By fall 2000 the US Presidential Election was in full swing. I started college at Washington University in St. Louis. It was an extremely rocky transition for me. I was living away from home for the first time ever and surrounded by people I didn’t know. I lived in a high-rise co-ed dorm, Eliot Residence Hall. I shared a tiny room with two other students, but I was so standoffish that I cannot say that I was ever really friends with them. It was nerve-wracking.

I was not eating much during those initial months because I did not know how the cafeteria point system worked. I basically starved myself because I was too shy to ask for help. I went to student events and activities and sustained myself largely on free pizza. It was surreal. It was in that state — hungry, friendless, running on borrowed pizza — that I used the Activities Fair to feel out conservative campus groups. I largely didn’t speak at the meetings. I sat, ate pizza, and observed.

When I went to my first conservative meeting, we went around the table to give introductions. I was terrified. I told everybody that my political perspective was informed by The Playboy Forum — I had noticed some articles there that seemed pro-gun. I also framed my journey around the contradiction that my Catholic Democrat grandparents marched for pro-life causes but were always voting for pro-choice candidates. I had some difficulty wrapping my head around that one, and I guess I was fishing for clarity. I was still a believing, though lapsed, Catholic, so I took an explicitly pro-life stance. I feel differently today. It wasn’t the first contradiction I’d noticed in my family — just the first one I went looking for a philosophy to fix.

It was spring 2001 when I was introduced to libertarianism. I know that because I was already a libertarian when fall 2001 rolled around. Student groups introduced me to many friends in the conservative sphere, and two of them took it upon themselves to describe to me the political theory of libertarianism — at least the nuts and bolts. At the time, I was considering getting ahold of some cannabis and was looking into the ethics of this action despite explicitly joining conservative groups. I was shy, I was alone, and I was depressed. Eventually, I would also begin drinking while engaging with the groups once I was legally able to do so, though I was already accessing alcohol through friends before I even turned 21. This was my doorway into conservatism and libertarianism.

I went to those meetings sporadically throughout my college career, secure in the comfort that I was a libertarian. When a Hardee’s coworker offered to provide me a weed supply shortly after, it fit the shape of a philosophy I’d already half-built for myself. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan did the same work in reverse — instead of confirming a belief, they gave one to me. Every contradiction I’d been fishing for clarity on since that dinner table in 2000 — a party that talked freedom and legislated morality, a party that talked equality and asked me to trust its institutions — libertarianism offered to resolve in one motion.

I graduated college in 2004 having been to Heritage Foundation events, Intercollegiate Studies Institute seminars, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. This was not something I did regularly, but I would take whatever opportunity presented itself. I’d like to say I arrived at all of this through pure reasoning — and some of it was reasoning, real values I still hold in some form. But underneath the reasoning was a hungry, isolated freshman who found a room that gave him free food and, eventually, a coherent story about why he didn’t fit anywhere else. In this way, I firmly prepared myself for the Ron Paul Revolution that I will cover in another essay.