On not finding yourself

The senior send-off is a column that goes way back in BlogDailyHerald (our abandoned publication) history—as way back as blogs can go, anyway. I read those of all the seniors before me as if they were advice columns tailored to the Brown experience. I loved them for two reasons. First, I craved ideas of how to be Brown, how to do Brown, and what a graduating senior looks and sounds like. Second, I loved thinking that one day, I too would have some advice to give, a written summarizing account of my Brown experience.Now that seems like a really lofty goal. I wanted to use this space to answer: what have I learned about myself during the last four years? What can I tell a freshman that is at all helpful about how to do college or be happy or successful or make some change?I don’t know anything of who I am or how I want to be. I spend a lot of time googling people I admire to figure out what to do next. “Amal Clooney law school” is open in one tab and “Joan Didion first job” in the next. My cousin thought about becoming a yoga instructor in Costa Rica so I think about it too. My sister is thinking about an MFA in Screenwriting and I wonder if I should join her. I look at all my friends with their next step planned and wonder if that's the kind of plan I want, too.When my parents’ friends (or even my own friends) ask why I chose Philosophy as my concentration, I joke, “Because it’s so practical for job prospects.” Here's the real reason: I wanted to spend four years thinking about how a person should live her life, how a society should be organized, and what we mean when we say certain words like “happiness” or “love” or “person.”If you’ve ever taken an intro-level philosophy class—or maybe even if you haven’t—you know that you can’t really find the answers to these questions in philosophy. You get to talk about some of them, but you can’t find answers. The existence of the humanities as subjects depends on the possibility of proving someone and some idea wrong, always.The summer before I started college, I read a novel by Sheila Heti called How Should a Person Be? (I got to see her speak at Brown my junior year, and then I went home and googled how I could be her.) She writes:

“You can admire anyone for being themselves. It’s hard not to, when everyone’s so good at it. But when you think of them all together like that, how can you choose? How can you say, I’d rather be responsible like Misha than irresponsible like Margaux. Responsibility looks so good on Misha, and irresponsibility looks so good on Margaux. How could I know which would look best on me?”

It is a book all about the struggle of not knowing yourself, or how you want to be—written by a woman in her thirties. In some ways, this was a relief. If you're the type of person who thinks about how a person should be—or more specifically, how you should be—it’s likely you will never move past it. There is no due date for finding yourself.This is a relief because people are always saying that college is the time to "find yourself." This is the myth they are talking about: you enter college with some vague sense of self, but it's these four years where we’re supposed to meet people that inspire us, realize our “passions.” We're supposed to graduate knowing what we want out of life, if not on track to getting it.People say a lot of untrue things, but this is especially untrue. You don’t graduate knowing those things. You probably will just take the next step, because you have to, and then somewhere along the way you realize some of your steps have amounted to the life of the person who you are. It might sound a little sad or scary, but I think there’s something beautiful about that.My junior fall I had to take Metaphysics as a requirement for my concentration. Metaphysics is the study of what is, and it is not the type of philosophy I am most comfortable with. Some of it went completely over my head.Still, I loved our unit on personal identity. It’s hard for philosophers to define what constitutes the same person because usually when we say two things are identical, we mean them to be exactly the same. But people—their bodies and their minds—change over time. So, we begin the struggle to come up with a definition for a person.My sister had a professor who told her that college isn’t about figuring out who you are, it’s about figuring out who you’re not. This seems more possible; but metaphysics and Heraclitus taught me that who we aren’t, just like who we are, is forever changing. The person exists in the continuity—the journey, if you want to get really cheesy—not in the end or start product.Last semester, I read an Italian feminist philosopher, Adrianna Cavarero, for a Religious Studies seminar. I was obsessed with her theory that a person consists in his or her life story, and our greatest desire is just to have that story told to us by some other. This is because “a life about which a story cannot be told risks remaining a mere empirical existence, or rather, an intolerable sequence of events.” Here is the good news:

“Every human being is unique, an unrepeatable existence, which—however much they run disoriented in the dark, mixing accidents with intentions—neither follows in the footsteps of another life, nor repeats the very same course, nor leaves behind the same story.”

All we want is for people to know our story, so that they can tell it to us and we can be sure that we exist. That’s why some of the best displays of affection are storytelling. It’s the moments your friend says “Remember this time?” or your mom tells you about how you were as a baby that they are telling you how much they love you.For all of us, Brown is just a part of our stories. For some of us it might be an especially important or meaningful chapter, but it doesn’t have to be. And certainly, the story of your Brown life (and your future life!) doesn't have to look any particular way.A problem with storytelling for our generation is the advent of social media. Snapstories are not the real stories, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Like I said, I am already prone to admiring people from afar and thinking I should be doing life-things differently. I know now that some of the best times aren't Instagram worthy and the worst times aren't captured. Social media might just be one big trick we're playing on our close acquaintances.Personally, Brown has given me some of the best parts of my story yet, and perhaps more importantly, some of the best narrators for that story. I mentioned that a lot of metaphysics went straight over my head. On one particularly unprepared and confused afternoon, we had to all debate some reading or something like that and I left class feeling the most defeated and stupid I’d ever felt. It was an all-around bad semester for me and I just needed to cry about how I was the worst, and I didn’t make it back to my house before I started to.A best friend called while I was sitting in the JWW lobby crying and said, “Okay we’ll be there in a minute.” She drove up, other best friend in tow, and I got in and talked about how I was dumb and terrible at life. We went to Three Sisters and they told me stories about how I was smart, cool, impressive. This made me cry a little too, but in the happy way. Later I would tell my friends, “Remember this Three Sisters time?” to show them how much they meant to me.This send-off has likely been confusing, so here is a summary of the advice I wanted to give: don’t worry about figuring out who you are or who you want to be during college. Think about those things, but don’t worry about having an answer. Focus on making stories, on listening to other people’s stories, on telling them. And whatever comes next, it’s part of your story—no one else’s—so comparisons are futile.I want to end with a quote by Joan Didion—who I admit, I still sometimes want to be.

“Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went 'but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,' and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

Deena Butt has been writing for Blog for 4 years and is an Editor-in-Chief Emeritus.