In “Mid-college Crisis,” Ryan Li ’28 tackles the before, during and after of his first half of Stanford. From Parisian culture shock to a canon-event career path crashout, he shares his most vulnerable takes and how they shape his approach to his last two years in his reformed path through the Farm.
Like when a caterpillar becomes its butterfly, sometimes we have to melt our insides into their constituent guts — marinate in our own nucleic fluid — until we are ready to become something new.
By the end of my sophomore fall, I was freshly out of my first relationship and drained from what it took from me. I had prioritized it over my life at Stanford. I found myself tracing a worn path between my room and the cold morning air of Berkeley; emotional fatigue like a steady stream of unassuming carbon monoxide entering my lungs until I couldn’t breathe anymore.
Paris was my cocoon. I studied abroad in sophomore winter, having made the decision six months beforehand with my friend. After I got off the plane at l’aéroport Charles de Gaulle and greeted my host dad at his place in the 15th arrondissement, I set my luggage down and slumped onto my new bed. Drifting off to sleep, I was confron...