Dear Lost Youth, Being Lost Is a Gift
Nadine Fahmy
Managing English Editor
It was a shot in the dark.
Becoming part of The Caravan, becoming an editor for two years and then a managing English editor for an entire year – all of it was based on a chance encounter with a good friend who managed to persuade me to do this.
And from that moment on, doors were opened to me – the doors of The Caravan newsroom and the doors into the world of journalism – which I had never imagined would welcome me so wholeheartedly.
Three years of learning, teaching, working, making friends and memories, all because of one chance encounter, and one spontaneous decision made at the spur of a moment.
Before I came to AUC, I imagined college life to be quite different – I imagined it to be structured, organized, divided into different little boxes which everyone fits into and which shape our lives.
It took me less than a year to realize that it was the exact opposite of what I had imagined.
College is about chance, impulse, good days and bad days, overlaps and muddledness, not knowing who we are or what we want to become, not knowing where we fit in or if we fit in.
Rather than blocks into which we were assigned, whether that is the world of engineering, or the Humanities, or Business, I found that a part of me lived in each of those very different places – they all helped me discover that I am much more than my major or my declaration, or my GPA.
Much like in life, where people tend to love plans and structure, labels and boxes, and try to force us into them, we broke through them, showing everyone and ourselves that we can be whatever we wanted to be, and that it could all happen with one small decision, one brief encounter, and one change of heart.
Youth in this day and age are thought to be in a crisis, with articles and books published about the dangers of social media and the “zombies” that are the millennials.
They tell us to stop being glued to our phones, that we need to become more involved, more active, more passionate.
But they don’t know the passion that bursts through every word we write on those phones of ours, the colors which saturate all of the pictures we take, and the fire of activism of which the first flicker starts and ends on our phones and through our chat groups and in our minds.
They don’t know that we are more alive than ever.
And that’s because we are doing things, meeting people that we never could have without the connections and media we now have.
And the fact that there are so many things happening at the same time can be damaging, exhausting – it can make us feel lost and like there is no straight path.
But that is because there has never been a straight path. There have never even been any paths – because we create them, when we walk through the unexpected and struggle through the surprises.
Our footsteps, they carve our paths for us.
We make our paths ourselves, and we can walk behind others who have made their own, but there will always be a choice. One of many.
Doesn’t that make losing ourselves a gift?
Doesn’t that allow us to do whatever, be whoever we want?
In college there are boxes and labels and academic paths and career paths.
But we managed to break through all of them and find the essence of life – the fact that there is no path at all, that we can find something or someone at the most random moment of any mundane day and have our entire lives turn out radically different.
It’s what has happened to me not just once, but more times than I can count. I meet someone and my life takes a turn and nothing is as it used to be.
But that’s what got me here, a place where I made friends I will never forget and where I created things I am proud of.
And even though I still feel lost, and might always remain that way, I know that I will continue to find beautiful things and people like those I found here.
