Ego

I love it here. I really do. I’d better, considering how much I recently blew ordering a class ring, but I digress.

Rather than giving a sentimental (and incomplete) list of all the things here I love, I’m more concerned with one of the things that I don’t: Managing your ego at Duke is no small task. The fact that I’m obsessed enough with my own to write about it is a case study in just how hard this place makes it.

If it were easy, we wouldn’t have the infamously recurring theme of “effortless perfection” on campus. There are people around you, many of them, who the Duke culture is absolutely eating alive. You may know they’re struggling, but odds are you don’t.

Take a look around you. There’s an absolutely ludicrous amount of talent here. I’m reminded of a shirt by SnorgTees that reads “I urinate excellence” across the front, except in less polite terms. Although I am sure most wouldn’t ever say it, the phrase describes pretty much everyone at Duke. It also explains the state of male bathrooms in my dorm most weekends. They are spreading excellence, you see.

There is the guy who plays piano, orates magnificently, understands quantum physics and can pick his nose with his little toe while doing a handstand. There is the girl who dances, sings beautifully, fills a room with laughter and has no clue how pretty she is. Then there’s you.

You are not in the same league as these people. They seem capable of doing anything well and barely even working at it. You’re struggling just to do merely what’s asked of you. Putting yourself up against that level of giftedness is not just humbling, it is outright painful. You want to hate them for it, but you can’t because you know they don’t want to hurt you. They are just better than you.

It is easy to get down on yourself when you recognize this. It’s easy to get down on yourself when you can’t keep up in a class. It’s easy to get down on yourself when it seems like you don’t have as many friends as you should (and Facebook affirms it). It’s easy to get down on yourself when your initial efforts to line up an internship fail spectacularly because your resumé reads, “Hi, I’ve done all this random crap that makes me exactly 36 percent qualified for nothing because I have no idea where I’m going with my life. Hire me!”

It’s even easier when you say it all at once. Depressing as all that may be, though, it’s still only one side of the coin.

A couple weeks ago I passed through a hallway where a couple guys were playing a game they called “Nutball.” It was aptly named, describing the elegant and sophisticated sport of throwing tennis balls at one another’s genitalia. America, I give you your future leaders. I make no guarantees about their prospects for producing the next generation.

I suddenly feel far less inferior. It’s comforting. That’s just the beginning, though. What goes on around you can bring your ego to new and lofty heights, perhaps in part because it is happening in the context of our Gothic Talentland.

It’s a good feeling when you get a perfect score on that test with an average in the low 70s. It’s wonderful when people compliment your writing (though a scathing indictment of their taste, really). It’s flattering when you catch her staring at you for the umpteenth time and she blushes. When you find out you’re someone’s hero—especially when that someone is your own hero—you are on top of the world.

But this doesn’t solve the problem; you are still letting your worth be dictated by factors in hands other than your own. Arguably, it’s worse because now you have farther to fall. Oh, and fall you will. Duke will always find ways to humble you.

I wish I could say that I rely on my own internalized definition of excellence, but I don’t. I try to, but it is too tempting to rely instead on external validation, especially during the times when it comes readily. Sometimes I don’t mind being called arrogant because it means I fooled someone into thinking I’ve got it figured out. Often the people I’m trying to fool are those closest to me.

If I can take any solace, though, it is in knowing that I am hardly alone in letting Duke and my peers define what success is. I hear it going on every day.

“Otherwise I’ll drown in the sea of resume builders.”

“Look at this picture; am I prettier than she is?”

“But you’re so much smarter than me!”

“Is everyone going out tonight?”

Perfection indeed.

Jeremy Walch is a Pratt junior. This is his final column of the semester.