Snippets & Sketches: In limbo
In her column “Snippets & Sketches”, Lily reflects on what it means to live a beautiful life.
“How’s it going?”
Sometimes I am at a complete loss. My mind wheels through the blur of studying, events and conversations of my first few weeks at Stanford. It’s impossible to interpret into a coherent sentence. My experience is piled like a jumble of items up past my ears; I can’t see what it is as a whole, only bits and fragments as I thrash my way through this cluttered sea.
“Alright,” I say with a catch in my voice, because I don’t want to pretend everything is jolly, but don’t want to admit to being confused. The only thing I can say with certainty about my life now: I don’t know anything with certainty.
It goes deeper than being unsure of what I’m majoring in or what I want to do. It is as if I have no fingerprints. I’ve been lifted up and off the grooves I have worn through the years; the way I spoke, what I did, who I saw, what I ate, what I believed, what I valued. It’s all no longer quite the same. Without these familiar landmarks, how are we to recognize ourselves? Even my face looks foreign in the mirror sometimes.
It feels scary not knowing myself, because it feels like I am losing myself, and because I feel small compared to everyone else talking so confidently of passion and purpose. I want to shrink into a little hobbit-hole, away to some green land with Winnie-the-Pooh. Or, I feel a reflex to defend myself, to cross my swords and hoist my shield against the barrage of new ideas, values, ways of life.
But I suspect neither of these reactions is wise. Yes, I am losing myself, or rather, the version of myself that made sense — but in the space that remains is the beautiful possibility of creating myself anew.
Everyone has a house in which they live. I don’t mean your physical dwelling, but your mental one: with foundations laid by your culture and family, a framework constructed of experiences and ideas, pleasant little pictures adorning the walls, and scary forms lurking in the basement. The catch is that you can’t leave the house, because for the most part we cannot leave our minds.
Some ideas are added to the house without perturbing it. But the best ideas creak and shift and rework the very foundations, letting in light and air, changing the world you see. A conversation with a friend leaves me puzzling for the rest of the week: are things going badly or well? What does that mean for me? My COLLEGE 101 readings leave me in an astonishment of beauty or profound understanding. How others live and see things causes shock, then curiosity.
Most of the house is made without us realizing it. The space of the unfamiliar–dwelling in limbo–allows us to see what it’s made of, something that is impossible when we are so used to living in it. It turns out you can’t really know yourself until you are no longer that self, until you depart a little ways from that fiction and gaze at it benevolently like an angel above. This is the privilege of college: space to see beliefs old and new, and the custody to choose. Space from who you thought you were, so you can become who you truly are.
There’s no rush to know yourself. Your true self will arise, as mysteriously and naturally as the dawn. You have only to step outside and meet it.
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