Help, I Got Dumb After College!
By: Taryn Murphy
I sat in my Zoom meeting, my heart beating quickly. My co-workers were waiting for me to answer a question, but I was tongue-tied. I hadn’t just forgotten how to eloquently articulate my thoughts. I had blanked on the entire English language. Had I really just graduated from Hillsdale College?
After graduating from Hillsdale, I began a remote marketing job at a wonderful company. I knew that my daily routine would be very different from college, but I didn’t anticipate how much it would impact me. My day went from running to a myriad of classes and activities and having constant intellectual and social stimulation, to sitting alone in my house from 9am to 5pm, looking at a computer screen, and walking to the fridge for a “fun activity.”
As the months passed by, I felt something begin to happen. I was forgetting things I’d learned and read at Hillsdale…a lot of things. I was finding it hard to form a sentence. Quite frankly, I was finding it hard to think. The question tumbled over and over in my mind: how could I have gotten so dumb?
Terrified that I was going to lose my liberal arts education forever, I did what any normal Hillsdale student would do. I read all 576 pages of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Spoiler alert: reading about a schizophrenic murderer didn’t make me feel any better. The truth is, I had read the book more for bragging rights than anything else. I thought it would restore my identity as a Hillsdale student, but obscenely-long Russian novels weren’t going to solve my dilemma. I needed to relearn what I’d forgotten, even if it felt like starting at square one.
I reminded myself that my own professors had read the books they taught dozens of times. Their expertise didn’t happen overnight; they were in lifelong pursuit of learning and re-learning, reading and re-reading, discovering and re-discovering. That’s because nurturing the intellect is hard and repetitive work. It isn’t always mind-blowing or fun, and it doesn’t always feel like an “accomplishment.” But it’s good and beautiful work.
Realizing this, I returned to the books I loved most in my time at Hillsdale. I started with The Wind in the Willows, a children’s book I read for the first time in Dr. Coupland’s Children’s Lit class (considered by Dr. Coupland to be “one of the greatest treatises on human friendship”). Next, I picked up Love and Responsibilityfrom Dr. Schlueter’s Philosophy of Love, Sex, and Marriage class. Now, I’m reading Moby Dick: my favorite novel from Dr. Franklin’s Great Books II class.
These books are nothing new, but they make my heart sing. As I turn their pages, I feel the rusty corners of my brain re-awakening, as if I’m meeting dear friends again. I know they will be my companions for life, nurturing my soul as I seek knowledge and virtue and helping me meet new friends along the way. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov just won’t be one of them.
Taryn Murphy is a 2021 Hillsdale graduate with a degree in Philosophy and Religion. She currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee where she works remotely as the Director of Marketing for the Classic Learning Test. Taryn enjoys practicing her barista skills, spending time outdoors, and being near any large body of water.
