What am I doing here? No really, I mean it. What am I doing here, in this chair, in the McGregor Room, in Alderman Library, at the University of Virginia, on this Tuesday evening in Charlottesville?
There is someone sitting across from me in an identical seat, with the lamp glowing like a halo around the textbook in her lap. The McGregor Room isn’t particularly packed tonight. I’ve seen a few of my friends walk by with coffee in hand, and we exchange silent nods and cheeky grins as they pass me to stake out their own study spots for the evening.
What am I doing here?
I stretch my fingers over my laptop’s keyboard and strain my eyes to read over what I’ve highlighted in my copy of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” but I can’t keep my focus there for long. I gaze back up at the expanse of room before me, at all the shelves of books and at the students who carefully check their earbuds to ensure their music isn’t disturbing anyone. There’s a sort of invisible, quiet communion that vibrates amidst the flipping pages of our great English novels and chemistry textbooks, and I can’t help but imagine the years’ worth of nights, just like this one, that have seeped into the memories of these walls. How many grueling and soul-crushing papers have been written in this seat I’m occupying? How many Economics exams have been crammed for under that lamp? How many new passions and ideas have sparked beside that fireplace?
Every day I ask myself the same sort of question, and every day I find I have no real concrete answer. What am I doing at the University of Virginia? And I don’t mean that literally. I know I am currently trying to read for my Major British Authors class. I know I am going to take a Spanish oral exam tomorrow at 2 p.m. But I want to get at the heart of something more substantial, something beyond just checking things off my everyday to-do list. What am I doing here? What effect do I have on those around me? Am I making a mark on this school? Am I letting this school make a mark on me?
As I peer around the McGregor Room from my perch in the corner, I can’t stop looking at all these focused faces and wonder if they’ve asked themselves these questions within the last hour too. We are all occupying the same room at the same school at the same moment in time, probably striving for very different things, but striving for something nevertheless. We’re all sitting here in silence, living our own lives filled with common pettiness and stress, and yet, each of us must be yearning deep down for similar senses of belonging here, or pondering the ways we might leave this school a little better than how we found it. Maybe I’m the only one distracted and tired enough to be thinking of all of this as the clock ticks away in the library, but I have to believe I’m not alone in wishing the walls and ground of U.Va will hold a small bit of me after I eventually have to leave.
Though the direction in which I’m moving is not always clear, and it’s often difficult to discern the meaning of my choices and actions here, I find great comfort in knowing that on any given night, I can prop myself in a corner of this great University and feel connected to someone, whether I know them personally or not. And in these moments of silence and communion, I’ve discovered that it’s okay to not have answers to the overwhelming questions I often ask myself.
It’s okay to come up empty and resigned when I try to piece together what kind of mark I want to leave on U.Va. It’s okay simply to sit here in this particular chair, on this particular night, and let those questions wash over and away from me. Sometimes it can be enough to sit among some unfamiliar faces in the library, and know that we can each sit here, together, in our mutual confusion, gratitude, and wonder. I don’t always know what I’m doing, but regardless, I am just so grateful that I get to do something here.
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