It’s funny to think how much the passage of time can change our relationships to ideas, hobbies and beliefs. This is something I’ve been grappling with lately: How much of our present selves are defined by our past identities?
It is obvious that much has changed in the year and a half I’ve been in college. I think about the way my high school self would have reacted to everything going on in my present life: how I’ve diverged, the habits I’ve adopted and fallen out of, and the people I’ve met that have shaped me into a different person. I think about the texts in English literature and philosophy—my intended concentrations—that I’ve absorbed, and the beliefs I’ve adopted as a result. What makes me different from who I was before coming to Brown? Should I be concerned about the extent to which I have changed, or that I haven’t changed enough?
College gives you a certain amount of freedom that is both a blessing and a curse. Suddenly, you are responsible for all of your actions, and structure is replaced by uncertainty and spontaneity. It is funny to think about how my high school self, addicted to watching college day-in-the-life and living alone vlogs, could only dream of these moments. My somewhat-monotonous high school life, spent mostly in the same suburban neighborhood, pales in comparison to the guarantee of near-total independence and freedom that college in a completely new environment has given me.
As with most unfamiliar and exciting things, I soon realized that independence comes with far more liabilities than expected. For chronic overthinkers, freedom and independence can mean thinking and rethinking every decision, whether as big as choosing the right classes to take that semester or as small as deciding what specific time to do laundry on the weekend so as not to disrupt the rest of the day. Am I taking full advantage of every opportunity available here? If I had made a different choice that day, or used a different phrase while talking to that one person, how would it have affected the trajectory of the rest of my college life? As the days pass and weeks blur, I sometimes wonder if my choices are the right ones, or if I’ll cringe looking back on them, as I so often do.
Perhaps the journey of making wrong decisions is supposed to teach me to do better in the future. Perhaps all the uncertainty of college can be boiled down to that period of indecisiveness I had last summer, staying in a sublet with my friends and being responsible for cooking my own meals for the first time—where an hour of scrolling through “easy meal recipes” on TikTok and an additional hour of trying not to burn down the kitchen led to a batch of overcooked rice and rubbery eggs. Maybe I should take every decision I make with a grain of salt, as one that most likely won’t have an impact on the near future or even the next 10 years, as I somehow naturally assumed. Maybe my identity is determined by something other than the dozens of mistakes and wrong choices I seem to make daily.
In high school, identity was formed from passions, but passions had the habit of slipping away when designated as work or obligation; trial and error with periods of packed schedules and nearly-inevitable bouts of burnout proved this time and again. As the number of “AP”s preceding the names of the classes on my high school transcript increased with each semester, I found myself reduced to someone motivated solely by doing the bare minimum, unable to muster the strength or energy to enjoy the activities I worked so hard toward improving, including competitive classical piano. By the end of senior year, not even my beloved “piano :)” playlist on Spotify or the videos of Seong-Jin Cho’s performances I’d rewatched on YouTube probably hundreds of times seemed able to revive this initial spirit; my piano books sullenly accrued dust on their bench.
Upon reaching college, where spontaneity is encouraged and deadlines only seem real when you’re face-to-face with them, uncertainty becomes an inevitable part of the human condition. Yet it’s from this uncertainty that passions arise, whether previously unfamiliar or reborn out of old, worn interests. As I let go of preconceived notions of obligations and let myself do whatever I want—embodying the spirit of the Open Curriculum, some would say—a sense of genuine interest returns, one that I seemed to have lost for a while. Who knew that a break from the stressful atmosphere of competitive classical piano for a year would result in a completely new interest, even fondness for the art, resulting in almost weekly trips to Steinert at midnight? Would my high school self—struggling through enriched biology and wondering what the purpose of life was—believe that I’d be discussing Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason every Monday and Wednesday in college?
Perhaps I should view myself as the sleep-deprived struggling student in suburban Minnesota dreaming of the day I’d move to a different environment—now in said different environment. Perhaps I should view myself as having left that identity behind, with my present identity being exactly what that high schooler imagined. Or maybe it would be better to try to focus more on the present moment: Maybe all of the miniscule decisions I make in a day really do compose my self-identity (perhaps I should view myself as the chronic bad free-day scheduler, where I somehow manage to attempt to do laundry each Saturday at the same time as every other individual in my dorm building).
When I look back on this article in the next few years, I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll find nearly all of these questions still unanswered, as usually is the natural state of those who live in the future, or at least in apprehension of it. Or maybe with time, I’ll grow to enjoy this uncertainty, one that I’ll accept as an inevitable part of my experience in this life.
