The Wellesley Experience

Flashback in a Film Reel: The Spin-off

By Natalie Marshall ‘21

I’ve been sitting on my bed in my second-floor Sev room for hours, trying to make sense of my “Wellesley experience.” Or, more specifically, trying to put it down in a neat couple thousand words. My problem is that I want it to have a linear arc, a beginning, middle, and end. A west-coast girl arrives in New England at a historically all-women’s college and struggles to adjust to her new environment, but eventually overcomes her troubles with the help of close friends and grows at ease in her no-longer-new world. We’re talking a four-season story arc, one for each year. The American college dream meets an academically rigorous environment, the realities of mental health struggles, some gay shit, and Nor’easters. Maybe there’d even be a plot twist or two—the one where she realizes that what she intended to major in is not at all what she really wants, the one where she gets a letter from her ex and they start talking again even though they’re three thousand miles apart and everyone knows that’s not a good idea, the one where she finds out the beautiful girl she thought was just being friendly is actually into her. There would be emotional highs and lows, a banging soundtrack, and themed episodes (MarMon, Headphone Disco, Dyke Ball). El Table could be their hangout spot, or the Shafer living room, or the 4th-floor study rooms in Clapp, or the first-year double in Pom. 

But this is an impossible fantasy. The reality is that my Wellesley experience has not been linear. For one thing, it has been geographically disparate: my first two years spent on campus, the majority of my third abroad in France, the spring of the third back in Oregon, in my childhood bedroom, the fall of my fourth with the beautiful girl and her family in Colorado. And finally, the spring of my senior year back on campus—Wellesley in the time of COVID—many of the people I began this journey with, and whom I associate most strongly with Wellesley, not on campus, not by my side. It’s strange to realize that I've spent almost as many of my Wellesley years off-campus as on. For another, being at Wellesley has not always been the dream. I struggled deeply with my mental health my first year; over that first winter break, I seriously considered transferring to the state school in my hometown. I still struggle sometimes. As a result, some of my memories are muddled and my emotions toward Wellesley themselves are, at times, muddled.  

There is also no arc because there is no one moment I can point to where I “figured things out,” where I reached a breaking point and prevailed. I arrived believing that I wanted to study political science or international relations and quickly realized that I liked the idea of those fields and not the reality. I was adrift; I felt like I had lost all sense of academic purpose. I stumbled into a French major, that I now wouldn’t trade for the world, because after so many years in an immersion school, I couldn’t imagine not being in a French class. I fell back in love with English, a subject that I don’t know I was ever truly out of love with, but that I didn’t like the idea of and that I couldn't romanticize for myself. My realizations, if I’ve had anything approaching the concept, have ebbed and flowed. I feel more confident in my decisions in some moments than in others. I’m emerging with academic passions, experience, and drive, a plan for next year, but no ten-year plan, not even a five-year plan. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. Arguably, I know that even less than my 18-year-old self did, or thought she did. 

So what then, is the Wellesley experience? Or how do I define my experience when much of what I think of as Wellesley did not even happen in Massachusetts, let alone on campus? The best description I can come up with is a film composed of different vignettes; flashbacks and memories captured in a multitude of textures and styles. Some I would rather erase and replace with something else—but I don’t, and I won’t––and others that I will treasure for the rest of my life. All defined, above all else, by people. I wish I could relive it. No, that’s not quite right. I don’t want to do it over or change anything. But I want to revisit all the scenes, walk through them like a ghost. So, I replay the reels in my mind. 

I go back to August in Keene, wandering around the Toadstool Bookshop talking about Nancy Drew with a girl who would become one of the most important people in my life, though I didn’t know it at the time. Then I’m in Oregon with her, trekking through old-growth forests and watching British TV shows. I’m on the bus to the airport with a girl I met in my dreaded American politics class, realizing how much we have in common, wanting desperately to be her friend. And there we are two and a half years later, in the Scottish highlands, listening to Harry Styles and “The Skye Boat Song.” In my mind’s eye, we sit in the Tishman tech booth, talking for hours. And another girl I befriended first year? We study in Starbucks together, cry together, see Lorde together. And she’s there in Scotland too, listening to pipe music in Hootanannys and dancing with me at the club in Edinburgh. I go back to the day we’re all eating French toast with coconut whipped cream together, thrift shopping, and taking photos in rainbow crosswalks. We’re in the arboretum, the movie theater, on the floor of the RD apartment. 

Then I’m with the beautiful girl, ice skating outside in freezing weather and setting off door alarms having our first kiss. And a year and a half later? We cook dinner together every night: soups and curries, pastas and stir-fries. Now I’m a sophomore, drinking wine out of mugs in the room of the senior I look up to; we talk about the Brontës and Tess, Marvel, and divorced parents. We’re in New York that following summer, watching Stranger Things and Fourth of July fireworks. I walk around the markets in Aix with a group of people I respect deeply and who are Wellesley to me, even if some of them don’t go there. We’re in sun-soaked Tavan, we’re waiting for the bus to Marseille, we sit on the roof of a church, we can barely move in the crowd of le Manoir. Then, I’m back at Wellesley having impromptu dance parties with my roommate. I’m sitting in the MIT student center at 3 am. I’m eating honey roasted peanut butter and spending hours reading in the Stone-D dining hall. I write thousands of words and rewrite them again and again. I go to concerts and therapy, Zoom classes and movie nights. I fly home and back again. 

This is but a fraction of my Wellesley experience. And there is no plot. Just things I did, people I grew close to, mistakes, successes, classes and parties, breakdowns, and late nights. What feels like a million vignettes. Maybe I don’t want to give it an arc; I just want to hold it all in my mind for as long as I can. 

Natalie Marshall ’21 (nmarsha3) knows she can’t repeat the past, but at least she can replay it in her mind from time to time. From the April/May 2021 issue.