She carefully approached us in the way one does when they do not not know how to tell their ridiculous story. I was catching up with her roommates—not in the “what have you been up to?” way, but more like they were a certain number of drinks ahead of me, and to keep up, I had to stop being able to taste.
During this time, after being isolated or in too tiny of a bubble for a year, no one “caught up” with each other. Catching up with someone felt like a pause in life. Those months were the first time in my life when I preferred talking and playing over what people call “conversations of substance.” I simply just wanted to fuck around. “So, we’re being evicted,” she said, elongating each vowel. “We all have to leave.”
It was something about noise level and crying babies. The moment she said that, four guys, one of them carrying a speaker three-quarters of the size of his body, rolled into the apartment. He let out a huge grunt of relief as he placed the speaker on the floor. We were many flights of stairs up. I stifled a laugh, knowing what was going to happen next.
Instead of worrying about the eviction, my friend and her roommates looked afraid, in disbelief, giddy, and excited all at once. I am positive we all did. They gathered the entire group, and instead of people trying to head off on their own, everyone piped in to offer their apartments for all of us to migrate to. We were collectively down—even the boy who knew he would have to carry that speaker downstairs. He was actually so down that everyone ended up in his and his roommates’ dark, color-changing basement thirty minutes later. I struggle to remember the full details on how we got there. The only clear moments for me are running and jumping down the flights of stairs, seeing confused friends entering the apartment as we were leaving, yelling out our destination’s address, and jumping into a car at the last moment, snuggling my body onto the floor of it. During that car ride, I remember screaming the lyrics to “Superbass.”
When we arrived, we stayed in the car for one more song—“TiK ToK.” On nights like those, somehow, I transport back to 2010, an incredibly corny, beautiful time. Everyone in the basement, our new home, became a friend. Every voice was shot, every body was equally drenched in sweat, bumping against each other. The energy was higher than a thirteen-year-old superfan who was given Believe concert tickets for Christmas in 2011.
A couple hours later, we sprinted out of the house and into another Uber, heading to another home, another basement that drenched us in a deep, smoky red. My two hours there felt like ten minutes. When my in-body experience ended, I realized where I was, and I realized that there were only ten people left. The exhaustion hit everyone at the same time. We piled into cars, on the laps of each other, and quietly went back to our respective apartments. I have a picture on my phone of a silhouette against the car window, the blurry Boston skyline in the background.
To describe this memory in one word, I would use presence. Around those people, in those spaces, I felt completely with them, taking up all the space I am meant to occupy. We filled that entire night up to its brink, and when it was over, I did not wish that it would never stop. It was completely enough. When I am old and filled with Botox and asked about my time in college, while I may not remember the details, I will picture these moments, especially this particular night, as ones of joy, chaos, excess, adrenaline, carelessness, selfishness, privilege, and youth. This time will glitter and shine, like gold.
We are constantly bombarded with social, academic, extracurricular, and work pressures. For the past five years, work has taken over my life, and of course, I still had fun, but did I ever just relax? Did I live completely in my body during these “fun moments?” Did I take the time to find what makes me happy? Did I know what I wanted to do and be? I indulged in what I thought mattered for my future and what could correct my past but never what mattered to me in that particular moment of life. Over this year, and I know this seems intuitive, I found out I deserve fun and rest—not just in the social realm but in every other part of life. What is the point of having access to such a ridiculously resource-rich institution if I do not learn, explore, and experiment with happiness?
We are taught to believe that what brings us happiness could only ever be a hobby, that what we do for a living could never bring us the richness and vibrancy of gold. Because of this, we push our desires—whatever makes work feel like it is not work–far away, almost out of the fear that if we attempt them, we will never be able to create a fake sense of happiness in anything else. Taking that step, however, was the greatest, scariest thing in my life. I still feel those social expectations surrounding what I should do, but I no longer feel lost; rather, found. I believe our generation will experience this after realizing most of what we have been taught to believe about life is bullshit. We do not have to seek. We must reject, wiping away all that clouds our right path.
Take heart, indulge the child within us, live life in our bubble to an excess, for what we know now more than ever before is that time will consume and haunt us if we refuse to be fucking down.
Arsh Dhillon ’23 (asekhon@college.harvard.edu) is the President of the Independent.