Autobiography
I used to pray. I don’t come from a consistently religious family; my father is a self-proclaimed Buddhist, my mother is superstitious, and my grandmother suggests that there is a God who settles all matters. My older brother is undecided, though he wears a stylish, Russian-Orthodox cross, my younger brother is completely embedded in the Episcopalian tradition of his school, and I am left in the quiet shadows of uncertainty. Uncertain that there is a greater cause, a bigger meaning, a destiny, a reason. My diminishing religiosity may have, at some point, saved my life.
With two working parents and a detached older sibling, I bonded with my maternal grandmother, Nikki, who sacrificed life in her home country to help raise me. As I got older, she gently but ardently fostered in me an acute romanticism, a perennial fantasy of the princely fellow my destiny necessarily involved. Facing any trials, she encouraged me to drink water prayed over by a Quran-interpreting villager from Azerbaijan. When anxious of my future, she called her psychic friends who assured me that my destiny shimmered brilliantly. I grew up with a narrative of what my life would be, the beating heart of this ideology being that I could serve a greater purpose and that a higher power had decided a course for me.
My belief system empowered me to be maniacal about my studies. By curating a particular work ethic, I knew I barreled down a pristinely charted course, one that involved attending an institution like Columbia University for my undergraduate degree. But the plot points of my junior year proved particularly destabilizing to the character I’d become: sifting through pages of Western philosophy questioning consciousness, witnessing Roe v Wade threatened, befriending a Marxist who obliterated my political understanding of the world, and losing a friend to suicide. It was a calamitous unraveling that devoured the person I was, and it all coalesced into three terrifying questions: Why is life so hard? Does it have meaning? And, how could I have been so mistaken about its meaning before?
The narrative of my entire being was disturbed. I could not reconcile what felt undeniably contradicting–that life was both predictably wonderful but also punishing and cruel. On one of the most challenging days of this utter wallowing, while pacing in my dorm room, I somehow stumbled upon Albert Camus’ Sisyphus. In this text, Camus famously interprets Sisyphus as happy, despite his eternal punishment of pushing a boulder up a hill. It revealed a profound truth: that the struggle of life itself was a “world contained”. These words nearly made my heart stop from infatuation. They quelled my greatest fears–that life was dreadfully meaningless and that the mere existence of suffering somehow contradicted the great meaning of life. But, as I learned from Camus, life indeed showed signs of extraordinary absurdity, bountiful joy, and immense pain, all in a beautiful sine wave. For the first time in my life, I actually felt happy to think that nothing contained me, no destiny defined me, and no one beyond me put suffering before me; that suffering was not just a punishment for living–it was life itself.
This kind of character development altered the way I perceive life. I feel more presently active in the creation of my own narrative, a greater desire to connect with those around me, and burgeoning fearlessness to become who I’d like to become. As a result, I am finally allowing myself to pursue paths I have always secretly admired in parallel to film, such as journalism. These past few years have thus been a rebirth. And while I feel there is less magic to my world, what without the curious “destiny” I was promised, I have found treasures of far greater importance to me than any prayer could have ever provided: people and their stories.