Column: Here, There, and Everywhere: Inside the Mind of a Yalie
As kids, we are told our fears are not real. They are unreasonable. Fixable. Easy to deal with. We will grow out of them.
My fear of the dark could always be solved by running to my parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night and eventually understanding that there wasn’t someone hiding behind me. The dentist, I quite recently realized, was acting in my best interest and hadn’t been plotting against me. Vaccine shots last a quick second. And artichokes, I can thankfully opt out of eating.
However, fears in adulthood are a different breed. They root themselves deeper within us and cannot, very unfortunately, be solved or forgotten as easily. Can they be outgrown? Do they ever vanish like the monster under our bed?
With one fear in particular, the reverse happened. Instead of growing out of it, I grew into it.
For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by space. Growing up, my room was covered in nebula posters and my ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars. There were visits to NASA and ESA, astronomy competitions, countless Wikipedia rabbit holes, and hours of Neil deGrasse Tyson videos—an entire universe I could disappear into whenever this one felt too small.
The appeal was always the scale. I loved how intriguing and vast and endless space looked. How it put things into perspective. How one bad day meant it was not the end of the world. Because whatever had gone wrong that day did not matter in the grand scheme of things. Stars would still shine, Earth would still spin and time would heal. I loved how stars made me feel small, but not alone. Part of something great even if I was a pebble in it. Knowing there is so much out there, beyond my house, my street, my country, our planet. And acknowledging it motivated me to go hunting for more of it. Kind of like my time here is sacred and has to be well spent. Spent exploring, finding beauty and absorbing as much of the world as I can.
Then I stopped looking at stars and started focusing on how they run. Fuel. Core temperature. How much a star can hold before it cannot suppress anything anymore.
And so, the fascination gave way to fear. A fear of a particular kind of star: supernovas.
Supernovas scare the shit out of me, especially the idea of becoming one. A supernova is the final explosion of certain stars. A massive star can burn steadily for millions of years until its core collapses and its outer layers are violently expelled into space. For one brief moment, the explosion can even outshine an entire galaxy.
I have always admired people who burn brightly. People who are unreasonably passionate, who care too much, attempt too much, love too much. I want to be one of them. I want to throw myself into the people and projects I love. I want to live so fully that very little of me remains unused.
But there is a thin line between using yourself and using yourself up.
When you live intensely enough, it is difficult not to wonder whether intensity comes with an expiration date. Whether every ambitious week, all-encompassing friendship, impossible project, and overwhelming love is fuel being spent. Whether passion is simply burnout with a better facade. Whether one day the core collapses and, after one final burst of light, there is nothing left to give.
But actually, I have decided to debunk the existence of supernovas. Not scientifically, but emotionally and energetically. I refuse to believe that people can pour everything they have into one person, one ambition, or one version of their lives and then simply disappear. Instead, I have complete faith that we are infinite. Not because we have endless time or because nothing can exhaust us. Our hearts break and our plans fail. We lose people, places, and versions of ourselves we thought would last forever. Sometimes we give too much to the wrong person. Sometimes we spend years working toward something we eventually realize we never wanted.
But we are not limited to one combustion. We can start over. Rebuild. Love a new partner. Change careers. Change our minds. Become different people—or become more completely ourselves.
When I came to the US, it felt like my whole life in Greece, my home country, would end. That it would stop growing and stay still in time. I would not be able to keep up with everyone, or live in two worlds, or love triple the amount of friends. There was guilt in being excited, too, as though being happy here meant I did not miss home enough, or loving new people meant I was replacing the ones who had known me first.
I felt the same way about picking up anything new. Very early on in my life, I put myself in a container marked STEM and it felt too late and too hard to climb out.
Which is funny, because I had already climbed out of so many. I spent my whole childhood in ballet before robotics took over. I wanted to be a lawyer. Then a diplomat, followed by pursuing biomed. Followed by doing research in astronomy and getting into academia. Then electrical engineering, then physics, then mechanical engineering, then mechanical engineering and economics. Each one supposedly the final answer—lowkey still pending. Writing, philosophy and music were things I absolutely loved and thought I could not afford to do, until I did them anyway. It took me a while to notice that the container had never once stopped changing shape.
I kept coming back to Sylvia Plath’s fig tree. Every fig a life you could have, and choosing one means watching the others go bad, so you sit under the tree long enough that they all rot anyway. That was the fear exactly. That leaving meant choosing, and choosing meant losing everything I did not pick.
But the fig tree runs on the very same logic as the supernova. A finite amount of you, spent once, and then gone. That is the part I no longer believe. There is no expiration date on love or figuring out your interests. There is no set volume you are allowed to fill or number of containers you can occupy. Now I get to have two homes, two majors, multiple families and many, many—maybe excessively many—hobbies. None of it made me forget about Greece, and nothing ever could replace it, because everything I have here was built out of it rather than instead of it. Greece and the US were never mutually exclusive. They are mutually inclusive, and I am where they touch.
Remember we do not begin again from nothing. We begin again from the remains.
But perhaps I do not need to debunk supernovas at all. Perhaps I have been so focused on the explosion and how intimidating it is that I have mistaken it for the entire story.
A supernova throws the material forged inside its star across space. But that material does not disappear. It enters clouds of gas and dust and can eventually become part of new stars, new planets, and new forms of life.
Rather than (mis)understand a supernova as a star ceasing to exist, I now see a beautiful natural process of a star becoming impossible to keep in one place.
Astronomers call it stellar nucleosynthesis; poets call it stardust. The idea is the same: parts of us were forged inside stars that lived and died long before we arrived. Somewhere inside your body is the continuation of an ancient explosion.
So then, being a supernova does not only mean burning until there is nothing left; it also means that what leaves you becomes part of something else. Even our endings produce material. An abandoned dream becomes the beginning of another. A friendship ends but leaves behind a version of you who would not otherwise exist. Wrong decisions help you make right ones. And sometimes nothing ends at all. Sometimes you go back. You forgive someone, or they forgive you, and what you return to is not the same thing you left. It has been through something. It has changed, evolved, and so have you.
The original form may be gone. The light, however, is not.
I sometimes think about the little neon stars on my childhood ceiling. During the day, they absorbed the light around them. Then, when my room went dark, they gave it back.
They were not their own source. And still, they shone.
