Arjun Shah on changing perspectives

Near the end of my junior year, I was captured by a new motivation: to radically change myself for the better. I am not quite sure what spurred this new desire. Ever since I was young, I have felt like I was supposed to be more than what I was, but I had never actually looked myself in the mirror and constructed a plan of action on how I could embark on this transformation. That spring, for whatever reason, I did.

One night, I set my alarm for 4 a.m., vowing to myself that the days of waking up 20 minutes before school were over—that now things would be different.

For the rest of the spring semester, I adhered to this routine, believing that if I worked hard enough all of my self-doubt and anxiety about who I was supposed to be would go away. I wrote extra articles, worked on InDesign pages early in the morning and studied for exams, all in the hope that one day I would look in the mirror and be proud of the person staring back at me. Yet that moment never arrived. Instead, the spring slipped away and summer began, and I abandoned my routine and discipline. In place of it, I began to spend long hours playing pick-up basketball at the YMCA, desperately trying to distract myself from the reality of who I was. Yet I could only avoid it for so long. Biking back from the gym, I felt empty inside. I had striven to become someone better, yet all of my hard work had brought me no satisfaction. Even as the sun embraced me and I looked up at the blossoming summer foliage, I felt completely alone.

In the fall of senior year, I got really into the idea of detachment. Toward the end of summer, I re-read Siddhartha and came to the conclusion that the root cause of all my afflictions was my attachment to the material world. So, I did my best not to care about external things like grades and awards. But ultimately, I failed. These things still mattered to me, even if I outwardly denied they did. I didn’t want to admit then that my new philosophy was just another way for me to avoid the fact that I didn’t like the person that I was.

In the second semester, I abandoned my philosophizing. I started a legendary (albeit short-lived) rap career, and overall I became a lot more extroverted. For the first time in my life, I began to fully invest my attention in the present. I no longer strove to achieve constructed goals, but rather to feel joy in each day. And yet, even with this new mindset, I still wasn’t satisfied. Though I spoke more, I also said countless things that I shouldn’t have. Though I invested more in my personal relationships, I also felt heartbreak. I lost friends because of my own foolishness, and ultimately, I was feeling more lost than ever before. People often tell me that I have changed a lot, and I suppose in a superficial way they are right. With each