College, the Existential Quest
In September of 2005, I went away to Purchase College in Westchester, New York, a school known for being artsy, liberal, and open-minded, and felt I had found my tribe at last. Hipsters, freaks, and queers scattered around campus in their band T-shirts and skinny jeans, smoking cigarettes like they were famous. They carried cameras and portfolios, and at least half of them had some combination of brightly colored hair, tattoos, and facial piercings. I remember reading in one online review about Purchase that it was the “college for dodgeball targets.” But if that was the case, then dodgeball targets were my favorite kind of people. Finally, I was surrounded by artists, writers, actors, and dancers—people with substance and eccentricities I could relate to and admire. And for the first time in my life, people my age actually took an interest in my thoughts and ideas. A good handful even found me intriguing. Even my professors were progressive, unique individuals who embraced the school’s motto, “Think wide open.”
One particularly definitive memory I have of Purchase happened my first week as a freshman. It was the hottest September I had ever encountered, and I remember tossing, turning, and sweating on the springy top bunk mattress of my dorm room, relieved only by the most compact of compact fans. Then, one night, after days of the humidity building and building so that the campus felt like it was swelling like a mother ready to give birth, the sky cracked open and it began pouring rain like it had never rained before. The sense of new beginnings was in the air, prompting every freshman to leap up and run outside, barefoot, naked—anything went. They laughed and danced and did cartwheels in the grass as if they had just arrived on this planet, as if they had never experienced rain before in their lives. I stood watching, my chest pounding a kind of euphoric melody, and debated what to do with my body. I felt, for a split second, like I could jump around, dance, and do cartwheels if I wanted to. I could finally let go. But the possibility only flickered in me like a trying, reluctant flame. And the most I could bring myself to do was stand there, completely paralyzed, terrified of looking like a fool.
For the first couple of months of my first semester, I continued to feel enamored by the new people and ideas that surrounded me. I was so enamored in fact that I decided to break up with my first serious girlfriend, who was still living back home on Long Island. I was in love with Meghan right up until the day I ended our relationship (in fact, far, far beyond that day). Yet, there was an appetite in my soul that was somehow bigger than that love. I had been committed to Meghan for nearly two years. She represented all the comforts of home and embodied many of the traits I wanted in a partner, but in my heart, I knew I had to explore myself and this exciting new chapter of my life without limitation. I was searching for something that was even deeper than the intimacy I could share with a romantic partner.
It was around this time that I began a mad love affair with philosophy, particularly existentialism. Existentialism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is a branch of philosophy which is characterized by the analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual, who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad. I got carried away with questions that would unravel my entire reality: Do I have free will or is everything predetermined? What do I actually believe in, and in what ways are all of my beliefs the result of conditioning? Is there such a thing as an absolute truth, or is my entire reality a projection of my biased perceptions? When am I my authentic self and when am I performing? What is real?
I formed friendships with people who asked the same questions, and our favorite thing to do was to sit somewhere on the grass under the stars, smoking cigarettes and breaking down the entirety of our existence until there was nothing left to ponder.
One night in the campus courtyard, my friend Jen pointed at the sky and said, “Look at the moon.”
“Yes, wow, it’s so big and yellow,” I replied.
“No, it isn’t big or yellow,” Jen said. “It just is.”
“What do you mean, ‘it just is?’”
“It just is,” Jen replied. “You’ll get it someday.”
As I later understood, what Jen was trying to communicate to me that night is that there’s a truth in things we can feel when we’re able to look at things, especially things in nature, without judgment. Nothing can be truly understood. And yet, there’s a special kind of peace that comes with surrendering to the mystery and wonder of creation. There’s freedom in the kind of mindful awareness that doesn’t try to own or control or identify various aspects of existence. To truly experience the moon, or anything for that matter, we must simply allow things to be what they are.
I’m afraid, however, that before I was able to truly grasp this concept, I misinterpreted it. I decided that if the moon wasn’t big or yellow, then I wasn’t anything either. I was personality-less, identity-less, sexuality-less. I was just a body that could not be labeled or defined. I tried on different personas for a time, seeing how people would respond. One day I could be quiet, mysterious, and aloof, and the next I could be talkative. I felt unguided by any sense of intuition– I was just a game piece, and life was just a game.
Never once in my life have I felt a raw, animalistic attraction toward a male. That shy, googly-eyed thing that happens to people when they’re crushing—I’ve had it for girls, but never for the other side. Nonetheless, there came a point for me where I worried about the what ifs. What if I hadn’t given guys a fair shot when I dated them before? What if I’d never experienced a boy I had things in common with or found aesthetically attractive? What if there was something about the boys in my high school, the boys of Long Island, that didn’t turn me on, but I could feel feelings for guys with more substance from more interesting places? I never doubted my interest in girls, but since I was newly single and challenging my mind to be wide open, as it were, I figured why not put my sexuality back on the table.
Shortly thereafter I was approached in the campus library by a suave Visual Arts major named Craig. Craig was by far the most attractive member of the male species that had ever expressed interest in me; he was tall with a medium build, sandy hair, and proportionate facial features. He was focusing on metal sculpture at the time, which meant he welded metal with a blowtorch into sculptures as tall as he was (pretty badass, I thought). Craig hit the mark with the way he introduced himself to me, too, with a well-executed blend of humor and swag. Yes, he will do, I thought. I will try him on for size.
I went to Craig’s dorm room a few times after that, and we made out to the soundtrack of Elliott Smith. We went out to dinner, seemingly had conversational chemistry, and talked about everything under the sun. Craig was intelligent, deep, and interesting—all the things I thought I “should” find attractive. And yet, each time he kissed me, I felt nothing but the stubble on his face. When he pushed himself against me, both of us fully clothed, it felt more forced than intimate. I felt no urge to pull his shirt over his head—no desire to expose his hairy man body.
Within weeks of Craig, my friend Tristan, a philosophy major, confessed that he had feelings for me despite my telling him from the time we met that I was a lesbian. Tristan and I had something sweet—the weather had turned cold by then, and so we’d spend many late nights together sitting on the dryers in the basement of my building, engaging in heated philosophical conversations until three in the morning. I could always tell Tristan was charmed by my ability to debate with him and keep up with the complicated theories he liked to throw at me. But I never expected he’d spill his heart to me the way he did. On this particular evening, Tristan and I had decided to hike up a small hill that was tucked alongside the campus. He waited until we’d made it to the top, then when we were finally sitting down admiring the view, still panting from the climb, he told me he loved me, with genuine tears behind his eyes.
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