Have you waited for so long that one morning, you wake up to realize it’s what you become? After I decided to take a gap year during the pandemic, I could feel each passing month take its toll, fermenting my body. “Perhaps I’m no longer waiting,” I thought during one struggling night, “perhaps I’m rotting away.”

Those who are like me understand what a life of waiting feels like. Scrawled in our journals are ever-growing bucket lists. The walls of our bedrooms are dressed with printed album covers of artists we hope to dance with strangers to. Deep in our minds is a faceless figure who would love us forever. 

I wondered if Yale was even a place for people like me — people who are left behind expecting, anticipating and always yearning. Before setting foot at Yale, my classmates seemed to know something I did not. Even during the height of the pandemic, they were overseas working in businesses, moving to cities to chase their dreams, getting published, researching, being interviewed and somehow refusing to wait for anything. Yet here I was, stagnant, in my room. On a productive day, I counted down the days until my gap year was over on a grayed dry-erase board. Sometimes, I would read a sentence of a 60-page novella that I had been attempting to read for three months. Eventually, I stopped everything. I hadn’t seen the sun in over a month. My bed became my body. A drunk friend called me: he was throwing up in a toilet far away in Chicago and speaking gibberish. I realized that the phone call was the closest I had ever been to anybody in months. I stopped remembering my dreams.

As time went by, however, I discovered that waiting was a worthwhile process. I committed to the 60-page novella, reading a page a day. I began to go for long walks in the middle of the night around my neighborhood. I wrote fifty words. In each wait, I always arrived somewhere.  Soon, I finished the novella. I walked to a marsh that seemed to sparkle in the night. Eventually, I found that I had written a story. This arrival, the journey of having ended up somewhere different than where I had started, was something I had forgotten about waiting.

These days, I relish the fact that I am in-between because someday, I will arrive. I don’t know where that place is, but I know it is beautiful. Maybe those who I envied for not waiting are also in their in-betweens. Maybe we are all holding on to the hope of some day arriving. 

Last week, I called my friend who had just finished her first year on campus. We made plans for when we would see each other. That night, I slept soundly. 

To my fellow first years: we’ve all had different types of waits. Gap years, semesters off, online school. Hasn’t this journey to Yale been worth it?  Don’t give up. I know when we see each others’ hopeful faces on campus, everything will fall into place. I can’t wait to see what beautiful things we achieve when we finally arrive.