Reeti Malhotra

I hate being still.

To be rooted to one place — the prospect of flight, change and possibility nullified. The rush of euphoria at connecting with a new person, no matter how minute our interaction, is a feeling I cannot shake. The desire for new experiences is an appetite I cannot satiate.

I hate being still. I always have.

The decision to attend university for four years was horrifying. In the tenth grade, exhausted by the rat-race of my hyper-academic landscape, I had declared that higher education was not for me. I was done with school. I would carve some other path, any other path, on my hands and knees and until my nails bled if need be. 

Yet, Yale remained a quiet inkling in the back of my mind. Maybe, I mused, if I managed to push through my IGCSE exams and two more years of the seemingly endless slog of high school, I could go to university. Maybe, I would go to Yale.

My use of “maybe” deceptively implies doubt. I knew this irrefutably. Yale was the only place I would go; the place I knew I needed to be, where stillness, for once, would be welcome. I do not know how I arrived at this conclusion, nor how I discovered this university to begin with. I was drawn here for reasons that continue to elude my understanding.

Sat on a patio in Bali in November after completing my finals — it was the time for graduation trips, after all — I twisted my face into a mask of false reassurance as my university counsellor impelled me to apply elsewhere over Zoom.

“I have a list, and I’m working on my other supplements and my UCAS personal statement,” I promised. “I’ll do my Singaporean applications in January, too.”

Falsehoods.

I needed to come to Yale to become whoever I needed to be — a person I still did not know, but would eventually come to recognise. I knew it in my bones.

Standing outside the Converse store in SoHo, I opened my phone to a slowly-buffering video of dancing bulldogs. It was happening. Images began to pour through my mind. I am sitting on Cross Campus and the grass is a vibrant, technicolour green. People mill around me — friends, I presume, but they are faceless as my mind awaits our meeting — and books are laid out around me. Aristotle, Sappho, I am not particular. We are on the same intellectual wavelength, but our conversations drift from the esoteric to the menial. We talk of our days, our favourite songs, our classes. Ambition seeps out of our pores, yet not of the corrosive kind. This is a community of the truest kind.

I sit in Sterling, glimmers of sunlight dancing through stained glass windows. I walk through campus, the cold night air biting into my skin as stars twinkle above.

Naïvete.

Now in April of my first year as the weather warms, I do sit on Cross Campus. I study in Sterling, and I walk in the dark. But my life is larger than the picturesque, tailored for an admissions-Instagram fantasy I once nurtured. I am more than the girl who merely talks of what she reads and much more than the girl who once feared stagnation with a vengeance and refuted higher education with a passion.

A friend of mine pointed to the fact that I had changed hugely over the course of the last few months. 

How so? 

I had come in with greater security in my sense of self, they explained. A series of odd circumstances — those that might have sent me running with my tail between my legs had I known of them before I arrived at Yale, those that almost did — had eroded the innocence in my gaze. Serendipitous connections and emotional bonds soured without rationale and closure. I began to crack under the insurmountable academic pressure I once shouldered automatically. The rupture forced a reckoning. School was never meant to be so difficult — I had been wired differently from the start.

For a time, I was melancholy and uncertainty personified. 

I felt impelled to contradict her, but found I could not. I remembered a time when this place had me declaring I did not believe in the innate goodness of people anymore. Another time when I found I could not bring myself to study any longer, choosing to succumb to the sweet calls of nervous sleep instead.

But in the absence of my former self, I developed a new understanding of who I could be. I formed friendships that reignited my faith in pure, selfless affection. I rediscovered a long-dead passion — writing — and nurtured my mind through arduous seminars on philosophy, politics and literature. I learned to let go, to embrace life as it comes, to no longer fear limbo and unpredictability.

You’re happier now, they remarked. 

I concurred. I know more now, and I am better for it. Yale has changed me. Over the next three years, it will continue to do so.