To myself in a year,

I hope that you have found happiness. I hope you have gone to an Ivy League university. And I hope that you still like to write random shit like this in the margins during boring class discussions.

Wm
12.4.2024

I don’t remember exactly what was going on last year in that December-morning English class at Harvard-Westlake, but I probably wasn’t paying attention and scribbled this note in the margins of my journal. Today, while I was going through my bookshelf, I happened to find this note. And I thought maybe some reflection and writing wouldn’t hurt. So here goes nothing.

Today marks another day of work in my life at Princeton. I finished a problem set this morning at 3 a.m., got through another chapter of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (which has been left unfinished on my dorm desk for a month now), and attended a rather pointless club meeting where we shuffled through slides that had so obviously been crafted by GPT. Tomorrow, I take the train up to New York again to grab a replacement pair of glasses for the last two I lost. After that, hopefully meet some old high-school friends for a dinner … to yap about politics, university life, and other observed bullshits of the world.

From a sober perspective, my life has never been better. Compared to where I was last year, things seem rather perfect. As I write to you right now, a majestic Princeton building lies in front of me; behind it is an equally majestic sunset. Below me is warm food, Small World Matcha, and an intellectual performative book by Foucault that I’ve been reading for my history/philosophy class.

There is always an urge to complain about many things, but I can’t. The grass always seems “greener on the other side,” but it probably isn’t. In the last two months, I have probably met more interesting people than I have in the last two years. I no longer spend my weekends locked up grinding pointless high-school extracurriculars or spitting out dumb rhetoric at debate tournaments; I now find spontaneous stuff to do in New York. I go to random galleries, slide into jazz clubs, and order Joe’s Pizza at two in the morning. Oh, and I don’t skip breakfast every day like I used to; I get an omelet every day at the dining hall. For the first time in my life, I feel rather free … like I am entirely in the driver’s seat. If life were a video game, it would appear to me as if all the features have finally unlocked. I have the full opportunity to admire, smile, and glamorize all the serious beauty in the world around me.

I found a rather fitting quote on an Instagram reel just a couple of days ago: “What a privilege to be in a place that your past self would have dreamt of.”

But now the butterflies have begun to settle. In all honesty, that initial excitement (and nervousness) of college life has subsided. I take increasingly less time to admire the Gothic architecture around me; I am simply in a rush to my next class. I find fewer and fewer opportunities to keep in touch with the people I met during orientation; I spend most of my evenings just chipping away at math problem sets. I don’t wake up with the same enthusiasm and energy I carried a month ago; I have once again found myself in a same-old-same-old routine. To my great disappointment, what I once viewed as exciting has once again become the ordinary.

If at the very top of the mountain — where all of life really does seem quite perfect, free, entirely within my control — why is it that I still seep back into a sense of incompleteness? Why is it that I have not exactly found “sustainable happiness”? Why is it that I am left still a little bit unfulfilled?

I obviously do not go about my day-to-day work with such a sentimental mentality. I do not walk from class to class with a strange philosophical quirk on my face and act all boozy/down during every interaction I have. But the truth is, during late nights when I am alone and studying, busy with my own thoughts in my dorm room, it does occur to me to think about where I am in life, or better yet, where I am headed. And in all honesty, the truth is I do not exactly know.

To conjure up an answer, I’ll spit out a theory I have about the world and ourselves. Maybe it is relatable, maybe it will turn out sounding crazy. There is a sort of late-night syndrome to philosophical introspection. During the day, it’s difficult work to be seriously reflective; from 30-minute reminders for the next thing across campus to constantly feeling like you must LinkedIn-optimize, the business of everyday life simply leaves no room for philosophizing. But when it’s late at night, and there is not much more productivity to churn out of yourself, and the world around you seems oddly stale, and you want to stay up just to think for the sake of thinking, and you’re too tired to get your gears really rolling, you finally give up the shield/mask of work and productivity that you carry throughout the day. You finally have the chance to sit down and reflect on why you’re even working at all.

Perhaps you might find this “late-night syndrome” relatable. When we’re tired, we’re more honest. We’re more of ourselves. We embody the people we don’t necessarily show to others; the people with dreams and goals and thoughts that we guard/shield from the rest of society. We sketch up ideas, brainstorm things we want for our lives, set goals that we might never even have a chance of achieving, et cetera.

But when it’s morning again, all of that disappears, and we fall right back into the feeling that everything is a plain old routine. We fall right back into the daily grind of having things to attend, to-do lists to run through, and people to perform for. And all those vivid, colorful dreams get shoved back onto the back-burner again and again, until one day they are left unfulfilled and forgotten.

Maybe this is just a feature of modern society. It would be easy if we were all farmers who waited the seasons out, planted the crops according to schedule, tallied up harvests, prayed for the right weather conditions, fed ourselves alone with our family, and repeated this process until we died. Our purposes would be set out for us from the get-go, our “life choices” wouldn’t be that dramatic, and we wouldn’t have all these random dreams about doing things out in the world. After all, there wouldn’t be much out there but farmland.

But we were born hundreds of years too late, for the better or for the worse. In all the in-between centuries, societies innovated, fought, and struggled so that our lives in the Global North could be more specialized, more independent, freer to trample into any career path that we would ever want. Today, one could be born in Los Angeles, get their degree in London, spend their twenties in New York, work abroad in Tokyo, and still ultimately come back to their hometown in less than 24 hours. More significantly, however, is that one can compare their life with anyone across the globe on a planet of 8 billion people, constantly seeing what is out there and what might be possible. There is always an Asian someone better than you, something greater to achieve, something that you don’t have.

And perhaps it is exactly this feeling of limitless opportunity that drives our limitless dissatisfaction. With all there is in the world, we feel a constant need to continue optimizing, ladder-climbing, and building boring routines to be the best in whatever we are told we must be the best in, and maybe after a while, that inevitably gets all the more tiring.

It’s almost as if Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison system has realized itself in modern life. In this jail design, a ring of cells surrounds a central “guard tower” that supposedly polices everyone; it is unclear whether someone is even in the tower, but everyone polices each other anyway for fear that there may be a guard.

Though it’s a bit of an overly intense analogy, I find it at least somewhat fitting to our world today. Globalization has made it so that we are constantly visible, constantly compared, and constantly measured against people that we have never met. Everyone feels pressured by everyone such that nobody feels adequate, and everyone copies and competes such that our lives are no longer our own.

There is something ironic about this; if anything, the opportunities of modern society — the promises of going to the top ranked university in the country — should mean that we have it all. It should mean that we don’t feel constrained, but rather free. Yet when I look around Princeton, I see exactly the same Panopticon mentality from the high-school college admissions process being recreated in real-time. It’s the same game of ladder-climbing as before, only now, instead of fighting about who gets to go to Harvard and Yale, it’s a battle for who lands the job at McKinsey, who recruits into Goldman Sachs, who obtains the travel opportunity, gets the relationship, wins the “game of life.” All has been put up for comparison and made into a climbable ladder.

I could end the essay here, but I would be pretty upset at myself. I would be no more than a complacent post-modern critical theorist slam-critiquing the world yet too lazy to find a reasonable solution. So I must find an answer: what do we do against this imposing “Panopticon” of the modern economy?

A few weeks ago, I became pretty interested in the ideas of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose 1946 book The Existentialism of Humanism might offer some insight here. He explains that there are two perspectives of seeing the world and life’s purpose; the first is that essence precedes existence. Your life has a purpose given to you — maybe that is from your parents’ goals for you, maybe it is through landing a job at the Big Three banks, maybe it is attending an Ivy League — whatever it is, your existence and actions primarily serve that goal. But the second perspective is what interests me more, that existence precedes essence. What if your life did not come with a predetermined purpose, and your purpose was made as you travelled through life itself? What if, after crossing one bridge, it wasn’t the world’s responsibility to tell you what to do, but your own? What if your actions, thoughts, and doings dictated where you went, rather than some arbitrary goal assigned to you by the rest of society?

What if you really believed in all those late-night thoughts and dreams that we so often throw away?

I’m not saying that traditional ladder climbing in life is bad. Maybe it is toxic, maybe you will get tired of all the stupid technical interviews along the way, and maybe it won’t be the glamorous life that is marketed to you. But all of the post-Ivy League plans, whether they be management consulting, finance, or law school, are all frankly quite comfortable. All I am saying is that there is something constraining about focusing all of your purpose on such a plan. There’s something exhausting about trying so hard to get into an Ivy League and then continuing to play a game of comparison for the rest of your life.

If all of life is split-screening your LinkedIn bio with the LinkedIn bios of a hundred thousand other job-seeking college students, even the beautiful halls of Princeton won’t revive your dying butterflies and ambition.

So maybe Sartre offers an escape, a blueprint of how to live in today’s economy. For myself and you who are reading — for the overachievers, the Ivy League students, the prestige seekers — maybe the answer isn’t in climbing the ladder that everyone else has climbed. Maybe the answer isn’t in embracing the Panopticon and playing exactly by all its rules. To feel truly motivated and free, to find that feeling of something exciting and new, to feel once again the enthusiasm and energy of a new Princeton student, perhaps the trick is for us to go ahead and “create our own essence.”

In other words, outside of the what we are constantly told to do, outside of the obligations that weigh us down, maybe there are things more subtle in life that we must focus on to unlock “sustainable happiness.” Maybe those things are what come after we “make it,” or even while we are making it. Buy that book you’ve been eyeing at Barnes and Noble or Labyrinth. Admire the sunsets that you always want to admire. Do the things in the gym which you have always thought of doing. Start the startup you have been planning in late-nights out with your friend. Write the book you have been brainstorming ideas about for years. Ask that girl you have been admiring on a date. Take a trip to the place in the world you have always wanted to see. Try everything there is in the world and take initiative on all the dreams you have dreamt of, because in the end, maybe that is what is special about modern society. Maybe that is what will motivate me, what will push me out of my same-old-same-old routine and allow my eyes to open once again to all the beauty in the world.

A month ago, I saw a pretty famous quote by Picasso under one of his paintings at the MoMA, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” I find quite some depth in that statement. When we’re children, we have so many aspirations and imaginative dreams, so many late-night visions we get just staring at the blank ceilings of our hometown bedrooms. I guess the greatest difficulty is remembering that childhood spirit — even in a world that might burn you out.

The other day, while riding the NYC subway, a random dude started looking at me and yelling “what are you doing with your life? what are you doing with your life?” repeatedly.

I spent most of my life on the West Coast in the safety of my parents’ Honda, so I pretty quickly switched subway cars and texted my friend the funny thing that just happened. Here’s what he said:

“Yeah, they’re psycho. But not going to lie, there is something admirable about just saying and doing whatever the hell you want.”

I’m in no support of insanity, craziness, or weirdo behavior. But in all honesty, what my friend said was food for thought. It’s easy for us privileged Ivy-League students to conform, get stuck in the constant ladder-climb, focus only on outcompeting those around you and doing what you “have to do.” It’s easy to pretend, walking around with the spirit of our LinkedIn bios and a perpetual performance of the ultimate careerist. But beneath it all, when we are tired and it is late at night and we are dreaming of what our lives could be and nobody is looking — maybe that is when we can be human again. Maybe that is when our true “sustainable happiness” might finally manifest.

So to my year-ago self, here is what I have learned in these eleven months. Happiness, as it turned out, wasn’t just about going to an Ivy League. It wasn’t about the next grade I got, the next ladder-climbing project I completed, the next award I got to tell others I won. All of that eventually got boring, if not tiring. Happiness was in embracing the small dreams I had, the daily beauties of the world, the “writing random shits in the margins of my English book” and then getting to talk about it here with you all.

Maurice Ravel wrote a piano suite in 1904 titled Miroirs.1 My favorite movement, Une barque sur l’ocean, is about “a small boat in the ocean” which is up against the unpredictable forces of the sea. I was too young to understand then, but my late piano teacher used to say that it was all just an impressionist analogy for our lives. We are in a large world with waves pushing us in every direction, and the beautiful struggle of life is remembering how to sail without losing our childhood dreams.

Three days ago, while sitting out in my front yard, I posted on my private Snap story, “Good weather is not just about the sun being out; it’s about the air being crisp.”

That Tuesday afternoon was quite the stream of dopamine. I was sitting in wet grass, finishing up the last few chapters of Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, and listening to my neighbor’s 5-year-old laugh as he repeatedly attempted lay-ups in the driveway across from mine. Forgive my over-dramatizing, but in that moment — or couple hours, really — I didn’t need much else in life. Gone were concerns about money, fame, success, reputation, or attention. My mind was just bathing in the sunlight, my eyes absorbing the scene, my soul “living in the present.”

Ah, the life of a second semester senior. Just a few months earlier, when sitting in this exact driveway, I was still stuck in that junior-year-I-need-to-get-into-college mentality. In fact, the last time I wrote about a moment in my front yard, I was devastated and filled with anxiety.

“I found myself, some morning in the middle of September, sitting alone in the grass outside by my driveway … Just a week earlier, I had missed five days of school to travel to a debate tournament in Dallas, and consequently, had been thrown off balance in much of my academic work. I had to make up four tests in the span of the next couple days and turn in several assignments I had missed.

So that morning, I was totally blown out, staring into the driveway like it was a bottomless abyss to jump into.”

—William’s Musings, in the midst of eleventh grade

And here I was now, 17 months later, smiling in that very “bottomless abyss.” I couldn’t help but wonder: what gave me joy so suddenly? Maybe it was the birds chirping in the distance, or the laughter of the family across my street. Perhaps it was the straight flush I hit earlier in the day on my rigged-fake-money Poker account, the coconut milk in my Starbucks Pink Drink, the sound of Keshi’s acoustic guitar in my JBL-Go.

I pondered this question for a while. It wasn’t any of those individual things. It was God.

You’re probably thinking: what an illogical leap, jumping in one sentence from the frame of a delicate driveway to a thesis about our world and the divine. I get it, slow down.

I’ll begin at the start of 2025, the time of year when I usually get a bombardment of “new year’s motivation” on social media, an endless flood of “motivational content” encouraging me to set new goals, hit the gym, achieve “peak productivity,” and achieve the ultimate comeback. I’ve learned to ignore these pieces of “encouragement” over the years — not because they aren’t true — but because I know myself better than anyone. I know that my lazy bum, two weeks into January, will have abandoned every new years’ resolution I vowed to make, falling back in the trap of brain-rot reels, procrastination, and heavy caffeine consumption. Knowing myself, why even bother?

Well, this year was different. I was through the gates of second-semester seniorhood, on the brink of heading to some university far from home, and geared for a total life reset. 2025 was already bound to be a year of change, so if there was any better time to rethink the way I was living, it was now. So off I was, exploring online YouTube motivational videos to help me on this journey. Matt D’Avella’s “I tracked my mood every day for one year.” Ali Abdaal’s “How to change your life in 90 days.” For about fifteen videos in a row, I skipped the ad(s), set the playback speed to 2x, jotted down any main points on an index card, then moved on and repeated until eventually, I stumbled upon Tim Wildsmith’s “How to Read the Entire Bible in a Year … and Make it Count.”

For context, here’s some of my background with religion. My grandpa’s where it stems from — he’s got a portrait of Jesus on his nightstand, prays regularly, reads the Bible, and has always encouraged me to do the same. In my formative years, I attended a Christian Science school — we had chapel assembly every morning, daily silent prayer, singing of various hymns, et cetera. And for several years, I prayed to God a few times every week, asking for blessings many of which He has fulfilled. But just a few months ago — when I was first beginning this “new year’s reset” — if you had quizzed me on any details within the Bible, I would fail miserably. Not only has it been six years since elementary school, I’ve just straight up never read the Bible. Now seemed like a good time to try.

Wildsmith’s video boils down to this: most people don’t read the entire Bible in a year — let alone ever — because the task just seems too daunting for them. The whole text is over 700,000 words, so one would have to make a detailed plan over 365 days, then somehow muster up enough discipline and motivation to stick to that plan. Given my track record, this seemed near impossible.

But I thought I would give it a shot. I ran down to my local bookstore, bought a small-sized Fabriano notebook, and wrote on the inside: “William Liu, 2025 Bible Journal.” Below, the first entry, “Genesis 1.” A physical pen and paper would perhaps ingrain some semblance of routine for myself.

So for the next couple months, before I went to bed — whether that was at 8 P.M. or 2 A.M. — I made sure to read a couple chapters of the Bible in chronological order as well as a psalm or two, jotting down relevant notes, thoughts, connections, and realizations. Slowly, I made my way through the Old Testament.

I must be honest: there were several days I missed in my scheduled Bible in a Year plan. Perhaps I fell asleep late at night, was “busy” at a debate tournament, or simply just didn’t feel it. No, I’m not proud of those moments, but I am grateful that I’ve kept up with this for almost a third of the year. Knowing myself, I really thought I wouldn’t get past mid-January.

Reading the Bible has taught me a lot about life, happiness, suffering, and gratitude. In each biblical story, law, or song (psalm), I find a lot in ancient scripture that reflects on how I live in 2025. In times of struggle and sin, when I feel tempted to ignore God’s word — choosing to lash out, lie, or spread negativity — I am reminded of the downfall of Egypt’s king in Exodus, who’s heart was “hardened” and enslaved the Israelites despite the Lord’s repeated warnings. When I feel down, sad, or defeated, I remember God’s mercy in Leviticus, keeping his covenant to the Promised Land despite allowing the Israelites wander and starve in the wilderness for forty years. And when I’m just unsure about whether God is really there, I remember to read through a Psalm and copy down some powerful verses as if I am speaking to Him directly.

Many supported my work until, just a couple days ago, when I showed this journal to a friend, his immediate response was: “Can I just ask, what’s even your motivation behind this?”

My initial response was anger. I felt that my faith was being questioned, that a difficult project I had pursued was being asked of its “validity” or “genuineness.” I wanted instant approval of my work for what it was, not skepticism about its quality or intent. In my heart, I felt resentment, insecurity, and fear. Who was my friend to look down upon something I was working on?

When working through a page of my journal that night, I thought pretty deeply about that moment. And although I was initially angry at my friend for asking that, it was an important question. Was I really praying for a genuine relationship with Him, or simply doing so out of fear of the college decisions releasing in a month? Was I journaling every day because I believed in the teachings of Jesus, or simply replicating spiritual superiority like Pauline Puyat in Tracks? Frankly, I was unsure about this myself, so I began seeking out some semblance of an answer.

To begin, while religion is often used in the name of superiority, conquest, and “moral high-ground,” scripture teaches us quite the opposite. Because we are all born with sin and a tendency toward it, God teaches us that we are “dust” and that we should never “act like God.” One should “love their neighbor,” not act above them.

With that basis, my question becomes easy to answer. When truly listening to the teachings of God — the lessons in each Bible story — there is no place for “spiritual superiority,” or “praying for the purpose of college.” And that exactly been my story: through reading the Bible over time, I’ve focused less and less on what God can do for me, and more on what I can do for God.

That’s the best thing I’ve taken away from the Bible. Through reading it daily, speaking about it, and thinking about God’s words, I’ve felt happier as a person. I’ve learned to not “want” things from God, but be appreciative of what I have. I’ve learned that, in response to questions like that posed by my friend, I shouldn’t angrily declare my pride as “threatened”; I should look to the words of God and find security in His teachings.

See, that’s the gratitude which fueled my joy on that Tuesday afternoon, in the sunlight of my front yard. Yes, there was still that 1900-word-minimum AP Government discussion, that impossible physics take-home test, that string of uncompleted linear algebra LaTeX problems. But when I looked up to the spirit of God — a higher power and purpose — and all that He had to teach, I felt just a little more comfort in where I was, comfort for all the little things I often overlook. As a human being born in sin, God’s mercy is what I find in the warm sunlight, the distant laughter of my neighbor’s child, and the beauty of music in my JBL speaker.

I didn’t write this as a means of “converting my readers” or “spreading the Gospel.” There are pastors, priests, and far more religiously dedicated individuals who can accomplish that task miles better than I. After all, I’m still naïve about religion. All I can say is that a little bit of gratitude and alignment with Jesus’ teachings has gone a long way in my journey for happiness.

As in all my posts, I included that song at the top for a reason. Not just because I love Mac DeMarco, but because he spoke so well to all that I just touched on. Sometimes, you’ll find me rude and uncaring, arrogant and prideful, ungrateful and demanding. But if there’s any room for hope, just know that this year, even that “bottomless abyss” in my front yard can be a place where I’ll smile.

Sometimes my love may be put on hold
Sometimes my heart may seem awful cold
These times come and these times go
As long as I live, all you need to know is

This old dog ain't about to forget
All we've had
And all that's next

6 P.M. Saperstein Theater. With no upcoming shows or concerts, the space was fully empty for us. I sat a few rows back in the audience section, observing from afar as I laughed at her dance on stage.

Afterwards, we went outside. We laid on the wet grass, imagining what senior year would be like. We didn’t bother to write much down, but we conjured up a few imaginary bullet points: the ring ceremony, commencement, prom, taking photos before flying off to college. Beyond the more formal milestones, we wondered: would we even remember each other by senior year? Would we still be close, share the same classes, have time for these thoughtful moments of pause?

Those deep-thinking conversations were common that year. I often stayed after school to speak with her in random areas all across campus — the lounge, backstage of Saperstein Theater, classrooms on the third floor of Hazy. With no personal blog in ninth grade, my thoughts often flowed to individuals like her, people that I cared about most.

My camera roll holds snapshots of those fleeting moments: the two of us fooling around on the Steinway piano in Bing, launching paper airplanes in the ninth-grade lounge, and sprinting through the language classrooms of Wang. Play any of these memories against the backdrop of an old song, and voilà, what a hit of nostalgia. A beautiful past to reminisce.

Frankly, though, I rarely encounter her these days. Outside of an occasional hallway glance or a hello-in-the-cafeteria-line moment, she barely crosses my mind anymore, and I’m likely the same to her — a distant figure she once knew, no longer relevant to her life.

This is, of course, inevitable. Even with those whom I still share classes and lunch tables with, many have changed drastically. They’ve matured, turned into brilliant, refined people — but they’ve also left behind parts of themselves we can’t ever reclaim, parts that I sometimes miss.

Such is the result of changing people, changing interests, and changing paths. Those we thought we’d be stuck with forever become insignificant and irrelevant over time. Those who we shared our deepest secrets with eventually lose any investment on remembering what we ever told them. Our seemingly closest friends eventually drift away, leaving us with nothing but the thought of new people and ideas.

Right before summer commenced, I was convinced by a friend to revisit the Middle School campus — a nostalgic haven. I did a lap around all the buildings, checking out each of the important spots I cared about, every place that I spent meaningful time.

Saperstein was one of them. But so were several Wang rooms, the Math office, the small conference rooms in Hazy, the Latin classroom, all those practice rooms in Bing.

In those places, I often would space out, losing track of my present self. Call me psychotic, but I would sit for a few seconds, a few minutes, perhaps even a half-hour in some of these rooms, thinking over all the little events that filled up the spaces I was in. With intense concentration, my memory would unravel all the vague details of middle school life in my head: the seating arrangement of the Latin classroom, the Debussy works we played in Bing, the hilarious interactions I had with my seventh grade math teacher. I would reabsorb the vibe of those rooms, remembering that indeed, this truly was that place. Six years ago, where my time at Harvard-Westlake began.

So on that night at the Middle School campus, I was genuinely nostalgic looking around. I felt a sense of sadness — an almost post-apocalyptical vision, or a hazy dream of sorts. It was like a scene from Inception, when Cobb is stuck in limbo, a “subconscious state where you are in a deep level of dreaming with no clear escape.”1 Sitting in a world that no longer exists, but still seeing parts or remnants of it show up.

Fast forward to a different story: I arrived in Michigan this summer alone. It had been a while since I had deeply involved myself in music, and consequently, I had nobody I immediately knew at camp.

So on the first afternoon, unlocking the key to my dorm, I plopped my stuff down and observed my room. Across from my bed lay my roommate’s violin case.

For a good couple minutes, I looked afar to understand the various stickers that had covered his instrument. Kendrick’s album art. Various youth symphonies that he had participated in. A picture of some girl. How interesting, I thought. I wondered who this person was, judging merely based off the top of his violin case. Turns out it was a viola case.

But we turned out to get along quite well. My roommate and I — and a few others whom I had met — engaged in fairly deep conversations at night after long hours of practicing. Even in the midst of room checks, hallway monitors, and several bangs on our door to “stay silent,” we managed to chat about a litany of things from ramen to Sibelius. He asked me about L.A, I asked him about Chicago. He asked me about Latin, I asked him about French. He asked me about debate, I asked him about dance.

Pretty cool how much you can learn from someone in just a week. By the end of camp, our small group of musicians grew pretty damn tight. We had conversations about practically everything — from the mundane to the profound — with people who, just weeks ago, had been complete strangers.

On the last night, while packing my things, it finally hit me that I would (most likely) never see these folks again. I wasn’t going to become a music major like those around me, and by returning to my L.A. world of Harvard-Westlake academia, I would never get to spend nine hours a day practicing, speaking, and thinking about music like I did at camp. For that brief moment, I had that same strange feeling I had while sitting at the middle school: that I was letting go of important people, once again.

Over the last few weeks of summer, I took the time to call a bunch of old friends. Many of them were in music. Buddies from a childhood piano class, old friends whom I toured Carnegie Hall with, cabinmates from the weeks I spent over the summers sailing and wakeboarding.

And eventually, I called my friends from music camp — this year. Because I missed them too. I wanted to have that hilarious conversation in the bathroom again, that funny sight-reading session, that ridiculous improv sequence in the hallways.

And while calling my music camp friends, I realized something interesting. As much as I missed my freshman friends in Saperstein Theater, my old orchestra buddies in Dorthey Chandler, my cabinmates on Shaver Lake, my debate camp friends at Simpson College, my robotics team members at the Dallas Convention Center — as much as I missed all those people in my past — I just as much missed the music camp friends I was on the phone with, the individuals whom I had just met a month ago. Right there in the wake of my nostalgia, I missed friends who — just a few weeks back — I wouldn’t have imagined of missing.

See, the most important people in our lives are not necessarily those that have left us, moved on, or passed away. The most important people in our lives will be the ones we are yet to meet.

When I visit Italy this spring, I’ll meet individuals whom I’ll maybe never get to see again. When I go off to college, I’ll meet a roommate whom I’ll only spend a couple years with. When I get a job, I’ll meet coworkers who leave and move on. With anyone we’ll get to know in our futures, our closest people will eventually drift away, making each of our days with them ever more significant.

There is a beauty in the impermanence of relationships — or perhaps even in life itself. It sets a timer on our most meaningful moments, preserving them as events we can later revisit in 'Inception-limbo.' In the limited time that we have, every new interaction is all the more valuable. Every new friend is a chance to create a meaningful experience, one that will make an impact before time runs out.

One day, years after my time at Harvard-Westlake, I’ll look back and smile at all the good people I knew here. My time on the debate team, my role in the orchestra, my laughs during late-evening layouts, my collection of blogposts, my funny AP Chemistry class, my heartwarming teachers, my hilarious lunch table. And frankly, I’ll miss this part of my life too. Now is the time to enjoy it.

”It’s over.”

The #1 phrase I deployed this last year, my personal brain-rot slang, my go-to hallway conversation-starter after every assessment.

Frankly, it was never really over. Eventually, I crossed the finish line with good grades, cool awards, and a compilation of humorous moments from all the times I broke down due to AP Latin.1 But now — 9 months and 17 all-nighters later — junior year is truly over. I have exited the ivory gates of hell; 83% of my time at Harvard-Westlake has passed.

Junior year is often known as the “hardest year of high school”. You take the hardest classes, try the most extra-curriculars, grind out the SAT/ACT, probably go on the lookout for an internship, et cetera. You are expected to wear as many hats as possible without tipping your whole hat-stack over, completing as many side quests that will paint an adequate picture for the mighty college application without blowing your brains out. Junior year is “the part where mental stability meets talent”, to quote Kendrick Lamar.

So before I head off to a few intense weeks of crying over Sibelius’ fingered octaves music camp, I thought I would ink out a more lighthearted post than what I’ve been writing on here recently, something that compiled all the bits and pieces of advice that I jotted down during all my 3 AM study sessions this last year. Here are the most notable things I learned from all 17 all-nighters — advice for both junior year and stressed-out people alike.

1. You aren’t running out of time. You are running out of energy.

I have always believed the following: if I had twice as many hours in a day, I would do twice as many things. That was my Newton’s Fourth Law — my personal truism across time, space, and whatever dimension my work would travel to. All that mattered was seconds — the more, the better.

Pretty soon, I realized that that was a reductive approach. It didn’t matter if I had ninety hours a day because I couldn’t make it through the first six. By the seventh hour, I was either passionately clenching a cup of coffee or crashed in the corner of Silent Study. No in-between.

I am not the worst example. A friend who lives in Kansas can’t get out of bed without a caffeine pill. Presumably, he began as I did — pulling an all-nighter, needing a stimulant to catch up, getting the afternoon crash, increasing his caffeine dosage to recover, building up a tolerance, trying out a Celsius, continuing to spiral his way to a heart attack.

No matter how much caffeine I consumed, the stimulant could not replace the restorative effects of true sleep, the recoveries I needed after each all-nighter. Absent actual rest, my work patterns became increasingly inefficient; during my energy highs, I would waste my time by jittering in my seat, running around randomly, and joining random yap-fests; during my energy lows, I sat defeated as I pushed through my work, struggling to focus and eventually folding to a looming 10-minute nap. As such, caffeine made my energy levels resemble sine or cosine — never truly stable, always uneven, and inevitably bound to dip.

So don’t get on coffee, don’t pursue the all-nighter, and don’t get into this horrible cycle. That’s the first and foremost tip of junior year.

2. Sorry, but it will not “all be fine.”

The most common piece of advice I have gotten throughout my brief lifetime: “It will all be fine, stop worrying.”

It’s probably true. No matter what happens, most of us lucky-ducks that attend privileged private institutions will have no problem seeing wonderful opportunities down the line. Sure, we won’t be guaranteed POTUS or the Fortune 500, but few of us will truly end up as Arthur Fleck.

That being said, the idea that it would “all be fine” was extremely harmful for me. As much as I used the advice to comfort myself in times of stress, I also used it as false assurance that I could begin a 4-hour long debate on universal healthcare and still finish my history research paper without an all-nighter.

Better known as procrastination, this disease plagued my junior year. It infected my coursework, my extracurriculars, and my hobbies. Confident that “it would all be fine,” I refused to begin important work until the very last minute. I was strung with the belief that if I waited until the last 5 minutes to complete a 5 month foreign policy paper, the paper would take 5 minutes. How mistaken I was.

The problem with junior year is that things keep getting thrown at you. If you don’t tackle an inbox item on Monday, chances are you’ll miss it Tuesday, ignore it Wednesday, and forget it Thursday. By Friday, you might find yourself frantically memorizing 1200 lines of Caesar in less than 24 hours.

We procrastinate because we find that tasks are daunting. We don’t respond to emails because we aren’t 100% sure what to say. We don’t start huge assignments because we just don’t feel “locked in” yet. As a result, we use excuses like “it will all be fine” to infinitely delay our work. We ghost emails, miss assignments, and pull all-nighters for deadlines.

To some degree, I procrastinate because I like it. Ironic as it seems, something about the panic monster that suddenly appears right before a major deadline, the sudden wakefulness to get going, and the ultimate I-didn’t-think-I-could-finish-but-I-somehow-did high all make procrastination a rather thrilling habit for me.

But at the cost of more stability? At the cost of ruining my sleep schedule and running out of energy? No thank you.

I'm starting to see that all I have to do is get up and go
Goin', goin', goin', before I'm gone

— Mac Miller, “Surf”

These days, I’d rather tell myself that it won’t “all be fine.” I better get going.

3. No offense, but your brain just isn’t all that.

I don’t consider myself to be unorganized. I have a planner, sort out my subjects well, and rarely lose important documents. But on many early 5 A.M. mornings — the ones where my half-closed eyes are darting across a textbook memorizing the last couple topics of an important exam — I question whether I am truly that organized intellectual I once narcissistically thought I was.

A summer or two ago, I spent quite a bit of time reading self-help books, the advice of which seemed to fly straight over my head. In the suffering of junior year, I revisited the words of Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain.

Humans have limited memory. We aren’t computers, and we don’t have 500 gigabytes to store full datasets in our small brains. In fact, I myself struggle remembering the few Reimann Sum formulas for arc length, disks, and washers, let alone the laundry list of tasks that make up junior year.

Forte’s advice was this: take only the truly noteworthy ideas, put them in a database like Notion, highlight your interpretation of those, simplify that interpretation, and repeat. In due time, information will become easy to remember.

In other words, two takeaways:

1. Write stuff down.

2. Simplify.

What I did right there was an example of Forte’s advice in action. I took two sentences filled with adjectives and descriptors and collapsed their ideas to two tiny bullet points. As such, my points became simpler, my life slightly easier.

This could be applied to any academic studying, but I found it even more useful on the level of planning. Instead of creating elaborate schedules bombarded with the 800+ tasks that appeared in my inbox over the week, I would group things, simplify tasks, and compress things to make my life seem easy. And in that way, I didn’t have much to remember or retain in my head. Everything was easily tucked away somewhere on my planner, my second-brain.

4. The numbers 93 and 100 both show up as an ‘A.’

A 93% average in a class is not perfect. You got most stuff right, studied quite hard, and earned a gold-star for figuring out how to beat everything but a sliver of the course.

A 100% average is perfect. With the exception of some extra-credit possibilities, you quite literally did not misunderstand a single thing about the course.

An 86% to a 93% and a 93% to a 100% both require a 7% jump. But the latter? Far harder. Because the closer you get to perfection, the harder it becomes.

There’s a principle called the law of diminishing returns. Adding “more” won’t always produce more, and as you get better and better, the same amount of work produces less and less change. It’s easy to start reading your history textbook to get a few more multiple-choice correct, but almost impossible to literally memorize Howard Zinn that even the most niche questions won’t throw you off.

Yes, memorizing Howard Zinn is ridiculous. And so is the opportunity cost of time that you could’ve spent studying other subjects, going for a run, playing blackjack, watching AI-generated LeBron, literally anything. That investment for the absolute 100% — when you already had a 93% — would be useless.

Of course, most aren’t obsessive enough to actually care about the final 7% in their courses. But in almost every other activity — sports, instruments, et cetera — there is no clear cutoff or threshold, no 93% that calls it a day. And as a result, many surpass the point of diminishing returns, burning themselves out when they don’t need to.

And so, as shown in the illustration, too many cooks means you aren’t cooking.

5. Look back, look forward, look around.

One of my more recent posts was on the importance of looking at your past to produce purpose, reflecting to create meaning. When we see how far we’ve come, we understand the meaning of living better, the joy in all those around us.

That keeps you going a lot in your junior year. There will be times in which life seems suffering, in which school feels like a cold, wet blanket draped over your life. But to appreciate the happier moments at other times, to listen to music that made you once smile, to think about friends that you had funny times with — all of that will give you a sense of meaning in a meaningless year.

Look forward too. Find the excitements you anticipate in activities, the places you would like to go, the life you imagine yourself to live. For me, my imagination of Greece two weeks before the trip kept my engine running for the last classes before spring break, and my excitement for the TOC pushed me through the horrible test weeks of April.

Besides, time moves fastest when you are busy. Any moment of endless, insufferable grinding will eventually end so long as you keep your head up and don’t stop. In fact, with junior year as fast as it is, you shouldn’t forget to look around and enjoy the small day-to-day joyful moments that won’t come back to you later. Because frankly, if it wasn’t for the ironic humor in my AP Calculus BC class, the trolling in my AP Chemistry class, or the dumbest conversations in dark practice rooms, I wouldn’t have made it.

My favorite memory from the year was while “looking around” on that Greece trip. Atop a ridge in Delphi, I remember something so special about that mountain range view, something that deeply influenced my perspective on life. Frankly, when I saw something that large and beautiful in our world, I noticed: all those academic terms and debate buzzwords truly meant something more than myself. That view was a call to humility, a call to zoom out of the vacuum or black hole of junior year work.

6. You aren’t special.

From a very young age, we are told that we are unique. We are individuals that have our own experiences, our own thoughts, our own interests.

What we don’t get told enough as how much we all are the same. Because truly, everyone gets stressed whether it’s junior year of high school or your second day of investment banking. No matter what, we’re all united in that matter.

So next time you face an unconquerable mountain of work, next time you punch the air as you gaze upon an imperfect transcript, remember that you aren’t alone. Everyone has felt like that. Even those with seemingly perfect achievements can sometimes be so used to perfection that they never feel complete.

Junior year will test your limits. It will push you to pull all-nighters, encourage you to abuse caffeine, and convince you to give up. But with healthy sleeping habits, time management, and the correct mentality, it may not be so bad after all. It may not be truly “over.”

Driving along Telegraph Avenue with a Matcha in one hand and the Berkeley Champion plate in the other, my coach said in the darkness of 1 in the morning:

“Well, you’re halfway there to being good now.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Now, you have to win everything.”

Winning a debate tournament is one of the best feelings on the emotional spectrum. Finishing AP Latin comes close, but there’s nothing like what a championship brings to your veins, the feeling of having triumphed over a huge pool of debaters, having your hard work validated.

Conversely, anything below expectations comes close to exactly the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. Two hours into the Tournament of Champions (TOC), I began with a record of 0-2 and, as I remember quite clearly, I paced along the road opposite Gatton Student Center, wishing in my head that I could simply give up and cry alone. As I ate with my teammates, I was fully distraught, contemplating how my junior year of debate would not end with a bang, but total defeat at the most important tournament of the year. Hours of work and an entire summer, all for nothing.1

This is what debate has done to me. It has brought me the happiest moments of my life, but also the most sad and broken parts as well. It has given me wonderful people, experiences, and memories to appreciate, but has also taken away many calm and peaceful weekends — the ones where I lose, not win. It has made the hotel room one of the happiest sites of celebration post-victory, but also one of the most hellish prisons post-defeat.

So I thought that, since it constituted so much of my life, I would reflect on my career in debate.

It’s lonely in finals. Almost every time I make it to the end of a debate tournament, nobody stays. My teammates and coaches fly home, younger debaters are long gone, and of those equal competitors who would’ve also made finals — many surrender themselves to their hotel rooms, questioning the utility of watching a round they should have been in. At the very top, there is not much outside of my opponent, three judges, and one championship trophy.

Yet even so, that trophy holds more power over my weekly (or even monthly) happiness than almost everything else. This is the power I assign to a win, the power of being 1st place on Tabroom.

It is almost by no surprise that my workspace is filled with my awards. On the left, my USC and Berkeley champion plates, on the right, the clock from winning the Greenhill Round Robin, All around are top speaker awards from various tournaments throughout the year, bundled in with medals from violin competitions. Whenever I would feel down or sad, I would only have to look up at what I accomplished, the things I’ve won, and the material worth of my victories. Right?

Because almost certainly, if I was sad about anything, all that mattered was how much of a winner I was. Broken in pieces and suffering through every element of my day, I knew that my problems could simply be solved by striving for another trophy, another bid, another win. If relationships were awkward or failed, if I disliked someone, if something bad happened, I would just have to work harder and overcome that with material trophies. In our society, you aren’t rewarded for what you think about yourself, but for what others think of you. Look at what you have, and imagine that there will be more.

Hence why, for my February playlist, I quite literally inscribed the word “trophies” in the description. That’s all that my awards meant to me — a collection of things that I worked for, lived for, and understood as my ultimate destiny. I was my awards, and my awards were me. Nothing existed outside of the prospect of winning — as long as I pushed through a tournament, dicking around and shoving aside all other obstacles for what would give me the quickest route to victory, I would be open and willing.

So what if I wasn’t winning?

When I sat there, alone, in the finals of Meadows, in the morning of elimination day at the TOC, in my hotel room at St. Marks, in my hotel room at Long Beach, and in countless other cities where I lost and did not win everything I possibly could, I cried and felt empty inside. When I looked at others winning, doing well in life, getting awards and opportunities more than me, I was a defeated soul — worthless. No matter what city I was in, what part of the nation that tournament took place in, every Marriott I stayed in, in all but the few tournaments I actually won, I felt sad and incomplete.

I wonder, why?

In the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis, there exists a concept called the Lack. In our lives, there is reality, and there is fantasy. We desire for certain things, but our world is never exactly what we desire. There is always a gap between perception and truth, victory and sub-victory — that is the Lack. Some accept that such a gap exists, but others (like myself) do not. It seemed infinitely challenging and frustrating that all I ever needed was the next win, the next bid, the next victory — and the absence of whatever came next virtually extinguished my soul slowly, gradually, and methodically.

Debate camp is a place of fun and memories. But for me, Michigan was a place for getting good. That’s all that mattered to me, and in August, having returned from camp, I wrote a post quite precisely: “Debate camp was for mastering one thing: debate”.

I remember getting coffee with a friend at Michigan. She detailed the people she met, the funny things that had happened, the time she was spending outside of debate. Then she asked me what was going on with my life at camp — who I liked, what unknown parts of the campus I had explored, what interesting or humorous things had occurred to me, what eats I had found. And I had very little. All of my time had spent in lab or in my dorm, grinding argument blocks, scanning niche things about debate, and reading books that were effective to my success. I was doing things that were useful, real, productive.

That was my lock screen for all of camp. When my record last year at the TOC was 1-5, I remember running to the nearest building, the McDonalds across the street from the last room I competed in. I sat in the bathroom, cried, and walked across the road, wondering why any work I ever put in was worth it. That moment haunted me for that entire week. Then, it haunted me for a month. The whole summer. My entire debate camp experience. Later, my whole season. It still haunts me, even after doing much better this year. I hate answering the question, “What was your record at the TOC”?

That moment epitomized the strain of being the worst of the TOC pool, the people who shouldn’t have even been there, qualified by accident. And thus, it only made sense that my lock screen was stained with the haunting of that moment, a constant threatening image of what would occur if I stopped working, stopped pushing, stopped directing all of my energy towards the prospect of winning.

That friend, whom I had lunch with that day, only stuck around for the first semester of debate. The time we got coffee at camp was one of the few times we ever talked at all (at camp), outside of being at the airport together before returning home. I remember that she said: “I probably spent more time with you and [our coach] than anyone else this last January, going to tournaments”.

So when she didn’t show up for the second semester, I was sad. I wished that she, the novices, teammates in my grade, and assistant coaches — did not fly home. Because frankly, sitting in finals, even with the championship plate, I still felt lonely. Incomplete. Like I won, but with nobody to win with. I had achieved the only thing my Lack needed, but that Lack still existed.

This made put two and two together: when I did not win, I broke down, and when I won, there was nothing to enjoy my wins with. Everything was centered around winning, yet winning was a high that was so hard to retain, so hard to consistently grasp effectively. Whatever possible things that were out of control for me — bad judging, arguments I just couldn’t have time to prepare for, family or friendship matters that distracted me in the back of my head — could sway or tip the championship from my hands in an instant. Any arbitrary matter that affected my success, even if it were external to my control, could immediately make me unhappy, lonely, unsatisfied, crying in the countless hotels where I sat defeated, setting my lock screen for the whole summer as a reminder for constant work.

And even putting the actual event aside, the fear of losing the win, losing the championship, losing the next round... all of that culminated in me orienting everything I cared about toward my accomplishments. I was paranoid about the possibility of losing, and would do anything to stop it. The trophy held more power over me than I held over the trophy.

“Myth” by Beach House, playing as I landed back in LAX, is a perfect description of this Lack, what it does to you. It describes the illusiveness of “winning”, the evasive nature of over-materialization:

If you built yourself a myth
You'd know just what to give
What comes after this
Momentary bliss?

Momentary bliss. That was what winning was for me, a moment of triumph, a period where I could experience the high on the human “emotional spectrum”. It was the thing I chased, the thing I would hang up around my room, stare at when sad, and comfort myself when in doubt. Yet it was momentary, potentially lost in an instant. When that feeling was gone and I sat in defeat, I would feel empty and useless, crying in a Mcdonalds’ bathroom, suffering an unproductive grind in my Michigan dorm, anti-social and fearful of losing another round. I’m reminded of a scene from the movie Whiplash: protagonist Andrew punches a drum after hours of jazz practice, knowing he failed his audition. He was influenced by that same desire to win and succeed obsessively, no matter the cost.

Grinding didn’t stop me from losing. I did better, but I still began the TOC 0-2, still lost the first round of Berkeley, and still dropped the first elimination of an easy local tournament to an easy argument to answer. In all of those moments, I had no championship plate to comfort me, no wall of trophies to stare at. I only had the “L” on Tabroom looming over my success, the stain of “DOUBLES” at Long Beach, the horrible atmosphere of being bad at the activity I was supposed to be good at. Winning, trophies, material success — it became a myth. A myth that made me always feel incomplete, chasing after whatever would settle my self-esteem and stop me from failure.

It’s interesting that sometimes, especially in deep reflective periods like these, I do not stare at my awards and recall hearing a judge read out, “the decision was for the affirmative from Harvard-Westlake”. Instead, I remember the people I was around — the coffee that my friend got for me, the jokes that I made during the tournament, the vlog that I kept going throughout the season. The moment when Andrew and I cleared at the TOC together (which I actually have on record as part of that vlog).

It was those moments that I remember really clearly, and really memorably. It was those moments of talking to friends across the nation, speaking about issues that were interesting to me and others, that kept me in the activity. It was the random made-up nuclear war scenarios, critical literature, and daily checking of foreignpolicy.com for uniqueness evidence that made me love the activity, torture myself for 7-weeks at camp. It was the funny coaches that I had and people that I knew along the way that tied me to debate.

That isn’t to say that winning wasn’t important to me at all. I came to tournaments to win, to get trophies, and to put hard work to use. But there was more than winning, more than the trophies. I began to understand that by over-focusing on the materialism of awards, I lost what debate had meant for me at all. I lost the enjoyment in the process of getting there, the value of memories along the way. When winning became everything, winning became a myth. Winning became nothing.

Because I was so obsessed with that prospect of winning, I never got to know the novices better, help them understand what debate has to offer. All I ever did was walk into debate practice staring intently at a trophy in my head, not helping my teammates love the activity too.

Almost all of my wins are attributed to the countless conversations I have with alums of the old Harvard-Westlake team. Those conversations were what got me to be as successful as I ever got. I’m sad that I didn’t play that role for the younger debaters yet. Because if it wasn’t for Gong and Sam and Jasmine helping me understand Baudrillard and urging me not to quit when I was in 8th grade, I would’ve never even signed up for a tournament freshman year.

I’m sad that that other friend quit, didn’t even go to the TOC. I’m reminiscent of when she helped me prep for the finals of the Round Robin, got me addicted to both Matchas and Korean indie music. I know that there were other factors involved, but I somewhat take responsibility for her quitting. I feel bad that perhaps part of it was that I was so focused on my own wins and success that I couldn’t keep up with helping others have a good time too. Because for those that weren’t so obsessive, it sucks to have someone by you 24/7 at a tournament who is.

My chemistry teacher always says, “You are not your grades”. Although the statement is, in some ways, over-simplifying, it’s true. Of course, we will care about our grades, our championships, and our achievements. We will care that we get to submit a full-fledged resume, loaded with activities we love and put effort in. But to focus only on that resume and let that wholly define your self-worth, that’s self-destructive, and it killed me. It turned an activity that I loved into one where I was constantly stressed out and paranoid, that even after winning Berkeley, the largest tournament on the West Coast, one of the largest in the nation, I still felt like I was only “halfway there to being good”. Like my coach said, I was yet to “win everything” (see the top of this post).

If I had just stepped back to understand how much more I loved about the activity, perhaps my final round at the TOC wouldn’t have culminated in a wave of nervousness, knowing that that would determine all of my self-worth. Perhaps I would have worked more efficiently at Michigan if I had spent time getting to know those around me, breaking off at certain points to take a rest. And perhaps, most importantly, I would not sit so defeated whenever factors out of my control prohibited me from bringing home 14 wins from 14 tournaments.

Next to my coach on that 1AM drive, "I Hope To Be Around” by Men I Trust was playing, a song I linked at the top of this post.

I dream of my future
Remote from time bounds
Becoming myself
Without any end
…
Becoming myself in truth

I sometimes wish for this, the prospect of dreaming of a future in debate where, removed from exclusively the idea of winning, I can enjoy the activity again for what it really is, what really drew me toward it in the first place. I can enjoy the people I love in it, the arguments I read, the authentic love I have for doing it.

As such, when I was finished cranking the AP Latin exam a couple afternoons ago, I headed home and moved my desk of trophies to a shelf slightly farther away from my sight. Directly in front of me, I posted a wall of pictures collected from the vlogs and memories I took all year, the important people in debate and funny things that the process gave to me.

And in that way, winning was no longer a myth — a pure, naked definition of me. Winning was a sign that I loved debate and everyone in it.

That’s the most important lesson debate ever imparted on me. A lesson about life, about winning, and about success. Don’t make it define you, and don’t let it control you. Find your joy in the intrinsic pleasures of activities, the people around you, and the joyful parts that losing can’t tarnish. Embrace that your desires might never be fulfilled — that there will always be a “Lack” — and maybe it will be alright if you’re only “halfway there”. Perhaps in that acceptance, you will find the ability to truly win everything.

Every once in a while, I get a dream that I remember. A collection of vague details, enough to help me piece together a general plot or summary, a SparkNotes version of a motion picture set in the time and place of my mind. Rarely do I remember the order of events, an exact timeline, or any actual scenery. More than likely, my indeterminate memory is gone by the end of the day, and as I proceed through checking off every facet of goddamn junior year, the sentimental appeal of seeing a previous dream slowly departs. Reality sets in, and I get my priorities straight.

A few months ago, I took it upon myself to start a dream journal. Most mornings, I would crawl out of bed, stare at the wall for ten minutes while I emotionally prepared for the incoming plight of 2000 lines of AP Latin, and then reluctantly roll into the bathroom hurrying through my routine and anticipating my first dose of caffeine to get me going. But occasionally, I would sit up for slightly longer, half-asleep and half-awake, trapped in some dreamy romanticism. In these cases, I would record whatever semblance of a dream I remembered in a tiny notebook that I set near my nightstand — what I had felt, why I perhaps felt it, and anything else that seemed relevant to me at that time.

Fast forward two months, and I was able to observe some patterns in my dreams. I noticed that many contained moments that I either missed dearly in life or felt awkwardly uncomfortable about. Dreams could be something along the lines of an old item that I had lost, an activity that I had once loved, my old experience in acting, a memory of being backstage when playing violin for commercial TV, or a person that I once had good, long conversations with while sitting in a dark practice room. They could also be something entirely different — an awkward situation redone in a good way, or a failed performance reenacted with near-perfect technique. Subconsciously, my brain would reconstruct these things which I wished for and desired, rendering them in a hazy, clouded vision — a dream.

The song at the beginning of the post probably illustrates this feeling best. A mixed bag of emotions — disappointed, but somehow happy and reminiscent. Like I was watching a movie, then realizing that I wasn’t actually there.

What I really realized, though, was that my dreams were manifestations of alternate universes. Paths from my childhood that I would have wished to expand instead of give up. Relationships that I would have wished to retain instead of forget about. Colorful kites that I would have flown around more instead of let go as I grew older, leaving them to drift off into the sky.

After such dreams, I always gain consciousness with a strange feeling of fuzzy warmth. Slowly, that warmth is replaced by a creeping menace of disappointment, that as reality sets in, the prospect of losing that world becomes more and more apparent. That always unsettles me, for it convinces me of making an irreversible, wrong choice about my life — an incorrect turn. I would see other lives that I missed out on, universes which I rejected.

A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once had a good visual depiction of this, but to keep this blogpost within reasonable length, I won’t give my detailed interpretation of that film.

I hate making bad decisions. In retrospect, I laugh at the stupidity or aimlessness my rationale was engaged in, and take great pain in trying to understand what in the world my mind was possibly wrapped around. Hard choices always seem hard in the moment, but in hindsight, they can be quite obvious. This type of remorse always captures and imprisons my mind. When I decide to finally move on, my subconscious clings tight, hanging onto a regret and occasionally revealing it in the form of a dream.

To quote a friend, insanity is the process of doing something over and over again while knowing that your result will be the same. This is the process I sometimes obsessively engage in, and can’t quite figure out why. So I decided to seek out an answer.

A mentor of mine had lunch with me a few weeks ago. I didn’t understand much of his advice at the time — most likely because I was busy inhaling one of the best Chinese Chicken Salads ever made — but it turned out to be incredibly useful.

Above is a neo-impressionist painting in the style of pointillism. Essentially, several small touches or dots of color make up a larger canvas. When you zoom into any small section of the painting, you see a limited view — a few dots of similar colors… some specks of blue mixed in with hints of yellow. But when you zoom out to obtain the whole picture, you start to see the coastline of a town… the broader impression and shape of an object. The blue and yellow, which we once thought encompassed our whole view, was all along just a small section of the sea.

Life, my mentor said, is a pointillist painting. We go about our everyday lives stuck in small purviews of the present moment, small specks of color that are indiscernible in the long run. But when we look back after our canvases are fully covered, or at least more completed than they are currently, we see a more fulfilling picture. We start to make sense of how certain colors, although initially strange, end up well together.

When zoomed into one, small section — perhaps a day or month in our life — the occasional yellow or brown speck appears abnormal and foreign in a sea of otherwise blue strokes. Yet with the whole canvas in sight, we can understand that such “out of place” strokes create the light and depth of the sea, the vibrancy that distinguishes it from a blue blob of Kindergarten Crayola coloring. Similarly, our lives are sometimes unsettling and puzzling to think about in the moment. Decisions can often seem strange… out of line with the broader picture. Yet in reality, they are only a few points … points that may in fact contribute quite nicely to a larger picture in the end. To this end, the constant anxiety and uncertainty that I employed my mind with — the constant stress of perfect course selections, perfect relationships, or perfect summer decisions — was entirely unwarranted. Frankly, much of life is instead acknowledging and living with that uncertainty, knowing that small, irregular specks every now and then can still create a beautiful canvas.

As Steve Jobs elegantly put in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, life is like a series of connecting dots, all of which individually have very little meaning, but collectively create something great. The calligraphy courses that Jobs once took in university may have seemed irrelevant to the technology industry at the time, but years later became the crux of visual appeal in Apple’s signature product lines.

I applied this principle to what I was unable to resolve — the remorse and regret of making “wrong” choices earlier in my life. Pointillism helped me understand that it would be alright if my dots weren’t uniformly the same color, that it would be alright if a few key decisions didn’t turn out as planned. And with such a limited purview in the present, it would impossible to get everything right anyhow.

I remember sitting in the front row of Walt Disney Concert Hall once, listening to Hilary Hahn grind out forty-minutes of a concerto… followed by a the L.A. Phil’s rendition of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 7 (linked above). I specifically remember 2:27 in the first movement. There was a certain gentleness and softness to this melody that touched me, and I wanted to carry that feeling of passive musicality in every performance I gave that year.

I then forgot about it for a while, until it appeared the other day in my dream. I didn’t think much of it then, but as similar musical memories visited my mind, I began to realize that I missed what was once a closer relationship between myself and my violin. I used to spend a good while imagining how a piece would create a particular, warm sound on stage… something a whole audience could understand from any seat in a theater. Nowadays, I grind through e minor octaves, tenths, a Paganini caprice, and the impossible intonation of Sibelius’ sixths…. but I sometimes forget that feeling I once had, that musical intention. I’m reminiscent of it.

I often catch myself thinking really hard in remorse about the choices I’ve taken in high school, particularly the ones that changed the course of my violin career. Perhaps it was just an issue of course selection. Perhaps workload distribution. Perhaps if I had stuck around people that reminded me of music more, I wouldn’t wake up, upset that my musicality was now behind my technicality.

The second movement of Sibelius always strikes something within me. Listening to this movement often makes me feel alone and thoughtful, reflective on my past decisions — whether a discolored speck on a section of my impressionist painting was the right or wrong choice, and why it seemed so awfully out of line with the mainstream colors surrounding it.

If life is a pointillist painting, a collection of small strokes that is confusing when zoomed in upon, I’m in the midst of a scattered and limited view of dots, none of which I can make out a coherent story for. I may have made the wrong choices… or I may have not. I may have painted the wrong colors… or I may have just added depth to a important scene of my life.

It’s hard to really resolve this uncertainty, but I guess that’s okay. It’s infinitely regressive to think about the infinite other lives and routes I may have taken, the dreams and hallucinations I may have realized. All I can acknowledge is that life will be alright. There is plenty of time to fill the canvas with dots, specks, and experiences of all sorts. Whatever happens, the points that seem so random will eventually form a painting that makes sense.

This post contains mentions of suicide and self-harm. If someone you know is suicidal, the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline can be reached by dialing 988.

I’m not sure how long this blogpost will go on. In a lot of my other posts on my page, I’ve tried to incorporate humor, a story, something relatable for you all. But in this post, I just want to be candid, genuine, and honest.

A month ago, a friend and classmate of mine passed away from suicide. Over the past four weeks, I’ve moved forward and grieved, always saddened by this event, but increasingly able to find some level of peace with this truth.

A couple days ago, another student from my school decided to take his life. I barely knew him, definitely not nearly as well as I knew Jordan, but his passing brought back a lot of feelings and emotions I experienced after Jordan’s passing.

Sigh. I’m already crying, and I haven’t even written anything substantive yet.

It’s hard to really put sadness or emotion into words. I can try my best to communicate the tears that I’m feeling, or the anger I can’t get out, or how much I want Jordan back. But none of those things are really possible with just words, no matter how much I try. To help me communicate my point even further, I encourage you to play the songs I have linked on the post, starting with the one above (I’ll link more songs down below as this article grows in length).

Okay, now that Mac Miller’s “Good News” is playing, I’ll begin.

The day that Jordan passed away, I felt like the very beginning of this song. I barely felt anything at all, except a super low mic drop that vibrated and bounced around my soul. But frankly, I was completely numb when I heard the news, and my gut reaction was to think nothing had even happened.

Frankly, I hesitated to title this blogpost, “Losing a Friend”. The first title I wrote down was actually, “Losing a Stranger”. Only after three revisions did I add the part about losing a friend. When Jordan died, I didn’t think we were even friends. Those that were around me, my best friends, everyone I knew— they would all say I certainly didn’t look like I gave a shit about her life anymore. I honestly didn’t feel like I did.

So on that Thursday evening in March, I played to the look I had been giving off for the past eight months. I really seemed like I didn’t care.

I remember what happened quite clearly, actually. It was a weird week for me. I had come home the previous weekend from winning a debate championship, but because of the school I missed, I was super behind on sleep. I was fatigued from the beginning of the week. In a conversation with my attendance coordinator that week, I let him know that I just couldn’t make one of my classes because of how tired I was. I was falling asleep during exciting moments of science labs, my eyes looked extremely red, and I had a shitload of schoolwork in front of me.

On Thursday, I was studying for a math test. I had just finished the school day, and gone to the math “lab” to work on trigonometry and polar-coordinate problems. Right before the cafeteria closed at 4:30, I remember taking a break and grabbing a snack. I quickly filled a cup full of hot water, grabbed a cookie, and went to sit outside.

It felt odd that afternoon. Something must’ve been off. I was super cold for some reason, and I felt chills throughout my body. I thought to myself that I must have caught a fever or cold.

I began walking upstairs towards the library to check out a book. A huge headache had begun to invade me, and I still had that shitload of work waiting for me back in that classroom. I passed by a classroom with these big glass windows as its walls— the Kutler Center. Inside, two of my close friends were having a conversation. I stopped by, and I remember being told that someone in our grade had committed suicide. It was a casual mention, really. I barely even took it seriously. Frankly, I was so innocent that I didn’t know what suicide really meant.

I was naïve, but still curious as to what exactly happened. All of our first impressions was that someone in our grade, perhaps a more “popular” kid, had gone too crazy and done some stupid shit. At one point, someone said to me that it might’ve been Jordan. I paused for a second, and said, “No way, she would never do that.”

Jordan was a huge listener to Spotify. So my gut reaction was to go check on her Spotify activity. Before my application had loaded, I assured my friends with a lie, “She was online fifteen minutes ago.”

We all laughed it all off— why would we ever think she would do that to herself? Then, Spotify loaded.

Last listening: 1 day.

I had a bit of a heart-drop. I told the others, and their reactions also took a pause. But in little time, they assured me that I was probably overthinking.

I really started to feel like shit with the fever and cold kicking in, so I headed to check out my library book, and immediately crashed on a bean bag near a cubby. I had an earphone in. This song was playing.

To me, it was like a little lullaby. I was so sleepy too, it helped me immediately dose off. An hour passed before I next woke up.

I remember the librarian waking me up, alerting me that the library was closed and it was time to go. I thanked her and rushed to my math classroom, where my stuff was. My fever had gotten slightly better, but I could still feel it, as well as the headache drilling through my skull.

I think it had begun to drizzle. Weirdly enough, the song that had been playing when I woke up was still the one above. I remember looking up at the sky, seeing the small amounts of rain fall, and even smiling a little. I always liked drizzling, it had some calm feeling.

I walked into my math classroom in a relatively good mood despite carrying the physical baggage of a fever and headache. I told Dr. Helston, the math teacher there, that I had just taken a nap, and made a joke about math making me tired.

He smiled, but didn’t say anything else. Those around me were all incredibly focused on their phones, specifically on their emails. I was really confused. A student next to me walked out looking traumatized. So I checked my email.

It’s weird that I remember exactly what I read and didn’t read from that email. I immediately looked for the names and important phrases from the letter.

HW Announcements. Very Sad News. Dear Students and Parents. It is with profound sadness that — skip a few words — Jordan Park.

I paused. Then reread the words I missed.

“We write to share the heartbreaking news of the death at home this morning,”

Fuck.

I paused my music and took out my earphones. I stopped reading the email, and started calling friends.

And then I called Jordan. But she didn’t pick up.

I immediately went home, saddened but also super numb. My mother asked me if I knew Jordan. I said to her, “Not really. I talked to her like in ninth grade, but I didn’t really know her.”

My mother accepted that, and drove me home. I tried as hard as I could to forget about this and focus on how bad my fever felt. But the pain seemed to have gone away… as if the fever didn’t matter anymore. Nevertheless, I assured myself that my relationship with Jordan was so far gone that I had almost nothing to do this.

After taking two pills of Tylenol, I was fast asleep again. I immediately left the scene and distanced myself. This was none of my business, I said to myself.

And even if it was, I may have just been in a dream. See you when the library opens again?

That was the least sadness I had felt.

“Sparks” was played at Jordan’s memorial. I included it to communicate what my feelings looked like as time progressed, and realizations kicked in.

I woke up with a strange feeling. The first thing that came to my mind was that Jordan was gone, but for some reason, it didn’t really settle in for me yet. In the back of my head, I thought she was probably still somewhere at home, just sick and missing school. Just one call away.

I remember arriving at school for an all-school assembly. That was when it first kicked in for me. Never before in my life had I saw almost a thousand high-school students and another hundred teachers and administrators dead silent in a gym. I arrived late, and immediately felt super out of place walking in such a silent building with so many people. I felt like every footstep I took— that it could be heard by all ears in the room. I sat down around a bunch of people I didn’t know, just so I could sit down as quickly as possible. I was so numb that it didn’t seem to matter.

As our Head of Upper School spoke, I realized that this was real. This wasn’t a dream. This wasn’t a simulation. I would never see Jordan… ever again.

When the assembly ended, I headed up to the sophomore lunch area where I usually spent time during free hours. My friends were sitting around a table crying. An old friend of mine came over and gave me a hug. And I started to remember everything.

The first thing I did was go to my Spotify. And I found a playlist I made with her. As I scrolled through the songs, I began to cry. A lot.

I’ve talked about the effect of nostalgic music on me before. And I’ll reiterate how it really gets you— that deep down, core-sucking want for the past. I sometimes think about the “regular” type of nostalgia, when you miss another time when you were young or in a completely different circumstance. Really, you could revisit those places, people, or moments, but part of time is that it only moves in one direction… so yeah, that time is gone.

I cannot express to you the entirely new level of pain knowing that the people from those times have left as well as the time itself. That what was what I felt listening to our playlist. Any memories, happy or sad, were left to myself, only to myself.

I have this string of old playlists.

A bit later on, not on that day, I found myself listening to some of those playlists, particularly the ones from over a year ago, maybe even two. What struck me as weird was that even those memories felt less distant than the ones with Jordan in May. I don’t mean that Jordan was distant— listening to the playlist from May was like listening to something so close to home… but at the same time, I was listening to music with feelings I would never feel again, sights I would never see again, and Jordan, who I would never greet again.

That’s when I began scrolling through text messages that I had with Jordan. And it all came rolling back. Realizations started to kick in, and a damper set on my heart that never really came off. In a way, I’m grateful that text messages don’t change, as scrolling upwards for hours was, quite literally, me replaying in exact detail the conversations I once had with Jordan.

Besides hyper-analyzing all the text messages she sent to me, I also looked a lot into the songs we listened to, like the one above. The lyrics hit incredibly different now.

Gravity's holdin' me back
I want you to hold out the palm of your hand
Why don't we leave it at that?
Nothin' to say
When everything gets in the way
Seems you cannot be replaced
And I'm the one who will stay

Yeah.

Towards the beginning of this article, I mentioned briefly that Jordan and I weren’t close at all when she passed. I almost was going to title this article, “Losing a Stranger”. Quite literally, Jordan and I stopped talking to me back in May. Admittedly, I made a lot of unforgivable mistakes, and suddenly, within the span of a day, we drifted apart entirely.

I always made excuses that it wasn’t the “right time” to make things up. I tried a couple times in May, but then I gave up and forced myself to move forward without any closure. Some of my friends even told me that closure was not needed, that the best thing to do was to forget about the past, and move on.

It’s certainly painful to think about those old memories of Jordan where I was smiling and friends with her, but it was even more painful thinking of the times I passed by her more recently, and decided it “wasn’t the right time”. It’s painful remembering those times where I’ve walked by silently in the hallways. It’s painful remembering those times when I could’ve said hi, but chose instead to spend time with other people and act like she had completely left my life.

Sadly enough, I will never again in my life get any of those opportunities. I will never get to say hi, or decide when the “right time” would be.

It’s heartbreaking knowing that Jordan passed away without a positive memory of me. It’s incredibly upsetting to me that it took, literally, her death for me to even realize that I truly did care about her. Despite hiding all feelings about her, separating myself, and “moving on”, at the bottom of my heart, Jordan was still my friend. And I didn’t do anything to fix the mistakes I had made… the cracks in our friendship that never really healed, but instead, solidified.

Now that I look back, it’s insane that I spent the last eight months without any appreciation for what Jordan brought to my life. It’s insane that, those moments where I’ve smiled and appreciated a drizzle while listening to Korean music… that those times were not shared with her at all. That I chose to separate myself and not fix what had happened.

As I said in the beginning of this blogpost, I didn’t think I would care at all when I read the email. Sure, I was shocked, but my gut reaction was to move on. After all, wasn’t I already separated from her? I even told my mother that I barely knew Jordan. But now I was beginning to realize… Jordan meant a shit ton to me. She was such a great friend— where was I to pay that back?

A lot of people who knew what went down in May were upset at me. They were upset that I didn’t go far enough to fix the situation. They were upset at the mistakes that I made.

And they were also upset that I got to cry at all when Jordan passed.

From the façade I was putting up, I didn’t care about Jordan to any meaningful level. Even if I knew her, I left on a negative note with her and decided to leave things as they were. And that’s what most people understood my position as. If I did care at all about Jordan, why didn’t I show it? How could such a shitter like myself feel any sadness for someone who I did not care about?

What I just said wasn’t meant to be a “guilt trap”. I was not intending to play the victim, as it truly was my bad for acting the way that I did— making those mistakes, not doing more than I could. I wanted, however, to comment on the compounded guilt that I faced— that only a few could really understand what position I was in, one of regret, sadness, and longing to see again a friend I never got to say goodbye too.

See, it is easy to empathize with someone who was close friends with Jordan when she passed. That person lost a friend and deserved to be sad. But I wasn’t really close with Jordan when she passed, and so many others showed so much more care for her than I did. Did she even think of me as a friend when it all ended? Did I lose a friend, or a stranger?

Did I deserve to cry at all?

I decided that the best thing to do for myself (and Jordan) was to move on and honor what she did mean to me. As much as I could reminisce and regret about the past, my best option was to, now in the present, appreciate and value what a wonderful person she was to me.

I’m not lying when I say that not a lot of people cared about me the way Jordan once did. She was the person who was genuinely excited when I had successes in life, and truly empathetic when I had failures.

I remember that once, I was playing Clair De Lune in a music room, and Jordan was sitting on the other side studying with AirPods in. By the end of my piece, she had stopped and listened attentively, and really appreciated what I had just played.

I am a music kid, and have spent hours down in that very room playing piano, violin, even trying out the drums. And out of all the people in that very music room that I met, Jordan was the only person who ever took genuine time and energy to appreciate the music I had introduced into the room.

I don’t think I’ve looked at music the same since. It really touched me, what Jordan did— that someone received the pure and authentic feelings and emotions I wanted to communicate. While before, I always played music for myself or for my music teachers, this was one of the times I really understood what it meant to communicate meaning in music. It wasn’t just notes, sound waves, or chords… Jordan helped me understand that music was a language.

Even playing Clair De Lune now is sometimes tough. Every moment of the piece has such insane meaning… that even without lyrics, I can just picture the day I played it in front of Jordan.

Take the moment at 2:02 of Seong-Jin Cho’s recording. This part always brings a smile to my face. It reminds me of Jordan’s conversations with me when we talked about exploring some hidden area or room on the middle school campus, and the excitement that came along.

But there’s also moments like 4:03, where things really slow down. And it’s those moments, where, as much as I’m smiling to remember Jordan and I staring into the evening sky after she forgot her backpack at school and missed the bus… I also am reminded that Jordan herself had now drifted into that very sky.

My late piano teacher once described to me the ending of Clair De Lune as a final wave of goodbye, as if it was your final glance at someone as they drifted into the moonlight. (Clair de lune means moonlight in French.)

I wish I had gotten around to sending Jordan my fingerings for Clair De Lune, or gone shopping at that Korean place that we were planning on, or talk to her after the concert on May 6th.

I included “Good News” here again to conclude my reflection on losing Jordan. The week after Jordan passed, I listened to this song for over twenty hours in a row. I fell asleep with an earbud playing the song… and I woke up with it playing. I listened to it through the entire day until I got tired of it. That’s how much this somehow connected with me.

I included the song at the beginning to communicate a bit of how I felt when the event had immediately occurred, and I had listened to this song. Everything felt like a fresh wound, and my feelings and understandings had not fully developed yet. And so “Good News” was just a regular sad song to me, nothing special.

As time progressed and my reflections became more nuanced, I understood more of my relationship with Jordan. I understood more of what really happened, and I understood not to cover up how much I really cared for her. And as I did those things, I continued to listen to this song. And my understanding for the song changed.

So I encourage you all to listen once more, after I have now (hopefully) described just some of the emotional waves I experienced following this tragic incident. This time, I hope it might hit a little different for you.

On the day that it happened, the plucking at the beginning had barely meant anything to me except a string of chords. But later, it began to remind me of a particular loneliness. I can’t exactly tell why, but every time I listened to the intro of this song… I would always think of this one moment of myself sitting alone outside on a bench… breaking it all down.

Mac Miller’s lyrics almost perfectly reflected my spiraling thoughts as I unraveled what went on.

I spent the whole day in my head
Do a little spring cleaning, I'm always too busy dreaming
Well, maybe I should wake up instead
A lot of things I regret but I just say I forget

Then, the beat drop at 0:46, resembling how I felt when everything just hit me. That Jordan wasn’t to be seen again, mistakes were made, and my time with her was over.

Why can't it just be easy?
…
When you're high but you're underneath the ceiling
Got the cards in my hand, I hate dealing

Those last two lines resonated with how I felt a lot of the time. I wasn’t really high on substances, but I continued to listen to music, special music that connected me with Jordan. I continued to search for old messages, things that reminded me of her. But I always felt “underneath the ceiling” still… like I wasn’t ever able to escape the reality of her truly being gone.

Maybe I'll lay down for a little, yeah
'Stead of always trying to figure everything out
And all I do is say sorry
Half the time, I don't even know what I'm saying it about

Self explanatory how that connected with me.

Mac Miller didn’t write these lyrics about my experiences after Jordan left this world. But they still connected with me in such a deep way. Again, a reminder of how much I appreciate the language of music.

The song closes beautifully. The last minute doesn’t even have any words. It’s just pure chords, instrumentals, and time for reflection.

I later found out that this song was connected with Mac Miller’s passing in 2018. He had a lot of struggles, but was a great person and artist. In some ways, I miss him too. This song really meant a lot to me.

Ironically, this article didn’t explain any “Good News”. But it was a time and space for me to reflect and understand my position in all of this. And most importantly, I really do appreciate you reading through 4000 (four-thousand) words to connect with me on this deep of an emotional level. Thank you.

And thank you Jordan, for bringing me so many smiles. If you ever get around to hearing this… I am so happy I got to know you.

“I Love You So” was played at Jordan’s memorial as well. I remember sitting alone after the services had ended, and just listening to this song while thinking a lot about everything. I didn’t have a great place to put it in this post, but I wanted to include it somewhere.

Hello!

Thanks for being here! Anyone reading this was notably forced by me a day or two ago because of how much I desperately needed the attention of people to bow down to all the nonsense I’m going to dump on this page. It’s actually really sad— I wasn’t able to have any actual social connection so here I am, typing away in a Chicago airport Starbucks because I can’t have a real conversation with a single person.

Blogging feels weird… but natural at the same time. It’s like you aren’t really talking to anyone, but you know some future character is going to be reading this sometime down the line. I think that’s kind of interesting— that whatever I write down here in April of 2023 might get read by someone in 2025… and everything I say here will be word-for-word the same. Every time you revisit this blog post, you’ll be a different person, but the person behind the screen typing is just me, at this specific time, place, date.

That’s the first reason why I wanted to do this. Because I think, at least for myself, it’s like a screenshot of a text message, but instead for my life— it saves your position in time, thought, and emotion. Sometimes I’ll go back and remember some vague memories, but it’s hard, honestly, to remember comprehensively exactly how I was feeling.

One thing I do, however, is look at pictures and listen to old playlists. Those things tend to throw us back into this wave of nostalgia— that feeling when it’s painful in your core because you really miss that person, place, or time. Pictures also work well too, but I think music hits especially hard. So I’ve decided to include a song, and maybe a picture, every post I make. Feel free to listen along, it’ll probably match what I was writing about that day. And if you don’t, enjoy the writing still.

The second reason was because of how insane my life has become recently. That’s not necessarily a good thing. When I say insane, I don’t mean that a flurry of events continues to happen everyday like I’m in the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once (9/10 by the way, maybe I’ll write something about that later) but rather that my life has been extremely volatile. A more diverse array of events has happened in the past 8 or 9 months than ever before, and I thought— what better way to share it then to write it down?

So I hope that you maybe can relate a little, because I bet most people’s lives have become “insane” in one way or another. So long, and so excited to share some stories with you all.