Student Blog: When Did It Become Fall?

Autumn is my favorite season, and not just because my birthday is in September. Growing up in California, there wasn’t a huge shift in the temperature when there was a shift in the season. It just got a little bit cooler, and sometimes rainer. So when I moved to New York, and it was below 50 degrees for multiple days of the week, I thought to myself: this is real autumn. 

The last few years of autumn have brought many different changes to my life. My freshman year of college, my first autumn in New York brought me my first tattoo, and some pivotal emotional battles in life. I changed my major from Creative Writing to Journalism, and started on what I hoped would be a successful path for my future career. To be honest, at that time, my goals were simply to make it through my first semester. I had never been so far away from home or from my boyfriend, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to fare on my own. 

Last autumn was the first time I had felt like I knew what I was doing in the city. My classes were exciting, and I was truly settled. Looking back, I still feel like a very different person now than I was then. I feel more sure of who I am, and more confident in being myself and setting the boundaries that are important to me. I have started to find my artistic voice and really discover what I’m passionate about when it comes to the stories I want to tell. Though I suspect it’ll still take some time to fully flesh out the person I want to be, I feel like I have more of a handle on it than I did a year ago.

There seems to be hope in the air for the first time in a year this November. The dread of the presidential election had settled into my bones as a first-time voter. Even though we aren’t yet halfway through this political term, Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City has brought joy to so many people, especially in my generation.

To be completely candid, this is the first autumn in years that I haven’t felt the dark cloud of anxiety over my head, constantly interrupting my days. I struggled a lot last year with health anxiety, and being anxious in general, and this year, I feel more at ease every day than I have in a while. Maybe that’s growth!

My goals in life have become more clear to me this fall as well. I can picture myself in places and working for companies in the future that I hadn’t been able to before. In years past, it was difficult for me to imagine life after college. What does my routine look like when I’m not tied down to an educational schedule? But I now know that I am meant to be in a newsroom, surrounded by intelligent voices with something to say, and I’m meant to be heard too.