Letter to My First-Year Self: Shae Lifson
To my freshman self:
You already know that you’re starting a new journey and I remember that you’re open to all kinds of possibilities. You still have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.
Time is a circle, and you’ll double back on yourself again and again. You think you’re escaping your oppressive hometown, but you’re not at all prepared for how strange it will feel to go back during breaks. You’re even less prepared for how strange it will feel when your parents move away and you realize you’ll never go back again. You’ll think you’re developing ideology, but you’ll realize that your thinking is wrong far more often than you’ll conclude that you’re on the right track, and then you’ll figure out that the great ideas you have were thought up already a long time ago. Realizing you’ve wasted time trying to reinvent the wheel will somehow be the least of your problems.
The most important thing, I think, is to remember that you have to make your own agenda. If you don’t, other people will make agendas for you, and they aren’t nearly as invested in things turning out okay for you as you are. If you lose track of your own agenda for too long, you’ll get swept up into someone else’s. If you’re wrapped up in things that have nothing to do with you it’s very easy to get sidetracked and end up where you should never have been, with people you should never have trusted. You think you’ve already learned that, but you haven’t.
It’s easy to get distracted and focus on the wrong things. It will be even easier to be misled when you finally decide that your focus is going to be on things you think you know are good.
Your intuition is an invaluable compass. I have the receipts, for example, of you predicting that you’d graduate college into a 2008-caliber financial collapse, and here I am in our parent’s basement during a global pandemic. Your mind! The problem is that you tend to let people talk you out of your gut instincts. I’m still working on that.
Ultimately, however, you’ll be proud to know that I have accomplished everything you set out for me when you got to NYU. I found the goals sheet you wrote at the beginning of welcome week and it’s all checked off. We did that.
Shae is a Senior in Gallatin concentrating in Global Systems, Precarious Futures
