Collapsing into bed at 10:30 p.m. and wanting to avoid being woken up by phone calls, I turned off my cell phone for the first time.
But it turned out to be much more of a bad decision than a good one. While I slept like a rock, my mom called me. For my mother, finding my phone off sparked catastrophic worries of me being kidnapped.
No matter how many times I’d told her of Westwood’s relatively high security, she just had to imagine the worst situation.
But just recently, I found myself guilty of doing the same thing, calling my family every minute while the wildfires raged just miles from my home in San Diego, and picturing every kind of situation possible.
In reality though, my family had been fine. My brother kept telling me not to worry and that all was well.
But being in the calm of Westwood, and so isolated from the apocalyptic inferno, only made it easier to torment myself with worries and fears.
The fires last week epitomized the struggle of balancing life back home and with life at school for all of the college students affected by the fires. We live dual lives, and when living in one, the other is as surreal and distant as the fires that blazed so far away.
And when catastrophe strikes in that world far away, it’s a challenge to distinguish the real from the imagined, and the paranoid worries from the rational concerns.
When I first settled into college, I thought the initial shock of separation and adjustment would be the only difficulty of living away from family. And once I learned to cook my own food and pay my own bills, I thought I was self-sufficient and ready to face adulthood.
But I was far from such maturity, because true independence isn’t just about knowing how to take care of yourself without your parents’ help.
When my brother first called me about our family evacuating, realizing that I had failed to strike this balance shocked me just as much as watching the firestorms swallow up the acres of land surrounding my home.
The sudden presence of “home world” pushing into “college world” caught me off guard; I had been furiously preparing for exams and papers and all of a sudden, the exams and the essays seemed so secondary. Would our house be standing in the next couple of hours? Would my brother be okay as he traveled down the freeway? What if the house caught fire as my family was packing to evacuate? Is there something I should be doing to help them? I was too preoccupied to study for my exam ““ but would not studying turn out to be a regretful decision later on?
It was difficult, but I realized that I simply had to accept that I could do nothing. I had to accept the outcomes, despite my dire wishes to be with my family. And I also had to learn that in such situations, when worrying won’t accomplish anything, it’s not a crime to be taking care of my current obligations ““ like studying for my test.
In college, we’re just starting to get a taste of the struggle for this equilibrium. It will follow us indefinitely when we step out and establish our own lives with our own careers and families.
When my brother asked, “We’re evacuating. What do you want me to take from your room?” I realized that we crowd our lives, our rooms and our minds with so many things that we lose the essential parts of our existence.
College life is different, because the education, the maturation and the experience can only be described as “the time of our lives” ““ something indescribably valuable. But it, too, has the effect of making us forget the truly important: home and family.
Of course, we’re only doing our jobs as students, immersing ourselves in school to make the most of it ““ for ourselves and for our parents.
So where should we allocate our attention and energy? How can we ever deal realistically with disasters affecting our loved ones, frustrated by our desires to be with them, with our imaginations making it difficult to discern fears from reality?
Everywhere, college students affected by the fires were asking these questions, and so we coped ““ together. It was amazing to reconnect with old friends in New York, Wisconsin and beyond, as we texted and called each other throughout the day.
And with hell breaking loose all around, for once all the different lives we lead converged into one.
But as the fires died to ashes, our dual lives picked up where they were, dancing in separate directions.
From now on, I won’t rely on another catastrophe to realize that leading two lives is better than one.
E-mail Yoo at jyoo@media.ucla.edu. General comments can be sent to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.