Sarah Bell
The Curation of a Lifetime
Would you visit a museum of your own life? If so, what would be in it?
These questions come to me as I pass through the halls of the Georgia Museum of Art on a field trip for my senior seminar in comparative literature class. I admire all the beautiful paintings and sculptures and wish I had the talent to create something so beautiful to leave behind.
Like any college senior, my life these days has been filled with anxiety for my future. Along with this anxiety comes reflection. Reflection of not only my college years but those that came before it. In a recent conversation with my friend, we agreed that somehow our high school years feel more recent than our freshman year of college. Time and memory work in that funny way where they distort certain memories yet leave others untouched.
For a long time, I referred to my first three semesters of college as a “write-off.” I began my college career in the fall of 2020. As you can imagine, it was not the exciting start to college I had dreamt of through my high school years. I couldn’t wait to follow in the footsteps of every cliched angsty teen before me and move to a big city to ‘find myself’. But when I arrived, the COVID-ridden reality smacked me in the face: my roommate ghosted me, social distancing protocols meant complete isolation, classes on Zoom, and feeling homesick for the first time in my life were just a few of the things that caused me to deem this first half of college unmemorable.
If I had to put this time of my life in a museum, the exhibit might include a tiny coffee maker, a copy of the book The Goldfinch, a mask, and a replica of the horrendous dining hall food I suffered through eating for dinner four nights a week. And a gazebo. The gazebos on campus were pretty nice.
Since this freshman year period feels more elusive, its display might come before the high school wing, which would be filled with band t-shirts, golf clubs, Queen records (I had a huge Queen phase), and a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. What better way to show what kind of teenager I was than to fill this wing with my pretentious reading choices and questionable outfits?
Next, my last three years of college at UGA. This display would feature some lovely abstract artwork of my loneliness fading into contentment being by myself. A movie ticket for one. Sneakers for my “mental health walks” that became a staple of my routine. It would also feature a month in France, where I made some of the best memories of my life and came back with friends that inspire me and make me laugh. A metro ticket. Gallons of coffee. A last-minute flight to Amsterdam.
Somewhere, tucked away in the corner of the museum, are the middle school years. Braces. Softball practices. “Your body is changing” talks. This wing is small and rarely visited due to embarrassment. However, they are vital years, as learning to humiliate yourself is a crucial skill.
All twenty-two years of my life can be sectioned off into exhibits, segmented by whatever house I was living in, or whatever school I went to at the time. But the most daunting wing is yet to be constructed: my future. What might go into this section of my museum keeps me up at night.
What part of the country will I be in?
Will I have a good job?
Will I have kids?
Will I have a nice time at my 32nd birthday party?
How many more exhibits do I have left in me?
Am I happy?
We are all walking museums, living exhibits. Sometimes, when you walk through your memory museum, you might stumble upon your first kiss, then your third-grade classroom, and then college graduation. The beautiful thing about museums, your museum, is that you can choose the way you walk through them. You can choose to spend your twenties hanging out in the childhood wing, feeling bitter about the way your parents raised you, ashamed of your choices, guilty about your mistakes; or you can wander back to the small section in the corner with footage of your fifth birthday and think of how proud your little self would be of everything that you’ve accomplished.
As I walk through the museum of my mind, I realize that it doesn’t take talent to create the beautiful things we leave behind, but rather the courage to recognize they are flawed — and display them proudly anyway.
I’ll end with the words of the ever-relevant Kurt Vonnegut:
