As a Freshman, You Can’t Avoid Reinvention

Photo

Singapore — In high school, my friends and I spent many afternoons discussing how our lives would change once we went to college. Lounging around coffee shops or our parents’ apartments, we’d fantasize aloud about prospective friends, future boyfriends and the careers we hoped to have after graduation.

We all saw our lives as single-handedly within our control, but one of my friends was more eager than the rest of us to make a total transformation. She said she wanted to be someone entirely new in college and do everything she couldn’t do back home in Singapore, our large city that was somehow made small by our tight-knit Indian community. Among our families, everyone always seemed to know everything about everybody.

At the time, her desire to reinvent herself upset me. I felt like she was proposing a drastic and strikingly unnatural step. It seemed inauthentic, like a rejection of her true self.

Now I think about how funny that seems. I’m only halfway through my first year at Durham University, in northeast England, and already I see that we are shaped by the new spaces we inhabit, whether we plan on changing or not. College is entirely about reinvention, and it’s not always in our control.

My unease about my friend’s aspiration to be a different person makes more sense now. I was afraid of losing her and my feelings weren’t entirely unjustified. All of my high school friends now live continents apart, and we speak less and less frequently.

I was born in New York and was raised mostly in Singapore, but for college, I moved to a small town three hours north of London where the landscape is dotted with castles and cathedrals. I’m entirely out of my comfort zone, in a country I knew little about before I arrived.

Everything I do on a day-to-day basis has changed, and as I walk to class, meet new people and make novel choices, I’m changing, too. I’m adapting to my environment and confronting parts of myself I didn’t realize were there.

When I arrived, for example, I was painfully aware of my background and race because of the predominantly white population around me. I felt the need to explain myself constantly — to tell people that I was born in New York and raised in Singapore but that my family was originally from India. It took me a while to realize that no one was demanding this explanation or even appeared wary of what I feared made me different. I was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t because those around me were being judgmental.

At a club one night, a girl asked me where I was from and after months of practiced defensiveness, I was surprised when I hesitated for several seconds. “Well, you’re a part of our community now,” she said, and moved on. Maybe those were drunken words on a night out, but they stayed with me. I realized that the need to explain myself had been personal, but it really wasn’t a big deal to anyone around me. This recognition, however small, felt important.

Over the past semester, I’ve had small but important realizations in academic settings too. I knew little about the literary history of Christianity before I took Classical and Biblical Studies. I had always thought about the Bible in a certain way — as a dry religious text — and was surprised to find myself deeply engrossed in the Book of Genesis. I developed an unexpected appreciation for the creation story as a guiding text, as well as a literary work about human relationships. I felt a shift in my preconceived notions, a challenge to biases I didn’t know I held.

I know my high school friends are changing in ways they didn’t expect, too. Before college, we’d spend way too much time together taking and editing photographs of one another to post on Instagram and Snapchat, concocting accompanying captions to amuse our followers. It was a constant show, a way to broadcast to the world that we were having fun. I still see these photos of them, but I’m on the outside now. The images are still performative, of course, but my friends’ lives are clearly different. Their smiles are the same, but the people behind the posts are in very new environments.

My desire for all of us to stay the same was futile. Change comes in quirky ways, and often without permission. Now I’m pushing myself to embrace it — to be open-minded and nonjudgmental, not only of the people around me but of myself. While I wouldn’t call it a full-fledged reinvention, I’m certainly not the same.