The summer before my senior year of high school, my mother handed me a hardcover book titled "The Best American Essays of 2001" and told me, "this'll help you with college applications." That was almost exactly four years ago. I was the biggest nerd at my high school, since being a member of Science Olympiad and Math Team and Science Bowl played a big part in the friends I made and the identity I constructed. I was also deathly afraid of English class. In every other class, I found it easy to perform the right calculations, apply the right rules. But then there was English with Mrs. Anderson and essay prompts that boiled down to "what do you think?" There were a million answers I could put down, and I could never pick which one to go with. I couldn't stand it. And so on that day four years ago when my mother handed me that book, I leafed through some of the pages, noted how dry it looked compared to the fantasy novels I enjoyed and put it aside on my desk where it would gather dust for four years.
In those four years, I managed to manufacture a couple of insipid application essays. Though I now imagine stuffy old men reading them and wincing, I did well enough with college admissions that my parents never mentioned that book of essays again.
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And by that, I mean I ended up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I figured I'd do fine despite possessing mediocre writing skills. And that was true, even though MIT has one of the finest humanities departments in the world. Many people go through MIT feeling that they are mediocre in the humanities. As a matter of fact, many people go through MIT feeling mediocre in everything. But avoiding something because you feel mediocre in it kind of misses the point.
I learned what it meant to feel mediocre about yourself; the worst kind of mediocrity. It sinks down to your bones, chokes your lungs, suffocates everything that nourishes and flows inside of you. It wasn't something that logic could heal, only time. Over time, I also learned how to speak out more — even when you don't think you know that girl across the hall very well, even when you don't have the words. That girl and I are pretty good friends now, but I'm still looking for the right words. Imperfect ones come to my mind all the time: ones that are too overwrought, or too cold, or too plain.
Sometime in these last four years, I've changed the way I read. I used to plow through books at breakneck speed to get that moment when a backstory or plot point is revealed. Now I put down the book when I come across a thought-provoking passage or a genius choice of words. So elegant! So precise! I lie down and ponder.
Recently, I began reading that dusty copy of "The Best American Essays of 2001" on my table. It takes patience. After all, some passages are dry. But I leave each essay feeling awed by the power of the author's experiences, feelings and words. I find it amazing that the "me" from four years ago casually tossed aside the book and even more amazing knowing that I would not have enjoyed it had I tried to read it. And though I don't have any hindsight based on which I can say this with certainty, maybe that's one of the most valuable lessons I've learned with my time at MIT: to have patience when solving problem sets, to have patience when reading, to have patience with myself.
