Chasing Butterflies by Allison E. '27

It’s an autumn evening in 2019–my first year in my high school’s marching band–and the clock is ticking towards midnight on our darkened school bus. Heads slump against precariously stacked saxophone cases, weighed down by a long day of football pep songs and field performances. As the bus turns off the freeway back towards school, the sound of traffic gives way to the soft rumble of the engine. Just as the wheels make their final turn, however, the quiet is shattered by a single bellowing voice:

“2, 4, 6, 8, WHO DO WE APPRECIATE?”

Heads snap awake as if they’d never been asleep, and the one shout becomes many, all in unison.

“BUS DRIVER, BUS DRIVER, YEAHHH BUS DRIVER!”

By now, the entire band is awake, and the shouts continue even stronger.

“ARISTOTLE, SOCRATES, PELOPONNESIAN WAR! (WAR!)”

“X-SQUARED, Y-SQUARED, H-2-S-O-4! (4!)”

“WHO FOR? WHAT FOR? WHO THE HELL WE CHEERING FOR?”

“BUS DRIVER, BUS DRIVER, YEAHHH BUS DRIVER!”

Incoherent yelling ensues as the bus doors open. The quiet is now broken, and lively banter bubbles up again as we unload instruments through the front gate.

This is the thank you cheer my high school’s marching band shouts after returning from every football game or performance, whether it’s 4:00 PM or midnight, whether we’ve won or lost, and whether the bus driver has heard it twenty times or none at all. It’s such a small moment–30 seconds, repeated so often that you forget it’s there. But when I think back on high school, it’s the moment that sits at the very top of my shelf of memories, because in many ways it’s the best monument I have to my 9th grade self, my 12th grade self, and all the years in between. 

The first bus driver cheer of my freshman year happened before I ever felt like I belonged in marching band. In fact, that same week I was actively thinking about quitting–I didn’t feel like I’d made new friends, I was too awkward to participate in the more ridiculous banter, and I couldn’t replicate the enthusiasm everyone else seemed to have for the band. I spent a lot of time quite literally sitting in the corner, feeling out of place and just observing.

When it came to the bus driver cheer, however, I didn’t have to feel like I belonged to take part in the tradition. All I needed to do was to be on that bus. The lyrics were silly, the rhymes were catchy, and the yelling was all a bit intoxicating. But as funny as the Greek history references were, the best thing about it was the camaraderie. The camaraderie of shouting yourself hoarse with others, and of feeling so in-sync that you can’t make out your own voice from the group’s. You don’t even need to know the people around you to feel it. After all, connection is what songs and chants are meant for, and the bus driver cheer did exactly that. It gave me something to share. It made me a part of the group. It convinced me to stay long enough to fall in love with marching band, and kept me from missing out on the most fulfilling part of my high school experience.

And then bam. COVID. Unfortunately, marching band–an activity spent blowing air out of your mouth and into your surroundings–is… notably difficult to do during a global pandemic. So is getting into a crowded school bus and shouting in unison.

As you can probably guess, lockdown turned our marching band into a shadow of itself for two years, and the bus driver cheer went into stasis. 

By the time restrictions loosened again, three class years had graduated, and three more had moved up to replace them without learning the cheer. Only a handful of us still knew the lyrics. But the bus driver cheer absolutely could not die, so in the first few weeks we went on a crusade to make sure that everyone in the band learned it. We passed around lyrics, whispered reminders from seat to seat, and double checked that even our shyest underclassmen knew what was happening. All it took was one bus ride for the loudest and most enthusiastic amongst us to join in (band kids will be band kids). But as the semester continued, even our shyest frosh were shouting it with more and more energy, until they were practically as loud as our seniors. And so the camaraderie of that tradition was revived for another generation.

This story was the first half of my Common App essay⁠01 albeit somewhat revised and taken from before I had to edit it down for word count, because now I HAVE CONTROL OF MY OWN WRITING , more or less my senior thesis on who I was and what I valued most. Four years later, as a senior once again, I’ve been thinking about the version of Allison that wrote that essay. Am I the same person? Am I different?

Certainly this is still the story that present-day me thinks of when imagining the word “community.” It feels so short-lived when I look back on it, as if it were a snapshot of people caught together in a crosswalk–paths intersecting half by chance, half by proximity, then continuing on in different directions. But a snapshot, as brief and ephemeral as it is, still captures the image of a much larger subject.

At the risk of sounding corny, that larger subject is less a crosswalk than it is a tree. It’s a community that lives, and grows, and blossoms just the same as a tree. A community with roots sunk so deep into the past and new branches reaching far enough into the future that it can’t fade with time. A community where each person is just one small leafy shoot, but together the years of those before build the foundation for years of those to come, with leadership and mentorship and traditions flowing upwards through the veins of one person to the next. A community grows and renews with a larger purpose. Instead of pouring energy into making springtime flowers bloom, it pours its dedication into putting on a musical show, or building a robot, or winning a competition. And that community is held together by the structure of that purpose–by the rehearsals and meetings and practices that work towards it. If you go to those rehearsals, and you are working towards the purpose, you are part of that tree, no questions asked. And there’s a comfort to knowing you’re a part of it. Part of something so large. Something so solid. Something with a past and a future and a purpose.

That’s what community feels like to me. All throughout high school, marching band and Science Olympiad and cross country and math team were practically my entire world. They were the most fulfilling parts of my life, and I absolutely knew it, so when I came to MIT, I was ready to plunge headfirst into every community I could find–clubs, dorm life, music groups–anything and everything. And that’s what I did. I jumped in with enthusiasm, and started to feel at home with various communities on campus.

At the same time, though, I was also discovering another facet of life at MIT: college friends. The friends who you stay up talking with until 5:00 am, and who are willing to indulge your dumbest ideas and join you on the most ridiculous adventures. I’ve had friends before, of course, but something about college and living together and the pure silliness of MIT made it different. It was intoxicating.

Unfortunately, our time is finite, over the course of freshman fall I found myself having to choose between my friends and the communities I’d started becoming a part of. And I ended up almost always choosing my friends. I spent late nights having absurd conversations in study rooms, poured organizational energy into group shenanigans, and invested emotionally in these relationships. This came at the cost of my engagement with the new clubs I had joined, and even though community was so baked into my sense of identity, I continued making those choices.

But as freshman fall turned into freshman spring, my friends got busier, classes got tougher, and it became harder and harder to spend time together. The spontaneous moments studying in the library or eating dinner started dissolving, and it became more difficult to wrangle people into a cooking project or late night discussion. Unlike with my clubs, there were no guaranteed weekly meetings or regularly scheduled events to rely on, and as the loneliness began to hit my mental health I started rethinking my decision to prioritize my friendships over everything else.

I wrote this in the midst of that fear:

I don’t think I’ve ever depended so much on people for my own happiness before, and it’s scary. I’ve depended on institutions–on solid things with schedule and structure and the cyclic constancy of meetings that will always happen because people see it as their responsibility. But I’ve never depended so wholly on this amorphous thing that is a group of friends, each with their own lives that intersect in different ways, where the schedules don’t exist and every. single. moment. has to be chased, and caught, and held like a butterfly in nervous, shaky hands. I feel like my happiness is built upon a marshland, where the currents flow underfoot and the ground sinks beneath you and you never know where your next step will land. I want the solidity of a boardwalk, with its symmetrical planks and its strictly dictated path. I want something I know will be there every time I put my foot down for the next step, and for every other step in this one direction that we’re all headed in together. But oh, I want the butterfly more. I want the warmth of the marsh and the joy of a thousand things breathing all at different times and with different sounds. I am standing in the marsh scared shitless by the shifting ground, but I’m also in love with the life here. I just don’t know how to stay on my feet.

Communities are usually stable things. There’s so much security that comes from knowing that meetings or rehearsals or just time with “your people” are regularly scheduled, and people will show up. It’s difficult to pull communities apart, because their seams are all stitched with a common purpose and a sense of responsibility to a common goal. 

The fluidity of friendships is so much harder to navigate, especially when every event to be planned starts feeling like a massive balancing act. You schedule it at a time when everyone’s awake, but there isn’t much going on. You remind people individually with just enough wheedling to lure them from their psets, but not so much that they feel coerced. You make sure enough people join that everyone feels it was worth their time, or else they’ll be harder to convince for the next group activity. When you do get the chance to hang out, you can’t let the conversation turn towards psets or sleep schedules, or plans the next day–otherwise people will start thinking about reasons to leave. You provide food, or a planned activity, or good conversation, and string them one after another with as little space in between for possible departures. Because each moment together must be chased. Must be caught. Must be held like a butterfly in nervous, shaky hands.

There are some groups that have the best of both worlds. They’re both circles of friends and communities in their own right–friends that live together, or take classes together, or have some regular guarantee of encounters. I’ve spent a long time trying to manufacture these aspects of community within my own group of friends.

And I think there’s merit in that effort. Community has been one of the most important and fulfilling parts of my life, and turning my friends into a community would bring that feeling back into my life. But chasing butterflies is also an exhausting, Sisyphean task. And more importantly, I’ve begun to realize that community is not the be all and end all for this sense of kinship.

Most obviously, friendships usually come with a deeper level of connection. With just friends, there’s no artificial scaffolding holding our relationship together at a few scattered contact points–we show up with our entire person and connect with our entire person. We aren’t trapped in conversations revolving around just music, or just math, or just “the thing” our community does. We can talk about linguistic drift for three hours on a random weeknight. We can share our insecurities about our future careers. We can cry for thirty minutes straight, and then we can hug each other, and then we can just sit there and be. 

I think friendship also comes with a completely different flavor of belonging. In a community, as long as I show up to all the designated activities, I’m accepted as a member. I don’t have to be funny, or interesting, or even that likeable–as long as I’m showing up, I belong. There’s reassurance in that fact, but there’s also a shallower sense of belonging. With my friends, it’s worth so much to know that they care about me because they like me as a person, and because they enjoy being around me. I don’t have a job to do or deadlines to hit to be a “contributing member” of an organization; my friends like me for me. They think I’m funny, and they think I’m interesting to talk to, and when shit hits the fan and I don’t have the energy to contribute anything, they’re exactly where they’ve always been–right alongside me.

There are so many other dimensions of friendship, and I’m still exploring them. I’m learning how to maintain individual relationships in a world where convenience doesn’t draw us naturally together (shoutout to my friend Miranda for being the role model that I’ve been studying 🔎).

But I’m also still partly mourning the loss of a more standard community in my life. Without the stability of belonging to an institution and the perpetuity of a constantly growing organization, I feel so much more unmoored than I did in high school. I wish I was leaving more of a mark on this school–building something that lasts, or helping the people after me build it themselves. Instead I’m still here chasing butterflies, but with less and less energy to do it.

Maybe there’s a balance to be found. Perhaps having a job and a workplace and coworkers has some of those community aspects to it, and perhaps outside the whirlwind of MIT there are friendships that don’t require chasing. I suppose I’ll find out in the next few years. In the meantime, though, have I made the right decision for my four years at MIT? I don’t know. I’m happy with where I am now, and I’m more than happy with all the people that are in my life, and I think that’s all I can really ask for.