Given that I have more exams/assignments than days left of this semester, this is probably the last blogpost I'll churn out before going home for the holidays. Which means: as you're reading this, I'm done with my first semester of college.
For the next decade, I'll be collecting milestones like Infinity Stones. After seventeen years of never moving at all, it feels like I'm going to be rushing with the water until my late twenties. So I know that in the grand scheme of things, finishing a semester of college doesn't mean anything -- after all, I have seven (!) more to go.
Nonetheless, this particular semester drawing to a close is meaningful to me because it means I can no longer consider myself "new" to this. I've found my favorite study spots and established a sense of routine, look unsuspecting enough to help strangers navigate their way to the appropriate building, and can even go an entire day without calling my mother (barely). I can no longer say I'm adjusting, but rather have to start saying I'm adjusted.
In senior year, I had this vision of returning home from my out-of-state college for the holidays and visiting a family friend's house with my parents for dinner. I'd be effortlessly cool, having conversations about the stock market and politics with adults I had previously only ever been socially awkward with. I'd excuse myself in the middle of dinner to take a phone call from a mysterious stranger, giving those from home a glimpse into the life I had elsewhere. I'd be more fashionable, and not wear sweatpants that stopped fitting six years ago.
At Thanksgiving, I was admittedly a little mad at myself for not achieving this Deepti 2.0 persona yet. I was almost violently unchanged, found it far too easy to revert back to my old routines. Nobody from college needed me enough to call me on the four days I was gone, and I still feel the most human when my entire body is covered in fleece.
And until a few days ago, I thought I'd return home for Christmas with the same lingering disappointment at the slothful rate of the transformation I believed I was owed. But after spending all of Saturday taking the Putnam, I had a few revelations:
The first was that my Roman Empire is all the ways I need fixing. I've spent the last ten years taking an MAA-sponsored math contest in the weeks before Christmas. It's perhaps the most longstanding tradition I have, and the one that signals to my lizard brain that the holidays have finally arrived. But this was the first year that I truly didn't care about the results -- no studying ahead of time, no superstitious routine of sharpening pencils the night before and wearing a lucky shirt. After years of giving myself stress ulcers over the gap between my expectations and performance, I finally let go, and as I walked out of the testing room unironically unable to suppress a grin, I had the startling insight: it could've been this fun this whole time.
The MATHCOUNTS tagline for all the years I competed was, "Some students love math. Some students hate it. MATHCOUNTS is the place for both." Looking back, I'm confident I adored and feared math in equal measure. I was intimidated by it, desperate to be good at it, aggressively trying to will my way to math stardom; it was almost like having a crush. Knowing that I liked it was the first piece of my identity I had ever forged (or claimed, or discovered, or whatever we do with our identities), and yet somehow I was terrified of the explorative process that solving complex math problems actually entails. I think I was scared of what I'd find if left to follow my own intuition, converse with myself about all the universe's unsolved questions.
I'm finally beginning to see that change. The way Putnam works, for those of you who don't know, is that you're given six hours to sit, silently, with nothing but blank paper and a pencil, and think. It's more than a math competition -- it's meditation, exposure therapy to your own thoughts. And I emerged completely, utterly, wholly at peace.
My sister once said that we know who we are by how we introduce ourselves. That is, "Hi, I'm Taylor Swift and I'm a songwriter," because that's who she thinks she is first and foremost. For all my club interviews this year, I began with, "Hi, I'm Deepti and I really like math." It is the thing that brought me here, the only thing that has remained constant in the last decade of my life. Every time I think about my sixth-grade crush I remember the Shoelace Theorem. I met my best friend in the back row of Algebra 1. This room is filled with faces that look nothing like mine and yet I see each one in the mirror every morning.
While taking the Putnam, a Philosophy professor walked in to help proctor. I later found out that he is one of eight people (in all of history) to be a 4-time Putnam Fellow. Then, during the lunch break, some boy mustered up the courage to ask him to explain a problem. We -- 200 of the nerdiest students in the country -- had been staring at this problem for three hours and getting nowhere. He glanced at the question and solved it on the board within five minutes. "What is he doing in the Philosophy Department?" I texted my sister in awe. She responded: "There's more to life than just math, Deepti." And I thought, not to people who are that good at it. I would know, because I'm not half as good, and there's nothing more to life for me.
All this to say-- somehow, when deciding on a college major, I chose business and computer science. Which isn't to say I don't love both of those things (because I do), but part of me wonders why I was so determined to contort into a version of myself I just inherently...wasn't, when the obvious choice was staring me in the face.
Which brings me back to Thanksgiving, and my vision of a transformed Deepti and an impressed circle of family and friends. This desperate desire to be changed, or changing, because of my bone-deep belief that nothing I am now is worth praise. Except...this is the village that raised me. They're already impressed. And I can change completely (which I have) or stay exactly the same (which I have), and they wouldn't love me any less. I don't need to run from who I am, or set arbitrary and impossible goals just so I feel justified in my self-loathing, or get famous. I'm not fashionable or really all that funny. I definitely shouldn't be allowed to run my mouth about politics in today's current climate, and I've never, ever been even slightly cool. I'm still adjusting, even though it feels like I should be done with that by now.
And it's all so, so, so okay. I'm okay. I'm in a good place. And even though I'll forget it tomorrow, I hope that one day, that thought will be my only Roman Empire.
(And, turns out, Mr. 4-Time Putnam-Philosophy Man actually specialized in a branch of logical operators that was so abstract, Carnegie-Mellon didn't understand how it related to numbers and just placed him in Philosophy.)
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