The Happiness Question

July 28, 2017

Recently, I sat down with a role model and friend of mine, who expects to return to teaching next spring at my old high school—Durham Academy, or DA. His class of choice, Ethics, is geared toward second-semester seniors, and he asked me, over coffee, what questions I thought they should discuss. He urged me to think about my own experiences; I had survived high school, and the transition to college, and my freshman year, and he was curious about my perspective.

What do you wish you’d known?

I don’t think he understood the extent of the self-reflection he provoked, but it’s a question that’s been turning over in my mind since. So much that it became the subject of multiple lunch conversations with friends, and so much that I sat down to write a concise, pithy blog post about it and the next thing I knew I had this mess of a thing, more than two thousand words of your typical teenage existential crisis. Just another day in the life.

And yet I can’t stop thinking about his question. About what I wish I’d known.

I loved DA. I had wonderful teachers. I made incredible friends. But I look back on high school with a fair amount of—not caution; more like self-doubt. It was a time I cherished, a place I felt at home—but I was undoubtedly sheltered there, and I bought into a very self-centered and all-consuming daily routine that some might construe as your classic high school culture: full of gossip and pointless drama, everyone in everyone else’s business. Don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t change it for the world. But it was a wonderfully contradictory experience for me, one I am only beginning to appreciate now.

I took classes I loved; I also took eleven APs. I spent hours on newspapers, essays, literary magazines; I also cried about bad grades, worried about my GPA, fretted about my extracurriculars, and carefully crafted my resume. I had this self-inflicted goal, this vision for myself—to impress, to excel, to succeed. For each thing I might have done for myself, there are ten things I did because I thought I was supposed to.

I’m trying to pick out what’s real. Those allegedly formative events that made me who I am. Those snapshots of unadulterated good.

I think about Mr. Cullen’s cross country and track teams. How much I loved those. Because those teams—I belonged there. He cared. He remembered every best time I ran. He cried when I broke six in the mile. Handshakes from Mr. Cullen—there’s nothing better.

I think about breaking six in the mile. I think about the pure adrenaline and exhilaration of that race. I think about being seven hundred meters from the finish, rounding the first curve of the third lap, and how everything in my body just fell into place. I could have run two miles, three, and I think I still would have felt that good—as if that was what I was meant to be doing in that moment, because running around that track felt as right and as purposeful as breathing. I think about the people screaming at me on the last straightaway: you can do anything for thirty seconds, go, go, go. I think about crossing the finish line. Adrenaline. Exhilaration. Raw happiness, unlike anything I can describe.

I think about traversing the campus with a stack of newspapers in my hand, dropping them on every available surface; I was the most annoying person in the world on distribution days, honestly: Want a newspaper? No? Well, here’s twenty! The final seconds of Fiddler, calling that last light cue, in the space after the darkness, but right before the applause, when I could inhale, exhale, once. Twenty-five hours at Panera, struggling through decisions about fonts and picture placement and page layout, Eve and I a little stir-crazy from our evenings spent cooped up in that café—and holding that first copy of Exurbia in our hands, our own creation, impossible without the contribution of countless others, yet feeling so proud, so possessive, so purely happy with what we had achieved, making something like that.

Flashes—how the spring sky looks from below, lying flat on my back in the quad. Dr. T’s classroom, a refuge from the rain. The couch in the history offices, ardent discussions about Marx and absolutism and Descartes’ search for an absolute truth, photocopies in our laps, leaning forward with excitement. Cold desks in the morning, watery coffee from the school store, trying to put together a powerpoint without losing all faith in a human race that could invent a means of presentation as dreary and soul-sucking as a powerpoint. 

And for every one of these, ten things I didn’t do right.

I think about the speech I gave at graduation. I said a lot of poetic things—about caring about each other, and remembering the little moments, and changing the world. I think about the teachers in the front two rows, and seeing them cry, and the comforting glare of the spotlight, and how I felt up there, on stage, some hundreds of people listening, watching, noticing. Commanding attention like that, everyone finally seeing how eloquent and intelligent and well-spoken I could be—how fitting it was, that that was the legacy I would leave. The final word. Applause.

I think about the hours spent, the summer before senior year, in the back corner of Caribou Coffee. Writing essays. Toiling over my common app. Those hours, where I was forced to pick and choose the pieces of myself that I thought would best endear me to an admissions officer—I wonder, even now, if the person in my college essays is anything like the person I actually am; if she could even be real. Every word, so carefully chosen; my voice, painstakingly cultivated; I remember balancing every sentence, walking that impossible line between intellectual and unique and insightful and funny, imagining after every paragraph the way I sounded on the page, this idealized and unattainable construction of myself—and they tell you, everyone tells you, be yourself, show what you’re passionate about, don’t just give them what they want to hear—but that’s what I did, isn’t it? I knew what they’d want to hear. I knew, for example, what Stanford wanted. Someone quirky, offbeat, enthusiastic—nevertheless, someone who fit that paradoxical Stanford mold of hardworking but happy, worldly but introspective, diverse and different and one-of-a-kind but still, inexplicably, the perfect student for our school.

How do you wrap your head around that? How, in six hundred and fifty words, do you present yourself as a fully formed human being capable of profound self-reflection, yet still accept, acknowledge, and own up to your weaknesses? Your youth? For God’s sake, I was seventeen when I wrote those essays. How was I supposed to discover and articulate and present my own truth at seventeen? How was I supposed to even know?

Confession: I didn’t. Another confession: I still don’t. But humble brag: I’m an uncommonly good writer. Somehow they bought it.

Everyone projects an image of themselves, but I’m afraid my image was more conscious than most. Good girl, funny girl, smart girl, happy girl, excited girl, passionate girl. The girl who does everything. The girl who does everything, and does it damn well.

I think about that image, and I wonder—how much of my motivation came from the desire to be recognized? How much did I accomplish simply because I wanted people to notice?

And I think about the way people react when I tell them where I go to college. Always impressed. That Veronica Kim, what an impressive girl.

And the inevitable follow-up: Where’d you go to high school?

And I tell them, Durham Academy. And if they’re from around here, their faces change. Just a little. Oh. As if I’ve fulfilled some kind of expectation. A smart-looking Asian girl who graduated from an elite private high school—what else could anyone expect of me? I’m probably a STEM major. I probably had helicopter parents. I probably had perfect SAT scores and a killer resume and a poster-child status so high Stanford couldn’t possibly refuse.

I resent those assumptions, but at the same time—I need them. I need them so when they ask me what kinds of things I did at DA, and I respond, oh, I was really into writing and journalism, and the music and theater departments, and I ran cross country and track, I can see their surprise. Once more exceeding expectations. Subverting them. That deep-rooted desire of mine, to be different, to be exceptional, again fulfilled.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my own happiness. For those of you who’ve suffered a year of this blog, you might remember last summer’s post, “Goodbye, Perfect Year,” in which I referenced what I believed (and still believe) to be the best twelve months of my life. Rewind to early May 2016, and you would have witnessed a Veronica aglow with happiness, shining, walking on top of the world. I’m so bad at letting go of the past. DA—it’s hard for me to relinquish. Maybe because it was a place where I thrived. Maybe because it was a place that told me, every day, how everyone saw great things in me, how successful I was going to be, how much I had already done. Maybe because it was a place where everyone knew who I was, and what I could do, and yet remained surprised, amazed, at the way I continued to excel.

I honestly didn’t write this post just to brag. It’s like—a part of me really hates how much I reveled in it. The attention. Being known.

But I loved it, too. I was happy.

And three months later I was thrown headfirst into a school where everyone was just as smart as, if not smarter than, I was; and let me tell you, it’s hard to believe you have achieved anything meaningful or productive in your life when you’re living in the same building as Katie Ledecky. And in conversations I had, whether with friends or people I’d just met, I talked about high school—about DA—and slowly, over time, I began to pause and listen to myself for a second, and it was stunning to me, how conceited I must sound.

Yeah, my high school didn’t have a cafeteria. We just had different vendors or food trucks come every day. Also, we had this school store where you could charge things to this invisible account and then your parents would just pay for it later; you didn’t have to worry about it. We were basically a feeder school for Duke—like ten or fifteen people went each year, out of a hundred or so per grade. I had a college counselor. I think my biggest class was like, twenty kids? And whenever we had assemblies, everyone would just leave their backpacks with their computers and wallets and stuff outside, because it wasn’t like anyone was going to steal a laptop; we all had our own. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

A place like DA is really interesting. When I transferred from public school, I arrived with a lot of stereotypes—of prejudice, of entitlement, of wealth. It was an exclusive place, unknown, referred to by my friends as “rich kid prep school,” a place I was afraid I’d never fit in. I don’t think I realized—and to an extent, I am still unaware of—the power of a place like DA.

But how long it has taken me to understand even a fraction of my privilege. To become self-conscious of the resources I had, and the advantages, and the breadth of opportunity presented to me at such an early age—and the sheer luck of my situation, how damn lucky I am to have grown up in an environment that could offer me so much, and I barely had to ask.

I can’t help but wonder how much of that contributed to my Perfect Year. I think a lot about the work I did, and how much of that was really defined by me, by whatever poetic motivation and creative force exists inside of me; and how much of that came from around me, from the people who kept saying you are so smart and so talented and so unique and so special—how much of that did I believe? All of it, I’m sure; I ate it up; I thrived (and still thrive) on that kind of external validation, of everyone telling me how lucky I am, how successful I am, how they expect me to do great things.

How different are those two sides of me, really, if I can’t even separate them? How much of me is driven by all of these visible indicators of success—and how much of me has come to rely on them?

I love being on stage. I think about the reasons I do. I wonder, and fear, that it’s simply because I like to be seen.

This role model and friend and future Ethics teacher? I gave him two questions. How do you define success? How do you define happiness?

My answer to both: I don’t know.

Header image courtesy of Unsplash