that our politics can be made righteous. I want to start wielding my imperfect memory to its full potential, working harder to remember birthdays and forget the pain of paradise lost.

At the close of college, the winds are changing. History books will soon be garnished with new chapters, and paradigms seem as sturdy as pillars of salt. My three years at UC Berkeley seem fleeting in retrospect, but perhaps this moment can be a necessary course correction. I accomplished little in college but learned lessons I don’t fear I’ll forget. My old ambitions died at UC Berkeley, yet the very concept of aspiration holds new meaning.

I no longer wish to be anything; now, I covet the capacity to do things.

Perhaps the best lesson I learned at UC Berkeley was actually rather simple: Not everything matters. Some things deserve to be forgotten. I couldn’t tell you the names of my professors from the spring semester of freshman year. I don’t recall how I felt the day I dropped out sophomore year. I don’t even remember how I first met my best friend during GBO.

But I remember crying at the top of the Campanile. I recall finishing the Berkeley Half Marathon and heading straight to work in San Francisco. And I doubt I’ll ever forget the euphoric cheer as I left my last exam freshman year, stepping out into the cool, starry night to revel with everyone else who was finally free.

My years at UC Berkeley presented such an array of superficial and authentic people that I now see myself more clearly. I want to be the kind of man who gets right down to brass tacks. I want to tell people I love them more quickly and with confidence. And I want to forget with panache, to allow for complex endings, to ground myself in the life I’ve lived.

So maybe, in the end, college won’t be unforgettable. But I think I’ll remember the moments that mattered.