Would You Still Love Me if I was a Worm?

As I teeter on the edge of adulthood — at the edge of a cliff where behind me is a long, windy road which has carried me throughout my teenage years, and at the foot of this cliff are clouds which obscure the area of my future from me being able to peer down— I’m so tempted to just jump. To kick my feet up in the air and to just soar in free fall, hands up, eyes wide open. To get the hesitation and waiting over with, since holding out for 6 more months shouldn’t change anything. I’m the most prepared I’ll ever be…right?

Something that is really important to me is growth. And I’ve realized growth only comes as a result of reflection and struggles. Who am I really? How will I trust myself to take care of myself if I’m not even sure of who I myself am?

Part 1: Realizing Many Worms are In the World

A thought that has been haunting me for the last few months is some sort of variation of the question: would you still love me if I was a worm?

It’s this sort of bullshit question that girlfriends ask their boyfriends when they want to make a bid for emotional reassurance — when they just want their boyfriends to answer “Yes, honey, I would still love you if you were a worm. I’d pick you up and put you in a pretty little garden and water you daily. I’d give you lots of sunshine and the best scraps of food and make sure you’ll never be a bored, little worm.”

what if everyone else besides myself is just a NPC with worms controlling their executive cognitive and motor functions?

The way I interpret the implicit emotions and ask behind the question is: would you still love me if I was not beautiful and couldn’t offer you any tangible benefit in your life? Would you still love me if I was ugly, slimy, and insignificant? Would you still love me for the core of my existence and for none of these external factors that seem to matter for adding value?

Maybe it doesn’t need to be super deep.

I’ve always prided myself (many times to a fault) in being overly logical, and this question is preposterous. If, sometime in the past, a girlfriend would have ever asked me (and thankfully none in the past ever have) if I would love her if she was a worm, then I would probably have answered to some sort of a fault(in order of increasing amounts of affection):

1. “No. Do you think my standards are low enough to date a worm?” (meaning to be funny and slightly flattering)
2. “Of course not. You’d be a worm and not my girlfriend.” (downright pragmatic)
3. “No that’s stupid. You being a worm would mean that we never would have been able to talk and I would have never gotten to like you for who you actually are.” (slightly giving reassurance, although probably more would be a lot better).

And I guess for certain people, certain answers would be received better.

Everyone gets insecure sometimes, and I frequently kick myself in the ass when my friends (or previous relationships) have asked me for things in indirect ways and I didn’t have the foresight to read what they really wanted instead of what they asked me that they wanted.

I think this question of “would you still love me if I was a worm” is frequently touted as a meme because of just how close it hits to home for so many people. Everyone wants to be loved and coddled. However, the older I get, and the more I talk to my female friends, my previous partners, and my sister, the more I’m surprised about just how oppressive society is towards women — in many regards and areas, but I am in particular surprised by just how overwhelming the pressure of needing to look good must feel. No wonder so many people wonder if their partners would love them if they were just a worm.

Maybe it’s just that I grew up as a boneheaded guy who didn’t really care much about how I looked (as in, I would frequently wear a T-Shirt from some academic club and baggy gym shorts all the time), but I didn’t realize just how bad it was for girls.

I didn’t realize that many girls felt the pressure of needing to keep up with other girls, buying jewelry and luxury bags or needing to spend hundreds on nails, make-up, and hair. I didn’t realize that some girls were really vicious in judging each other based on appearance and dress code. I didn’t realize that many girls grew up very sensitive about their weight and would have unhealthy relationships with food because of the connection to looks.*

I’m sure many of you are also like this, but I grew up posting whatever the hell I wanted to on my Instagram, because my wall is the way that I see the beauty of the world through my unique lens, and my wall was mostly of life experiences with my friends. That’s all there was to it. It’s just all vibes and I’ve never really thought very deeply about what it means to be perceived by other people, haha. I didn’t really think about looking hot or my appearance that much since my posts were just centered around core memories that I wanted to document.

But Goddamn.

When society pelts you with picture perfect celebrities (who have probably had plastic surgery), bombards you with advertisements about self-enhancement products, and constantly evaluates you based on the way you look, I can’t imagine how overwhelming this would be to all take in constantly. I myself grew up without the need to constantly feel like I should look a certain way, should eat a certain amount, or should purchase certain things, and I’m very grateful, but it scares me just how loud the world seems to be for some of my friends sometimes. It’s brutal out here. Comparison is the thief of joy, but how could one not compare oneself when all the things around oneself is just constant comparisons?*

*I’m not making a blanket values judgment on these items being negative or undesirable, I’m saying that I regret that some of the people around me need to struggle with these pressures that I didn’t realize existed until these last few years.

Part 2: The Bookworm and His Place in the Tall Grass

A few months ago, I also (fortunately or maybe unfortunately) went into a really deep spiral about evaluating my own worth to society and to the people around me.

As I was growing up, my mother and father always constantly instilled in me that it was going to be my responsibility to provide for a household in the future — mostly in a monetary sense, but also sometimes in an emotional availability sense. My mother would constantly tell me to study hard, citing that working hard would catapult me to better job opportunities which would lead to having more money to provide for my future wife and children — as in, having a higher income and a heightened ability to provide monetarily would also give me leverage to impact more people and to do more goodwill, but also to care for my spouse and kids. I was never encouraged to study purely for the sake of interest, but because it was a tool or a stepping stone. It’s a miracle I fell in love with poetry, reading literature, history and documentaries, music, and philosophy — because even though these items have little monetary value, they color my life so much and add so much meaning to exploration. I was raised to believe that pursuing academics and studying hard was a virtue — that chasing external success would fulfill my internal success as a person. Academic fulfillment for the purpose of financial stability, so to speak.

However, it was precisely my parents’ hyperfocus on academics (and their projection onto future earnings) and its productive value that led me to heavily tie my self worth to productivity and metrics, which is also a self-ingrained thought process I am trying to unlearn to this day.

Shamefully, I used to tie my perception of self-worth and of others’-worth with productivity and academic/career success. Speaking on myself, I used to think — if I just got that orchestra Principal Chair position, or if I won that next Science Olympiad medal, or if I got into an elite college or “top” company (the word top heavily emphasized here because I could and probably will go on a whole rant about disillusionment with corporate glamour) — that I would improve my self-worth and be in a better position than I was before, meaning somehow, I would be a better person. Or at least, better than I was before I got those things. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely fell in love with playing music and with researching invasive species(thanks Science Olympiad) and with case interviews and with Leetcode interviews (hot take, but Leetcoding and casing is actually fun if you just want to learn for the sake of learning), but I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t a part of me who wanted to chase these things because I thought it would make me a better person.

fun fact I learned in science olympiad: Kudzu, an invasive species imported from Japan, was originally brought for soil erosion, but it has frequently grown unchecked at a whole ass foot per day and has vines of over 100 feet. The only thing that grows faster than that is my resentment for girls on Hinge who, in response to the prompt “I’ll fall for you if…”, put “if you trip me!” kms.

It very much formed a core of my identity. I relied on my accomplishments and my intellect / my goals / my career aspirations for a large part of my self-identity. These were the things that society, my parents, and the people around me told me to value, and I never fully took ownership or thought extremely deeply about why I valued some of these things or why they really made me feel good about myself.

Coming into Stanford, I’ve been thrown into a crazy microcosm of students which is an incredibly skewed glimpse into the real world, and it has been an incredibly painful journey to grow and to change as a person. Stanford students are fucking weird, and I’m still trying to figure out how representative of the real world this place might be.

As a freshman, I was thrown into this whirlwind of club recruitment. Imagine working your ass off to get to this place, just to figure out that you have to apply to preprofessional clubs, competing against students who are much more prepared than you were and much more intense. I remember crying — like legitimately crying tears which I have never done because of academics — many nights my first Fall Quarter because of constantly getting rejected from clubs. I didn’t get into Stanford Consulting or Stanford Finance, I didn’t get into either of the bootcamps hosted by the entrepreneurship clubs, and I didn’t get into any of the acapella groups (I had high hopes of living out Pitch Perfect in college, lmao). I wasn’t even accepted to the Korean Student’s Association (KSA). Amazing. Not to even fucking mention, many classes at Stanford are by application. I didn’t get into a single intro-seminar my entire freshman year, and I don’t think my essays were even terrible. It was brutal because my entire self-worth felt completely shattered as I was getting rejection after rejection, and I took it as a self-reflection of my effort, my intelligence, and my future career prospects.

Would I still love myself if I didn’t have any of these things? I definitely didn’t at the time, and I’ve tried so hard to start loving myself outside of external markers.

So many people must be going through the same shit. And to all my underclassmen, if you’re not enough without a gold medal, you’ll never be enough even with it.

But I digress.

As I proceeded with my Stanford academic career, it felt that everyone started becoming defined by their accomplishments and academic pursuits. Upon meeting others, the first question I was frequently asked and the first question I frequently ask other people is some variation of “what is your major?” and “what did you do this summer / what are you planning to do this summer?” Maybe I am reading too much into things, but it was as if someone’s academic and preprofessional interests spoke to them as a person, that you could understand or predict how someone grew up, what they valued, and what they were ambitious about by their exact intended preprofessional field. There was definitely a peculiar feeling of people looking down on or up to people based on their majors, and I absolutely hate how so many people’s egos and personalities are tied to their careers.* It seems that many damn students, as accomplished and smart as they are, are all (me included) insecure about our places in the world and turn to external validation and measures of success for defining our worth.

*I myself have been hypocritical about this and have frequently joked about how I have such a CS major personality or such a consultant way of talking, but I hate the system of putting myself and others into boxes.

I remember asking a friend about his recent offer in a top quant research company, a place where he would be making $300K starting salary as a new grad. I asked him “would you still love yourself if you didn’t get the offer?”

I was shocked to hear the short answer: “No. I don’t think so.”

It is insane because people look for all sorts of measures to define themselves — for some sort of identity to latch onto or to differentiate themselves from the others around them — and so many people often fail to develop a self-love or an interesting personality past the shallowness of their academic interests or their careers.

When I got the consulting internship in my sophomore year, it was all of a sudden palpable how different people started treating me. People who were once indifferent to me were congratulating me on my summer internship, distant connections were hitting me up at parties for advice on recruiting, and sometimes, just sometimes, it felt that people started listening just a bit more when I provided some of my ideas. Acquaintances started treating me more warmly, and I was just overall treated with more respect, almost an uncomfortable deference sometimes. It was even pervasive in academic club dynamics. I was urged by upperclassmen now to fill leadership positions and to mentor underclassmen, even though I was still the same clown that I always have been, just now with a fancy title of being a Clown Analyst at a consulting company.

promotion path: Clown Analyst -> Senior Clown Analyst -> Clown Manager -> Clown Associate Partner -> Big Shot Partner Clown

Part 3: The Working Worm and Wandering Woefully

It’s not a perfect comparison, but I think that the male or boyfriend equivalent to “would you still love me if I was a worm” is “would you still stay with me if I was poor or had no job prospects in the future?” or maybe “would you still love me if I got into an accident and couldn’t work anymore?”

Something that really started haunting me was that my entire existence during my internship seemed to be reduced to how fast I could make slides or how accurate my excel calculations were: essentially, facets of my personhood which were under my control, but didn’t feel like they represented my entire existence. I felt as though my manager’s constant hyper vigilance on performance dominated my sense of self-worth.

A few months into dating my (now) ex-girlfriend, I started to become bothered by some of the comments that she had off-handedly made. I started feeling like I was in this relationship because I checked off a lot of her boxes, rather than because she genuinely loved me or wanted to be with me. We had met off of Hinge and had hit it off really quickly and started dating at a very fast pace, but I think there were some residual aftereffects of that which I didn’t predict would happen.

Maybe some of these questions were unfair questions, and I think I’ve learned to not ask questions where I might not like the resulting answer:

“Would you still want to be with me or ended up swiping right on me if I didn’t have a job at McKinsey? Would you still want to date me if I wasn’t this height or if I didn’t have money in the future?” — me

“I don’t think that I would have continued talking to you if you didn’t have some sort of ambition or job prospects. All of these things are things that you have and I can’t really separate you from them. You don’t have money right now but you have potential.” -her

But what I really wanted was something along the lines of :“I love you for the way you think and the way you go out of your way to care for me. I love your ambition and that’ll be something that always makes things eventually work. We don’t have to make much money to be happy, but your potential to care for us is something that I really value.”

“Sometimes our extravagant spending worries me because one of my goals is to be financially stable and save away a lot of money for retirement. I’m worried that we won’t be able to save up as quickly if we keep spending a lot.” -me

“Haha, that makes sense. You should just try to make more money (in a joking manner, but still a large kernel of truth. The emphasis on you really threw me for a loop and made me very sad).” -her

It was somewhat these experiences and a lack of substantive care or affection that I was seeking out that made me frequently reduce my self-perception and self-worth to objective and external measures of success. I hated feeling like my curiosity and passion for long, deep convos seemed reduced to earning potential or that my propensity to be sentimental felt like a checkbox item or requirement of “being a simp.” I hated myself for just letting this feeling constantly slide since I know she didn’t mean to let me have this perception, but it was never a comfortable topic to bring up since it always resulted in negative emotions and some sort of unresolved conflict since it was constantly never adequately addressed. She was the kind of girl who seemed like she had many things: a lot of money, affluent and interesting friends, many life stories and travels, and multiple degrees from top universities all around the world, but it often felt like the things that I had to offer were overlooked or under appreciated or taken for granted. I hated the feeling of constantly pouring affection, appreciation, and patience to just receive crumbs and slivers of mental energy back. I was hurt so badly by the constant buzzing feeling of “If I just love her a bit more and am just a little more patient, then she’ll realize all it is that I’m going through and will finally start fixing some of the issues and will start actually loving me.” We sometimes come into relationships with an idea or picture of what it’s supposed to be. And instead of creating new art, we trace that picture.

Despite how absolutely soul-crushing the relationship turned out, I am grateful for all the life lessons I have learned, and that I have learned them in my early 20s instead of toward my late 20s. I have also had multiple faults and flaws in the relationship, and I am glad that these events gave me a chance to learn from them. As I’ve said before, growth only comes as a result of reflections and struggles, and I’m grateful that the people around me put up with some unintended effects of my growing pains.

Part 4: The Reflective Worm

oh damn.

Would you still love yourself if you were a worm?

I wouldn’t.

I wouldn’t be able to love how I’ve learned to take care of friends or the people around me. I wouldn’t be me without my love for learning about different career industries, different lifestyles, and different life values. I wouldn’t love myself for the way in which I’ll try to sacrifice all of my energy and time for my friends to book out Zipcars to pick them up from the airport or to host small kickbacks. I wouldn’t be able to love someone in the future unabashedly, with my entire soul on the line, despite all my fears and insecurities. Because if I love the wrong people so much, just how much can I love the right person? I wouldn’t be able to read other people’s reflections, thoughts, and insights, and I wouldn’t be able to figure people out as if they were puzzles. I wouldn’t be able to continue blogging, to continue making music, and to continue living life as vibrantly as I could as a person. I wouldn’t be able to love making small talk or to love asking people for random life advice on small tidbits. I wouldn’t be able to be the sum of all my experiences, my mistakes, my failures, my successes, and my future plans if I had to be a worm.

I am more than just my earning potential or my productivity in increasing shareholder value.

I am my thoughts, I am my reflection, I am me.

J.Z.