A Summer Of Unknowing

In one of my earliest childhood memories, I'm sitting with my classmates on the rainbow carpet in my kindergarten classroom. My teacher is going over the math homework—it was our geometry unit—and there's this question about triangles that stumped everyone.

"No one got this one right," said my teacher.

"Not even Michelle?" asked a classmate, dumbfounded.

Not even Michelle.

I've told this story to friends sometimes in conversations about people-pleasing, perfectionism, futilely chasing self-worth through never-ending academic achievement, and so on—the many qualities and tendencies that often, for better or for worse, my peers at Princeton and I share. If we can know something better than everyone else, that makes us feel good. Or if we don't know something everyone else seems to know, that makes us feel awful.

For me, I guess it started as early as kindergarten. Achievement became both a way I measured my own worth and a way I received validation from others. In middle school, one of my math teachers put the names of all the students who got A's on our most recent test on a big classroom wall. I made sure my name never left that wall.

In high school, whenever I scrolled on my phone, checking my exact grade percentage was part of my routine. For four years, I kept my grade percentages to as close to 100% as possible.

When I failed a quiz for the first time sophomore year, dropping my grade from a 98% to a 93% in my calculus class, I couldn't sleep much for a week, and I got so nervous before every subsequent exam that I would get a stomachache before class. In an attempt to reduce my anxiety (and to make a point about what he knew I would do), my dad even told me he'd pay me $200 to get a B in calculus. Instead of tanking my grade and taking the $200, I printed out every AP Calculus exam from the CollegeBoard website and spent my weekends doing practice AP problems. I ended the term with a 95%.

Then in December of senior year, I was accepted into the "#1 university in the country"! Yay! Now I would be happy, right?

Clearly, I had a relationship with academics, and with myself, to heal. In three years at Princeton, I've come a long way. Unless you're some natural-born genius, to be an academic perfectionist at Princeton will drain the life out of you, so my high school perfectionism faded away over time in the face of Princeton academic rigor.

I'm happy to say now that I don't do all my readings. I don't read my essays ten times before submitting them. I can finally say that I'm excited to learn for the sake of learning, and I place my effort where it yields the most intellectual curiosity and growth, not where it maximizes grade percentages.

So I'm better now in classes and have a healthier relationship with knowing and achieving in a school setting. But what about outside of school and grades? What happens when you apply a framework of academic achievement to questions of meaning? Of the afterlife? Of God and the spirit and soul?

While things have relatively stabilized in my academic life, this year, everything outside of academics has felt incredibly volatile. My childhood home was sold. Friends disappeared. Friends passed away. I don't even play tennis anymore these days, and tennis was a near constant in my life since I was about eight years old.

An unexpected (but in hindsight not that surprising) result has been this: a summer of processing my spring has catapulted me into a spiritual journey unlike anything I could've anticipated, so that beliefs I'd taken as truths my entire life began to crumble. I entered a pursuit of spiritual truth, the kind of thing I'd always heard about, something like: this terrible thing happened to this person so then they tried to find out all the answers about the universe. Call me crazy, but I get it now.

When it came to the existential, I found myself painfully stumped by new spiritual questions, and I felt many of my secular beliefs unravel. These questions kept me up at night and burned through my conscience a thousand times more fiercely than any exam question or academic research question I've ever had to answer.

The American schooling system teaches us that we can always separate truth from falsity with human cognition. It teaches that through individual pursuit of knowledge we can learn to be correct and righteous, and those who are more educated should and will have more informed perspectives on the world.

In the face of death and change and instability, my academic achievements were meaningless. There were questions right in my face that I could not answer, like: where is the meaning in death, what happens after it, what is the reason for such terrible pain? Do we really just accept it as a sad circle of life thing, shove it all away, and move on?

My short lifetime of knowing how to get the right answer in class and on exams couldn't hold a candle to the existential. I've even found, recently, that my trained confidence in my ability to "find the answer" has at times stifled my spiritual life and clouded my judgment such that my belief in my own right-ness has kept me from truly opening myself to hearing out different perspectives. I can see my ego and pride much more clearly now than ever before.

Does a razor focus on academic and intellectual attainment necessarily stifle the spiritual? I'd certainly hope not—spiritual exploration can push us to grow so much intellectually too—but I'm going to keep this question in the back of my mind as I enter senior year attempting to strike balance between both.

In a phone conversation I had with a close friend last week, we discussed this very topic. We've been so trained to read texts through an analytical, performative lens for our seminars. Our achiever, people-pleaser, grade-seeking selves often still read superficially, trying to take from our readings whatever we can regurgitate most eloquently in a three-hour class discussion, all so our professors can tell we did the readings.

What happens if this is how we read religious and spiritual texts? Is it possible to really understand them?

My own answer is no. It's been a welcome change to feel when I read—to have found texts and scripture that spark a kind of heart movement, to let myself be inspired and transformed without my typical cold intellectualizing.

a view from a hotel room in Taichung where much spiritual pondering occurred!

Anyway, this is just a little (and intentionally vague) glimpse into what the inside of my brain has looked like this summer. Honestly, it took me a long time to even get myself write this—my notion of truth has felt so fluid this summer that I have felt silly trying to write and assert anything at all, scared that I'll say something and feel differently about it later. I've been humbled so many times lately by my raging misconceptions that I've often felt like I don't know anything, which is a pretty big mental block if you're trying to write and share it with the world.

I decided though that if I let this new awareness of the limits of my knowledge stop me, I would quite possibly be able to convince myself to never write again. And if one thing hasn't changed, it's been this calling to the pen and page and the narrations of thoughts that spin around in my head constantly, if only to (hopefully!) find a way to your hearts.