Nobody teaches you what you desire in life. You simply absorb it — from the people around you, from the culture you are assimilated in, from the particular anxiety of watching everyone want the same thing and deciding that must mean it is worth wanting. French academic and philosopher René Girard christened this worldview as mimetic desire: the idea that human longing is fundamentally imitative, that we do not generate our desires from within so much as the people around us.
I began to feel personally attacked by this ideology on Dec. 18, 2025, when I got into Penn.
Here’s the thing: I wanted this for years. Badly. I was sure of that. I wanted this in an obsessive, rewrite-your-essays-until-you-no-longer-recognize-your-own-voice kind of way. And when the decision arrived, I felt everything you’re supposed to feel. I cried. I screamed. I texted people I hadn't spoken to in months, and then somewhere in between the confetti and kudos, a sinking feeling pooled at my feet, and a considerably more agitating question snuck its way in: how much of this wanting was actually mine?
How much of this desire was me, and how much of it was years of cultural messaging and the ultra-specific pressure of watching everyone around me aim for the same target and concluding that it must be worth hitting? I know that I want to be here, and I am more than grateful for the opportunity. The gray area is the backsplash where wanting collided with the need to prove myself. And when you build your identity around chasing goals, masking the fear of failure with “ambition” and developing the habit of running without ever letting yourself land, nobody really warns you of what happens when you succeed by your own definition. The question you have not prepared yourself for, even if you feel that you have prepared yourself for every question in the world, is “Now what?”
We tend to treat achievement like accumulation. You work toward something, you get it, and then it’s yours, permanently, safely in your possession.
But that’s not how it works.
Getting into Penn doesn’t mean I have been decided upon, once and for all, as someone who belongs here. I will have to keep deciding that, probably every semester, probably in every seminar room where I’m convinced I’m the only one who did not read the footnotes. If Girard is right, if the desire was never fully mine to begin with, then the credential cannot close the gap. It was never built to do so. It was meant to get you in the room. What you do once you are in the room is an entirely different problem, and one that requires you to actually know what you want. Independently.
What I do know is simpler. I know that I love to write, not because anyone told me to want that, but because I have been doing it since before I knew it could mean anything. I know I am hungry for knowledge in a way that feels cellular, like it was there before the rankings and the resume and the need to prove something. I know that I want to be around good people, good energy, and light. The kind of light that comes from being in the right space, with the right people who make you feel less like you are performing and more like you are actually alive.
That desire, I am certain, is mine.
It takes a little digging to discover it, but I believe you know a desire is yours when no one can talk you out of it. When it survives the doubt and everyone else’s opinion of what you should want instead. That is the only thing worth bringing with you anywhere.
So I am going to Penn this August without the assurance I thought I had earned. I do not truly know what being a student at Penn looks like day-to-day, when it stops being a dream and simply becomes a Tuesday, a dining hall, a problem set, a 15-minute walk in the cold. I don’t know who I will be here, now that I am no longer the girl trying to get there. But maybe that is the more honest version of this story. Not “I worked hard, and it paid off.” Not the confetti. Not the notifications and well wishes. But the morning after, lying awake in my bed, asking, “Now what?” and sitting with the fact that I do not know yet.
The goal does not have to be Penn, or any institution. It just has to be yours. And that question, the real one, only you can answer.
I’ll start there.
IDIA ENOMA is an incoming College first-year from Chester, NY. Her email is ienoma@sas.upenn.edu.
