On the first day of school, I counted the mirrors around me: a large pane in the bathroom, vanity mirrors on our desks, floor-length mirrors on the walls, the reflective, fish-eye distortions of our water bottles.  We see ourselves far too much, the opaque, stretched-thin formations of our faces disintegrating into no meaning at all. As my parents left me, they insisted, ‘Be yourself.’ I tried repeatedly for the past few months to adhere to this epithet — as wide-eyed and stiff as an owl, plunging into the glitzy nights attempting to present and exude my high school self, while simultaneously trying to reimagine a static cutout of a new me. I didn’t know what it meant to ‘be myself’ when I wanted to be changed by Yale. Now, I understand that ‘being’ yourself is a constant striving, an active process.

When we took MBTI tests on the eve of my friend’s 18th birthday, we were cutting up a single raisin cookie between the three of us with a plastic knife and discussing our traits, each of us strung into a tight wire with the yearning to perform a fascination with the concepts of others, and to perform a fascinating identity we want to construct for ourselves. At the start, I felt the pressure to make myself known, to formulate a history and identity for others to latch onto. 

We perform mirror images of other people and who they expect us to be because we do not yet know what we ourselves want. Oftentimes, I shrink as if I am invisible, curled on couches where people float past like razor-tipped bowls of fish, wearing golden chained necklaces of paperclips, inserting myself into a role that I persuade myself I feel comfortable in; I am oddly surprised by the subtle quips and jokes made by my friends that misidentify my perception of myself, sometimes in negative ways. We fit and cram ourselves into lecture halls and suites brimming with voices that clash and clamor, code-switching dialects of tossing out Internet jargon, screaming pop songs and proclaiming “I hear you, but … ” In a sea where we’re bereft of the family and friends whose subtle perceptions of us represented mirrors for us to match, — like lighthouses in the dark, guiding us on how to act and speak — we cling onto the undercurrents of conversations that we sense to create individuality for ourselves.

The advice ‘be yourself’ feels meaningless when you do not quite know which pieces of yourself constitute who you want to be. I count my traits to myself: likes the color ochre, likes sunlight, likes naps in the sun, likes matcha, likes long walks in the early morning, likes conversations that make her head whirl, likes jazz music. I could be anyone, really. In lecture halls full of hundreds of people, I feel liberated compared to the 52-person high school I attended and yet devoid of any sensation of individual specialness. 

In this first semester, I’ve found that ‘being yourself’ is an active effort, making choices from the type of person you want to be until you truly inhabit them. I won’t forget the night a suitemate who barely knew me stayed up until five in the morning when I was coughing so hard from pneumonia that I couldn’t breathe. She wore a thick mask, brewed me several kettles of hot water, washed my cups with boiling water and made me several cups of tea. She sat with me until I fell asleep and told me the funny stories from the night that had passed, trying to distract me from the feeling alone. Each day, I try to embody that unending and organic kindness, mirroring the type of person that she is. One boy who lives in the building next to me would follow me outside of crowded gatherings if he could see my face falling, reading the subtleties of my expression with gentleness. The girl who lives in the suite above blows me kisses from across the hallway unprompted and holds my hands, telling me not to worry. I want to be their mirror image. I really do. 

I remember taking a morning run with a girl I’d befriended at the Trumbull dance. As we jogged around New Haven, the fall leaves brightening to the crisp yellow of fresh peppers, we discussed a reflective paper she was writing about the sport she had dedicated her life to. As we ran, she talked about funneling her childhood and high school years into competition, yet falling just shy of the final goal she had set for herself. But in her demeanor and disposition, it’s clear to me that her drive for success permeates her being, strengthens her focus and makes her brilliant to be around. She knows how to solve problems in her mind that whirl and click like pieces in an infinite puzzle without hesitating. I admire her lack of hesitation and her immediate love for the world, and when I feel paralyzed, I think of how she would act — with an open-minded and unhesitating passion for what you want.

I’ll never understand the discrete boundaries between individual shifts that have occurred inside of me; Yale is a place where the Picasso-like fragments of the concept of Sarah have scattered, dissociating and blurring. Yet change occurs in the dark, away from the conscious gaze. It’s true that there’s no solid ‘yourself’ for me to inhabit, and that’s the wonder of living in a place where we’re tugged by our own willingness to shift and metamorphose into the mirror image of our future selves.

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