Roxana Anayat
A few weeks ago, the universe decided to strike me down with an irksome cold, which, combined with graduation anxiety, made me too enervated to do much else. Thus, I returned home for the weekend. I attempted to study for my upcoming exam, but I couldn’t focus — and I’d rather spend time with my family — so I plopped myself down on the living room couch, joining my grandpa.
When I was a kid, my grandpa always had the news on loop. From CNN to NHK, the world had seemed terrifying when viewed through the news. In an effort to divert the seeping geopolitical anxiety, I would point to the television in a request to change the channel.
So, on this weekend of recovery, as if I were 14 years old again, I gestured toward the TV, and my grandpa, with a smile, told me I had permission to change the channel. As he headed to his room to sleep, I surfed through the TV guide, glancing through copious movie networks and cartoon mainstays until I came across the Freeform channel. They were showing my favorite childhood sitcom, “Boy Meets World.”
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I used to tune into Freeform every afternoon during seventh and eighth grade to watch the daily escapades of Cory Matthews — played by a lively Ben Savage — as he navigated from middle school to college over seven seasons. I found the show moving in its wisdom and warmth about the world: always comforting, but never condescending. It was on that childhood couch where I first gained an appreciation for how art could stand as a marker of our lives, denoting just how far we’ve come and how much we’ve grown.
Throughout my adolescence, I took respite in these characters and their world, laughing when Cory unionized his English class and went on strike, smiling when Mr. Turner took in Shawn Hunter and became his surrogate father, and melting when Cory moved space and time to win back Topanga’s heart at Disney World.
When I tuned in this time, Cory was saying farewell.
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In the “Boy Meets World” series finale, titled “Brave New World,” the core cast has finished college and is preparing to scatter across the world. Sequences of the past and future intertwine as the characters bid farewell to friends, family long since past, and their life mentor, Mr. Feeny. I had seen this finale before, but a decade later, after recontextualizing it with my own impending graduation, the totality of life smote me all at once. I slouched into the couch, heavy with existential melancholy as Mr. Feeny and the cast exited their middle school classroom for the final time.
It’s strange; I am now older than Ben Savage was when he finished filming “Boy Meets World.” Cory, by the finale, had already fallen in love, graduated, and perhaps lived more life than me. Meanwhile, I don’t have a prospective job or stable enough income to even think about living independently after college.
I used to believe that Cory and Topanga’s teenage romance would one day come to me. I used to believe that getting into Yale was as effortless as it was for Topanga. I used to believe that the friends I made in high school would still be with me to this day, just like the characters in the show. For me, growing up was a lot less tumultuous than it may have been for Mr. Matthews — but it was also a lot more boring.
At almost 22, though, it feels pointless to compare myself to the standards of a television sitcom. This year, I’ve been learning a lot about how to carry myself independently, now having formed a near-complete sense of self away from the friends and films that became my lifelines throughout college. In my journey toward that middle ground, I’ve come to find that art isn’t always a standard to project ourselves onto, nor something that we should use to override our sense of identity. Sometimes, it is just a friend that you can take comfort in.
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Sitting there on the couch, I languished in the show’s bittersweet final moments, realizing the ways I had unknowingly internalized its life lessons in the years since I last watched it. In particular, my mind replayed one of Mr. Feeny and Topanga’s final exchanges — a quote that had subconsciously lodged itself in my brain:
“Believe in yourselves. Dream. Try. Do good.”
“Don’t you mean do well?”
“No, I mean do good.”
Syndicated sitcoms aren’t the norm anymore. It’s been 25 years since “Boy Meets World” concluded, and in a world that demands increasing complexity in its art, the television programming around us has evolved to reflect that. In parallel, life never seems so simple anymore. Climate change, the job market, the AI revolution, the constant economic and political turmoil — I can’t tell if the world has gotten worse, or if these are all just symptoms of growing up.
Nonetheless, there are certain axioms and tenets that remain true in spite of the changing tides. There is always room for change, always room for persistence, and always room to do good for the world. Every so often, a friend’s advice becomes evergreen.
But I was tired. My head was heavy, and my cold was still getting the better of me, and so I settled into bed shortly after. Several disconcerting CNN headlines ran through my head, but this night, I had one pleasant thought to override the anxiety and ease me into the night: One of the most beautiful parts of our souls is how malleable it is, shifting and restructuring around the friends we love, the work we are passionate about, and the places we cherish. Humans have been around for 300,000 years, and even if the world is on fire, they will persist, taking on the world in their own, unique ways.
And you know what? I will too.