Ode to Stanford

2025

When I first arrived at Stanford, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I was thoroughly infatuated. Finally thousands of miles away from the toxic home that suffocated my spirit and demolished my self-worth, a place that promised frigid winters and demanded rigid conformity, I was enthralled by the palm tree paradise that teemed with so much possibility and radiant sun. 

But soon the sun set on my quixotic daydream. I learned that the esteemed university is no utopia, but a regressive institution enamored with the capitalist promise of uninhibited progress through technological innovation and steeped in a culture of individualistic productivity, entrepreneurship, and achievement. While touting a veneer of progressivism, it enacts brutal repression upon any activism that jeopardizes its political and financial interests.

Injustice is baked into the very sandstone blocks that construct the glamorous Spanish colonial architecture synonymous with Stanford University's aesthetic facade. From its inception, its history has been marred by deep complicity with eugenics, neoliberalism, and the military-industrial complex. I guess what can you expect from an institution founded by a man who explicitly called for the genocide of Indigenous peoples and exploited thousands of Chinese laborers to build his industrial empire? 

But despite the cloud of cynicism that grew denser with each passing year, luminous gratitude penetrated through the disillusionment. I’m grateful to the people who loved me unwaveringly and shaped me indelibly. I’m grateful to the teachers who showed me new ways to see and be in the world. I’m grateful to the clusters of California poppies bursting through the desiccated grass, adorned with petals so jarringly vibrant they almost hurt your eyes. I’m grateful to the strangers rushing to my aid after my many bike falls; to Joan, Mae, Rocío, and all the custodial and food service staff who greeted each day with tenacious smiles; to the lake basin drained of its water, whose well-trodden perimeter nourished so many friendships.

The past four years were terrible and incredible, beyond difficult and beyond magical. I sank into the deepest abyss of desolation and ascended to the zenith of bliss. 

I contended with mental illness, forced to confront the specters whose haunting I couldn’t outrun. I came to know physical illness, forced to relearn how to navigate the world in a disabled body, forced to confront the fact that my horizon of possibility is not boundless, but constrained by the very real finitude of the human vessel. To live with chronic illness is to tick out of rhythm like a broken clock, so out of sync with all who surround you. It’s to look out at the vast and scintillating world from within a confining glass enclosure, to catch only a tantalizing whiff of a sumptuous meal far in the distance. But I found my people – people who showed up for me, who carved out time despite its scarcity, who held me through the chaos, who wished for my flourishing as ardently as their own. 

And I learned so much – within and beyond the classroom. I learned about my identity and my place in the world, about the contours of my body and mind, about slowly relinquishing ambition and self-hatred, about vocalizing my needs to both myself and others, about reciprocity and interdependence and forging bridges across difference, about how to give and accept love.

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A particular anecdote from a few years ago has continued to echo in the hallways of my mind. I find myself returning to if often, and it buoys me.

One afternoon in sophomore year, the year shrouded in an inky black depression, I was lying in bed. Blanketed by leaden despair, deafened by the roaring emptiness expanding against my ribcage, tempted by the prospect of my own nonexistence. Tears slid down the slopes of my cheeks, puddling in the hollows of my ears. And then I heard something magical that transformed my anguish into mirth.

Outside my window, someone started blasting that song that goes:

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My neck, my back
Lick my pussy and my crack

My chest hurt from the wracking sobs now joined by heaving laughter.

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I took it as a reminder from the universe that yes, life is hard – it’s brutal and painful and terrifying – but that shit is also fucking silly. Two things can be true at once.

And so we go on.

Stanford Cactus Garden, acrylic and paint marker on wood panel, 12" x 9", 2021