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{shortcode-24643cedbe14221289878261864001a8ceef067a}ver winter break, I cried for four and a half hours straight in three different places: lying on my childhood bed, sitting at the kitchen table, sprawled out on a sinking sofa. Apart from my tears, there was one constant companion — my copy of Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, “When Breath Becomes Air.”
Paul, a Stanford neurosurgeon received a terminal Stage IV lung cancer diagnosis in his last year of residency — right before all of his work for the past decade was meant to pay off. In his memoir, Paul documents his attempt to grapple with big, existential questions: What does it mean to live a meaningful life? What makes life worth living in the face of death? How can one approach death with grace?
Crying over art isn’t new to me. I’ve always been the kind of person who weeps at books, films, even old photographs — “as if they were real, as if your tears do anything,” my grandmother used to chide whenever she saw my face, puffy and raw from tears.
But crying from the very first page to the very last was new. My throat began to tighten from the foreword — “I came to know [Paul] most intimately when he’d ceased to be” — and still I turned the page, dampening the corners with each touch. Even more surprising: This was a reread. And I don’t reread. Ever.
Which is why this felt different. My emotional response wasn’t just strong — it was disorienting. I cried like it was private. I cried in the kind of way that makes you believe that maybe tears are a kind of comprehension. I cried like the memoir’s events personally happened to me, like my tears were a form of understanding.
In a way the events did. Like Paul, I’ve always been interested in questions about meaning. Like Paul, I’ve turned to literature to answer these questions — his memoir, T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” Sally Rooney’s “Intermezzo.” Unlike Paul, I haven’t turned to clinical medicine to “forge relationships with the suffering,” to investigate firsthand what gives the ill the courage to live, to press closely against life and death in my everyday work. Nor have I been able, like he did, to find a career that is more than a job, but a calling. To find my purpose.
I want to write something — not to arrive at clarity, but to practice reaching for it. To trace the distance between where I am and where I think I could be. To say: I don’t know what I’m meant to do, but I want it to matter.
***
At Harvard — just to get into Harvard — you learn to optimize early. You map out crisp timelines, racing to choose a career ten years in advance. There are a few risk-free, respectable, revenue-generating paths: finance, consulting, medicine, law. You’re told to decide quickly — recruiting starts early, resumes need building, doors won't stay open forever.
There’s a unique, almost musical, rhythm to club applications your freshman fall: info session, coffee chat, interview, interview, and if you’re lucky, new member orientation. Like many others, I joined a consulting club and sat on the finance board for others. I didn’t know what I was interested in, but I figured that if over a third of each graduating class ended up in consulting or finance, there had to be something special there. I thought I was finding security, that I was doing everything “right.”And yet I felt incredibly empty.
Lying in my double, facing the wall as my roommate did homework two feet away. Looking out of the window as the T crossed the Longfellow Bridge. In a second floor Lamont cubicle at 2am. In moments of transit, relaxation, quiet, whenever I had a second to pause and reflect, I would feel my eyes water as a sense of hollowness washed over me. The obvious solution was to keep moving, to pack my schedule tighter, to push aside any inconvenient emotions.
I took my History and Literature lecturer out to the First-Year Faculty Dinner in November. In his course, we’d read portraits of work in literature, examined primary documents on labor systems ranging from slavery to silver mining, and asked ourselves how contemporary work could be an act of beauty and self-definition. If there was anyone who could teach me more about how to work wisely and with purpose, I figured it had to be him.
Later, as we sat across from each other in Annenberg — fake candles illuminating our plates of roast chicken, charcuterie, and French onion soup — he asked me about my campus commitments. After describing them, I admitted that I was struggling to find meaning in the work I was doing.
He said, “You have your whole life to figure out what you want to do. There’s no rush. The answers will change as you change.” Then he added, “But if you continue doing the work you already don’t like, there will be a day when you wake up and dread everything you have to do. Your goal is to delay that day for as long as possible.”
I realized I had already started waking up like that.
And that’s why I was crying. Not because I hadn’t done enough — but because nothing I’d done felt like it mattered. There was nothing I could speak about with the same devotion Paul had for neurosurgery, nothing I could call a calling.
***
When I first read “When Breath Becomes Air” at age 10, I copied down a line: “You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving."
There was an aura of mystery to it. Back then, I didn’t know what an asymptote was, so I Googled it. The idea of striving without arrival, of chasing something just out of reach haunted me.
Since coming back from winter break, I’ve tried to explore fields that feel more meaningful — global health, green tech, journalism. I joined a health policy study group at the IOP. Started working on a healthcare consulting case. Traveled to New York for the All Ivy environmental career fair. But even as I moved toward meaning, I found myself exhausted by the effort of wanting meaning at all.
On rereading Paul’s memoir, that same quote caught me again. This time, it felt like both exposure and recognition. Maybe I hadn’t been pursuing something I loved — just something that looked like progress. Something that climbed cleanly towards a grounded value.
Sometimes, the search for purpose feels like another career in disguise. Another ambition. Another branding exercise in sincerity. There have still been days where I wake up and dread the homework, the club meetings, the endless tasks filling up my calendar. Days when I don’t feel excited by the “good” I could be doing. I’m tired of turning myself into a statement of intent.
Still, something in me wants to keep trying.
Tomorrow, I’m making a trip to Trader Joe’s to taste-test tinned fish with a friend. Next week, I’ll start working on a project on agrivoltaic and solar panel construction. This summer, I’m studying aesthetics and morality in Italy for eight weeks. I’m learning to prioritize what I want to do — who I am — in this moment, even if it doesn’t map neatly onto a career plan.
I think of Paul. Of the way he wrote in the face of vanishing time. Of how his prose didn’t reach for transcendence but met the ordinary with reverence. Of his decision in college to choose a position as a summer camp counselor over a more prestigious research assistantship because he wanted to live first, not just observe. He quotes a friend’s short story inspired by that summer:
“I want the counselors to build a pyre … and let my ashes drop and mingle with the sand. Lose my bones amongst the driftwood, my teeth amongst the sand … There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
