I live in Welch Hall, a brown-red building just next to Phelps Gate shaded by emerald-green shrubbery that knocks softly in the wind. Water easily puddles in the pavement paths that criss-cross Old Campus, and if you walk into our common room you can hear the staticky bass at night from cars that rush through the street. 

My nine suitemates: a girl who wants to be a dentist with charm-embroidered white crocs; a violinist whose face is always bright with silver jewelry; a pianist who walks with a stable slant to her shoulders; a girl who is always dancing to herself; a girl with a room full of pink pillows; a lacrosse player with a low voice; and my roommate, who I see mostly in the light of her vanity mirror, her eyes sharp and leaf-like with makeup. These are the images that float to my mind most easily, but I still feel that I do not know them enough, even after the first month. I do not know what enough means. In fact, I have never felt that I have known anyone enough. 

You walk around Old Campus at night and you see people clustered together at duty, holding donuts, trying to listen hard enough for the invisible threads that tie us together. You see people rushing off into the night, their hair glossy with gel and clips. You hear the sound of guitar music and you wonder, looking at your own hands with their cracked lines underneath the bright bulbs of the security lights, if you are so small that others pass through you like wind. You sit in the Trumbull common room, curled up on the red leather couch, while your pianist friend plays music that she’s practiced for years; it thunders and rolls. She says that she can’t articulate the music in words, and if she could, why would she play?

For the last month, we have left thumbprints on one another that disappear after moments. Groups of people brush past one another, look one another in the eyes, quivering with white-yellow-blue energy like the angelhair of candles. I wonder if others have already found their two-way mirrors –– other eyes, other people, that recognize each part of you, your fears, your desires, your chronic anxieties,  and reflect them back at you in resinous suspension. I wonder if I have ever found mine before, in high school, and if I will find them here.

Is it rational to search for people to understand you so fully? In high school, many of us likely prized rationality as the way to keep ourselves self-disciplined and forward-focused. Even emotionally, I often lived according to the advice of other people that spoke inside of my head, explained the right and wrong things to do or feel; I subscribed to the arbitrary prescriptive measures of society of how to develop close friendships, fall in love, and unlock the next stage of emotional closeness with your parents, following the advice that others gave me – a script that we comforted ourselves by following. But during my gap year, I gave myself an ultimatum: be buoyed by the cascades of specific moments, fascinations, and fixations. We tossed around constellations of words like healthy, toxic, codependent, but, really, at a certain point, our patience wears thin, and we yearn to simply live.

Entering campus a month ago shook me back into my high school mentality of always trying to adhere to a normative, rational self, a Sarah who’s always begging the question, what should I be doing? At Yale, I’m trying to regain that irrationality, with all of its highs and neurotic, expansive lows.  

We compare ourselves to other people clustered together and wonder how they have already found their two-way mirrors, and social media only exacerbates this effect. But as I learned in my psychology class, the representativeness heuristic is a shortcut that allows us to over-represent past stereotypes we see in real life. We over-represent the closeness of others in our heads, projecting social media and the instances in which we see people clustered together, but in truth, we’re not on the outside at all. We’re never on the outside; everyone floats in this crystal lattice, drifting slowly together. Feeling lonely at Yale is irrational – that’s exactly what makes it such a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

To be rational all of the time, to remind ourselves of the reality of the situation, requires consistent cognitive capacity. To allow ourselves to be irrational, giving into our current wishes and fears, is an indulgence that makes us feel more mature and strong in the long run. Sometimes, irrationality is a beautifully chaotic human thing, to allow ourselves to be filled with emotion that propels us. In those discrete moments, we stop being the creator of the artwork and slip into the identity of the characters, who lack foresight and vision but still, we love them for how idiosyncratic, boundless, and vibrant they are. I want to graduate Yale with a better answer to the questions, ‘what did you learn?’ but also –– ‘what do you regret the most?’ and ‘what were the moments in which you felt the most alone?’ 

Loneliness can be liberating as we strive to recreate ourselves into the people we want to be; it can also be anxiety-inducing and terrifying. We psychologically overestimate how on the ‘outside’ we are and try too hard to maximize our lives, and we are far from understanding ourselves because we are not yet sure who we want to be. There is distance between me, Sarah a day from now, and Sarah in a year. That’s why I feel so lost, sitting in a little canoe in the darkroom of my mind, floating. Recently, I learned about a Dostoevsky quote about how a man is exploring the deep sea, only to be disillusioned when he completes his journey. The real importance was the process of exploration. I want to treasure this feeling of inching and thawing away the loneliness; it is the process that I will remember the most and not the end.

This sensation of distance is what drives us towards being together, the shining angelhair of candlelight whose warmth flares up at the moments when we need it the most.

SARAH FENG is a first-year in Trumbull college. Contact her at sarah.feng@yale.edu