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Staff Editorial

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Rohith Nandagiri

In my six months of writing this column, I have been e-mailed by many people, some of them young, some old, some eccentric and some boring. However, I had never met a person who spoke so freely with me in hopes that I would publish his story. 

I have now. His name, for purposes of this column, is Paul.

Paul is a senior at UH and is majoring in psychology. He has gone through a lot of troubling times in his life, but most of them were created internally. Most of them were problems that he walked into. Most of them were problems he could have avoided.

Paul confesses to being a liar. He used to lie all the time. He lied to get what he wanted from his parents. He lied to make himself look better with other people.

He even lied to people he cared about and had to keep up a lie for almost two years when he was dating a girl he hoped he would marry someday. Paul told her he was making better grades than he actually was because he wanted her to think of him as successful. Paul told her he got job offers when he really did not. He wanted this girl, whom he held so dear, to tell him how smart he was. He wanted that false sense of happiness, the euphoria that comes when everyone thinks you are successful.

Paul related to me a lot about his life. He told me that when he was younger, he stole books from the book fair. He stole small amounts of money from adults. He lied to hide his poor grades. Nevertheless, everyone around him thought he was a model child and his parents thought the same thing.

He had lost many people he was close to due to death and departure. He was empty inside.

Even people he had considered his close friends would be given the same treatment. He did not study well. He skipped class. He would waste his time and try to make money any way he could. However, he never did drugs or smoked because he was worried people would look down on him.

Don't misunderstand me, what he did was wrong. I am not trying to glamorize what he did. After I met with him, I spoke to a friend who is a psychiatrist and she explained that he suffered from a lot of insecurity and self doubt; it manifested itself in him as he was trying to be someone else. 

He was almost happy with his artificial life. But all the while, he was unhappy inside. He was never really happy. He tried to find solace and happiness in trivial things. He was never able to relax and he was moody if everything wasn't just right.

Paul could never let people get too close to him for fear they would find out. He didn't have a lot of friends. He was just going around in circles waiting for something good to happen.

But something happened last month. He lost his girlfriend because of personality differences, something a lot of us have gone through. He lost his first love. He lost the one thing that made him happy because of his alter ego. She never saw Paul's real self. She was seeing the one he had created.

To me, this is the saddest part. But Paul has learned from all of this. He is now honest with himself. He has become calm and collected, and he now is honest with others. He simply does not want to revisit the sins of his past. He wants to have true happiness and to find true love. This, Paul says, is his message. To be true to yourself, and to go for the best. He says that unless you are honest with yourself, nothing can be achieved. 

"At the end of the day, the only two people that know you are God and yourself," Paul said to me last week.

Paul is now preparing to graduate with a 3.1 grade point average. This after being on academic probation for almost a year and a half. In the last three semesters, his GPA has been Dean's List material. He is on his way to medical school in his home state of Washington.

"In this lifetime, you only have yourself to blame and yourself to praise when something goes wrong," Paul adds. "I stopped caring what people thought and became selfish with my time. I am truly in the happiest part of my life."

Paul admits he is still missing his now-departed first love. He wants her to know that he has changed. He was alone on Valentine's Day and he has been alone since they broke up. He is waiting for the right one. He is waiting for the last piece of the puzzle.