I was very HTT in high school. My best friend and I were basically the queens of HTT. (HTT means holier than thou.) Back in the day, it was so easy, being the academically driven and “hard-working” students that we were, to look down on those who actually had social lives — basically, people who went to parties, hosted parties, drank on a semi-regular basis. It wasn’t necessarily that we were “losers,” per se, in the media-portrayed sense of the word; our closest friends did all of the above fairly frequently come junior and senior years of high school. I was just conditioned to think, “Ugh, gross!” whenever I heard any story that involved alcohol, drugs, or even just noise complaints. It was all too easy to look on and judge and turn up my nose, and think, “Those dumb high school party animals!”

Because in high school it’s all too easy for you to think you know everything — and maybe you did! I mean, you could probably say you knew everything that pertained to the personalized bubble in which you lived. Sometimes that bubble was inside another bubble, the bubble of suburbia. You knew what it was like to suffer through APs, the pressure to make it to the infamous 2400 just to say you did, the competition of edging out someone by 0.0001 to make it into the top 5 percent — typical high school struggles.

But things become less clear-cut and much blurrier in college because you might realize no, what you considered "suffering" in high school was not really suffering at all — it was a privilege. Coming to college, you might realize you were privileged to have academic complaints and opportunities, privileged to have APs to take, privileged to simply have a home.

It’s hard to make sure you’re ready for the real world, with all its goings on and politics and layers and layers of questionable morality; the world and its issues are huge and virtually unanswerable, unquantifiable. An answer can’t be found by flipping to the answer key in the textbook (odd numbers!) or hitting up a friend, not anymore.

And then a personal crisis is impending: There is so much to find out about the world that on a broader, more realistic scale, that it is hard for you to say you really know what you believe in. (I know I always begin a declaratory statement, I interrupt myself with a disclaimer — “Well I mean, maybe that’s not the right word” or “Maybe I’m wrong!! But…”)

It’s a downward spiral. On top of having no idea what to make of the real world and all the surrounding gray matter, you might find you’re not prepared for anything college has to present to you — independence or career goals or world views, the slightest suggestion of adult life. And how are you supposed to make any decisions about what you think of broader society if you can't even formulate concrete choices for yourself?

Maybe you’ll find what you prided yourself on in high school, what might have set you apart from all the rest, doesn’t even apply anymore. You find yourself feeling not special at all, invalidated by the many accomplishments of your brilliant peers. You’re comparing yourself to others all the time and you feel small and unworthy. Your peers are in labs and research outside of school, spending hours there every week. Others are already applying for summer internships (in September?!!) — some students already have internships to pick from. And you’re lost. What do you even do with yourself?

Then maybe to make up for all this you’ll go and overexert yourself, dive into a plethora of activities and enroll in the maximum number of credit hours. You’ll take on leadership positions for clubs and volunteer organizations (sorry) you don’t even care about. You’ll apply and get into a year-round internship that demands 20-plus hours a week from you; you’ll do it anyway because you want to feel validated. You're doing just to do, you're doing so you don't have to think. You want to feel accomplished and mature or something.

So comes the vulnerability. If you don’t have goals, you don’t quite know who you are because you don’t know what you want and you have no direction. And if you don’t know who you are, everything else just pretty much goes to shit, because there goes your identity; you’ve got nothing to say for yourself, do you?

And on a broader scale, this relates to small-scale personal relationships and interactions. That intense vulnerability and insecurity that often comes with the loss of identity leads to a desire to be taken care of, and you can't hold harbor that craving because it's a very dangerous and unhealthy need to "be loved.” That's a lack of independence and individualism right there. That's a tell-tale sign of dependence and neediness that no strong individual can possess. It might even lead to either your taking advantage of someone or someone taking advantage of you — a two-way street ending in shit both ways.

You’ll want someone there for you because it’s so incredibly lonely during such a time of confusion. To fall into that trap would be toxic. You know you need to stand on your own; you need to validate yourself on your own; you need the ability to take care of yourself before adding someone else to the equation.

It's hard to tell people what's going on. It's hard to allow yourself to show vulnerability to that degree, let alone own it. Hell, it's hard to admit to yourself that you're vulnerable in some shape or form. But so many people, including some of the most intelligent people around, are going through something very similar. It's not a sign of weakness; it's, as my roommate would say, "a thing that just happens." And as sad of an answer that is, as utterly unsatisfying as it is, there is simply no other way to define it.

I am a vagabond. I need to build my own house before I can invite anyone in. I don't know what kind of house I want, I don't know where I want my house to be, and I don't know how I'm going to make that house when — if — I get to it. In any case, my life is a spiral and I don't know when or where it's going to end. Logically, I know what must transpire from here. I can preach on your behalf and tell you to defend yourself; I can tell you to take it one step at a time, to maybe draw back a little and give yourself some "me time," to quit something because no, actually you can't do it all. But I don’t know how to follow my own advice because I think I end up falling into every pitfall I tell you to avoid.

I don’t have an answer this time. I always tell myself I need a tapered end to somehow make something more of a narrative, but this time I don’t have a concrete "Do this instead of this! It’ll all be okay!” I feel like through this kind of disillusionment and/or existential crisis, one can either come out of it knowing exactly who one is or just continue in that vein forever. Just existing or doinglife.

The future is a very scary thing, but I think what's scariest is not really knowing who you are.