Amy Chan

My whole life, I have pictured greatness as Instagram flashes of beautiful girls fisting champagne on boats, people in fine coats promenading down Fifth Avenue.

“Well, of course I am going to live a significant life,” we all tell ourselves. The only uncertainty is how we are going to do it.

I want to tell them not to give themselves so easily to others because they’ll disappoint you in the end. I want to say, prepare yourselves for the storm.

I feel as if there is something wrong with me, especially because everyone around me seems to be moving on. And for the first time in my life, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

I never realized how worthless being mediocre can make us feel. I’m sure that everyone at Penn has experienced at some point the sensation of being “less than,” of trying one’s best and still falling short.

To live the way someone would have wanted us to live is a grand, beautiful task, because it requires intimate knowledge of the person we lost and it acknowledges that they were more than some casualty in the circle of life.

What do we do when something we love becomes something we hate?

Like editing an essay, reinventing doesn’t mean that we’re erasing everything we had before. We are tweaking it, refining it, uncovering the original spark hidden in the chaotic mind. 

If we insist on viewing time as ours, then we have to acknowledge that we’ve never misplaced a single second; only put it somewhere it’s a little more difficult to show off on a plaque.

The fall semester is just about to end and a lot has happened that has left lasting impressions and changes on this campus.