News travels quickly, but gossip travels even faster. Especially if you’re traveling with a few hundred people.
As I tossed my high school graduation cap into the air, my nostalgia for the countless hours I spent with my friends was overcome by the relief of being able to retreat into a comfortable space of no-oneness. I had only 120 classmates and everyone knew everyone. Thankfully, people didn’t talk about me as much as others, but we probably all knew details about each other’s lives that we shouldn’t.
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One of the reasons I wanted to attend a large university like USC was because I expected anonymity in a class size of 3,420 students. In other words, I wanted to be someone to most people, and someone only to the people who really mattered to me.
But USC’s undergraduate Indian student community only has about 320 people, so most students know each other, or at least know each other.
There are countless good things about this. You no longer have to eat alone in the cafeteria because you might run into a familiar face. There are so many people to celebrate festivals with, and so many friends you can count on to brighten your day when you’re feeling homesick. I am happy to be part of the Indian community. Because even though I’m nearly 8,000 miles from home, I’m surrounded by people just like me (I’m not kidding, I’m sitting under a Tommy Trojan statue and counting). 1 in 5 people passing by were South Asian).
However, I often think that these positive points are outweighed by the major drawback of being a mini-high school. Once again, a culture of harmful gossip is blatantly evident. I haven’t even talked to some of them, but I know which classes they flunked, which nightclubs they got drunk at, and which friendships went up in flames.
It’s human nature to enjoy hearing interesting details about other people’s lives, especially when there’s a face to the name and it’s not a stranger. But gossip is like quicksand. You will slowly be sucked in and before you know it, it will be difficult to get out. What’s more, you spend so much time gossiping about other people that you start to suspect that they’re also talking about you.
You might call me paranoid, but I sometimes think twice before doing what I want to do, and sometimes I act in certain ways because I’m afraid of how I’ll be judged by about 100 other students. But I don’t want to reconsider my actions, especially at a university where “no one cares”. Maybe 17-year-old me can be justified in acting this way — after all, she’s on the brink of adulthood making life-altering decisions, and she doesn’t know any better. I was — but I’ll never be able to justify the 21-year-old me — the old me graduated college with the same fear.
So I decided to try to free myself from this fear by freeing others from my judgment (drumroll please). I want to be in an environment where I can do whatever I want without worrying about gossipmongers. But to get there, I need to take the first step and allow those around me to do the same. In other words, live and let live.
That’s not to say my curiosity will never get the better of me. But I’d like to think that most of the time, my desire to eliminate this toxicity wins out. And yes, maybe I’m ready to forget about this, but not everyone is. Some may choose to stay in high school longer because they may enjoy the culture or may not be influenced by other people’s opinions. And that’s their choice. But as someone who second-guesses myself because of gossip, I’m going to take myself out of the equation. I’m ready to graduate high school, in high school.
Edhita Singhal, a second-year university student from India, writes about her experiences as an international student in her biweekly Tuesday column, “Foreign Footsteps.”
