Looking Back, Going Forward.. a year at Harvard

"Enter to Grow in Wisdom"
-Dexter Gate
My living room can be seen through the left window

**On a plane headed back to the Golden State**
One of the things I’ve most admired about all great writing is eloquence, a way to master and bend the English language into art, the way writers can shape and paint the scene with HD Blu-ray clarity picking the perfect verb, noun, held together with the most necessary adjective. Sometimes, the beauty of the English language can exist in the most exact and precise form, without the bells and whistles and pomp as, say, a Wilde book or play. For example, take one of my favorite quotes from my commonplace book:

“ ‘Then why you not stop it?’ my mother asks.
And it was such a simple question”

And it’s such a simple sentence, yet it conveys so much meaning to the reader that I will find myself applying the same question to a miscellaneous grab-bag of circumstances (i.e. Lamont Library at 3am finishing a Chinese worksheet that could have and should have been completed days ago if I was disciplined).
Eloquence is something I wish I had.

On my expos 50 reviews, the same essential message came through in every single comment from my fellow classmates—“You have a unique, strong, funny voice that is strong and constant. Keep it up.”

Failure. I tried so hard in Expos 50 to deviate from my artificial, habituated style of verse carefully constructed and pieced from attempts to sound like real writers I’ve admired, and I still came out with the same result. It amazes me how far I’ve progressed through the world without someone calling my bluff on this charade.
But again, I’m deviating from the main point of this post. The previous introduction was my attempt to explain and excuse my previous shoddy posts, written on the fly and absolutely overflowing with prose written on the fly without any careful cultivation or attempts to make it sound like something halfway readable.

What I meant to discuss was a reflection of my first year.

This afternoon, I was standing in the middle of my living room, looking out onto Mass Ave., the room and walls completely generic and devoid of the sig of inhabitance accumulated from a year’s attempt to make the place feel like home. Nothing had changed, but I doubt I could have recognized the girl as the same person who had walked in, welcome packet in hand, nine months before.

I came to Harvard for a change; a premature attempt to quell the what-ifs that would have haunted me if I had went anywhere else. The world was telling me that college would inevitably change the entire direction of my life, but I naively believed that I was an acceptation to the rule, that I would end up going where I wanted in life through sheer determination and stubbornness. Of course, I would inevitably come to collide with completely different people at opposite ends of the country’s coasts, but why would it essentially matter? In the end, I would still find myself inhabiting the same streets, with the same long-established group of friends I have been anchored to for so long I count them as relatives, and I would be essentially the same person I was back in high school.

If this hypothesis were a thesis, I would have been doomed to flunk graduation the moment I stepped off the plane. I have deviated so off-course from the person I person I used to be I sometimes half-expect TSA at the airport to detain me on grounds of traveling with a fake ID. If you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you must be already well acquainted with my anxiety of returning home, afraid that I would be unable to consolidate the two faces I’ve been torn between. The people I’ve crossed paths with, the relationships I’ve forced, the things I’ve done, the things I’ve been willing and half-willingly gave into doing, the things I now know I am capable of, the moments that I cannot think back to without a rush of adrenaline flooding my veins, have eroded the essential essence of the person I used to be. I’ve learned to accept that I am completely off-track to the person I want to be in ten years, but I’ve made no effort to find and follow course again.

Unless this is the person I’ve been all along, and college was the only environment where I’ve been free to express this. No longer bound to the expectations of the person I used to be, the expectations that others set for me, paired with the freedom of farsightedly little supervision and a curfew or the breaks that leaving the campus life provide, I may have been able to express the person that I am. I can’t say I am particularly fond of her, nor can I say that I am completely ready to embrace her as the person that I am now.

I remember a friend back home commenting on how much I’ve changed, and how I seem to fit in so easily on campus at Harvard. There are times when I believe that to be true; few friends back home really understood my drive and determination to succeed at the cost of everything else in my life, few of them and I shared enough of the same schema for them to completely understand random references I would throw out in conversation. However, this isn’t to say that I don’t cherish both groups of my social circle equally; there is so much history and shared experiences between those I had shared high school with that I still ache to see and talk to them everyday even though I never have the time to.

And there remains a nagging possibility that I actually don’t fit into the Harvard campus, a fear that my acquaintances are only drawn in and attracted to this confident Anna that I’ve carefully constructed to gain acceptance in my new environment. For example, during lunch the other day, someone commented on how they actually never felt like anyone in high school was worth the time to actually talk to, and that they believed they fit more into the environment here at Harvard, where they were around peers on a more-or-less equal intellectual playing field. At the same time., they would only associate with the elite here too; no, only the top tier straight A student at Harvard was good enough for them, people in high school were too scared and jealous by their intellect and ambition that they would hate and shun the future Harvardian.

Ouch. I my peers here, but to completely write off everyone they used to know as bimbos beneath them, as was the connotation of that remark. This was the type of inflated self-worth and arrogance I believed was confined to only a few students on campus; but apparently Harvardians themselves are not immune to the effects of the H-Bomb either. Yes, you are a Harvardian, but that does not make you any better of a person than the guy taking orders behind the counter of Dunkin’ Donuts. Yes, your determination and hard work are commendable, but at the same time, so much of life is dependent on the factor of sheer luck that one other town down another block may have resulted in you serving coffee behind a counter instead. It is this mentality that gives our school a negative connotation in society, and if this really is the secret mentality behind the vast majority of students here at Harvard, then I am not sure that I want to be associated with the title. If people here really do believe that they are the best and the brightest that the world has to offer, then the entire planet is more doomed than Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth will lead you to believe.

Furthermore, if they knew that the mediocre Harvard student they all condone was I, I doubt they would even wait to associate with me. Perhaps I just associate with an outlying group of people on campus, but most everyone I associate with seem to exist way above the Harvard men, achieving practically all straight As and A-s in their courses, while I have to struggle just to attempt to make the mean. Though I know I should just be grateful that I am passing at the one of the most rigorous universities in the world, I cannot but wonder if those that have a hint at how mediocre I really am secretly think I am beneath them. And it’s twisted that I actually still crave their approval.

As I accidentally slam the door to the room that’s substituted as my nest and sanctuary for the past year, I signal the end to my first year here. And even with a year’s worth of a Harvard education fresh in mind, I wonder if I’m any better off from the girl that walked in a year ago.