I was at a party that my friend was hosting. Happy music, flickering lights, red plastic cups strewn around the backyard — there was a pleasant feeling in the air, a kind of hazy warmth from the last of summer interlaced with excitement about the start of senior year. I didn’t know many people, but I was having a good time.
I met Sam, who I didn’t recognize but whose name was extremely familiar. Turns out I’d interviewed him a few months ago for an article about Yale’s jazz club. We laughed about my edits and ended up leaving the party together. My ten-dollar espadrilles broke and Sam offered to walk me home. We stumbled into the night: him, slightly drunk and pretty tired and me, hopping on one foot as I tried to walk barefoot (Would home ever again be a barefoot walk away?)
I burst into what had been on my mind for a few weeks now. “I’m terrified of graduating.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I don’t want to ‘be an adult.’”
“You’d prefer to stay in college forever? Honestly, I’m pretty ready to get out of here.”
“No, it’s not that.” A part of me was also slowly growing out of college.
“It’s more like,” I started, and tried to find words for what I wanted to say: that I was afraid adulthood was a soft descent into the mediocre and the mundane, endless days of working and paying bills and filing taxes. That as reality sunk in and we were no longer insulated from our responsibilities, we would have little capacity to dream, reflect, or interrogate our lives beyond our day-to-day.
“I think adulthood represents the loss of ideals.”
He paused briefly then and looked over at me. “I never thought of it like that.”
I fell in love with Yale before I ever came to campus.
Amid countless hours of scrolling as I decided where to apply early decision, I came across a college confidential blog describing three reasons a CS student decided to transfer out of Yale: its gothic revival architecture, seclusion from big cities, and the humanities atmosphere that permeated all of campus. This was my first impression of Yale, and I was already falling in love from over 8,000 miles away.
This feeling didn’t change when I came to Yale: all my friends can attest to my near-borderline obsession with stopping on sidewalks, often mid-conversation, to take pictures of campus, right until the end of senior year. Sterling Library on a sunny day, tulips in the Branford courtyard, the view of Harkness Tower from the Humanities Center — I could already see those moments becoming memories before my eyes. I wanted to forever nurse these fleeting moments in this beautiful place close to my heart.
I expected so much from Yale, and it met my conjectures in the most unexpected ways. It gave us so much: the opportunity to continue a near lifelong indulgence in learning, the kindest people to support us as we stumbled through some of the hardest and messiest moments of our life, and most of all, the space to freely dream and forge our ideals.
We entered Yale as young and impressionable individuals during some of the most formative years of our life, still developing our worldview and still understanding ourselves. We were simultaneously less accountable to the world in our sheltered seclusion, and more open than we ever would be to reassess our perspectives, challenge our assumptions, rethink our moral and political sensibilities, and be influenced by life’s myriad possibilities. It was alongside our maturity into adulthood that we were able to indulge in a little bit of everything and engage in fake trials of life paths we may never take: working at the art gallery, constructing a set for a play, writing code to create a website. As we switched majors or dropped extracurriculars or had an unexpectedly stimulating conversation about something we had never heard of, it was easy to believe that anything was possible.
Some of my most treasured memories are from my first year nights spent in Bass library until it closed, reading Aristotle or Arendt or Proust or whatever reading we had for the week. I remember students sporadically streaming out as I snuggled deeper into my armchair, free to ponder the most dazzling ideas about the polis, statelessness, German idealism, the anxiety of faith — all while cocooned in the comforting sensation of not knowing where my life might take me and not needing to care.
In reality, there is something hopelessly idealistic about the idea of infinite paths. The idea that at any moment in life, we can reverse the choices we have made to completely alter our trajectory. We come into college with the world wide open before us, but the moment we step out, we make our first choice, and in doing so unwittingly eliminate a few thousand others. Most of us have come across Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy in The Bell Jar: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was… I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest.” With every choice, we change our scope of possibility ever so slightly, drawing ourselves into a life we can often only understand in retrospect. We inadvertently add to the cumulative narrative of ourselves, until who we are becomes inseparable from the life we live.
"With every choice, we change our scope of possibility ever so slightly, drawing ourselves into a life we can often only understand in retrospect. We inadvertently add to the cumulative narrative of ourselves, until who we are becomes inseparable from the life we live."
One night, I was walking back to Franklin college from a friend’s place on Dwight Street. It was around 2 a.m. and there was almost no one about — campus felt soft and still, like it was holding its breath. It felt like it belonged to me.
Part of me fears I will never become any of the people I dreamed I would be. But here, tonight, and perhaps for these four years, I am all of them at once. As I stand at the precipice of several paths stretching beyond me, all my dreams — undefined, barely known, and only vaguely graspable by me — are possible. With never-ending choices before me, I am everything at once: a writer, a policymaker, a cognitive scientist, a director, a journalist, someone who travels the world, someone who goes back home and never leaves. At this moment, I am surrounded by the silent comfort of thousands of others like me: a little lost, confused, and searching for answers.
I think this is what I have been trying to preserve through all my pictures and memories: the image of my precious, blissful, careless youth, when we had each other and all the time in the world and life was not yet a certainty, but rather a string of infinite possibilities.
"I think this is what I have been trying to preserve through all my pictures and memories: the image of my precious, blissful, careless youth, when we had each other and all the time in the world and life was not yet a certainty, but rather a string of infinite possibilities."
Adulthood has brought me simple joys.
My body is just as important as my mind: I enjoy cooking meals for myself and exercising. I call my parents more often. I work a regular corporate job, keep no alarms on weekends, and meet my friends often in fancy bars instead of dorm rooms. I have more time to read for pleasure and take delight in picking up pastries at cafes and grocery stores.
As I feared, I am fairly rooted in the day-to-day — there is less room for grandeur and larger-than-life ideas. I am both Atlas and Camus’s Sisyphus, navigating between holding the weight of the world and learning how to find joy in pushing the rocks of every day. The modern day hero is quite dull. But unexpectedly, I find that is not the end of the world. In many ways I am healthier and more at peace than I was in college.
"I am both Atlas and Camus’s Sisyphus, navigating between holding the weight of the world and learning how to find joy in pushing the rocks of everyday. The modern day hero is quite dull."
Some days, I look at my laptop screen and wonder where my life is going. A friend recently recommended Letters to a Young Poet to me, in which Rilke writes, “Many signs indicate that the future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.” We are all in endless iterations of ourselves, never just “being” but always “becoming.”
Who am I becoming?
I often go back to Yale in my mind: I dearly miss campus, my friends, and what professor David Kastan once described at coffee as “pockets of nerdiness.” These memories are a reminder: there is more to life than the groceries we buy and shows we watch. They encapsulate an awareness of something bigger than oneself that follows me as I take flights to other cities or meet new people — a quality to life that exceeds our immediate routines.
We record time linearly, but my progression through life often feels cyclical. Memories not only show me snapshots of times passed but also bring past versions of myself back to me. I’m eternally thankful for where I’ve come, but in some ways, I hope to forever remain that confused first year — full of wonder and a million questions.
So thank you, Yale — for the greatest privilege of my life. I will carry forth with me the most beautiful memories: the eternal buzz of chatter in the Berkeley dining hall, Old Campus aglow in warm yellow light in the dusk, the hourly chimes of the Harkness bells. The impromptu chats on sunny days on Cross Campus, the exciting burst of a new idea mid-seminar, the stifled laughs and naps in libraries, the study breaks when we gave up on work altogether, the conversations that bled into early morning hours. The messy nights, the drinking, the tears, the hugs.
I will also remember the less tangible takeaways. That great conversations can spurt from the most random instances. That just like there are different kinds of love, there are different feelings of home. That I may always be homesick for some place. That spending time procrastinating, waiting, or doing nothing with the people you love is not wasting time. And that being intelligent and interesting may be important, but cannot go far without kindness and warmth.
I remember much, and I remember me: walking through Phelps gates for the very first time, my heart full and with the rest of my life before me.
Author’s Note: Thank you for reading! Thoughts or feedback are much welcome —please drop a comment if you have some! You can also contact me here.
“Most of us have come across Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy in The Bell Jar…” I’m flattered you might think I’ve read Sylvia Plath. I like the analogy though and feel that way sometimes. But, trying to contribute as a CS major, at least there’s no Dijkstra’s algorithm for life so we get to figure out what we want as we go and our choices can never be proven wrong 🙂
Freya, this was beautiful, as expected. To see Yale through your eyes was always a gift and I think no differently now. And I am so excited to continue to see your life as you write it because “I am both Atlas and Camus’s Sisyphus, navigating between holding the weight of the world and learning how to find joy in pushing the rocks of every day” will live in my mind forever.