Moving beyond meaninglessness and despair

Charlotte Willenbring/The Miscellany News. Sitting on a bench in Central Park, I start thinking about what brought me here: not my physical self, not the causal chain of events—getting accepted to a university, acquiring a visa and getting on an unimaginably long jet lag-inducing flight—but something inexplicable that only comes to me in flashes, like broken bits of a dream I cannot remember. This feeling of estrangement can arise from a loss of the familiar voices, faces and physical world in which one had figured out a stable sense of existence. For most of us, moving away from home and adjusting to new social and linguistic environments, balancing our academic needs and responsibilities while trying to create and maintain new interpersonal relationships, can often lead to a sense of helplessness and disorientation. We are wired to try to make sense of our place in this world, to give our choices meaning and to fit them into their place in the bigger picture.

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