After living through NSO and the first two weeks of freshman year, I can firmly say that I’ve mastered the art of small talk.

You start by asking names. This is always the most precarious part of the conversation for me, because if they don’t pronounce my name correctly during our conversation, they never will, and I will inevitably be too passive to correct them in the future. Then, you move on to places. Ask where they used to live, where they live on campus now. And, when all else fails, talk about how nice the weather is — even if the weather isn’t particularly nice that day. By now, I could probably sustain at least 10 minutes of conversation with anyone in my sleep.

But after all the countless introductions I’ve had to make in the past couple of weeks, I’ve come to realize that there is something awfully oppressive about small talk. It suggests that in the span of 10, maybe 15 minutes, you can understand someone’s many contours. That with a few wellplaced questions, you can know someone, and be known back. And, at least for me, this makes the act of small talk never-endingly terrifying. Because suddenly, every question I ask and every answer I give carries incredible weight. These past few weeks, as I introduced and reintroduced myself, I could feel my words defining who I was.

At least once a day, someone will ask me what I’m thinking about majoring in. Economics, I’ll say, and suddenly, miraculously, to that person, I am an economics major. I am bound by all the things being an economics major entails. What are you interested in? Someone asks me. I like writing, I’ll respond, and now, to them, I am A Writer, and I have to subscribe to all the things that come with that.

Even coming up with a name for this column threw me into a multi-day turmoil. What kinds of things is a person like me supposed to be writing about in a column? And by extension — what does that say about the kind of person I am?

With every small-talk answer I give, every column I name, I can feel myself becoming tethered to more things. The outline of who I am — and who, I guess, I will have to keep on being — slowly sharpens. And sometimes, I think that this should probably make me happy. For the past three weeks, I’ve been told endlessly that Stanford is the place where you will suddenly discover some deep-down hidden version of yourself you were always meant to find. But instead, I find myself scrambling for escape from all the definitions being piled onto me.

Because: What if I don’t want to be the person I say I am? With every seemingly trivial small-talk conversation I have, I am more and more afraid of talking myself into becoming a person that I will not recognize. As I struggle over my economics problem sets (and they are a struggle), I wonder: Do I really want to major in economics? Do I want to do this for the next four years? Even trying to write this column, I agonize: Am I even a good enough writer to be doing this?

But as freshman year slowly loses its glimmering novelty and the amount of small talk I am forced to do begins to taper down, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that who I am does not have to be tied to my small talk answers. Perhaps college isn’t so much about suddenly being a different, newer person as much as it is about the process of becoming. Ceaselessly and relentlessly changing. Constantly struggling, growing and simply being. Not being afraid of defining yourself, but also not being afraid of changing your definition from day to day — or hour to hour. This idea is not as clean and simple as the answers I give during my short small talk conversations. But it is much more real.

Contact Adesuwa Agbonile at [email protected].