Hey Alan,
I hope sophomore year is treating you well. I know my sophomore year of high school was the eye of a hurricane. It felt a little bit like a calm, trial period of being a pseudo-adult before you get hit by junior year lock-in and college applications. Sophomore year was also about when mom started giving me what would become her favorite lecture.
“Don’t miss the train,” she would always chide me. “Get on the train now and your life will be easy. All you have to do is ride. If you miss the train now, you’ll spend the rest of your life running after it.” Somehow, no matter how many times I heard them, the words always seemed to sharpen themselves into acupuncture needles on their airborne journey to my heart. Even hearing them for the hundredth time in the midst of college applications, her advice kept a certain rawness simply because it came from her. After all, mom really has spent her whole life thinking she missed the train.
Imagine those words coming from your own mom, whose entire career direction hinged not on some idealistic internal drive or a childhood dream, but on the fact that a graduate school entrance exam was an order of magnitude cheaper than taking the medical board exam. Even now, mom’s not shy about telling me all the opportunities she was denied simply for being an immigrant: the scholarships and conferences nobody told her about, the little nuances that made transitioning from Chinese to American education so difficult.
I hope you understand, then, why I ended up placing those words so close to my heart. All she wanted was to see me grab a hold of the opportunities she never saw; how could I let her down, especially when it seemed so simple? All I had to do was get into a good college and my ticket would be secured. If I worked hard enough, maybe I’d even get a window seat.
So, the day Hopkins’ Early Decision results came out, I was clouded by an all-consuming existential worry. My only relief was a gentle Ethiopian Orthodox prayer and the feeling of erratically dancing to Flume in the middle of Multi. It seemed to me that at exactly 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time, I would either receive my little slip of cardstock reading “Admit One” or get hit by the glass door on the way in and be forced to watch my dreams chug on away without me.
Evidently, I did end up seeing that blue congratulations in a band practice room, and for a second, it really did feel like I managed to hop on the train. I jumped around and screamed so loud my laptop stopped picking up the audio. I celebrated with my friends and they celebrated with me.
But then I actually got here.
The funny thing is that, if the movies are to be believed, college is a time for active reinvention. You walk in lost but with some vague idea of a dream and college is a time to search for some way to realize your ambitions. Supposedly, people come here to become the person they’ve always wanted to be.
I couldn’t imagine a college experience further from the truth. There is no steering wheel here.
MIT has the saying “drinking from a fire hose” to describe the academic experience at their school, but the implication has always been that you’re supposed to learn to step away from the fire hose long enough to catch your breath. We are supposed to lean in just enough to only have our lips blasted off.
I don’t think managing such a feat is possible. We all open the door to the rest of our lives only to find 200 pounds-per-square-inch of water straight to the face waiting for us on the other side, and even if you try to lay in bed doomscrolling your days away or to dodge every campus event and school club you can, you can never move out of the way.
The mere fact of college is existentially strange. You have to experience life and the world and free will for the first time ever and it makes you feel completely naked everywhere you go. You get to point in any direction you want to, but all the cool classes and amazing clubs you’re in spare you no time to ever stop and think about where it is you’re headed. You get into weird situationships and ignore elephants in the room until you’re finally drunk enough off of sleepless nights and CharMar slop to spill it all out in a couple late-night conversations.
I am lucky that my friends here have reciprocally afforded me enough vulnerability to acknowledge that none of them really know what they’re doing either. In fact, I’ve never seen a group of people as clueless as the matriculants to top American universities. I used to be utterly in love with that sentiment: the idea that “we are all lost.” It must be ironic, then, that it’s become something of a banal platitude to me. I’m tired of it.
Not because I’ve suddenly decided that it’s just another pretentious pseudo-insight — it’s still very much true — but because I don’t think it's even possible to not be lost anymore. To really live, to truly experience the existence in the world, is to be permanently lost.
Growing older is realizing that you’ve been making mistakes your entire life. No matter how well versed you think you are in the nature of the universe, I promise you these coming years will show you just how blind we all are.
I liked to think that I was emotionally aware when I got here: that I knew a lot about how I felt and how to communicate with those I loved. But there are ways to mess up that you haven’t even imagined yet. You can be a shitty, absent friend even if you feel like you’ve been there. You can think you’re being a communicative, emotionally responsible romantic partner when all you’re doing is running away from your internal turmoil. I can believe all I want that I have something new to write about life, but all I am is just some dude trying his best to land on his feet.
In four years, you may very well look back and wonder how you were so foolish. I know I do, and I’m well aware that in four more years I might read this letter back and wonder how I was so pretentious. We are all stuck in the process of becoming wiser fools.
That’s why I think I have such a problem with the idea that, given enough willpower, we can just become different, better people. No. All we can do is become the type of people that have the potential to be better.
Your friend is going to piss you off in a specific way that gets you angrier than you should. You are going to experience a rejection that will make you feel like the sky is going to come down on you. You are going to be a bad person sometimes.
So why in the world would you make it your job to be a good person? Your only job is to find your own method of reacting to whatever comes at you and grabbing up just enough flying debris along your journey to build yourself something approaching a life’s work.
There is nothing in our lives that is not sand, and the tighter you try and hold on to all of it, the more of it that slips right through your fingers. In high school, the world is small enough for it to really feel like you could do it all if you tried – the classes are all standardized, the clubs are all accessible and the faces are all familiar. In college, that’s just not the case. There’s enough here to fill a hundred lifetimes and you can drown in the general body meetings and weekend functions if you’re not careful.
Even if you’re not ready, the train’s gonna hit you anyways. It doesn’t care where you want to go or even if you’re ready to hold on; it’s already on its way to somewhere over the horizon. You just have to be ready to step off with a smile when it gets there.
I never really got on the train myself. I just stepped in front of its headlights, and now I’m trying my best to hold on long enough for it to arrive somewhere, wherever that is.
I believe in you. Hold on tight and enjoy the breeze.
Always your older brother,
Steve Wang
Steve Wang is a freshman from Missouri City, Texas majoring in Biomedical Engineering. His column tries to put words to the things that exist just outside the language of our daily lives and make everybody feel a little less crazy.
