I am no stranger to feeling lost, to lacking purpose, an identity. I am cynical — that much I know.

I am also an existentialist, just like my friend the French novelist and playwright Jean Genet. I met him standing at the cusp of my internal revolution, looking out at the field of discovery spread ahead of me. I saw among the famous figures and places an ethereal mist. I would later become intimately acquainted with it, and identify it as my political consciousness. At that moment I only registered how incandescent it looked, and how surprisingly familiar.

Over the course of the next few months, I would go for long walks with my political consciousness. (I give it no other name simply because it has no need for another name: its quintessential grandness is already captured in the sibilance on the last three syllables, the possession in the first, all centered around the truth at the core of the name. Calling it something else, something artificial and contrived like Rosalind Montmorency, would simply take away from its beautiful simplicity.) With it, I would think about the state of the world and what needed to be done to better it. I began to develop a mindset geared toward evaluating inequalities in terms of numbers, policies, and solutions. Over time, I came to one indisputable conclusion: capitalism had to be replaced. With it, it would be impossible to make any headway, swimming against the current of a self-reinforcing system.

What else, then? What should replace it? The answer lay in an idea I had formed in my early childhood: wealth had to be redistributed, the world wiped clean and given a fresh start, this time with policy-followers making policies instead of the other way around. Once I grew older, I found out that this imagined utopia existed outside of my own head, much to my disbelief, and it had a name: socialism. Accompanied by my political consciousness, I delved deeper into the world of political ideology to find an even more refined version of socialism: anarcho-syndicalism (defined by Britannica to be “an [anarchist] movement that advocates direct action by the working class to abolish the capitalist order, including the state, and to establish in its place a social order based on workers organized in production units.”)

This discovery gave me direction: a clear course of study and career to pursue in the years that will follow. I found meaning in a concrete school of thought, formed by others and adopted by myself, and hence also found community. The figures I had seen from afar in the field of discovery were reintroduced to me, nearer and more distinct without the mist distorting their features. I met revolutionaries, theorists, leaders, renegades, and more, all the while aspiring more and more to be like them: to harness courage and spirit and then unleash it on the world, leaving it better than it was before.

In my political consciousness I found myself, and my will to help other people.

I found reflections of these figures in my closest friends. Some were socialist, some were not. But all of them had depths of integrity and compassion within them. One of my most treasured memories is that of hosting the inaugural session of an inter-school book club I co-founded. We delved into thought-provoking literature together, discussing Crime and Punishment, On Anarchism, Feminism Is for Everybody, and endless others. It was a pleasant surprise, to see clearly, as if for the first time, my friends’ futures as compassionate, adept leaders spread out before them. They inspire me to continue caring.

It is now more evident to me than it ever has been before that I live for others. In today’s society, this is often seen as restricting and self-sacrificing, but I am at peace with my moral philosophy. The fact of the matter is that I don’t know any other way to live. My own identity is not stifled or lessened by others’; rather, it flourishes by working for other people. Bettering someone’s living conditions or even simply uplifting their spirits comes instinctively to me even when mine have descended out of reach. It is easier to concentrate my energies on listening to and empathizing with a friend than it is to tackle my own problems, and this also helps me re-center and cool down.

It has also gotten easier to stay calm and quietly determined after I met my political consciousness. I realize now I will never be alone as I was before, as I can access many people in my mind. My field of discovery, where figures stand clear as day and resolute as stone, is now interposed with the faces of my friends, ever-equitable and ever-caring. Most of the people I admire are collected in one place, serving as the ultimate inspiration for me to find meaning by giving back to the world. It seems fitting that this altruism has led to even my mind giving itself away, hosting others in it, granting each one a place.