Editor's Note: Through the Looking Glass is The Mirror's newest feature. We welcome submissions from all members of the community both past and present who wish to write about defining experiences, moments or relationships during their time at Dartmouth. Please submit articles of 800-1,000 words to the.dartmouth@dartmouth.edu.
I probably wouldn't be writing these words had the dice rolled differently. When I applied to college, I was a wait-listed at Dartmouth.
For the latter part of my senior year in high school, I was in a sort of limbo. My days were spent sending love letters to the Admissions Office and listening for gossip of the waitlist movement. I called it quits when I graduated. "It's too bad" were the final words I said with remorse and tears about the school in New England that gave me the cold shoulder.
It was in late June, two weeks after I graduated high school, that I received a phone call. I couldn't help but realize that it was a sequence of serendipitous events that resulted in my admission.
Had Dartmouth accepted just the right number of students, had the person before me taken the spot off the waitlist, had I been lower on the list, I wouldn't be writing this column.
So I should be grateful to be here. Every day should be a blessing. That phone call was, at the time, the happiest moment of my life. Yet, if I told my 18-year-old self at that moment that my life at Dartmouth wouldn't be perfect, that I would experience feelings of dissatisfaction, life would be unimaginable.
I came into this school nervous and insecure, with a chip on my shoulder. Maybe it was because I was wait-listed, or maybe because I didn't go on Trips. But I set this goal of becoming the well-liked, quintessential Dartmouth man. I went to great lengths to be or at least appear to be extroverted and social my freshman year. I went out a lot. I talked a lot. I sucked up a lot. I acted dumb a lot. I found that people liked you better if you crafted your conversation and responses to their desires. Being the silly kid soon became my niche. I joined sociable organizations where I could reinforce this persona, like The Mirror and Dimensions. I did these things as a way to get facetime and feel a sense of self-worth. As a consequence, friends-wise, I became a jack of all trades but master of none.
The Dartmouth social structure is built on a system of self-affirmation, and I fed right into it. I became a stereotypical people pleaser.
People pleasing, I learned, is toxic. There's nothing more intoxicating than the feeling of being well-liked. I found that every day, I was acting. I had become this sort of happy-go-lucky caricature that people expected. They say humans are complex, but at the time, my friends could probably have encapsulated me with three descriptors: bubbly, excitable and bat-shit crazy. I felt like I could never act seriously, that I always had to have a smile on my face.
Looking back at my early Mirror articles, I found that they are ridden with hackneyed, overplayed and vapid cliches. It's not that I couldn't write seriously, it was that I couldn't fathom breaking this persona I had created.
That's the other problem with people pleasing: You lose yourself.
If you read the other "Through the Looking Glass" columns, you'll see that many point out the impact of rush, how it acts as this crossroad for many people's social lives. I left rush not with the ideal, tight-knit, all-loving brotherhood I had dreamed of, but the polar opposite: a new fraternity consisting of a small, random group of guys with little in common. This house didn't have an identity it was an "other" in people's minds. I didn't embrace this new affiliation because I cared too much about what everyone else thought.
The problem was that I wanted, for whatever reason, to be labeled by something tangible to others. If my affiliation didn't make others happy with me, then I didn't need it. So I shirked my responsibilities and commitments to the house and instead watched my other friends comfortably slide into their new affiliations. I constantly compared myself to my old friends, and seeing that I wasn't following a perceived normal Dartmouth trajectory only brought a sense of envy and anxiety.
After joining different houses, witnessing my friends distance themselves from me, both intentionally and unintentionally, was the most crushing. To my surprise, joining a house jumping into the system brought an unexpected sense of isolation.
It's hard for me to say I've stopped feeling this need to seek approval. As I move closer to the real world and farther from college, I begin to see the futility in always finding validation in others.
Maybe if I had found a fraternity that was more in-line with the status quo, I wouldn't have felt a need to be so self-conscious. Maybe if I had taken time to reflect earlier, I would have realized how I had dug myself into a hole.
There are a lot of maybes. Seeking self-worth is natural, but the opportunity to let others dictate who you are to become a phony is all too easy in the social incubator here.
Don't get me wrong I would take the spot on the waitlist again in a heartbeat. The fact that I wrote this makes me think that I've come a long way, in part because of Dartmouth. I'm not proud or ashamed, but fascinated by how social pressures pushed me to where I am.
I haven't painted the greatest picture of myself, but it's an honest one not smoke and mirrors.
Patrick Chen '12 is a staff writer for The Mirror who ironically, despite his angst over his time at Dartmouth, will be going to graduate school here.
