If I had to name one big-picture takeaway from the creative nonfiction class I took at Saint Constantine College last semester, it would be to be wary of writing about a season of our lives that hasn’t ended yet.

After all, how can we say with any affectation of certainty what God is teaching us until the lesson is over and we’re given the quiz? It’s easy to laugh at high school from the distance of a college dorm; it’s more pleasant to admit the benefits of singleness when you’re comfortably married; the list goes on. The general opinion seems to be that we ought to wait for the moment of perfect hindsight before trying to pin personal experience to the page. Nostalgia, who lends a pleasant golden glow to any memory, is always a welcome guest of the writer.

But sometimes I wonder what’s lost when we only take the time to consider a period in our lives after it’s over. I worry that we forget the difficulty of daily, prizeless struggle when it becomes merely a dot in the rearview mirror. We go from sobbing under a clammy duvet to perching on the edge of our beds, recalling that time with a sort of confused fondness. Maybe it’s just a form of fight or flight, but I am amazed by how quickly I can go from desperately wishing for a season to be over to wondering, “What was so bad about those eight months, again?” Memory is weird that way.

Of course, I don’t think we should obsess over memories either. The person who can acknowledge their trauma, put it in its proper place, and move forward with courage and joy—in a writerly direction or otherwise—is to be commended and emulated. But still, I’m curious whether we ought to spend more time not wishing for a season to be over, but asking what will be lost when it is.

On a Saturday morning some weeks ago, I was cleaning out my email inbox, and the title of one email caught my eye just as I deleted it. It read, “Rejoice though you have considered all the facts.” “Considering all the facts” was something I did on a daily basis, rarely to my beneft nor with much rejoicing. So I hit the “Undo Delete” button and opened the email to find an excerpt from a book called Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life. Its author was Joy Marie Clarkson, to whose Substack, once upon a time, I had apparently subscribed.

In the excerpt, Clarkson related a memory of one New Year’s Day in her college dorm. She was on the cusp of her last semester in undergrad, and as her roommate slept, Joy lounged in bed, drinking tea, enjoying the morning stillness, and anticipating the promise of a fresh year. Suddenly, a clear message struck her heart, interrupting her serenity: “This year will be hard. You will suffer. The people you love will suffer. Prepare yourself.”

Clarkson explained how, over the next few months, the message proved to be true. Though she did not go into detail, she admitted that her final semester of college was one of the hardest times of her life. And yet she managed to graduate, gain acceptance to numerous prestigious grad schools, and eventually shake off the sorrows that had shadowed her final exams.

Tears sprung to my eyes as I read. What Clarkson was describing sounded exactly like where I was—where I am now, as I write this. I, too, am in my final semester of college; I, too, feel the threat of impending sorrows—some I can precisely name, some I can only tentatively expect—and I, too, spend my early mornings in bed, drinking tea while my roommate sleeps and trying not to let my anxiety crush me before the day has even begun.

I’m not trying to be dramatic; I’m just trying to figure out this thing called your early twenties. It’s not like I wasn’t warned that senior year is accompanied by difficult questions: “How will I be remembered here? Did I spend enough time with my college friends? Did I make the most of my education?” I ask myself these questions daily, it seems, and though I try not to let them affect my schoolwork too much, sometimes it seems like no coincidence that I’m writing my senior thesis on how memory can haunt a person.

But I was also told that senior year is an especially sweet and formative time. A time to academically push yourself, to delight in the growth and accomplishments of the past three years (you’re never cooler than when you’re a senior, after all), and to embrace the tricky junction between childhood and adulthood that freshman, sophomore, and junior year only pretend to be. When I examine my life, the sweetness is there. It just always seems less obvious than the formation—harder to find, to hold onto. But it’s there. Like Nostalgia, it glows.

As I finished Clarkson’s email and dried my eyes, I was overwhelmed by two emotions: jealousy and relief. Jealousy because Clarkson can reflect on this time in her life with the distance and maturity to realize its worth—something I can’t do yet. Relief because others have walked exactly where I am walking, and because there is nothing new under the sun, and because God works all things together for good. And because this too shall pass. Clarkson’s story offered me renewed hope in that last promise especially.

Every day when I wake up, it only takes a few seconds for all that is broken and confusing and painful in my life to settle in its usual place at the front of my mind. This is a somewhat new experience for me, something that strikes me as sad in itself. Historically, I’ve always been a pretty happy person (another thing Clarkson and I have in common), so it’s been a struggle figuring out what to do with the vague sense of doom that has lately been my constant companion.

I pray. I drag myself into the bathroom and mumble a prayer as I get ready, asking God to bless my day and those of the people I care about, to help me work hard and have fun and be humble and love. I look to Clarkson—both the crying college-age Clarkson and the older Clarkson, the one who’s finally found the right words to express her pain. Doing these things doesn’t always make me feel better, but it does make me feel less alone.

Being at Saint Constantine helps. People pass around me, older and younger faces mimicking my own in surprisingly delightful likeness. My academic mentor and I express the same pleasure in having caffeinated tea at 1 o’clock; the boy I tutor, as he copies cursive letters, tells me about his day, reminding me of the trials of being twelve years old. In discussion, I laugh with some of my favorite people in the world, people with whom I have shared ideas for almost four years, who know my mind like no one else does. The sun sets, and by the end of some days I’m still anxious. But by the end of other days I’ve forgotten my troubles, dropped them somewhere along the path, traded it for something else: a recognition of the goodness of the shared experience of life, no matter how bitter it may be at times.

This too shall pass. I think about that when it seems like there’s too much to do, to plan, to worry about. Everything passes. The work always gets done—from momentary tasks to days to decades. For me, the work of college will be done pretty soon. But the work of this difficult time in my life? I can’t say—so, for better or for worse, I’m writing instead. I am being bold and writing about a season of my life that hasn’t ended yet.

“The beauty and the pain together,” writes Clarkson. “This is life.” This is the struggle of each and every day, the struggle unique to humanity: the perpetual, living chiaroscuro, working itself out in all of us but fulfilled in the One on whom we are to cast all our anxiety, because He cares for us. What will be lost when this time of my life quietly comes to an end, and something else begins? Eventually this pain and this sense of doom will be lost to me—I will forget them as I feel them in this moment, even when I reread this essay ten years from now. And in one way, if that were the end of the story, it would be a bittersweet one. But it is not the end, because Christ has come to seek and to save that which would be lost—so we don’t have to. Nostalgia may be a welcome guest, but that moment of perfect hindsight, which all writers desire, has already come in the fullness of time. And it is coming again, soon.

So, like Clarkson, I will make it through undergrad, keep living, keep (imperfectly) reflecting, keep writing. And yet I can take heart in the knowledge that the book is already written.