You never really think about it at the beginning of your first year of college, but four years is not a lot of time. There’s still a part of me that imagines the Fall 2021 version of myself, wearing those silly convertible khakis riding a bike up Gilman Road between my first and second class of the day, who can’t picture the end of college. At the same time, that version of me is also not really “me;” while I am the same flesh and blood, I am so different.
Now that everything seems to be coming to an end as quickly as it started, it’s customary to spend time reflecting — talk about what we learned, all the personal growth and everything that changed since the beginning of college.
Yet, trained as I am in the ways of the fire and brimstone academic environment of Fremont, CA, I first see the missed opportunities. The time that I sunk into an economics major long after losing love for the subject, the classes I didn’t pay attention in and all the hours I squandered posting on Twitter rather than making friends.
But “failure,” as I am wont to judge these past four years, would be an unfair characterization.
One of the most irksome and trite (yet true) sayings is the old line that you need to “do your best and leave the rest” (apparently, attributed to Charles F. Deems of New York). Arriving at college, I failed to comprehend that there were indeed two parts to that old saying.
High school had felt like a failure to me. I left without feeling a sense of direction in my studies, having given up on the idea that math was a viable career path — that I wasn’t built for it. I was resentful — the effort I had put into my classes in high school was met with a string of college rejections, and Occidental was the only one in California that admitted me.
Convinced that I simply wasn’t doing my best, I poured more and more into studying to the detriment of everything else — with predictable, negative results. Upon eschewing social connections, exercise and other enjoyable parts of life, I found solace in Twitter — and I felt worse and lonelier than I ever had up to that point. Even though I was doing “well” in my classes, I wasn’t retaining much of the information, and I had nothing to show for my (lack of) effort come summer, where I had to spend that time at home doing effectively nothing.
My second year, I decided to make some changes and start (slowly) exiting the shell I had built for myself. I started to retain more of the content from my classes, spent less time in my dorm’s common room and spent more time making friends and connections. I started to feel like I could put myself out there — I created a website and applied to Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) (with a string of rejections, but still).
This pattern continued into junior year — more friends, more content retention, more fun and more trust in others and myself. Yet, something always felt off during this time period. Assessing my situation objectively, I was doing incredibly well — I had great friends, was doing well academically, was physically active and had fun in a variety of activities. Yet, depression attacked me with a vengeance. That spring, I dealt with an emergency and deep emotional dysregulation after the fact and felt even more lost in my personal life. I did my best, and I crashed and burned.
Really, I knew that I was still the high-strung, lonely, resentful teenager that had entered Occidental after a certifiably miserable four years of high school. But I couldn’t admit it — for some reason, it was too painful to let those parts of my identity stay in the past.
Come Fall 2024, I was determined to change. My REU taught me that “doing your best” is important, yes, but it is just as (if not more) important to know when to let something go. We easily get caught in cycles of thought leading to no distinct benefit, running around in circles like a dog leashed to a pole.
And so, that fateful fall, I let myself go — freeing myself from all self-imposed doubts, regrets and insecurities that so defined my first three years of college. When they popped into my head, I’d often say to myself (or out loud if they started to crop up in conversation), “no regrets.” Regrets were to be an artifact of a younger and more naive version of myself.
Miraculously, it worked. Without sacrificing academics or social life, and even picking piano back up after a year-long hiatus, I had an incredibly rewarding semester. Before, I thought I needed a particular, existential struggle that defined that year — adjustment woes, depression, difficult classes or some combination of them — so that I would push myself to be the best I could. Yet, I only needed to give myself a little bit of grace.
In the end, I got pretty much everything I could ever ask for these past four years — amazing, lifelong friends, wonderful math courses that taught me more than I could ever imagine, admission to a PhD program and a deeply rewarding experience working for the newspaper. While I had basically all of these things for years, it took one final step to finally appreciate them all.
Better late than never.
Contact Avinash Iyer at iyera@oxy.edu
