For me, like many other seniors, this past summer came and went at an eerie pace. In the course of its brisk months, I trained for my last-ever tennis season, shaved my college list down to a reasonable number of schools and arrived at the formidable realization that I had only until fall before I would become a legal adult.
But the most distinct memory of all was not any of these things, but one entirely self-inflicted plan I devised, which involved putting even more on my plate. Perhaps initially as an enduring and elaborate distraction from everything else, in place of the whole list of books I’m used to sifting through within a summer, I chose to zero in on one. It was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s final and longest work, “The Brothers Karamazov”–840 pages and brimming with translator’s footnotes, Russian names with three or more diminutives and entire chapters with hardly an indent.
While I’d read more than my fair share of thick classics in the past, even Dostoyevsky’s other works, this one was by far the most difficult to find my way through, not because it was dry (quite the opposite, in fact), but because it made my head heavy sometimes, simply from all the issues and characters it presented that felt like wide symbols of universal nature and intimate, personal jabs in the same sentence.
No book had ever quite overwhelmed me to that degree before. But even when I felt a drought of stamina to continue and I could hardly pick it up for more than a few minutes at a time, the book stayed with me in my backpack through each one of my college tours and to each trip to the cafe where I’d churn out another draft or rewrite of my personal essays.
My summer was filled with these things, but more prevalently, it was filled with decisions that were every bit as overwhelming as “The Brothers Karamazov” and more. But I was determined not to let other voices—whether it be my peers, my family, or my overflowing inbox of college emails—blur my conception of what I wanted for myself. As Dostoyevsky said: “To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” But sometimes, I’d lose sight of my own way when it grew too clouded by my own second-guessing.
It took reading something that punctured incredible depths into human struggle and psyche for me to reflect on why I felt so overloaded myself. All along, I’d never been a stranger to extreme patterns of thinking. There were points when I believed that if I left a single thing on the table when it came to crafting my list of schools and finalizing my essays, I’d be betraying both myself and everyone who’d supported me.
I remembered how, when I was younger, I sought out such a fantastical morality and clearness of conscience, especially when it came to making choices, that it often manifested in paralyzing intrusive thoughts that convinced me I was depraved and bound for Hell– a spiritual concept I wasn’t even sure I believed in. The only way I could temporarily alleviate the stress was through the idea of confession: recounting everything supposedly corrupt I’d thought and done to those in my family, who always reassured me there was nothing to forgive.
As I’ve grown up and sought help, I’ve learned to better recognize and dismiss these thoughts for what they are, but such nagging patterns still linger in my mind and threaten to return at crucial times like these. But what I found was that, in “The Brothers Karamazov,” many of the characters seemed to have their own intrusive thoughts as they each questioned and struggled with their own definition of morality, conscience and spirituality.
By the time I finished, I realized it was also a very open-ended book. It offered me no more consolation nor formulaic solution to my own continuous turmoil than it offered most of its own characters. Instead, those very characters and their conscience battles gave me something I needed infinitely more: a warm, metaphorical hand of validation on my shoulder and a voice that seemed to whisper, “Don’t worry; you’re very human. Good luck out there.”
