The scattered pieces of a self
Who am I, standing here now?
A junior in the School of Electronic Science and Engineering at Nanjing University. President of the ITXia Mutual Aid Association. A lover of boiled fish.
But I could just as easily be described another way: a hobbyist amateur radio operator who has barely made contact with anyone, an active speaker in all kinds of obscure group chats, a blogger no one reads, an open-source developer whose projects have only a handful of stars.
Identity is strange like that. It works almost like politics, or like a judgment made by others—a social label that never quite comes off, yet never fully sticks either. We can be the polished version that appears on a résumé, and we can also be the one assembled out of niche interests and private obsessions.
The fall from “top student” to “ordinary person”
Before coming to Nanjing University, most of us were the center of our own small worlds. We were the bright ones in our teachers’ eyes, the ones who had always stood out.
Then we arrived here and had to face a simple fact: there are too many suns. In the end, most of us dissolve into a galaxy called ordinary.
There are only so many national scholarships. Only so many papers in top journals. Once you enter a place filled with people who were all exceptional somewhere else, it becomes hard to keep telling yourself that life is a straight track called excellence, with everyone arranged neatly by rank.
That first stage after enrollment can be rough. It is easy to feel the drop. We are used to a single scale of comparison, and once that scale stops placing us at the top, disappointment comes quickly.
The problem is the measuring system
Later, though, I realized the problem was not us. The problem was that narrow way of seeing.
If we look at classmates only through GPA, student leadership titles, or publication counts, living people are reduced to cold numbers. It does not matter whether you benefit from that system or lose under it—either way, it is hard to be genuinely happy.
People were never meant to be lined up on a balance and weighed against each other. Everyone has a different texture, a different shape of life, and each person can bloom in a different way.
The crowded road, and the things that seem “useless”
This is where another anxiety begins: what is an undergraduate supposed to do?
On one side is the mainstream script everyone repeats. Get the highest grades you can. Win the big awards. Secure admission to a strong graduate group. Enter the system through a selective government track. It all sounds attractive, like a highway lit in gold.
On the other side are the choices people are less willing to declare proudly: spending an entire day gaming in the dorm, skipping class to travel far away on a shoestring budget, becoming absorbed in some extracurricular passion with no obvious practical return. None of this sounds like the kind of thing people like to place under the heading of “outstanding.”
But life only happens once, and college happens only once too.
What makes university so precious is exactly this: compared with secondary school, the suffocating pressure from parents and teachers has loosened; compared with working life, the burden of earning a living and supporting a family has not yet fully arrived. It is the period when the cost of trial and error is at its lowest.
If everyone crowds onto the same officially approved road, then of course that road will be packed, and the scenery along it will all start to look the same.
When work stops feeling like obligation
Marx once imagined a society in which labor would no longer be a form of exploitation, but something a person could pursue and even enjoy. I used to think that sounded wildly unrealistic. How could labor ever be enjoyable?
Now, at Nanjing University, I think I understand a little better.
On those afternoons when I skip an evening class to tinker with radio equipment, or write a piece of code for an open-source community that almost no one will ever notice, something changes. If you find a field where you need no GPA incentive, no extra evaluation points, not even an audience, and you can still lose yourself in it completely, then you have found something that belongs only to you.
You have found your own trellis to sit under.
Accept yourself, and taste your own grape
People say unreachable grapes are either sour or sweet. But the only grape that really matters is the one you pick yourself and place in your own mouth.
So try things. Make peace with the version of yourself that does not have to walk at the very front of the line. Find the thing you can spend an entire afternoon doing for no reason at all, with no reward waiting at the end.
Maybe others will think it is pointless. Maybe it will never become a credential. But if it lets you bloom, then that is one of the highest forms of success college can offer.
Life is only about thirty thousand days long. Do not lose yourself in the middle of it.