This is only my second time writing for The Hoot. I wrote once as a first-year and now I’m writing for the last time as a senior, so maybe this is fitting in a bookend sort of way.

I’m writing this because I made it into the staff box this year as The Hoot’s editorial cartoonist. Instead of reflecting on other people’s thoughts on my drawings, I think it’s time for me to talk about my own; not through pictures, but through words. Lean close, read intently. Listen to me as if I’m a mystical crone you ran into deep in the woods somewhere. It’s foggy all around us. The air is damp and cold and you don’t know where you are. You can’t see my face, but I’m holding a lantern that’s probably a fire hazard and beckoning you closer even as the trees are whispering and bending and telling you not to. You step forward anyway, because you’re wondering exactly what this cartoonist, huddled away in a mysterious cave somewhere with a pen in hand and very little patience for shitty art, has to say about herself and her last year as an undergrad. You ask me, Do you have any regrets? Did you like your time at Brandeis? Do you think The Hoot is better than the Justice? (Yes.)

I do have some regrets. I wish I’d gotten that computer science minor I was always thinking of, because maybe then I’d actually be able to find a well-paying job straight out of undergrad. I wish I’d eaten less at Lower Usdan, which is single-handedly responsible for the worst cases of the Sodexo Shits I’ve ever had over the last four years. I wish Brandeis had paid certain professors better so that they wouldn’t have had to leave for other institutions that treat them the way they deserve. And—I wish I’d joined The Hoot sooner. But overall, my regrets are pretty few.

I liked my time at Brandeis. It’s coming to a close now and the world outside of it is scary and exciting. I don’t know if I know how to adult. I barely know how to do my taxes. My diet is 50 percent potato chips and the remaining half is an ungodly mix of instant noodles, the occasional vegetable and chocolate. I feel absurd and absurdly young. I’m afraid that I’m going to emerge into the real world and my inexperience and the shiny newness of my youth will make it that much harder to earn the respect I want. I’m graduating: I’m stepping out of the woods and into something new, but I have no sense yet of what the landscape will be like. I’m forging forward, blind and feeling like every step forward is a trust fall. And yet, maybe I would be more worried if the journey didn’t feel that way. If I knew exactly what was coming, that wouldn’t be right. The whole point of growing up is to discover something new out there. I want to see what’s next.

So this is it. The Hoot’s editorial cartoonist has spoken for the last time. Now, get the hell out of my woods. I’m leaving, and you should too. I hope we both find somewhere warm and sunny, where the fog vanishes with the morning and we’re left with just clear skies.