I used to have an unhealthy obsession with LinkedIn – not my own profile, but others’. I scrolled through the multiple employment and extracurricular highlights that friends, acquaintances, and even people whose names I came across on random Penn-related websites offered to the Internet. The people I passed on Locust knew to strategically arrange their accomplishments, so readily visible that they became convenient benchmarks I could use to measure my own worth. Their skills always looked more marketable than mine, their headshots more professional, their internships more likely to lead to future, stable jobs. These thumb-nail snapshots of my classmates seemed way more capable of navigating adulthood. How could I identify myself and my value, in relation to the expectations they unknowingly set?
Writing this makes me sound like a jaded child. I should, and I do, indeed, feel fortunate to be here at Penn, to enjoy all the resources it has to offer, and even to have stuff to display on LinkedIn. But why did this sense of deficit keep coming back and generate so much anxiety about my self-esteem? Maybe given such privileges and opportunities, I’d feel ashamed to squander my blessings and not constantly exert myself. Or that I instinctively needed some tangible, yet unattainable goal to assign some sort of meaning to my endeavors. Whatever the reason, I translated constructed external values, imposed identifiers – grades, club commitment, parties, the number of “connections” I’d established – into internal self-worth.
This is Penn: competitiveness and an outward-looking perspective propel us forward. We’re trapped in the impasse between being simultaneously sufficient and insufficient. We don’t see the failures and missteps of the people around us– they’re stifled by the resonance of achievements that constantly rings across campus and, this summer, on our laptops as LinkedIn becomes a perpetually open tab. There are always the personal struggles that we keep strictly to ourselves, and realizing that the experience is almost universal is one of the first steps towards constructive self-evaluation– no computer required.
What I have come to acknowledge is that external values are cold, vain and disturbingly neat gauges. But our sense of self-worth is palpably human and plagued by uncertainty. So is college, really. And this is okay. I think internal value is supposed to be somewhat messy and uncomfortable. We’re here to learn, after all. We can obsess over external values, but it’s possible to rack up awards and LinkedIn updates without finding a sense of purpose.
We need to truly examine our strengths and weaknesses, what we treasure– to appreciate our own story. One bad day, one fewer profile update, does not diminish our journeys. Not after everything.
