I was restless in my sheets. Why do I feel so weak? Why can’t I make it here like everyone else? What is the secret? The questions came round and round at me answerless, as if they were written inside a hamster wheel and I was the hamster. When my stomach grumbled, I threw off the covers. On the way to the dining hall, I bumped into one of my student advisors, Bong Ju, chewing on a bagel.

“Are you okay?” he asked, stopping in his tracks. Bong Ju was Korean and my friend. I must have looked bad, because there was concern on his face. It looked so much like mine—the subtle features, the smooth brow, the coloring. In that moment, I knew I could say anything to him as my brother.

After I had confessed everything to Bong Ju, an hour later, I walked into the dean’s office. Inside the capacious room, the leaded casement windows were closed to the autumnal morning, the sunlight making glitter out of the flying motes of dust.

Dean Kay was in her early fifties. She wore her blond hair sensibly in a short bob and a sympathetic expression. On her mammoth wooden desk, behind which she sat dwarfed, she had placed framed pictures of her family, facing them outward instead of toward herself, as if what she wanted weren’t reminders of her beautiful children but humanization in front of her audience.

“Bong Ju says you’ve been having a hard time,” she said once I was settled across from her. “You don’t seem to be suffering from the standpoint of academics: your grades last year were impressive, Hyeseung, and I know you are well-liked. Bong says so himself.” She threaded her fingers together.

I forced a smile. “I’m a first-generation Korean American, Dean Kay. I don’t ever have a choice but to succeed.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re enjoying yourself at Princeton despite the achievement.”

“When I came here, I thought all of this”—I swooped my arm in a big circle—“would be a new start. But now I’m here, and Princeton expects me to achieve even more, wants me to blaze in the direction I’ve always been pushing but at a heightened level.

“The problem is that what I have been doing in the past hasn’t served me at all. I need to be able to fail, Dean Kay, and not have it mean the end of me.”

She nodded. “Failure is an important part of education.”

“Is it?” Suddenly, I felt surly hearing her truism. “I’m constantly wondering why my friends get upset about anything. They’ll never fail. Their parents will never let them fail. Princeton will never let them fail. Is that perfection even real?”

“Well, it’s college. It’s real and it isn’t real,” she said, moving her head to one side and then to the other, her bob never losing its shape.

My eyes blurred in the sunlight. I knew what it looked like—that safe, perfect, guaranteed life my parents wanted for me. They believed if I traveled the deep-grooved path in front of me, a blueprint they themselves had not followed, I’d make no mistakes, never be hurt, never suffer as they had. But to live was to suffer. Here was yet another truism, and what a truism it was. Pinning everything on the nail of achievement had meant that failure was death and life was small. Ultimately, I had suffered anyway and my belief in this ontological structure had faltered.

“I just want a simple life that isn’t being lived for anyone but myself. And, I suppose, I want it to have the risks attendant in real life.” This had been the impetus behind last night’s jaunt to New York, my attempt to grab at any experience that felt more genuine.

I scratched at a spot on my leg and tried to think. “Dean Kay,” I said slowly. “You see a lot of students…”

“I do.”

“Am I the only one who thinks like this?”

“No,” she replied, also slowly. “But it feels like it’s been your experience that you are quite alone. That sounds hard. And it’s important to acknowledge, even if I hope it isn’t the truth for any student.”

“I can’t get up in the morning because of how worthless I feel. I cry all the time, I’m scaring Abby. On the outside, it might look like things are okay most of the time, but on the inside, nothing is, and I’ve been acting. I’ve been a good actor, but at any second, everything is going to fall apart.”

She smiled faintly. “Tell me again about the simple life.”

I dropped my gaze to the floor. The red and black medallions in the rug blurred as the vision in my head sharpened. I conjured a white room. Inside were a wooden desk and books as well as a window, which didn’t look out onto anything but opened onto more whiteness. The room was suffused with a warm, yeasty smell, and the smell was comfort. Into this room I had entered weak and alone, and alone too I would leave, but strong.

“My dream is to live alone for a while. It sounds silly, but wouldn’t it be lovely to live above a bakery? I want to wake up in the morning to the smell of bread baking. It would be like living in a womb of dough, very safe, very comfortable. I’d like to belong to myself and work at something I know I could contribute to without having to ‘be the best.’ A mistake wouldn’t be a death, but rather a mistake. At night, I’d read or walk. And the only rule would be to do what fulfills me and only me.”

There, I had said it all. The pattern in the rug sharpened again, and I lifted my gaze and stopped: the dean was fighting back tears.

I cleared my throat. “Do you know the poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ Dean Kay?”

“By Yeats. Yes.”

“I want to ‘live alone in the bee-loud glade.’ Just a simple life.”

The clock on the wall ticked the seconds away. In the widening silence, Dean Kay remained wordless. Perhaps she was thinking I wanted to hole up in a convent, baking bread. I leaned toward the photo closest to me on her desk, her grown children sparkling in the sterling silver frame. It struck me they themselves had probably gone to Princeton, too, had loved it, and that my unformed complaints to their mother were a denigration of their happiness.

“I have an idea,” she said, breaking the silence. “How about a compromise? How about leaving Princeton for a year in search of that simple life? And in the meantime, no more escapes to New York at two in the morning?”

Relief, astonishment, and gratitude hit me together in one stupendous wave. “Thank you,” I whispered once I’d caught my breath. This would not be leaving Princeton so I could cash out and check into a La Quinta to kill myself. This would be leaving Princeton so I wouldn’t have to end this life, but rather could search for another. To press pause had never occurred to me.

“The door is open to you. You have opened it because you have agency here.”

“I can leave, I can come back, and the door will stay open,” I repeated.

She nodded.

That afternoon, I emailed my professors and started taking down my side of the dorm room. Two days later, I hugged Abby goodbye in our common room, and I was going to fly back to my parents in Houston, until I could find a place to live simply.

Would I ever return?

I didn’t know.

5.

WHEN I CALLED MY PARENTS after the meeting with Dean Kay, they were confused.

“But you just left for your second year,” Appa said. “Are you sick?” Umma asked. “No, don’t you hear her? She doesn’t like school,” he barked. “What’s there to like or not like? It’s school!” “But you made As,” he said. “What are we going to tell people at church?” “Well, come home before you screw up your GPA if you’re that unhappy,” she said in the end.

The first night home while I was unpacking, Umma came in and sat down on my bed. It was time for us to try to understand each other.

“It’s just one year,” I sighed, careful to keep exasperation from bleeding. Keep it a cold, hard nugget, I pressed myself, trying to confound the emotion, which wanted to rail into an unnatural shape.

“How do you know it’ll be one year? One year can turn into two. Into three. Into never going back!”

I knew my mother. She was nothing if not an excellent catastrophizer, and she loved to argue by way of hypotheticals and slippery slopes. Instantly, I lost patience: the nugget began to stir, grow live, grow hot, a coal upon which a conflagration could be born.

“People are going to think you couldn’t cut it.”

Exactly! “But I couldn’t cut it. I got depressed!”

She produced the letter of congratulations the dean had sent over the summer and waved it in my face. “Are these the grades of a girl who couldn’t cut it?” In that second, my beautiful mother did not look beautiful to me. To her, achievement and mental derangement were inconsistent phenomena, and I didn’t fight back. As it had been when I was younger, it was easier to melt away.

I didn’t go to church with my parents the first Sunday. In not-so-hushed tones over breakfast, they discussed whether they should lie when the inevitable questions arose. I could hear it now. “How is Hyeseung-a doing at Princeton? Still conquering the academic life?” an ajumma would inquire. “She’s home because she’d rather live a simple life smelling bread” certainly wasn’t the right answer. Eventually, they devised something face-saving: “She’s been killing herself over her work and has completely tired herself out, so we told her to come home and rest.” A physical weakness was more excusable than a mental. My parents couldn’t accept what was happening to me—I barely understood it myself—and they were ashamed.

In this time of purgatory, I didn’t leave my bedroom. The nanny kept to the living room, snoozing whenever Sarah slept. Arthur had started tenth grade. After school, he got a snack from the kitchen and headed to his bedroom. From my doorway, I stared at his big feet straying off the edge of his twin and heard him chuckle over something he read. As if the feet and the chuckle were the marriage of sin to laziness, I applied myself harder, the black monkey of existential listlessness crouching in the corner of my bedroom, watching with its red eyes.

Princeton’s famously engaged alumni operated a career board, and I was going to use it to find a job, and the job would earn me money, and the money would give me freedom. While my friends partied, studied, and lived their college lives, I hunkered down on the floor of my childhood room in a makeshift bullpen of newspapers, legal pads, and laptops. I scoured career lists, wrote emails and cover letters, and updated my résumé.

After a couple of weeks, I was offered a job at a nonprofit in Chicago. Chicago! I imagined bakeries, walks along Lake Michigan, art museums, and bookstores. I had gotten off the phone with the head of the nonprofit when Umma popped her head in.

“I’ve had enough,” she said. “If you’re going to take a year off, you’re doing what Appa and I want.”