Not a Goodbye, but a Quiet Lisel Christiansen
Six years doesn’t seem that long, until I realise that the amount of time I’ve spent at uni is the same as I spent at high school. It doesn’t quite sink in until I look back and realise how much has changed over those years.
A lot has changed, but some things are still the same. I still can’t keep my room clean to save my life, but I try more often now. Sometimes I wonder where I would be if I had worked a little harder in that final year, gotten a better ATAR, and ended up going somewhere other than Deakin. It’s such an alien thought that I can’t even comprehend the possibility of it. It feels like a long time ago, yet at the same time, it doesn’t.
Time’s never quite made sense to me, a weird jumbled flow that seems fast or slow at any given time for no apparent reason. Yeah, well, turns out there’s a reason for that.
When I started uni, I had a job. I worked nineteen to twenty-four hours a week around four units and had to take public transport everywhere. The mandatory 8 am lectures on Mondays were the worst, with a 5 am start to get the first bus of the day. I was going to go into science once I finished, and probably move to Europe where science and renewables are actually invested in and wanted. I was going to have an anthropology major, and there was no real plan beyond that. A real plan was future Lisel’s problem. It still is. Now I can wake up, throw everything together in twenty minutes, and be out of the house by 7.15 am to drive. Science still isn’t invested in, but it turns out that there’s more to the writing process than writing, so that’s where I’m going. There continues to be no bigger plan. I found an amazing group of friends, I found out that I was queer, that genders are bullshit and that if I don’t feel comfortable being one, then I can not, and that being asexual is a thing that is valid. I changed my pronouns, but I’m just as terrible about telling people. Some things don’t change.
I joined Deakin Writers in my second year but didn’t go to a launch until the end of 2016. I wasn’t an active member until the following year when I had a class with two of the executive team, and I’ve never looked back. I made new friends, and I laughed and drank more than I had before. I wrote, I submitted, I got accepted. I wrote, I submitted, I got rejected. I wrote some more.
I found my way onto the executive team last year, ran events for the club and magazine, then became the president. I still can’t organise my life or get it under control, but I continue to pick up more responsibility than I should. I have since come into the position of Queer Representative for the campus committee. I’ve had a blast despite all the anxiety that it sometimes gives me.
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