A week after returning from visiting my friend studying in Reims, a charming city in the Champagne region of France, I sent her a text: “I miss your friends.” I had known them for three days, an embarrassingly short time to claim such an attachment. And yet, there I was, staring at a reading list with an inexplicable nostalgia for people I barely knew. I missed a flat I’d visited a handful of times and the Thursday tradition at Saint Maurice bar I’d borrowed for one evening. Stranger still, I missed a person: a slightly louder, more spontaneous, French-phrase-attempting version of myself who stayed behind in France, and neglected to board the Eurostar home.
My friend was amused by my sentimentality for a city she had lately associated with mid-term preparation. Seeing Reims through my eyes, she told me, had reminded her to appreciate it. For three days, I inhabited the most romanticised version of her ordinary life. No deadlines, laundry, or the type of mundane grievances that inevitably accumulate, even in the loveliest of places. But I realised that, just as my visit had briefly changed her relationship with the city, it had changed mine with myself. I missed being me there as much as I missed being there.
I think William James would have understood my text. In Principles of Psychology, he argued that a person has “as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him”. This, he suggested, is just how selfhood works: we step into a different version of ourselves with each group that knows us, each a partial expression of who we are. Susan M. Andersen and Serena Chen’s concept of the ‘relational self’ suggests we carry mental models of the people close to us that shift how we behave when they’re around. This isn’t necessarily dishonesty or performance. Some people make you funnier, others more thoughtful, others capable of talking to strangers in broken French. It might take leaving their company to notice how much of ourselves they brought out, for better or for worse.
University, it turns out, is an extraordinarily efficient machine for manufacturing these selves, and Oxford seems particularly fertile ground for it. There is the college self, who you become when you queue for the dining hall, do your laundry, and collect parcels from the porter’s lodge. There is the tutorial self, who says things like “encapsulates” with an ease that is rarely demonstrated outside oak-pannelled rooms lined with books. There is the rowing self, the library self, the Spoons self, and, in due course, the home self.
Each belongs to a slightly different world, sustained by the company in which it exists. People often talk about Oxford’s sense of identity as a single, unified, aesthetic experience: bookish students moving through spires and candlelit libraries. In reality, however, the selves we occupy come from the many intense, smaller components of our lives. We belong to so many different places and people that leaving any one of them behind can feel like leaving something of ourselves behind too.
I find this most apparent in Michaelmas. I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting it to promise a fresh beginning: a better work ethic, a more packed social calendar, a newfound commitment to attending lectures, and maybe, just maybe, a sustainable sleep schedule. Social media only adds to the feeling. As I scroll, the instructions to begin a ‘winter arc’ seep into my subconscious. Reinvention in October is a trend as old as TikTok, and it feels almost compulsory. New wardrobes, timetables, and fresh seasonal coffee options offer us every opportunity, and every pressure, to become a slightly improved version of ourselves.
This year, the transition felt even more abrupt. I had only just returned from France when noughth week demanded an entirely different version of me. Suddenly, I was no longer babbling rusty GCSE French over drinks, but a second-year student, expected to have acquired some wisdom, academic discipline, and general competence over summer. I was caught between affection for the self I’d left behind, and anticipation of the one I might become.
Yet, what might offer some comfort is how quickly this new self begins to feel ordinary. By fifth week, some novelty has worn off, and your routines may have settled. You know when Michaelmas-you wakes up, where they like to study, and which newly familiar faces they’ll encounter on the way there. We develop our own small geography each term, and soon enough it’ll become second nature for a short time.
This can make Michaelmas bittersweet. Autumn is conventionally associated with endings, retreating indoors, hibernating. Yet at university, it is the season in which so much begins. New friendships form under trees already shedding their golden leaves, and new routes back from the library will become familiar as the daylight disappears and tries to draw you home. We spend October becoming people that we get to know only in November, before December arrives to take them away.
Because then it all reverses. Eight weeks on, even more weeks off, and the communities we’ve assembled scatter across the country and the world.
So, somewhere between college Christmas dinner and packing a suitcase in a freezing room, the person you’ve spent Michaelmas becoming begins to slip into the past. Perhaps it’s only in January, scrolling through your carefully curated end-of-term Instagram dump, that you realise how attached you’d become to October-to-December-you.
We have plenty of language for missing people and places, but less for missing the person we were in their company.
The odd thing is that, come Hilary, I’ll probably return to many of the same people and places, and become a slightly different person all over again. For all my attempts to make a fresh start, I was equally determined to mourn my last self. Maybe that’s the real Michaelmas tradition: spending eight weeks reinventing ourselves, then the vacation looking back at who we became.
