Two People in a Person

The more I stay at home after the first year of college, the more I began to realize that I'm not the same person that I am in college. My motivation is different, my balance is different, and the way I approach my life is completely different.

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Early this summer, as I was chatting with a good college friend over the phone, he said something that really stuck with me. He was telling me about how he constantly felt unproductive and lazy and how he almost felt like he was "becoming his old self." The pre-college, pre-world-understanding, pre-drive-to-succeed highschool version of himself that he thought he had left behind when he bought his ticket to SF.

The strange thing was that I really understood what he meant. Ever since I had gotten home, I had become lazy, would sleep all day, spend a disgusting amount of time scrolling through social media, feel guilty for wasting time, and thus, sleep more and waste more time.

In college, I was the complete opposite.

I took on more projects than I could handle, pushed myself to my actual breaking point and back, and literally forced my body to be productive all in the name of progress. Regardless of what kind of progress, I was always doing things. And it made me irritable and exhausted sometimes, but honestly, the busyness was comforting. The underlying feeling that I was at least moving in SOME direction made it worth it.

All of that went out the window once I came back to Texas. It almost feels like some sort of evolutionary reversal, or maybe a really long dream of what I potentially could achieve, from which I was promptly slapped awake and returned to the reality of I am useless.

It's quite frustrating really. And I began to wonder why.

They say that people rarely act the same in front of different people, whether that be friends, family, or strangers, etc. We tend to mold ourselves to the wavelength of the people we are interacting with, especially depending on the environment and circumstances.

Which was precisely the difference.

Not only was I around different people in college, but I was around a distinctly different type of people. There, I was constantly surrounded by Type A overachievers with generally low self esteem and excruciating FOMO. The people around me did so much that I felt like I should be doing so much just to keep up. In a way, I fed off of their energy and used it to fuel my own interests, which was actually really effective. The environment pushed me to constantly matamorphasize, and even though that potential was always in me somewhere, it was never catalyzed until these triggers were present.

I remember the anxiety of not doing enough in highschool. This nagging at the back of my head that always said "You could do so much with that club" or "Your grades could be so much better if you just cared" or even "It's not that you can't do it, it's that you won't." No one really pushed me in highschool, and even in middle school, I never really struggled to keep good grades or the basic do these things cuz they look good for colleges.

But maybe I should make a distinction.

No one pushed me and was successful. My mother always nagged about doing more and practicing or studying or not. wasting. time. But it never really worked. Maybe I would do what she told me to, but if my heart wasn't in it, then I couldn't push my heart to be in it. I could never force myself to care about something that I just didn't care about. "Well you should make yourself care," she would always say. But how? How do you make yourself inspired or motivated when those ingredients are just... not there?

There were certain times where I was really motivated, though. And looking back, I can see that it usually was because of the teacher. In 8th grade, I had an amazing science teacher named Mr. Gollner. He wasn't the smartest scientist in the world or the best teacher on the planet, but he simply cared about teaching. In fact, I think he really enjoyed it. He would always joke around in class and make stories and analogies out of lessons and make sarcastic comments that left the class in a state of fun. And by the end of the year, we didn't even realize how much we had learned while we were just having fun. What made his class so good was not just that he really knew what he was talking about, but the fact that he was interested in what he was talking about. He was curious and genuinely wanted to learn just for the sake of learning.

And that hunger, that genuine care was contagious.

Science wasn't really ever my thing, not that I was bad at it, but it was never really the subject that got me the most riled up or wide eyed. But I swear there was never a single day I wasn't excited to go to Gollner's 7th period science class. It was always the highlight of my day. And that year (I don't know why this sticks out to me) I got a perfect score on my STAAR test in science. A perfect score. On a test that I could literally care less about. In a subject that was only interesting because of the teacher. I blew my mind.

It was the first taste of how I could be motivated to move not because someone pushed me, but because someone inspired me. It was the difference between a coach standing behind his runners yelling LET"S GOOO PICK IT UPPP, versus a coach standing at the finish line whispering you got this you got this let's go pick it up, as he squats in genuine apprehension. It's amazing how effective the latter is, and it's amazing how painfully inefficient the former is.

In highschool I found a couple more teachers like that. Mr. Hussey, Mr. Porter, Mr. Perryman. They all cared, and that's what made me feel like it was okay to care too. It was never that I had no interest in academics or these subjects, but rather that I felt like I was the only one who had an interest in them. So I always hesitated and just grumbled in my own frustration instead of putting in the effort. Instead of caring, I chose to not care, because at least I had other people to not care with me. At least I wouldn't be alone.

And fundamentally that's what it is right? We search and search for answers and learn things to satisfy that inner craving for understanding. That satisfaction of oh well, now I know and I won't go wandering around the world misunderstanding reality, or worse, believing a reality that doesn't exist. Man is eternally and universally cursed to endure his human experience in solitude, and though there are avenues to ease that pain through art and science and learning and teaching, there is no key that exists to free that human experience in its entirety. I can never be another person and understand their feelings and thoughts and motivations at some exact moment at some exact place. I just don't believe that it's replicable. Or that it should be. And if that means that we're imprisoned in our own minds and can only find solace in trying to replicate it, then what better way than through learning? What better answer to that echo than curiosity?

If we crave to be understood and we crave to be anything but alone in that understanding, then doesn't that mean that all I want is to learn things about the world? I want to dissect the world and let it dissect me, just to know how it functions, and if I'm lucky, why it functions?

I couldn't find that in Texas. Maybe not because it didn't exist, but because I was so afraid to be alone and I couldn't find company either way I looked at it: Following my passions and interests meant studying them only by myself, and not following my passions meant constant dissatisfaction with the lack of understanding and just simple care that surrounded me.

And obviously this means that I'm leaving out all those exceptions of amazing teachers or friends that defied odds, but for the most part, I felt like the last piece that wouldn't fit in this little Texas puzzle.

And until I came to Minerva, I don't think I realized that I was really just a piece that belonged to a different puzzle entirely.

The people at Minerva aren't like this. No matter who you talk to you can always hold a conversation about something that they're super interested in. And the beauty of it is that there is such an incredible variety of interests that each person pours their soul into. For one it's finishing an entire CS project in a single line of code, for another it's biking all the way from the west coast to the east coast just to challenge our understanding of borders, and for still another it's writing an entire album of songs because it's the only way he can express his truth. All these people live and thrive on the very edges of their character. With scrunched up eyebrows and back of the napkin ideas, they're just constantly asking. They're not demanding answers from the world or forcing answers out of the world, but they're just asking. How. Who. Maybe? Possibly. Of course! Oh, definitely. Hmmm but why?

And it's in that asking that you can see the very essence of human nature in them. It's that care with which they go about investing their questions that makes you think "yeah that twinkle in his eye? It definitely means that he's got something."

And it's definitely contagious.

A couple weeks ago, another friend was telling me about how she made completely different decisions in college than what she would have made a home. It was the first time she was outside her comfort zone, and understandably, a little frazzled. "But now that I'm back home, I know that this is the normal me, so I need to just focus on doing the same things in college too."

If the people you are surrounded by and the places you are in, manifest a different branch of your being, then who is to say that this one is your true self and that the other is not? Just because I am a different person at home than I am at college doesn't mean that one is wrong, right, better, or worse. Rather, it shows us what recipes we can make if we just switch up the ingredients from time to time. If I want to be more productive, I need to surround myself with other productive people. If I want to be emotionally stable, I need to lean on the people that I trust. If I want to not be alone, then I need to find something that makes me feel less alone.

We need to stop expecting things to just come to us, and put in the effort to explore and fail enough times to understand what that secret ingredient is that makes me me- regardless of who or what is around me. That's what college is for. That's what life is for.

As we live, we learn, and ultimately, decide which person we want to become. Maybe life has no meaning and we're all just wasting our time trying find something that keeps us busy enough to not think about all the bad stuff that pops up if you close your eyes long enough. But maybe parsing through different versions of yourself makes life a little bit more worth living. A little bit more bearable. Maybe it means you'll get out of it what you give. Or just maybe it means that there are truly an infinite number of you's out there waiting to be found.

All it takes is a couple dollops of caring, a pinch of chance, and the secret secret ingredient: you.