What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

There’s a scene in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot in which our protagonist, Selin, who is a student at Harvard, goes to see a therapist. After Selin explains that she feels alienated from her fellow students, her teachers, and herself, her therapist replies, “I’m interested in your comment that most people are ‘so awful.’ What makes most people awful?” Selin tells him that most people, the second they meet you, are sizing you up as competition for the same resources. “It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify the dispensable people—people they could get rid of.” “Do you see yourself as one of the dispensable people?” the therapist asks. Selin replies, “The point is, I don’t want to get involved in that question, and it’s all most people want to talk about.” She explains that not many people seem interested in “what you’re like.” They just want to figure out what you’re worth. Instead of recognizing that what Selin wants from the world is a divine and magical kind of connection between disparate souls, the therapist reveals himself to be precisely the kind of sorter Selin has described. He assumes that she is mostly consumed by a “fear of competition and a fear of rejection by [her] peers.” She is focused on success and fears failure, and she’s suffering from the low self-esteem common to all of the ultra-competitive students at Harvard. “You rat...