College Essay

As a current junior in high school, my brother is writing practice college essays.  And since I’ve forgotten how much fun some of these prompts are, I decided to answer one myself.

A community can be defined by its shape, by who finds a seat there, by what transpires there, by what is inspired there. Tell us about your table.

-2010 college application, University of Chicago

My life has been about finding tables to sit at, people to eat with, something to define me. There is something unique about being an immigrant in the way I am an immigrant. First generation, because I was born in Karachi, Pakistan. Second generation because I moved to Chicago, Illinois at the age of three, raised as an English-speaking Pakistani-American. Third generation because I am part of a community of Pakistani-Americans who have lived in Chicago, Illinois since 1964. I feel each generation’s burden, each struggle to assimilate further and further into blended cream-colored America.

High school often felt like belonging to no one besides my family. The Arains defined my every fiber, my thoughts revolved around them. I rejoiced in the fact that I belonged to something outside of high school, the ultimate downfall of so many self-esteems. But I was just as low as any of them. I brushed aside high school because I knew if I cared about it, the outcome would have been the same. I gave up – quit before high school could hurt me. My brown skin kept me away from the center of goings on, my strange introverted extraversion kept me from making any real friends besides my cousin. I spent weekends pretending I was too cool for any of them.

I took the opposite attitude in college. This was where I would belong, I decided, because if it wasn’t, then I would fail at belonging to things afterwards. I spent my time in my dorm hall freshman year, with my Munhoes. It was tight-knit in a way that I had not known before. It was like going to Hogwarts, being around your peers all day and all night, our optimism for the future was like our magic. Everything lay ahead of us, we had all left high school behind like throwing out trash. Anyone who didn’t do so wasn’t part of us.

And yet, the nagging feeling that I should reject this, too. They were not so easy to cast aside as high school – they were real to me in a way my peers in high school were not. But they drank things at the table that I did not. As an American Muslim, my ties to my table at home kept pulling me away. I started to spend weekends at home. My cousin started spending whole weeks away from them. We retreated to the suburbs again, our comfort zone.

I still feel guilty about it all in hindsight. Don’t we all feel guilty for the people we didn’t treat properly?

My table now is emptier than ever. I soon retreated away from everyone, even my family. This Fellowship took me away from them all, from the only city and place that I love. I love it not because it is beautiful, though it is. I love it because it holds all my guilt from everyone’s failed expectations of me. I did not become who they thought I was going to be.

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