I recently had a conversation with someone I had not talked to in a long while. I was feeling particularly unenthused with my life this day and was not especially in the mood for some mindless chatter. Something about the combination of the pandemic and the perception of the decay of the world as I know it has made me somewhat more antisocial. 

Regardless, I waved aimlessly at this person from a couple feet away – maybe the pleasant spring breeze inspired some feelings other than misanthropy for once. But something about my wave communicated openness, and before I knew it, they had approached me and we were then sitting outside on a park bench, exchanging the usual how-do-you-do’s. 

I’m not sure how we got on to this topic of conversation. I have to admit that I was only half paying attention to the actual dialogue. I think the person said something about being antisocial, and I said something to the effect that I was surely doing that this semester. Then, unprompted, this person said that I had changed quite a bit from the beginning of my freshman year to now. 

Maybe I am a narcissist. Maybe we all are because when we are offered a little glimpse into how other people see us – I mean, really see us – we jump at the opportunity the way a cat jumps at the opportunity to eat unattended plastic bags. It’s weird and disgusting, and maybe slightly endearing and exasperating all the same. 

Either way, what this person said to me was that I had become more me over my time at William Jewell College. I had to give kind of an enthused look at them. I could recognize, in a sense, that this was true. Objectively speaking, what they were telling me was undeniable – by ending my toxic, six year long relationship with my ex-boyfriend, by cutting off my abusive parents and by limiting contact with my extended family, I really had given myself enough space to become myself again. 

The proof of this is how much I cringe when I see my old ID photo. I mean, who the hell is that? I was trying to embody a stupid ideal of femininity and selfhood that I couldn’t even unreflexively endorse. I look at myself in the mirror, and I can tell that I’m becoming more me. My ex-boyfriend would call me all kinds of slurs if he could see me now, with my short hair and my binder. 

And it’s undeniable that I find myself thrilled at this new me. I like being, well, to put it frankly, a very gay academic who is a little too into moral psychology. I more than like it – I love it. I think of dating my ex now or contacting my homophobic mom and actively have to suppress gagging. I think I’ve grown up as a person, and I am ecstatic. 

But it’s the ecstasy of a junkie. The ecstasy of St. Augustine stealing pears and sinning against God. To what extent is my joy at eating these pears, of enjoying these newfound experiences of so-called “true” selfhood just a rebellion against my parents? Against my abusive ex? And to what extent is it really me? And then, even if I’m really me when I’m being – to put it roughly – incredibly queer, it’s like I’m plagued by a demon. 

I look in the mirror and feel pleasure at my reflection. Me! I enjoy the reflection that looks back, where once I never did. But at the same time, I hear my mother’s hissing voice shaming me. I hear my ex’s idiotic, unfalsifiable conspiracy theories ricocheting back and forth in my brain whenever I try to make any sort of claim about anything. 

Always, the evil genius of my past comes to poison whatever first steps I’ve made into some semblance of happiness! I’m tossed and spilled in this internal contradiction that I’ve become. This roiling, broiling sea of teenage angst. Subjectively speaking, I’ve never been more miserable in my entire life, despite the fact that I’m no longer actively in the abusive situations that I used to be in. In being me, I’ve never felt less like me. 

Funny the way life works. There’s a fancy philosophical term that you can use to describe what it is that I’m doing. Or maybe, what it is that is psychologically, causally occurring in me. Because I’m certainly not doing this, hence why I describe it as being possessed by a demon. Essentially, I’ve lived 18 years of my life surrounded by people who told me that who I was and what I valued was fundamentally wrong. 

Not just wrong, actually. That what I valued was somehow disgusting, or inhumane, and that I should feel ashamed for loving who I loved, or wanting to look the way I wanted to look or wanting to even learn about the things I wanted to learn about. That all of my creative powers and my energies of self-direction were evil. So, it was not merely resentment for myself which I was taught, but ressentiment, if we want to get philosophical about it. 

And when you’re in that kind of environment, where you’re not only told, but raised in a way that screams at you that you’re somehow evil or gross, it tends to deform your desires. That’s exactly what I have: deformed desires. I’ve internalized a narrative that was intentionally crafted to make me feel bad about myself and so all my desires toward myself are, well, deformed. 

It’s fun to get philosophical in the abstract about it, I think. But I think it’s become less fun for me when it’s no longer abstract and I turn my philosophical glare inwards. It’s fun to do case studies and talk about people’s deformed desires when it’s not about you, but then when it is about you, and you do have to deal with feeling like you’re possessed by the devil, then you do all this fancy philosophical footwork and are left with the feeling that you’ve performed surgery on yourself. 

And guess what? Now you have a very mangled-up patient that can now say “I have deformed desires,” but that in no way helps with the fact that the patient is mangled up and still has deformed desires. So here is my advice. Probably, my advice is very narrow advice. But I will draw from Levin, a character from “Anna Karenina,” to make some of my points. And maybe a bit from Nietzsche. 

Like Levin, I believe in reason. I think that reason is the key to finding out the answer to the question  “What is it to live rightly?” But I also think that, like Levin, I tend to be kind of an idiot in the way that I torture myself with reason and thinking about reason. Levin wants to use all these sorts of metaphysical theories about the nature of the worker and the relationship the essence of the worker has to the field in order to solve the question of what is to live rightly. Specifically, what it is to live rightly in relation to the Russian agrarian lifestyle. 

But in digging around all these metaphysical theories, in trying to find some kind of way of putting in very clearly articulated premises the way to live well, in a way that is indefeasible, Levin mostly ends up torturing himself. In the entirety of “Anna Karenina,” he comes off as a generally very irritated character who wants to believe in truth, beauty and justice. He even has glimpses of such truth, beauty and justice, yet every time he tries to grasp it by using reason – by using treatises, by writing very complicated argumentation – he loses the nature of truth, beauty and justice which seemed so close to him only moments before. 

I think I’ve become much the same as Levin. I want to put everything into very clearly defined boxes and premises and arguments, and I want everything to be rational. And then my life isn’t. And my desires aren’t. And I wake up in the morning, and I want to scream my head off. I feel shame at myself for feeling shame, and I feel shame at myself for being ashamed at myself – I can’t get anything in my psychic disposition to align with any measure of reason, I’m just screaming. I am in despair at the idea that if Plato’s polis was started, I would be the worst guardian because my parents treated me like garbage. 

I can’t bear it. I can’t bear the idea of being an imperfect human being. I can’t bear the idea that my being imperfect is out of my control, that my being irrational is not something that I can fix immediately despite all my fancy philosophical footwork. Why don’t I cohere to reason instantly? Why was I treated this way? I hate the problem of moral luck. And similarly, Levin can’t understand why his life can’t be perfect either after he marries the love of his life. Isn’t this what he wanted?

Haven’t I also gotten everything I wanted? Why can’t I just be happy? Why aren’t things just falling into place? Why isn’t Reason the measure of my life? What is wrong with me? What is wrong with the world? Why aren’t things beautiful, true and just? Why are both Levin and I so irritated?

And the reason is that we are both fundamentally living like idiots. And if Nietzsche was still alive, I think he would probably hit me on the head – and Levin too. Probably, he would say something to the tune that I need to relax and read less Greek philosophy. I’ve become too Apollonian. 

In other words, I’m overthinking it. I’m way, way, way overthinking things. I’m using reason not just as a tool to better my life, but as a tool to tear into myself for not being perfect due to things other people did to me. I’ve cut people who were abusive out of my life just to replace them with an even worse critic: the internal critic of objective reason. With me! 

I am not at all taking seriously the fact that maybe I just know, emotionally, willfully, that I am living rightly. That when I look in the mirror and feel good, that it is good. That I don’t have to worry about stupid questions, about whether or not I’m just rebelling or paying attention to the voice in my head that’s my mom. 

So what I’m telling you, dear reader, is not to use reason, or any of your other capacities, as a kind of doubt-raising tool against yourself. Don’t start your quest for autonomy and self-creation by looking for things that are wrong with you and start tearing yourself apart limb by limb looking for something that is metaphysically rotten within you. You’ll never find the source of your discomfort because it’s probably not even you. It was probably something that someone did to you or something that was not your fault. 

Instead, take seriously that there’s something already within you worth keeping, something within you that already is good, and work with that. Human beings are not inherently evil. Most of us want to do good. Most of us are good. And I think most of us think there is something wrong with us and, in our desire to become good so badly, end up doing really bad things to ourselves or to others. 

Perhaps we ought to relax just a little and remember that in the end, we tend to live rightly when we are not ripping ourselves to shreds. The task is self-creation, not self-destruction. Find who you are and then let yourself be that person. And remember that self-creation does not occur in a vacuum – other people exist to help you in that arena; to give you feedback and love. 

I think this last point is pretty important too and one that is astonishingly easy to forget, especially in a pandemic hellscape. I tend to get stuck into a kind of doom cycle of thinking there’s something wrong with me, and then that’s reinforced because I get some kind of interpersonal interaction wrong and that leads me to flee from society. And fleeing from society is so easy now with quarantine happening, but it’s so bad for me because then I get even more stuck in my doom cycle of there-is-something-metaphysically-rotten with me. 

I recently got this sense of sucking at interpersonal relations and did that thing where I disappear from the face of the earth in order to feel less humiliated. But this time, I ran back in despair to my old high school friend, Marissa. And while Nietzsche may be dead and cannot come hit me on the head with a book, Marissa is still a pretty good substitute and can philosophize pretty well with the hammer, despite being a computer science major. 

I was crying to Marissa on the phone at being an abject failure at interpersonal relations. She was trying to comfort me. I’m usually impossible to comfort when I get in these sorts of doom spirals of feeling like I can’t get the measure of Reason. She asked me, “What do you think is wrong?” Here I felt a sense of relief because I thought that I could articulate, using my fancy philosophical footwork, what the problem was. 

I began with my first premise: the problem of what I believe was my metaphysical rot, instantiated by years of poor habituation, which resulted in deformed desires. And how that ultimately culminated in my every external manifestation being also rotten. 

It cracks me up to type this now, but I’ll never forget when Marissa interrupted me mid-rant to say: “Meta-what? What the hell are you saying to me? Plato’s “Republic”? Habituation? Are you literally trying to say that you think something is wrong with you and then that everything you do is wrong as a result? You’re so stupid! Shut up. You are literally fine and are just having a panic attack.” 

If that isn’t philosophizing with a hammer back at me, I don’t know what that is. So dear reader, apart from advising you to not use reason or any other capacity to tear into yourself, I also recognize how difficult it is, for those of us who have a tendency to tear into ourselves, to actually remember that advice. I tend to forget it in five minutes. You should remember that you also have friends. And maybe some of your friends are hopefully infused with a more Nietzsche-like spirit and will cut right through your doom spiraling. Cling to those friends and help each other in your self-creation projects. We are, after all, social animals. 

Science fiction movies are filled with tropes about parallel universes and travel to them. It makes one stop and wonder about the different ways one’s own life could have been different. I like to think of my own life as a kind of tree, where each pivotal decision point can be represented as a branch. You can trace the decisions which brought me to the branch that I am occupying now by following out the living branches and ignoring the withered branches of possible decisions that I did not take. 

The current branch that I am occupying is the branch where I am a philosophy major at William Jewell College. But, given that I have traveled the winding road of decision points, I have a pretty good idea of what could have been. I know that one of the withered branches, for example, is that I could have been a history major at Rice University. Still another withered branch is the one where I am an English major and I dedicate my life to writing some great romantic masterpiece.

It is this particular withered branch that I would like to explore. I spend a good chunk of my time before bed toying with this little writer-fantasy of mine. This is probably because as a child, the first career that I wanted to have was that of a writer. I was an ardent fan of Georgian romance novels in particular as a child. That influenced almost every aspect of my life, right down to my mannerisms. For example, I had a habit of saying that people were seven and 20, as opposed to saying numbers normally, and I insisted on having tea parties to discuss some imaginary social scandal or another. 

What changed for me to abandon my pretensions of being the next Jane Austen? A large part of it was that my dad had cancer for the first time when I was in first grade. Romantic novels and Rococo playfulness are fun, but there were more noble pursuits at hand for me. I cast aside all thoughts of writing coy dialogues and studied the latest developments in neuroscience, with the naive belief that doing so would somehow help my dad recover from his glioblastoma. 

Given my disdain for all the medical sciences and that no 10-year-old, no matter how desperate, can ever come up with a cure for cancer, it is of no surprise that I am no neuroscientist. Still, I did not return to writing romances. I had become somewhat disillusioned with the world after the years of my dad’s cancer treatments. I stumbled into history and then into philosophy by chance. I had no major aspirations when I was younger, apart from being a writer or a neuroscientist, both of which were swept away.

And so, I ask myself, what would have to be different for me to have stuck with writing? Obviously, I think that my father not having cancer would have probably helped a great deal. I would not have suffered from my so-called “Great Disenchantment” that effectively killed whatever romantic-Byronic aspirations I had. But probably what would have helped fuel my writing ambitions would have been having a deeper connection with my family in Mexico. 

I was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. The entirety of my extended family lives there. Until the age of four, I also lived there. I moved to the United States with my mother because my father was offered a job in an aerospace engineer company. It was a good opportunity for the budding marketing salesman, I think. But it means that where I could have been raised surrounded by my family – my grandparents, my cousins, my aunts, my great-aunts, my great-uncles, my uncles, etc. – I mostly interacted with my mom and my books. 

In other words, instead of being taken up in a huge web of social relations, where I would have implicitly learned a much more nuanced conception of what-it-is to love and to be in a loving relationship, I really only had my mom as the measure of what the nature of love was. 

My mom, for reasons which were out of her control, was often emotionally drained. Looking back on some of my old writing for school, I can clearly see the ways in which my co-dependent relationship with my mother clearly demonstrated a lack of nuanced understanding of love. What I thought was a cute dialogue reads as desperate, clingy and sad. 

So, in another possible world, the one in which I don’t move to the United States, I can see a much more well-balanced writer-me sitting in my grandmother’s house clacking on a typewriter and writing what is some hopefully less-sad romantic dialogue. Not to mention that elementary and secondary education in Mexico has, as part of its regular curriculum, extensive lessons in French and English, so the dialogue could potentially be written in French. That’s even more inherently romantic. 

Being around my family in Mexico also means that I would have been more exposed to a more distinctly European culture as well. My grandmother is fond of taking yearly trips to France or England and would have taken me to these trips had I been around to take them with her. 

I think that these trips would have been useful to my awakening my young writing spirit. I would have probably been given a lot of free reign to fraternize with the local youth, and I would have been more confident as a result of growing up around my rowdy cousins. It would have been a good opportunity to get into some scandalous situations, like fall in love with some Parisian damsel and get a little tipsy and get a stick and poke with her and write her some poetry. Then come back home and write about our whirlwind romance, immortalizing our love. 

This possible writer-fantasy universe of mine is just a fantasy. It is true that I am probably a lot more nervous and cynical than I would have been if things had been different in my life. Still, I like being a philosophy major at William Jewell College. And it is not as though I have completely given up the writer ideal. In many ways, I am the same person that writer-me is. I may be less bombastic and spontaneous, but I am still sentimental and hopelessly in love with love. And maybe someday, I will sit at a typewriter in my grandmother’s house and write some corny dialogue, just for fun. And maybe in another universe, some other me is putting down the quill and picking up some Kant, just for fun. 

It is 3 a.m. Dutifully, my phone replays “Questions In a World of Blue” by Julee Cruise for what seems like the millionth time. My headphones have long since broken, so Cruise’s soothing, yet haunting, voice now just sounds tinny. 

I think that everyone has gone through a sort of mental funk this past year. It’s probably inevitable, what with the backdrop of a pandemic and the bleak reality of fascism. I’d like to think that I’ve handled it better, but then I would be shoving the record of my horrendous lack of self-care under my bed. 

I would not say that I’ve had the typical life experiences. You could probably put me in a room with a psychiatrist and they would be able to get a couple of pages of interesting notes – something to pore over on a dull night, at the very least (and haven’t we had a surplus of dull nights during the pandemic?). But the crux of the matter is that I feel like I’ve lost the thread. 

What do I mean? Well, certainly the aforementioned pandemic-fascism backdrop has not helped, but I think I have found myself floundering in terms of the meaning of life. Specifically, my life. In general, most people would say that they want their lives to have meaning. In order for lives to have meaning, they have to be somewhat cohesive. Imagine that our lives are like stories. We don’t understand stories, or at least, we have trouble understanding stories when they seem to have no clear plotline. 

So when I say that I feel as though I have lost the thread, I mean that I feel as if the story arc of my life has disappeared – although, maybe it was never there to begin with. Instead, I am left with a jarring sense of disembodied memories and of voices with no clear speaker. It is all very Proustian, but instead of biting into a madeline and thinking of my mother fondly, I look out the window at the snow and am filled with the sense that my life has fallen apart. 

Obviously, one might imagine that this is a rather untenable condition. Something must be done to alleviate it – something meaningful must be found. Still, it was not evidently clear what I should do. How does one find a story arc in a 19 year-long, confused story? And, why should there be such clear parallelism between my life and a story – why should there be unifying themes whatsoever? Maybe things really were meaningless. 

Such were my thoughts as I wandered from my campus and, as Edgar Allen Poe wrote, “Back into my chamber turning, all my soul within me burning.” I should know better though than to hopelessly despair as if I had no philosophy professors who end up counseling me, even if rather indirectly. 

I am currently taking Philosophy of Science with Dr. Sperry. One of the essential issues we are tackling in the class is how to demarcate science and non-science. In other words, how can we distinguish science from other non-scientific fields of inquiry? What is science? 

One of the most compelling ways to speak of science is through a framework proposed by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. He described his “paradigmatic normal science” as the way of understanding science as a field of inquiry in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” one of the required readings for the class.

I will not go into excruciating detail about the arguments presented in the book, but I will touch upon the major conclusions because they unexpectedly led me to a potential resolution to my own personal crisis.

Arguably, we have this view of science as a field which progresses linearly and cumulatively. That is to say, the work of previous scientists can be “stacked” on top of each other, and their collective work is a tower of progress reaching further and further until finally, someday, reaching objective truth. And such a view is flawed. Science is neither so cumulative nor so linear in its progression. Instead, Kuhn proposes that most scientists work under the constraints of “normal science,” which is characterized by the fact that a community of scientists are committed to a theoretical framework: to a paradigm. 

In other words, a group of scientists doing research to progress a shared theoretical commitment (a paradigm), and not to make discoveries themselves, per se, is what constitutes scientific inquiry. The scientists work to make the nature of reality conform to a set of theoretical commitments. Normal science under a Newtonian paradigm, for example, would entail a group of scientists working to apply Newtonian principles to the natural world so that the application of these principles could be expanded. 

During scientific revolutions, one paradigm is discarded for another after the other systematically fails to work in terms of applicability and explainability of natural phenomena. The Newtonian paradigm, for example, was discarded for the Einsteinian paradigm – after a period of crisis in the scientific community – because the Newtonian paradigm could no longer be fruitfully expanded upon, elaborated and exploited. And because the Einsteinian paradigm promised greater fruitfulness, among other things. 

To sum it up: there is no “stacking” of scientists’ work. After there is a revolution, there is a major change in theoretical commitments, such that progress from one revolution to another is not linear progress whatsoever. In fact, progress made in the old paradigm – since it was made for the purposes of expanding the theoretical commitments of that paradigm – is no longer useful in a new paradigm with new theoretical commitments. There may be linear and cumulative progress under a paradigm when that paradigm is being elaborated as part of normal science, but when another revolution comes, any semblance of linearity and cumulative-ness gets washed away. 

Perhaps you can see where I am going here. In the same way that there is a tendency to cling to an erroneous view of science as a linear field of inquiry, I am trying to cling to my life as a linear story. I did, after all, ask myself why there should be parallelism between my life and a story. 

Have I not lived through various major crises? Haven’t we all in this past year alone? Why should I try to hold onto a conceptual framework that no longer explains the nature of the phenomena I experience? Shouldn’t I embrace a kind of Kuhnian paradigm shift?

Maybe my life need not be linear nor cumulative, and what I need is a new conceptual framework to begin with – a new way of embedding the symbols which I use to communicate who I am, a new way of understanding the nature of reality. And this new set of theoretical, practical and methodological life commitments need not be building on my past experiences. The measure of a good scientific paradigm is not whether it builds on other paradigms. It is whether or not it is better than other paradigms at explaining natural phenomena and predicting future occurrences. Maybe, the measure of a meaningful framework of life for me is something similar. 

When I came to William Jewell College, I had meticulously spelled out a four-year plan. The end result of this four-year plan was what I envisioned to be the culmination of the ideal me: I would have earned a bachelor’s degree in history and would be on track to going to some Ivy league institution to start a master’s program. 

I felt that this desire of mine to have a degree in history, which I had loved to study throughout my four years in high school, was an utterly fundamental desire. My whole being was filtered through this desire. I could not have been described without reference to my love of history. Thus, I was fervently convinced that I had settled into a fixed pattern of being, into a kind of irrevocable character. I was very much mistaken. 

My so-called irrevocable character was already crumbling with a few phone conversations with the senior tutor of Oxbridge, Dr. Kenneth Alpern. The summer before I committed to going to Jewell, I was discussing my ideas on the nature of trust and love. I did not understand the kind of analysis I was doing in my conversations, but I found that I was growing increasingly fascinated with conceptual analysis. In other words, without knowing it, I was discovering that what I was truly passionate about was philosophy, not history. 

Throughout the entirety of my high school career, I had often been frustrated at the fact that history would not delve into the minds of the people we studied. I thought that to engage with the individual – with the structure of that individual, taking into consideration their motivations, their desires, their feelings – history could potentially arrive at some kind of account on the nature of human beings. 

I described the kind of history I wanted to study as a deeply individualistic account of history, with the agent as the source of historical change, but nonetheless the agent was embedded in a kind of historically determined context. Such an account was necessarily confused and conflicting – I was torn by a desire to analyze a kind of underlying structure I perceived in historical events and in people, but I had no words to describe what I really wanted to study. 

When I communicated my conception of the kind of history I wanted to study, people suggested that I study psychology instead. I would grow irate. There was something in the very nature of the kind of human experience, historical and not historical, which was important. My conversations with Alpern that summer further convinced me that he implicitly understood the kinds of inquiry I wanted to undertake. When he suggested that I take an ethics course, I initially felt a sense of confusion. Had I not told him that I wanted to study history? Why did he insist on my taking ethics, of all things? I hardly knew what the course entailed. Nevertheless, I had come to trust Alpern, for I perceived him as the sort of individual who knew what was what. So, I agreed to take ethics. 

The next couple of weeks saw me in the thick of philosophical analysis. I woke up in the mornings to discuss coherentism, noncognitivism, and deontology in ethics. I would then go to my responsible self class, and my professor was Dr. Elizabeth Sperry, the department chair for philosophy. I would go to Oxbridge introductory seminar and pit Plato and Mill together. I was ecstatic. I knew that in all my conversations in all of these classes, I was delving into what it was that made life worth living, what made life good. Things made sense now – before, I had been trying to dig underneath historical concepts without having any understanding of what it was I was digging for. Here it was! What I wanted more than anything was to study philosophy, not history. 

But I felt enormously guilty as soon as I began to realize that my love of history was a rather misplaced love. In high school, I was the history student. I had made a commitment, through my words, through my actions, through my feelings, to my history professors to the field of history. If I gave up what I once would have called my undying love for history, would I be giving up who I was? Would I lose my essence? 

Eventually, my love of philosophy trumped my feelings of inconsistency and identity-confusion. After all, wasn’t I in college? I was supposed to change, and I was not obligated to be a particular way. Nobody could be upset that I was choosing what I really wanted. In fact, if I did not change my major to philosophy, I would be making myself miserable, and what for? Because I was moved by the past merely because I had once been habituated in such a way, and thought that somehow justified a kind of needless suffering? Just because I was becoming an essentially different person, did not mean that I was being somehow less true to myself or that I was going down the wrong path. If anything, my self is in a constant state of reinvention – as I interact with other people and other disciplines, I come to conceive of myself differently, and I reconstruct who I am successively. 

In switching my major to History of Ideas, I was moving away from adhering to the past, to custom, merely for custom’s sake. Instead, I was beginning to critically reflect on the kinds of things which I had once valued, and asking myself whether or not I thought that these were the kinds of things which I wanted to value. I was redefining what exactly a good life would look like for me and the ways in which I might reorient my psychic dispositions and my circumstances such that I could achieve my new ideal. In my conscientious reflection, I was becoming more me. That ended my predicament. 

What I mean to communicate to you, dear reader, is that you are bound to change in college. As I write now, I am still in the process of changing. And that is perfectly okay. Human beings are not these rigid things that refuse to respond to change. Rather, we are dynamic. It is okay to think that you will be one way, and then the next moment feel as though you are something different. So long as you are engaging in critical, but constructive, self-reflection that seeks to reach a better understanding of the self and the good life for the self, then you are doing a great job. You are meant to change. It is not a crime. You do not have to feel guilty for changing majors, for breaking up with a romantic partner or for choosing different friends. College is a time of transition – don’t make the transition harder than it needs to be by torturing yourself unnecessarily.