fourth year jacob porter

I like to think that when we wake up and the day ahead looks dark, the brim of a hat we have outgrown has simply slipped over our eyes.

I say this to mean that we put on different hats every day. Every second of every day, really.

“Jacob!” you exclaim, flabbergasted, “What kind of cliche, pretentious bullshit metaphor are you employing today?”

Hey. Shhhh. Just wait. Let’s examine your day real quick.

You’ve got class. And it’s math, too. Left brain shit. So you put on the left brain hat.

You have time to put on the socialization hat. And lucky for you, you get to eat with your friend’s friend with problematic views — the “don’t talk about politics” hat finally gets its chance to shine today.

Little brother needs help with his homework - time to step into the big sibling hat.

And finally — it’s 2 AM. The girl you like? She’s not texting you back. The sad boy hours hat? It’s in the corner over there. Go get it. Gonna be a long night. Might have to go ahead and put on the Tinder hat.

It’s not a subtle metaphor. We wear a lot of hats in life. And sometimes, the amount of hats we wear can feel overwhelming.

But what feels worse than that is feeling like we don’t fit a particular hat that we’ve been wearing for a really long time.

It’s a jarring feeling when suddenly the math you have to do every morning in class starts to get more complicated, and your grades start to slip. Or when conversation becomes stilted with someone although it used to flow with them easier than anything in the world. Then there’s the somewhat empty pride that comes when your brother stops needing your help, or the disappointment that comes when the girl you like does text you back, but you realize you guys have way less in common than you thought. These things don’t happen instantaneously. The realization that things are different than before is slow and often sad.

It’s easy to feel like we’re performing poorly in the roles that we have to play in life, that these are hats we don’t fit anymore. And sometimes, that’s true, and okay. We can’t wear the same hats and play the same roles forever. But we can always look back on the ones we did wear and appreciate those times. Maybe that’s all we really can do when things change.

When the day looks dark ahead, it’s easy to imagine that the brim of a hat we’ve come to love has finally become too big for us, in a world where it feels like we’re constantly shrinking — a dark, upside-down horizon, if you will. But over that horizon are new responsibilities, new roles, new hats. It just might take a while to break them in.

But there’s a hat for that journey, too.

a short essay on headgear