humansizedplanet

[humansizedplanet]

first semester.

In the last few days and weeks, I’ve laid witness to a flood of joyous “end-of-first-semester”-type posts on Instagram, Facebook and otherwise. Slides and galleries of shiny, beautiful humans — at parties and museums, in dorm rooms and at galas, some sober and some definitely not — have dominated my feed (and I am sure yours too, for my collegiate peers). So lucky to be here, the captions read. The end to an amazing semester. Whirlwind. Can’t believe it’s over.

From rooftops and in darkness, they shout, implicitly: look at my people! Look at how fun! Look at how deeply I am in love, and look how much I have done!

And I cannot doubt the veracity of these narratives. Rather, I congratulate them. I am sure the photos, or at least I hope so, are captures of moments of joy. They are emblems of what makes college an extraordinary experience for some. In fact, many of us — probably including myself — have experienced one of the best times of our lives this semester in college, whether it be our first or one of our last. In college, joy escapes few who permit themselves to feel it, and who have the circumstances to do so. Joy has acutely rested in the palms of the dominant majority as new experiences, bodies, feelings, and opportunities have bubbled excitedly to the surface. It is normal to live a collegiate life enshrouded by a happy ambiance, momentarily (or, for some, permanently) immune — or perhaps just deflective towards — negativity and anxious stress. I mean, when your school has just won its first NCAA men’s soccer College Cup in institutional history, how can you not stoke the flickering fire in your stomach, the warmth of a newfound pride radiating through every part of your body? When you dance to good music at strange parties, surrounded by those who you have claimed your own, how might you stop the spread of smile? When your professor grants you a good mark or says something kind to you in office hours, what rationale is there to suppress the kick of joy at your belly?

Beyond the scope of sports teams and compliments, my own joy has been immense throughout the last four months. From pieces for the Georgetown Voice + Independent to poetry slams, I’ve found spaces to write and create and share so much of my heart. In class and through conversation, I’ve learned previously unheard narratives and the contours of faces lost to the sands of history. I’ve let dance seep into my bones at concerts and political realism indoctrinate my foreign policy takes in seminars. I’ve tried strange foods and strange music; I’ve sang in stairwells at unholy hours. Most importantly, I’ve tied new knots in an ever-expanding safety net of human beings I love and trust, and these bows are ones made by some of the most considerate, intelligent, talented, and visionary people I’ve had the chance to meet. These are relationships that welcome challenge and fear no depth of dialogue; these are individuals who are happy to free dive into the muddy waters if it means emerging with a new clarity about the world above the surface afterwards. These are people who pivot to the sun without forgetting the shadow that leaks behind, who radiate light but shy, not, from sheer darkness. And God, I am so lucky.

I, too, then, have so much to post about: so much has been good to me.

Yet I cannot help but feel a bit of guilt at the subtractive artifice that comes with presentations of this first semester on social media. Those joyful posts I’ve encountered — and my own paragraph, immediately above — imagine a neon world, full of brightness and joy and success and humor. Indeed, social media is a preservationist tool: they tell us what you put on the Internet is out there forever, and I believe it. It makes sense to plaster joy on our feeds because it memorializes times and people that make us happy. Why not seal them in amber, parade them around like trinkets? Certainly, it’s better to celebrate what is joyful rather than what is tragic. I myself curate meticulously: my Instagram is filled with the flash of teeth, and it makes me happy to share with the world the moments of joy that I feel profoundly.

But in doing so, we lose the messy, real edges. We erase unshapely life. The neon world ends up neglecting the hours that are not so glorious, and preaches delusional narrative to the consuming masses that all is to be filled with joy. Perhaps social media is not meant to be very realistic, but I have spent so many hours in its vestiges that I refuse to accept that this must be its only formulation. I write this post not to critique social media or launch into yet another explanation of how social media changes our psychology and has toxic aftereffects. As (mostly) conscious consumers, we are all aware of this truth. I am sure many of you have gone on your own social media cleanses, have identified how it propagates challenges with self-esteem and forms artificial, at-times untenable expectations.

So I come to you, instead, with an admittance of (at least some of) the messier edges of my own college experience. Yes, it has been defined so loudly by joy: I feel lucky every day to be at Georgetown and to be surrounded by such magic. But for every night of spontaneity and fun and happiness and catharsis there has also been one of struggle. For one, college is also about confronting loneliness, and normalizing social singularity. I ate many meals alone this semester, many more than I would like to admit. Sometimes as a result of schedule, sometimes as a result of intention (“needing space”), and other times simply because I was too shy to ask someone to dinner, I found myself often in the dining hall amidst a pulsating, socialized universe. And though I had always been so comfortable with loneliness — as the only child of immigrant parents, this reality is unavoidable — I found the collegiate breed of it to be particularly corrosive. What am I doing wrong? I wondered. Am I not good enough?

And it is this question of “good enough” that defines so many of the darker narratives of the collegiate experience. So much of college — at least at Georgetown — is this process of trying out for things; applications for clubs and fellowships and grants build a mountain of attempts to try to throw yourself into things. This story is, I think, particularly familiar to the first-year student: we are told, before even stepping foot on campus, that there is some family here for you. Most of the time, there is — and so it makes sense to continue this narrative. But the result is that freshmen blindly throw themselves at things, and so much emotional gravity is placed on acceptance into these spaces. Rejection, eventually, becomes a quiet but familiar face for so many. Rationalizing with it yields no comfort; ultimately, there is only the necessity of accepting that you are not meant to be certain places at certain times, and the search continues. You convince yourself that you are good enough…for something. Hopefully. And I searched. Even when I was lucky enough to have been given entrypoints, I was still confronted with this persistent question: is this it? Am I here?

When asked about my support system — my place on campus, more specifically — by old friends, former teachers, even fellow freshmen on campus, I came up with a routine answer: still working on it. I am still working on it. This is no hyperbolic dramatization: I think the cycle is still spinning in my laundry machine. The engineer of that machine never gifted me a timer, however, so I see no end to this process. I know it must come, at some point, but when? How will I even know?

This sense of perpetuity — this continuous question of finding where exactly I belong — has been accompanied by a strange reorientation of social place. Beyond mere loneliness, I found myself often struggling to parse through the literal thousands of students I was surrounded by. How do I find my people? Who do I even like? What do I even like? What the hell am I even doing? I struggled with my gut instincts about individuals because in the past I have been proven, again and again, so profoundly wrong. First impressions rarely reveal the elemental nature of relationships. So on a college campus where the only real tool towards beginning to feel social place is capitalizing on first impressions, what do you even do?

Even those that I found myself gravitated to — things were not always pretty. Nor will they be. People fight. Misunderstandings happen. Even beyond conflict, I found myself time and time again having to help friends confront new challenges in their personal lives. Lots of hands held. Lots of hugs given. Many hours of sitting in the quiet. Presence matters. And it’s hard, often, to be as present as you need to be.

There was a reckoning with the past, too. There were catch-up calls with old high school friends where I felt, suddenly, like a foreigner peering into their local lives, startled by how much of their worlds were no longer landscapes I could even begin to understand. I struggled to figure out who to message when I got off the plane at Thanksgiving because I didn’t know who liked me enough to spend their precious hours with me during those short days. There were text message discussions with my former high school teachers where I felt alien, too mature and yet not enough to exist, still, in their worlds. And along the lines of all of this was a quiet fear that I had done it all in high school, and that I had left so much for so little.

You may have noticed the excess of rhetorical questions that have colonized the last few paragraphs of this piece. I think it’s clear that I’m still in a state of inquiry. And I accept it joyously, because that state of inquiry had historically always led to better results for me in both lab reports and in general life things. Just know that as I have questioned and answered and questioned again, there have been valleys as much as there have been peaks.

If you’re a first-year student reading this and haven’t had the best few months of your life, I hear you. I love you. Your story is valid. There were many nights where I felt like I was the only one going through stuff, even though I knew there definitely were so many others feeling the same way. There were many sad moments in private library rooms where I chewed on gummy candy and contemplated why I was where I was. In shower stalls, mindlessly letting water cascade, wondering if my day was going to be any good. If you’re a first-year student reading this and have experienced nothing but utmost joy, props. I hope, dearly, that it lasts. If you’re yet to enter college, I hope reading this demolishes any pressure you have come next fall to make your freshman year perfect. It might not be. And that’s okay. And if you’re one of the lucky people that is years older, I hope this post related experiences and validated emotions you may have felt so many years ago.

When I look back on the last four months, I refuse the rose-colored glasses. Not everything has been easy. But in seeing my first semester realistically, with all its mess, I find such value and such room for optimism for the next one. I’m incredibly excited. Sunlight feels good now, don’t it? So many kisses. x