“From Yaad to Yard” is a bi-weekly column where Breanna Burke, a Jamaican international student at Stanford, shares her unique experiences navigating life on the Farm. Through reflections on culture, identity and academia, she offers a thoughtful perspective on bridging the distance between her Caribbean roots and her new life on the Farm.
“Good friend better than pocket money.”
— Jamaican proverb meaning “A good friend is better than money.”
The drive to Kingston was an exhaustingly long four hours, with a couple of off-tune shrieks as my mom and I sang ’90s dancehall. Then it happened. I counted the cars that zoomed past us on the highway and wondered if the lives within them were as strange as mine. The question lingered in the cold air of the car and slowly fell flat as we inched closer to our destination.
“Don’t you want to see any of your old friends?”
My mom’s question poked a heavy dot of navy sadness within me, one that was bound to explode sooner or later. Growing up, I never felt as if I had a best friend. Sure, I had friends whose giggles often filled tiny, pink bedrooms as we mused over crushes, but I never felt the inexplicable pull of the best friend that’s sold on TV — the one who knows everything about you, the one you have sleepovers with all the time.
When I left Jamaica, I left with two amazing friends from high school, who I talk with daily. The three of us had bonded after a school trip to Barbados. From then, our group chat “BIM” held thousands of messages containing our deepest secrets, fears and sometimes funny Instagram reels (to their dismay, I am not on TikTok). I loved them, but I didn’t share a life with them and I thought that’s what having a best friend was. The other friendships I had in high school slowly dissolved over the summer, especially when we all went off to college (partly due to moving to a completely different country). People I spoke to every day for the last seven years had been relegated to a simple “Happy Birthday” once a year.
The truth was, I didn’t really want to see them. We had become completely different people. We were strangers.
The night before I flew to Stanford, I made a new note on my phone titled “Goals for Stanford Experience – To Be Achieved by Graduation”:
- To make at least 2 genuine friends
If I’m being honest, everything else was just a space filler. If you had asked any other pre-frosh what they were most scared about, they would’ve probably said being away from everything they’ve ever known and not knowing if they’d find their people. For me, I didn’t even know what it meant to find “my people,” especially in a new country. I just knew that for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to be okay with feeling alone.
Within the past year, I have found friends in the most unlikely places and had to work to reframe my idea of what friendship truly means. When the lining of the gorgeous red dress I bought for CROM (Crothers’ prom) burned under the heat of my iron — thanks to my very teenage inexperience with pressing my own clothes — rather than sitting in my misery alone (or bothering my mom at 10 p.m.), I rang my friend in the dorm, who offered to lend me her steamer so that I could still dazzle the night away (even if a bit burnt on the inside). Similarly, when it felt as if my entire world was crashing under the weight of CS p-sets and self-doubt, I had people who reminded me that I belonged here and that everything would be okay — my people.
If you asked me two years ago if I would have chosen a good friend or $1,000 (okay, maybe $10,000), I would have chosen the money. Now, I’d think a bit more carefully. I’ve learned that a good friend is more than just that: they’re proof that our worlds are more than just the bubbles that we isolate ourselves in. They are proof that there is more. In the words of the best Batman, Christian Bale, they are evidence that, “I am more.” A good friend extends your reality beyond your fears and your flaws and gives you a more vast world, where there is beauty in that.
And I think that infinite world beats a couple of bucks.