I had been debating with myself for over a week now about whether I should really be writing an AWL or not, and after a lot of thinking, contemplating, and convincing by the people I love, here I am, finally writing one.

*lowkey crashing out virtually*

—-

The strangest thing about leaving college is realizing how many people you became while you were here.

To me, college life has always felt like standing on the shore of an ocean, watching each new wave arrive differently and leave behind its grains. These grains felt like fragments of who we once were — pieces that existed only for a moment. Just as no two waves are the same, each leaves behind something the next wave never could.

And only when your time is coming to an end do you really sit on this shore, stare back at the ocean, and appreciate how far we have truly made it and how beautiful it all was.

I will not be talking about how my four years havehad been, and I will not bore you by describing the chronology of each semester because what stayed with me was never the sequence of years.

Instead, I will tell you about how I spent four years becoming and unbecoming.

When you first come to college, you arrive with the dream that you will become the best version of yourself and that there will be no regrets at all. But as time passes, you constantly grow up wondering if you really are enough — wondering if you could have done better and lived better, loved better, laughed better.

All of these what-ifs could pile up, and a completely different world with a completely different version of you could be living this life.

And that is alright, because that is life.

At some point, I came across a Sylvia Plath quote that felt painfully true:
“There is so much working, reading, thinking, and living to do. A lifetime is not enough.”

I felt that.

For the longest time, I had disliked my lifestyle and always wondered if I could have been a better version of myself — that I could have met better people, studied better, or worked harder or smarter. That I could have secured an internship. That I could have fallen in love later.

Maybe I would have become unrecognizable.

In another life, I would have lived a completely different life where I never had to wonder, “what if?”

But all of this thinking stopped when I told myself to shut up, sit back, and watch it all.

Because at the end of time,
I did live one life here.
This one.

I sat back and told myself to watch it all.

This place that felt too small while I was in it and too large now that I am leaving broke me into a million pieces before it taught me how to become a person.

In the span of four years of college, you meet many versions of yourself: the one that did not care about acads, the one that loved too much, the one that was too hurt, the one who could have stayed, the one who could have left earlier. The ambitious version, the quieter version, the unbearable version, the happier version.

Some survived, while some disappeared.

You try to live all of these versions just to see which one fits you the best and which one you would choose to carry as who you are at the end.

There could have been millions of versions of a college life you could have lived, but you do end up living one.

And maybe that is what living is all about too:
To carry all of these pieces of you with you.
To not become someone entirely new, but to choose which version you wish to live with and which you wish to grieve about.

I love the thought that every person you meet leaves a piece of themselves within you.

Each interaction leaves behind a tiny imprint within you: phrases we pick up, habits we learn, standards we absorb, even the way we interpret situations.

Over time, you become a layered version of all of the people you’ve met — friends, mentors, random conversations, even people you don’t talk to anymore.

Eventually, you become a new person with all of these fragments stacked quietly within you.

But here is the thing we tend to forget:
You choose what you desire to be.
You become a filter for all the fragments you encounter.

So while you’re being shaped, you’re also constantly choosing who gets to stay inside of you.

And what I love about my college life is that I got to meet so many different people that I feel comforted by the idea that I carry a fragment of all the people and conversations I’ve ever had.

It leaves a deeper impression on even the silliest interactions, treating them with the same importance as the life-changing ones.

In a place this vast, you slowly discover how much of you was shaped by the people around you.

When you first enter college, every single person tells you the same thing — explore.

Explore the campus, the clubs, the rooftops, the festivals, the people, the chaos, like a ritual passed down batch after batch.

In the beginning, it feels like empty enthusiasm.

The constant “bas enthu chahiye” slowly fades into background noise. But by the end of four years, you realise that was the only advice that truly mattered.

To try enough lives until one finally feels like yours. And before you know it, you become the same senior repeating those words to someone else.

Leave no stone unturned. We all thought we had more time too.

Keep meeting new people. Keep walking into new waves.
Some waves carry you home.
Some break you apart only to rebuild you differently.

Over time, I started wondering whether people are shaped more by who they meet or by what they survive.

I was once sitting in a group of people when the question struck me: What are the major events in college that altered us into who we are?

This question felt too deep and private to ask, and initially everyone around me went into a spiral of thinking about what really changed us all.

The answers were all different, and all of them seemed emotionally rocking because it was never a single event, but a series of events, and all of these events molded us individually.

It got me wondering if maybe the sequence of all of these events is what made us who we are today, shaping us brick by brick.

Maybe earning that F in my first year taught me how to work harder later. Maybe not getting an internship and bawling my eyes out over it made me realise I should be focusing on building myself first. Maybe being excluded by a friend group made me find the people who really cared about me. Maybe every failed relationship taught me to love myself and put myself first.

Some experiences do not crash into your life all at once.
They erode you slowly, like water against stone, until one day you wake up unable to recognize the shape you once had.

I remember my third-year summer vividly because it was the first time I truly sat with the weight of every decision I had ever made in my college life.
I remember not being able to get out of bed some days, exhausted before the day even began.
For three months that summer, I told myself I was better off not studying on this campus because of how unworthy I felt.
I remember sitting and staring at unfinished assignments and thinking of a different life I could have lived.

The self-doubt was piling up, and I was drowning myself in disappointment for failing to be anywhere important.

But the bittersweet part of it all was this:
It was also the best summer I ever had on campus.