Jessai Flores

I’d been waiting to take the train home for Thanksgiving break since seventh grade. That was the year I indulged in the saga of Gogol Ganguli — his struggle to reconcile with 1) his namesake, a Russian author his father loved; 2) his culture, from which he feels said namesake has pulled him away; and 3) Ruth, the intoxicating girl he first meets on the train coming home from New Haven.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s vivid prose was my first exposure to Yale. I marveled at the way she moved Gogol through the heartbreak and hardship that soured starkly against the Neo-Gothic beauty that drew him to campus in the first place. I suspect that “The Namesake” was a significant motivator for my early application. And while life on campus has certainly not been as novelistically adaptable as Gogol’s was, there is a sense of watching for one’s Ruth that undergirds much of the student body.

The Marriage Pact is a Yale tradition that uses an algorithm to match students with potential future spouses based on intimate survey responses. It is a public-facing symptom of a more nebulous affliction: the existential dread of graduating college with an identity we don’t really want for ourselves. The security of a life partner who is a “match” for us, or at least this iteration of us, is a tantalizing offer in the tumultuous midst of what are meant to be our formative years. Everything in our lives, from the people we eat our meals with, to the classes we take, to the train cars we sit in on the way home, balloons in importance when we consider that once we leave campus, we’re expected to be fully realized adults ready to carpe the diem out of the real world.

After my uneventful (slumbering) train (bus) ride back home from Boston for Thanksgiving, I stretched out on the couch and waited. And when my nine-year-old brother came barrelling through the door, the first thing my brain registered was how small he looked. He’s less than a foot shorter than me, but it took me a second to get used to craning my neck that far down. My mom shrugged at my wrinkled brows and said it was because I had been around people my own size for so long. 

Being hit with this latent burst of reality made me realize how little had actually changed in what had felt to me like a turbulent first three months of school. My brother’s voice had not yet dropped, congestion pricing had still not been implemented and my mother didn’t fail to supplement her greeting with another kale smoothie. In college, every moment seems monumental on its own scale of propitiousness because there is little constancy to life: an awkward moment with a professor might dictate your productivity for the rest of the day, just like an especially good a cappella rehearsal might set you on a high of tranquility. And the seeming tempestuousness of the lives of every other human being around us only compounds upon this feeling. More often than not, it can lead us to place unnecessary importance on trivial things.

This is not to say that people should stop caring; caring is what makes the world go round. But a little perspective never hurts. College functions in the opposite way as does a car’s side-view mirror: objects in mirror are further than they appear. Maybe the workplace is pretty proximate, after all, but the people we will carve ourselves out to be are still works in progress. We don’t have to pop every metaphorical pimple as we look at the reflections of our future selves; we can’t even see the blemishes yet. For an undisclosed length of time, we are all blank slates, easily written on but also easily erased, like the peeling whiteboards that witnessed every kindergarten subtraction slip-up and spelling mistake. The more mistakes we make, the better we become at reflecting upon and adjusting the parts of ourselves that might merit improvement. 

So maybe we don’t have to worry about becoming the best versions of ourselves before we don cap and gown. Maybe the best versions of ourselves are indeed the ones most pockmarked by regrets and missteps. In any case, most things aren’t worth dwelling too deeply upon. Except, of course, those curious eyes that glance up from time to time from that waterlogged paperback on the Amtrak Northeast Regional.