I am in my senior year of college and I am terrified of looking back.
Regardless of my many mistakes, my four years of higher education are free of regrets. I have taken full advantage of the opportunities afforded to me. I am, by all accounts, graduating knowing I’ve had an incredibly successful run. I’ve beat all the odds! Despite my background, I’ve racked up an array of achievements. I know I will wear my cap and gown, have my silly little diploma to hang up and eventually don an oversized “Michigan Alum” MDen crewneck. I will sit in my well-lit apartment paid for by the kind of job that makes my peers’ eyes go wide. I will be comfortable. And, despite all that comfort, I will look back and know that the comfort is an isolating one, meant only for me alone.
The worst part of “making it” is knowing you can’t bring everyone with you. Being someone who has “beaten the odds” means being someone who comes from a family and community that are plagued with those very same odds. We lack the money, connections and support others are blessed with. Beating those odds is a reflection of what luck and opportunity come our way. A particularly dedicated counselor, a well-timed application submission, bumping into someone with the right connections or, in my case, coincidentally working at a cafe frequented by the right people. Who knows where I’d be if that job hadn’t triggered a chain of events connecting me to outlandish opportunities I never even knew existed. A chance introduction to one of the most important people on campus changed my life, all because they wanted a cup of hot tea.
Unfortunately, deservingness is not something that comes into play when it comes to who’s able to work their way around an empty bank account and lack of resources. We all deserve it. Only some of us are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time around the right people. We all work hard. I got lucky.
One thing they don’t tell you about attending a renowned predominantly white institution (PWI) is that it will draw an invisible curtain between you and your loved ones. Something shifts just so and you suddenly exist on different planes, neither fully understanding the other. No more freezing waits at bus stops, no more day-old discount bread. Your life becomes something alien, filled with stand-up meetings and coffee chats. Should you choose to carry through, you will be successful. You will get the job that pulls you out of poverty. You will turn around, do your best to help your loved ones. You will realize there’s only so much you can do, and only so many people you can reach. You will give your mom some money, maybe your siblings. You will refer a friend to a good job. You will drown in the fact that everyone you know and love is poor and stripped of opportunity — your meager success will never be enough to change that. No matter how strongly you believe everyone is entitled to a base level of ease, you will never be able to cure them of all their struggles.
I wish I could give all my friends secure, comfortable jobs. I yearn to buy my mother a house and a car, to put my younger siblings through college. What I wouldn’t give to pay my grandmother’s medical bills and help my neighbors fix their windows. To even the playing field, even the score, give everyone what they really deserve and build a reality where a life of comfort is guaranteed regardless of money and connections. The guilt of being the only one to make it out is the kind of thing that eats you alive.
I am a senior in college and I am moving forward, bittersweet as that is. I have my post-grad job and am looking for an apartment. Throughout all this, I am grappling with the reality that I cannot bring all the people I love up here with me. I will put on my cap and gown, hug my mother in the Big House, and then I will leave. I will look back. I will know I can’t take them all with me, no matter how much I want to.
Columnist Huda Shulaiba can be reached at hudashu@umich.edu.