I have been a student all of my life. School consumed most of my waking hours and supposedly created the white hairs that continue to sprout all over my 19-year-old head. I never questioned my role as a student, it was just what everyone around me was and what I was supposed to be too.
When I was in elementary, I loved school so much. My heart raced every time I packed my backpack. Imagine tiny pudgy fingers placing pencils, erasers and lead just so in a Disney Princess pencil case every couple of hours. The end of heavy August heat and trips to the office section of Walmart brought on jitters. I was sleepless every night before a field trip, thinking about who I’d sit next to on the bus. Clearly, I was (and still am) a COLOSSAL nerd.
Of course, the childlike excitement cannot last. School started to lose its charm. I became so overly aware of who I was and what I seemed like to my classmates and teachers. I went to middle school with a cloud over my head: I needed to work hard to get into a good high school. A math placement exam scared me so much I froze halfway through the test and just stopped completing it. By the time I was in 7th grade, it was commonplace to find either my peers or myself crying in bathrooms and hallways because of Bs and 89s that were almost 90s. When I was twelve, a teacher told me I was doing well, and I responded by saying “Not well enough,” a sentiment which today I find absolutely hilarious and terrifying at the same time. I was twelve.
My academic overenthusiasm became irritating for others. I asked too many questions about the US Constitution and was told I shouldn’t care because I “wasn’t a citizen anyway” (I was). I asked too many questions in chemistry class and heard girls laughing behind me and was told later that they were calling me an attention whore. Effortless success became the goal, not a desire for knowledge itself.
When we started realizing that our friends and peers around us were actually our competitors for a limited number of spots, things started changing. A girl tried to calm down her crying friend by telling her she thought the 80% on a math test was actually very good, and the friend replied, “That’s good for YOU.” My peer who had gotten into every elite university I can name except for one, immediately blamed his Black and Latinx peers for his lack of admission. Everyone started looking down on amazing public universities and even our local Ivy. Someone asked about another’s SAT score, and before they could finish, he said “I got a 1590 and didn’t even prepare.”
I thought getting into Harvard would be this monumental moment where I showed everyone who I was, where I could really smirk in their face and say suck it. And when I did get in, a lot of people were kind. But behind my back, I heard some say that if I could get in, well then of course they would too. Friends started drifting away, and to this day I still wonder what I did wrong. There was no winning.
I went to college hoping for things to be different. And for the most part they were. It started out lonely and isolating. I used Google Maps to get across the street. The family of the boy who sat across from me in class practically owns the city I dream of moving to. For every meal, I walked into an imposing 9,000 sq ft hall filled with stained glass, busts of different high achieving men, and hundreds of students dressed better than me. I wasn’t different here; I was actually the same. My white professor corrected me when I described my culture. I found myself not knowing what makes me distinct from this group of people who have probably all had the same thoughts I have, but better. It seems like everyone was either constantly talking about their new LinkedIn connections, building a start-up, or writing a book/album. I, on the other hand, accidentally complained about the lack of non-vegetable hors d’oeuvres at a university event, unknowingly in front of the dean. After a series of awkward missteps, clumsy words, a lot of “like,” “um,” and “does that make sense?” in class, I concluded that I actually did not know anything about anything at all.
But no one laughed at me for knowing nothing. No one asked me what I got on a test. No one thought my questions in class made me a whore. Gossip and insults always exist no matter where you go, and competition thrives in elite institutions, but I didn’t feel like I did in high school, where I had to actively hide from everyone where I was applying to college in order to escape snide comments, especially in the case that I didn’t get in. Hundreds of professors and teaching fellows were so excited to answer my questions, and dozens of student groups gathered to be nerdy about all the things I am nerdy about. I was constantly running from place to place, and I finally found that enthusiasm that I had left tied up in a corner of my mind. I was challenged in the way I thought about the world. The world’s injustices were opened up and exposed, and we were encouraged to fix them. I was the happiest I have ever been.
And then, in March, the virus that I had brushed off earlier as just something like the 2009 swine flu that made teachers post hand washing instructions in classrooms, became nothing like most people had ever seen in their lifetimes. And at 9 am, right before my French final, I got a notice that I needed to pack up all my stuff and get the hell away from campus in five days.
When I got home, I immediately set a countdown on my phone until the fall semester when I’d be able to go back. I felt numb for weeks, sitting through online lectures making eye contact with pixels and not pupils. As the months went by, I realized I actually had no idea what would happen to friendships that had just begun to grow, and less importantly, what would happen to all my things, sitting in boxes in a tiny empty dorm room that I am unhealthily attached to. I realized I was actually not going back anytime soon. The enthusiasm and excitement were relegated back to a crawl space in my mind. I didn’t know how I could care about my essays and exams when I couldn’t retain abstract information and complex theories taught to me through Google Docs and PowerPoint presentations, and while hundreds of thousands of people were being hurt by sickness as well as the police. I went back to trying to get through classes instead of loving them.
School has been my identity, and I love it too much to make me any bit cool. But because I have the privilege to, I’m choosing to let go of it. I’ve lost the happiness that school gives me, and I can’t come up with reasons to go back. Certainly not because I love Zoom chimes and unmuting myself to speak. I’m not going to school just to finish and move on to the next thing. I don’t even know what the next thing is. I’m going to try and find out what else makes me happy, in this horrible aloneness we’re all in, and work for things I care about, so I know where all this school is leading me. I have no idea when it will happen, or if it will happen, but I blindly long for the day I am back to being the little girl wiggling her toes in the back seat of the car waiting for the first day of school, and the college student who over-romanticizes higher education, smiling every time she leaves her dorm, on the way to do something a sane person would find incredibly boring, so I won’t describe it here.