News travels fast, but gossip travels even faster. Especially when it’s only traveling among a few hundred people. 

As I threw my high school graduation cap into the air, my nostalgia for the countless hours I had spent with my friends was undercut by the relief that I could retreat into the comfort of being a nobody. With only 120 students in my cohort, we all knew everyone. While, thankfully, people didn’t talk about me as much as they did about others, we all probably knew details about each other’s lives that we shouldn’t have known. 

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One of the reasons I wanted to attend a large college like USC was because I was looking forward to anonymity in a class size of 3,420: I wanted to be a nobody to most people, and somebody to only those who truly mattered. 

But because there are only about 320 of us in the undergraduate Indian international student community at USC, most students know each other, or at least know of each other. 

There are countless positives to this: You will never need to eat alone in a dining hall because you are bound to run into a familiar face; you have tons of people with whom you can celebrate festivals and you have numerous friends to count on to brighten your day when you are feeling homesick. I am glad I am part of the Indian community because even though I am nearly 8,700 miles from home, I am surrounded by people who look like me (I’m not kidding, I sat under Tommy Trojan’s statue and counted that every fifth person who walked by was South Asian).

However, I often wonder if these positives are outweighed by the one colossal con: It’s a mini high school. The toxic gossip culture is blatantly prominent here, too. I have never even spoken to some people, yet I know which classes they are failing, which night club they passed out at and which friendship went up in flames. 

It’s human nature to enjoy listening to the juicy details about others’ lives, especially when you can put a face to the name and it’s not a random stranger. But gossip is like quicksand; it slowly sucks you in and, before you know it, it’s hard to escape. More than that, you spend so much time gossiping about others that you start to wonder if they are also talking about you. 

Call me paranoid, but I sometimes think twice before doing something I want to, or act a certain way out of the fear of being judged by about 100 other students. But, I don’t want to second guess my actions, especially at college where “no one cares.” Perhaps, I could justify 17-year-old me acting this way — after all, she was on the brink of adulthood making life-changing decisions and she didn’t know any better — but I would never be able to justify 21-year-old me graduating college with the same fear. 

So, I have decided (drumroll, please) that I am going to free myself of this fear by freeing others from my judgment. I would love to be in an environment where I could do as I please without worrying about the gossipmongers. But to get there, I need to take the first step and allow others around me to do the same — live and let live. 

I am not saying that my curiosity won’t ever get the better of me. But I would like to think my desire to end this toxicity will win on most occasions. And yes, perhaps I am ready to put this behind me, but not everyone is. Some people may choose to exist in high school for longer because they may enjoy the culture or perhaps they are immune to the opinions of others. And that’s their choice. But, as someone who does second-guess herself because of the gossip, I am going to remove myself from the equation. I am ready to leave high school, in high school.

Edhita Singhal is a sophomore from India writing about her experiences as an international student in her column, “Foreign Footprints,” which runs every other Tuesday.