I know too much about the lives of many of my fellow students.
News travels fast, but gossip travels even faster, especially when it’s just a few hundred people.
As I tossed my school cap into the air, my nostalgia for the countless hours I had spent with my friends was undermined by the relief of being able to retire and enjoy the comfort of being a nobody. With only 120 students in my cohort, we all knew everybody. Although, thankfully, other people didn’t talk about me as much as everyone else, we probably all knew important aspects of each other’s lives that we shouldn’t have known.
One of the reasons I wanted to attend a big university like USC was because I expected anonymity in a group of 3,420 students: I wanted to be nobody to most people and someone only to those who mattered.
But since there are only about 320 of us in the network of Indian foreign university students at USC, most academics know others, or at least know others.
This has countless positives: you never want to eat alone in a dining room because you’re bound to bump into a familiar face; You have tons of other people you can celebrate festivals with, and you have plenty of friends to depend on to brighten your day when you’re feeling homesick. I’m satisfied to be a component of the Indian network because, although I’m not almost 8,700 miles from home, I’m surrounded by other people who look like me (I’m not kidding, I sat under the Tommy Trojan statue and counted that one in five people passing by were from South Asia).
However, I wonder if those positives are outweighed by the one colossal drawback: it’s a top-notch school. The culture of poisonous gossip is notoriously vital here too. I’ve never talked to some people, but I know which courses they fail. , in which nightclub they passed out and what friendship burned.
It’s human nature to love hearing the juicy highlights of other people’s lives, especially when you can put a face to the call and it’s not a random stranger. But gossip is like quicksand; It slowly sucks you in, and before you know it, it’s hard to escape. Plus, you spend so much time gossiping about others that you start to wonder if they’re talking about you, too.
Call me paranoid, but I think twice about doing anything I should do or act in a safe way for fear of being judged by hundreds of other students. But I don’t need to question my actions, especially at school where “no one” can perhaps justify a 17-year-old girl acting that way; after all, she was about to become an adult and make decisions that would change her life and she didn’t know anything else, but she could never justify Behavior at the young age of 21.
So, I have decided (drumroll, please) that I am going to free myself of this fear by freeing others from my judgment. I would love to be in an environment where I could do as I please without worrying about the gossipmongers. But to get there, I need to take the first step and allow others around me to do the same — live and let live.
I’m not saying that my interest will never get the better of me, but I’d like to think that my preference for ending this toxicity will triumph in most cases. And yes, I’d possibly be willing to put that behind me. However, not everyone is. Some other people might stay longer in high school because they like the culture or because they are immune to the opinions of others. And that’s your choice. But, as someone who questions me because of gossip, I’m going to get out of the equation. I’m in a position to give up the best school, the best school.
Edhita Singhal is an Indian sophomore who writes about her experiences as a foreign student in her “Foreign Footprints” column, which appears every Tuesday.
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