During spring 2018, I got so depressed that I holed myself up in my room for a month and only came out to watch my friends play Fortnite in the common room (which, to be fair, lasted at least 5 hours a day). I remember the moment I realized I wanted to withdraw — I was sitting on our shitty L-Dub F42 couch, desperately willing the girl from across the hall to leave so I could talk to my roommate about it. But she didn’t. Eventually, the words just flew out of my mouth, so strong was my conviction that I needed to be anywhere but Yale.

I left on my flight home for spring break and didn’t come back. For those not in the know, you don’t get any credit for the semester during which you withdraw, and you have to take a full, additional semester off if you leave for medical reasons. Thus, I came back in January 2019 a second-semester first year, a newly-minted member of the class of 2022.

My last year here has delivered on the promise that year off made: that one day, I’d have to take on Yale without the people I came in with. The prospect terrified me for ages, but I mostly just feel old as hell. Furthermore, as Yale’s resident elder, I’ve claimed my right to do what I want. I was a froco this year, and manners be damned, my first years were going to hear my shower playlist every night whether they liked it or not. On the flip side, when I told them the first time I went to Woads was in 2017, they laughed in my face.

In the moments this year I’ve been able to sit down and reflect, in the gaps in the jumble of life at Yale, I’ve come up with a few threads defining my experience as a super senior.

Most prominent: Yale can be so lonely, despite even your best efforts. Which conflicts with every narrative about what this place is supposed to be, but it’s so lonely. Taking a lap around the dining hall, always hopeful but never recognizing a single face; trekking up Science Hill without any of the passing greetings that make it bearable; sitting in my L-Dub F11 single on a Saturday night wanting nothing more than to shoot the shit with my friends with “Shrek 2” in the background.

It’s been especially weird talking to my first years worried out of their minds about making friends. When I tell them everyone feels like this at first and it gets better, sometimes I’m not sure if I believe it myself. Because it does, then it doesn’t, and I feel like a fraud stuck in the same entryway where it all started.

At the same time, taking that year off has given me a second chance here in two ways. First, it put me back on track to staying alive and becoming happy. I don’t know where I’d be without the time I took to go to therapy, think about how I saw myself and create a new narrative of my life. 

Second, it coincidentally shifted my senior year to now. In spring 2018, I somehow didn’t foresee that a pandemic would shut down the world and upheave life as we knew it. One result has been that I ended up being a super senior in a sea of them. “Community” might be a strong word for it, but seeing another super senior out and about feels like reuniting with a cousin you’d half forgotten. It’s funny what even the barest hint of familiarity can do for a relationship. One night in the Luther kitchen, I bumped into a girl who spent three years studiously ignoring me and gossiped with her about the men we were currently seeing. 

After 14 months of total disaster, this extra year has been an unexpected gift. In the interludes between waves, it’s felt like Yale again — another opportunity to go to class just to scroll on Twitter and to get hammered with my friends and dance my heart out. It’s been everything I’d missed so dearly. 

And yet — I still wish I could do it all with my best friends. I’ve never felt so good in my entire life as I do now, and it feels like a cosmic joke that I couldn’t enjoy that feeling with some of the people I care about the most. 

In 30 years, these problems will probably come out in the wash. I’ll remember how much fun I had with my society, how I single-handedly kept Tomatillo in business, how I saw the future U.S. Senator from New York rip shots at Rudy’s. I’m glad. When I leave Yale, I want to keep it in my thoughts as the place where I grew so much and learned to love. 

Nothing can change what happened in the second half of my first year. But I’m stronger for having been through it, and I wouldn’t trade this senior year for all the dining points in the world. After all the gaps of Yale I’ve gone through, I’m coming out the other side feeling whole.

WILL WANG