Community is Not Comfort

It’s 10:30 p.m., and I’ve just realized I haven’t finished my English essay, the one due at midnight. Apparently taking four writing-heavy classes as an English major was not, in fact, a strategic decision. For the 30th time since move-in, I begin questioning my life choices. Maybe I’m not a writer. Maybe I’m meant to be a musician. Nah, music theory sounds terrifying. My friend Bob says it’s “intense,” which is usually code for “you will get cooked.” Fine. Pre-med? But then again, every time I walk through Sci Li, it feels less like a study space and more like a funeral home. And that’s when it hits me. Everywhere I look at Wesleyan, people seem to have it figured out, and what makes it worse is that they’ve all figured it out in completely different ways. The activist. The athlete. The double majors. The entrepreneur. The person somehow triple majoring and still sleeping eight hours a night no, seriously, how are they sleeping at night?

Maybe the real problem isn’t that I can’t decide who I want to be. Maybe it’s that, at Wesleyan, there are too many compelling versions of who I could be. My parents tell me I should go down traditional paths like being a doctor or lawyer, etc., understandable. But the thing is, am I doing it because I want to? Or am I doing it because it is stable? There’s a difference between building a comfortable life and building a life you can actually live with. Success looks good on paper. It looks good in holiday photos. But what happens if you dread the job that funds it? Looking at this community, I see so many people going down paths that aren’t even traditionally in the books, which concerns me because, according to the propaganda of “Top 10 High-Paying Majors,” there are only a handful of careers that will get you into that upper-class lifestyle. Or, you know, maybe I am looking too deep into it. It isn’t like majors are going to be wiped clean off the syllabus because of some new technology rising up cough, cough, AI, I’m looking at you.

This is the paradox of diversity at Wesleyan: The more paths we see, the more freedom we have, and the more pressure we feel to choose the right one. It’s not enough to pick a direction; we are also expected to define what success means for ourselves. And that’s harder than it sounds. In “Culture and the Self,” the authors argue that the “inner self” is not always the center of personhood and that who we are is shaped by relationships and social context. In other words, even our definition of success is not created in isolation. This pressure isn’t just personal insecurity; it’s structural. Hewitt and Flett take this further in their work on socially prescribed perfectionism, describing the belief that other people expect us to be perfect and that our worth depends on meeting those expectations. At a place like Wesleyan, where excellence takes a thousand different forms, that pressure doesn’t disappear. It multiplies. And yet, maybe that’s the point. When there is no single script to follow, no obvious “correct” version of success, we are forced to confront what actually matters to us.

Diversity doesn’t guarantee belonging. It guarantees exposure, and exposure, at a place like Wesleyan, means constantly measuring ourselves against countless definitions of success. Community requires something harder: staying in conversations that challenge us and resisting the urge to retreat into the most comfortable version of ourselves. It’s easier to stay amongst the people who think like us, within the same political circles, the same academic departments, the same late-night conversations that confirm what we already believe. But a campus like Wesleyan’s only becomes a community when we’re willing to sit in rooms where we disagree or where we don’t immediately understand the language being spoken. Which is all very inspiring in theory. In practice, it’s 11:50 p.m., and I’m once again reconsidering my entire career trajectory because someone down the hall just announced they’re double majoring in neuroscience and East Asian Studies. Maybe that uncertainty is the cost of having so many possible selves to become. The good news is that this essay did get written. The bad news is I’m still not sure who I’m becoming while writing it.

Badu Smart is a member of the class of 2029 and can be reached at bsmart@wesleyan.edu.