To My Younger Self,

What I Would Tell You If I Could

I wish I could tell you to keep your chin up, Penn is a great place if you just try to notice it. But you would say, Why, and I would say, Because of the people you'll meet when you try to meet people, and you would say, I haven't met many great people, I've tried. And you would look off into the distance as if to say, It doesn't feel like there are many people here. I wish I could say to you, There will come a time when you shiver at the thought of leaving this place, a haven of comfort and risk, and that will be a wonderful thing. There are many ways to grow into adulthood, this place gives you all the options. But you would say, You sound like a campus tour guide, then you would rush to tell me, Don't laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you, even though I wasn't. Maybe you would turn your back to me with such a furious speed that I would take a moment to recognize what just happened, because I had forgotten how quickly I used to resort to that. So much can change in 4 years.

    You at one point asked to no one in particular, Why do I feel this way? I know this because I too have asked this question many times. And now, well, I suppose I can tell you why. Penn has a special ability to catalyze forced connection: you may think this is good, but it is not. When you're applying for a club, and they ask you about hardship; when you're trying to get a job, and they ask you about failures; when you're trying to make a friend, so you become "open" to feel connected. These are not connections—they're basically interview responses. Do it enough, and you'll find the interviewer and, devastatingly, the interviewee cannot discern the truth. Knowing your weaknesses will be supplanted with the appearance of knowing your weaknesses. You will start to lie to others—perhaps lie is too strong a word—you will tell others answers that aren't true to your being, but a surface-level truth, the kind that is not painful to admit. Yes, you may have done poorly on that last exam, you may have been rejected from that one thing, you may be sleeping too little, but these things are far too easy. At some point, all the things you have ignored—the friends and family you love but have been too busy for, the mentor who is always there for you but never hears of your appreciation, the sense of living-by-surviving that pervades too much of your day to day life—all these things will hit you. And that will be a terrible feeling.

 

It's not your fault. You got into this school based off, well, everyone got into this school based off a certain conscientiousness—and being early enough in that consciousness—of how things looked on paper. You knew that doing "something" wasn't enough; you must do a "something" you can talk about. To be honest, that's fine, just look at how great the people are around you.

    But, as that continues, you will not stop. You will do things completely contrary to what you enjoy, just so you can talk about enjoying them. You will apply to M&T and end up hating all but 5 of your Wharton classes, wasting more than a dozen credits along the way, including never taking a photography class that you swore you would take. You will join clubs whose schedules feel like they were designed by Satan's secretary. And you will discover the pain of going home to an empty dorm, devoid of love, any love—filial, platonic, chosen.

    By your junior year, you will get exactly what you were aiming towards. You will have people, freshmen and even some faculty, idolizing your work, who seek you out to tell you that your latest project or club or whatever is the best damn thing they have ever seen. But who gives a shit. Is your work all that you're living for? There are few worse things than having so much to live up to and so few people to live around. You will feel lonely, asking a sincere and sad version of, Why can't I connect with the people around me? I wish I could tell you, Because you aren't looking properly! but I know who you are. You will roll your eyes at me, in the same way you rolled your eyes at Mrs. Kent when she told you to stop interrupting her perfectly reasonable instructions. But you. aren't. looking. You're wandering, maybe, but you're too busy looking for opportunities of progress and impact and legacy rather than friends and family and feelings.

 

Now let me tell you what you actually want, not what you think you want. On the eve of the birthday of your senior year, you will cook with a close friend and she will leave at 11:50pm, and you will think to yourself, a birthday alone. But at 10 past midnight, because your friends are always late to everything, people will barge into your room just as you are forcing sadness on paper, singing and announcing their love for you. And that will be a lovely wonderful feeling. And you will go to bed, half confused, because these are friends you have not made the time for in a while, but you will mostly go to bed so happy to be loved, so happy to be happy. Then you will wake up, go to Operations class with your favorite professor—ironically, the man who runs the M&T program who has become your mentor—then philosophy, then spend 3 hours in an English class reflecting with peers you just met but know you better than most, then go to a Buddhism lecture, have your probability professor whose class you at one point thought you would fail tell you Happy Birthday, and finally plan on spending the night with another close friend, only to be surprised again, this time by 30 people who helped you get through college. They will stick candles in dumplings and sing their love and your birthday to you. And you will go to bed thinking, what a wonderful place of sincere connection. Never again will life feel so full. For the first time in your life, you will realize how many people wish to know you, just because. And that is a great definition of friendship.

    You only get four years of this. Why is it taking you so damn long to recognize it? Wake up. The days here are so full, so very full. You will shiver at the thought of losing that. Why can't you see it earlier? There are good things worth chasing. And there are also good names worth chasing. But you should distinguish the two, because if you spend all your time chasing the latter, then you will miss the former, because the best good thing to chase, the goodest thing to chase, is the people who love you. They love you. For no other reason than who you are. And isn't that a wonderful thing?

    As you face your own struggles—and I know how much these struggles will hurt—you see will begin to begin to see the things that make your life possible. What is more important than realizing that people love you, is that you love people. I wish to tell you, that if someone matters to you, grabbing drinks with him or her is far more important than finishing up your work, not for them but for you. I wish I could tell you that the way to affirm a relationship is not through when someone needs you, though that is certainly a requisite understanding. No, the subtlety of any relationship is not borne of necessity, but of slow, messy desire: the dinner, the phone call, the happy hour that is not required. Those are what matter.

 

I don't know how many times people have asked me what graduating feels like, sometimes by people who are only a month away from finding out themselves. Even you have realized this, when you make your camera money by taking others' graduation photos, you have seen it. You have seen seniors hold themselves back from thinking too much about what they're doing, because they're leaving. There are so many ways to miss something; what you will always miss most, is what is right next to you that you cannot see.

    Maybe it's ridiculous to suppose that this will help you at any point. If you could read this at any point—even if you could read this with one year left—I do not expect anything to change. But I would try. I would tell you to wake up, you're paying this money to learn from others' mistakes, if you just stop and think about it long enough, but I know this to be futile, you care too much about chasing prestige right now. And you are so bad at learning from anyone's mistakes that it will take one of your own to slap you across your being before you stop.

    I suppose all that there is left to leave you with is this: there are lessons you will learn that you will wish you didn't, because they come from mistakes that hurt too much. But those are the best mistakes. Those are how you will grow into who you are—into who you actually are. So I wish you the best failures, I hope you fail a lot. And I hope that in those failures, you will learn that each trip you fall into means you are orienting yourself more towards who you are. And I hope that you fail enough to see what was right there all along.

 

Gave a talk based off the notes I used to write this linked here