If you grew up watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, you may remember Iroh as the wise, tea-loving uncle of the hotheaded, banished, teenage prince Zuko. During the series, Uncle Iroh delivered some of the most profound lessons about growing up to the young heroes in the show. As a child, I looked up to Iroh, but many of his sayings went over my head. Now, with a little more life behind me, Uncle Iroh’s words not only leave me in awe, but resonate with more relevance than ever. Iroh’s wisdom still applies to growing up, even more so now, as in college I begin to make the transition from adolescent to adult.
In Book 2 Chapter 17 of the Avatar series, Uncle Iroh tells Zuko, “It’s time for you to look inward and begin asking yourself the big questions: Who are you and what do you want?”
In the series, Zuko’s sole mission was to regain his honor, which he felt he lost when his father banished him. His self-worth and self-respect were contingent on his father’s opinion. Zuko, restless and desperate, set out across the world to find the Avatar, someone who hadn’t been seen for a hundred years. Zuko became convinced that capturing the Avatar was the only way to regain his honor. He never questioned this. He never questioned his father. He never asked himself if he was honorable.
This is, however, what his Uncle Iroh begged him to do. He wanted Zuko to define his own identity. He wanted Zuko to pursue the life he wanted, not the life he felt he had to live. Zuko became conflicted while wrestling with these questions throughout the rest of season two and half of season three. In the end, Zuko realized that, “all [he] wanted was for [his father] to love [him], to accept [him]. [He] thought it was [his] honor that [he] wanted, but really, [he] was just trying to please [his father]” (Book 3, Chapter 11). From then on, he decided to live a life of honor on his own terms. He rejected his father’s expectations, and lived to fulfill his own. He stopped his hunt for the Avatar, and instead, chose his own path. He decided who he was, and what he wanted.
While most teenagers and young adults don’t set off traipsing the globe on a man-hunt to regain their honor, many feel compelled to go to great lengths to find a place to belong. We live in an age where college students increasingly feel pressured to meet unrealistic expectations to be accepted by others and themselves. They have to take 5 classes, volunteer, have a social life, have a 4.0 GPA, lead 2 clubs, get into a prestigious grad school, and get a high paying job, while never breaking down and never breaking a sweat. But is that the way we want to live? Â
I know now that coming to college, I had some pretty unrealistic expectations. I felt I had to please everybody. I felt I had to know exactly what I wanted to major in. I felt that I had to have an internship my first year. No father had banished me, but inside I had cast myself out. I had told myself I wasn’t worthy of love and belonging until I did all these things, until I captured my Avatar.
Mount Holyoke was the place that inspired me to take the question, “Who are you and what do you want,” seriously.  It’s not that I feel that the college isn’t liable to creating an environment of stress due to implied expectations. However, it was in my classes at Mount Holyoke that I began to think more critically about the expectations I had always taken for granted. It was meeting the teachers and counselors on campus who thought it would be cool if I was an English or a Philosophy major. And, most importantly, it was seeing the diversity of paths that people around me were taking that inspired me to try to find my own path. None of this is to say that I don’t chase my Avatar every once in awhile, that I don’t believe on occasion that my worth as a person is contingent on my grades. It does mean, however, that I’m starting to question, like Zuko, the assumptions I make about who I am and how I should live my life. I am growing up.
Questions: Have you ever felt that you were trying to achieve unrealistic expectations? If so, what were they? Where do you think these expectations come from? What do you think gives the beliefs reinforced by these expectations power?