every quarter, she invites us all over for dinner on a saturday scheduled months in advance, squeezed between all of our busy schedules. she has a specific menu in mind, fine-tuning it over several weeks in her head. then, she spends the days leading up to the feast frantically preparing, running around the city to procure ingredients, chopping, cleaning, cooking.

she’s been hosting quarterly dinners feasts for the last two years, without fail.

J’s dinners are something special. everything is completely homemade, from the lemonade to the simmered-for-days stew to the meringue mushrooms on the dessert log.

J and i are super different. our friendship is a real-life example of two people with wildly different love languages, deepening a friendship together over time.

at dinner last week, we shared corn ribs, where she learned how much i love corn. last night, i walked into her feast, where corn was front and center.

as a quarterly dinner guest, i have much appreciation for the tradition. i’m amazed by the amount of effort and consideration J puts into cooking these elaborate dinners while asking nothing in return. surely friends showing up to her apartment, petting her cats, and devouring her food is not fueling the several days of effort she’s poured into cooking?

as we’ve gotten closer, i’ve come to learn that J hosts these dinners for the love of the game.

last night, deep into a game of jenga, she casually remarked about how she only cooked for 10 hours this time. this dinner was the easiest one!

J is meticulous in execution and a perfectionist by nature. she devotes herself heavily into all of her hobbies, but her quarterly dinners always highlight her rare devotion. it shows in the masochistic nature of the painstaking commitments she takes on like cross-stitching personalized keychains for every guest (q4 2025) or importing raw fish from japan (q3 2025). over the years, i’ve also seen her accumulate all of the niche gadgets to make her vision come to life in her nyc apartment where she lives alone ~ from a takoyaki pan to an ice machine, and more recently from a 6-cup rice cooker to a 10-cup rice cooker.

thirty years ago my parents immigrated to the US without knowing anyone. since we didn’t have any family here, i grew up spending holidays with friends they’ve made throughout the years. that family was built over decades of fourth of july bbqs, potlucks where all of the children were forced to perform something, and christmas dinners and gift exchanges. decades of repeated tradition and showing up to each others homes over and over in different stages of life, no matter what is going on. to this day, these people are our family.

somehow, in just two years, i get the same feeling from J’s dinners. i don’t see this group of friends all that often, pretty much only for these quarterly dinners. over time, they’ve come to feel like my weird cousins and extended family i only see for the holidays. at these dinners, we update each other on our lives: new jobs, breakups, visa drama. like family, we also argue about politics, play random board games, and usually end the night with a movie or some trashy reality tv. one year we spontaneously competed in a beyblade tournament. we’ve shown up repeatedly, quarter after quarter. it’s only been two years, but we’ve been through a lot together, from the last presidential election to new and old relationships to 2 cross-country and 4 international moves.

the thing about family is that you don’t necessarily have to have the deepest friendships with each of them individually, but collectively they embody an inimitable constellation of community. these quarterly dinners are a group of people who started out as acquaintances coming together once a quarter to share a delicious home-cooked meal before going out to live our own individual lives.

J’s dinners have come to be a treasured tradition and one of my first roots since moving to new york. the quarterly cadence has become the beautiful backdrop for the dramatics of our early twenties lives. even though it was never her intention, she’s shown me what it means to cultivate community by setting a table that people continuously return to.

~ quarterly dinner over the years ~

on the train ride up to montreal, m and i sat facing across from two older ladies. the first woman boarded the train with us and insisted on saving a seat for a friend who was joining in a few stops. she took off her shoes immediately, and after stepping in a puddle, laid out her wet sock to dry atop our chargers plugged into the wall. her friend joined us a few stops later as promised with a big bag of food. they said very few words to each other, but she somehow restored the balance of our little train booth.

maybe we are looking into our future.

m and i have been friends for exactly ten years. this was our friendiversary trip, a four-day escape. we spent two of those days on the train.

m and i first met in the summer of 2016. we were in high school and insane back then. we were both taking a summer class on american history. the first time we met up was to study. we coordinated on snapchat, met up at the public library, and got kicked out of the conference room by an old man.

since then we’ve been close. we are each other’s closest, longest, purely platonic friendships. we’ve been with each other through high school drama, moving out of our parents’ homes, our first and subsequent most turbulent relationships, new cities, jobs, and friends galore.

ten years is a long time to weave your life path into another person’s. and if you are as dramatic as we are, it is not something that happens by accident.

our relationship has ebbed and flowed through the last decade of distinct eras. somehow we always find our way back to each other.

the plot of our friendship is one of my favourite stories, but the quieter intimacy of simply knowing each other has been less celebrated.

over fermented fries on a random rooftop in chinatown, we reminisced about the last decade of our lives. we found ourselves scrolling through our earliest text messages. back and forths about how to handle group project drama, scheming on how to start a school club so we could get into college, and tweaking over test grades.

appalled and amused, we could trace our roots there. it is where we came from, whether we like it or not.

reading through the messages, we also discovered that the third girl in our trio deserves all the credit for the origins of our friendship. though we don’t talk to her anymore, her initiative in bringing the group chat together constantly back then was undoubtedly the reason we ever became this close.

that night, we reminisced about the last ten years into the morning. times we’ve fucked up, been fucked up, the most beautiful and the ugliest and the smallest most whimsical character development arcs. freely pulling names of old characters and season one details that no one else in our lives could even begin to understand.

we talked about all the ways we’ve influenced each other, and in particular our standards for friendship.

she was my first friend to confront me with how she felt about something i did. i was the first friend to receive something like that from her.

we often credit a lot of our relational learnings from the people we’ve dated, but i think we’ve learned a lot of relationship skills from each other and our decade of friendship.

i only had one thing i wanted to do in montreal and that was to eat a montreal bagel. on our first morning, i picked a bagel spot across town and we embarked on our expedition.

as we neared the bagel spot, i started to recognize the neighborhood as the disappointing montreal bagel spot from my last montreal trip.

hours later, we happened to pass by the bagel spot that i did like years ago, and m asked if i wanted to get another one since i was disappointed by the bagel this morning. she could tell.

i usually tend to hide my disappointment because things are usually fine and i don’t want to bring down the vibes (i mean the bagel was still good!). ten years of knowing me meant she could see through that.

that day, we went to a botanical garden and just walked around in complete silence for like three hours. after which we talked about how we could both feel like the other person was tired and hungry even though we never actually named those things in ourselves too well during the visit.

this trip we felt noticeably older. less hyperexcited, more measured.

three years ago, we went on a cruise together. on the trip, we casually threw out coming back in another ten years with families and with kids and eagerly plotted a cruise per era for the rest of our lives.

this time around, m noticed that we don’t throw things like that around nearly as easily nor with nearly as much excitement. we’ve grown a bit more jaded, and perhaps it’s becoming too real. the screaming baby next to us at the korean restaurant we were eating dinner at brought us back into the reality of what it really means to grow older and to have responsibilities.

i suppose the last few years of turbulent relationships, figuring out rent and mortgages, and navigating actual adult things did that to us.

i find a lot of sadness in the reality that two people can never fully know each other — i’d like to know the people i care about as deeply as humanly possible! it sucks that there seems to be an asymptote to closeness… like you can approach someone infinitely, but you can never fully arrive.

with the new characters that enter our lives, nothing can replace time. we can visit each other’s hometowns and recite monologues about the ways we were raised, but it will never be the same as having borne witness to it. there are too many details that feel too inconsequential to ever say out loud.

in a decade-long friendship, it never had to be said because it was lived. m can silently understand.

if we are children who add a layer of life each year, lots of new people only know my newest layers. some have known only the middle ones. but m has seen almost every layer. every regrettable haircut, every personality arc, every grand this-is-my-life-calling ambition, every version of myself i eventually outgrew.

m will always be one of the greatest loves of my life.

this week i turned twenty five. i celebrated it with small, intimate groups of friends—a contrast to the giant picnics i used to throw in the last few years. it was a soft type of warmth, and felt symbolic of my pull towards quieting down and deeply integrating.

at twelve o five on my birthday, my roommate conjured up some goal-setting questions to kick off my twenty-fifth year.

what would you like to embrace this year that fits with your values?

i landed on: patience. trusting that the open questions that i have will come together eventually.

last year for my twenty fourth birthday, i wrote twenty four lessons for twenty four. this year the idea of listing twenty five lessons makes me want to burst out laughing. i mostly only learned one thing: that it’s not about figuring it out as much as it’s about how to move when it’s not figured out yet.

a recent journal entry reads:

i’m working on individual threads without an idea of how the tapestry all comes together.

it feels like the sequel to something i wrote two years ago in an essay titled “our rebuilding movement”:

we are all choosing to completely demolish the homes we’ve been building and to build them again from scratch.

in this 2024 essay, i end with some open questions to marinate in. now, after waiting impatiently for the last two years and digging through this last year’s journal entries, i finally have some semblance of answers.

answering my past self

How much is this rebuilding movement just a chapter unique to our early 20s? Or will we be perpetually demolishing everything and rebuilding?

after our last volleyball game, A and i walked around midtown dwelling over our respective problems. in specifics, the scenarios we are going through are new to us individually. but zoom out, and we’re facing all too familiar themes.

it seems like we will forever be in some cycle of confusion. the choice to break the problem down though, is a choice.

in my software engineering job, sometimes a complete redesign (or refactor, the process of restructuring existing code) is the best way to solve a built-up problem. as the environment changes, the structures we’ve set in place get tested. there are only so many ways to work around bad fit before the root of the problem needs to be tackled.

so yeah, i think we will always be repeating this cycle of demolishing and rebuilding. but hopefully each time it will be different.

How can I simultaneously question everything and also not spiral down rabbit holes so I can do the things I want to do?

recently i’ve learned that it’s not useful to question everything all the time. i learned this one from M.

i tend toward turning over the same rocks over and over from different angles, without keeping a tidy record of paths i’ve already spiraled down. i lose my mind in this process, and probably a lot of time and opportunity here too.

M, on the other hand, makes life pivots with ease and regularly commits to thought-out decisions with grace. in the past year, she’s pivoted careers, gotten married, and explored so many other parts of herself way more fully than anyone else i know.

if underthinking and overthinking are two ends of a spectrum, M operates in an optimal spot: thinking just enough to have covered the essential bases, and stopping to commit just before it turns unproductive.

i’ve been learning a related lesson at work. this year, i’ve had to make more big technical decisions. in doing so i’m learning that committing often comes before knowing. there are periods of time when we will not have enough information to make a thoroughly informed decision. it’s important to move forward anyway.

so i refuse the basis of this question. it is not necessary to question everything! thinking can quickly become unproductive. when it does, it’s time to just make some moves.

How much should I rely on motivation versus discipline to do hard things? Would I accomplish my goals if I relied solely on my motivations?

i’ve learned to rely on systems to keep me on track. three years into living in new york with a busy work and travel schedule, life has accumulated so loudly! compared to two years ago, i really just want to think way less and lessen the barriers to action. creating systems, a set of rules and regular habits to stick to, really eases the cognitive load so i can focus on showing up.

things i’ve found really enjoyable weekly: writing club, sports leagues, cooking dinners with my roommate, park before work with friends, and a decluttering day.

daily habits i’ve enjoyed: journaling, exercising, walking to work with my friend, and my morning coffee routine.

these systems allow me to practice navigating motivation in building systems, in tandem with lower doses of discipline to get things done.

Is it healthy to force an outcome?

over the last few years i’ve been working on embracing the things that are meant for me, and letting go of the things that are not.

my answer is that no, things are mostly not worth forcing. if something reacts well to my honest efforts it’s worth continuing. if it doesn’t, it’s usually not for me at that time.

i want to believe that the things that are the best uses of my natural, authentic self, would move towards me as much as i’m moving towards them like a magnet nearing a fridge. on the other hand, forcing myself into the wrong roles, rooms, and relationships seems like a personal hell.

How do I handle contradicting value systems in decision-making?

last fall i went through a heartbreak that was really uncomfortable to sit in. there, i had a choice in taking some drastic actions: cutting an important friendship out of my life, leaning into the complexities, or sitting in a murky limbo.

in sept, i wrote about how we have a choice in what desires we pursue:

we can really choose not to give into certain desires and impulses to explore when you don’t want that complexity in your life.

a few months later after healing from the urgency of the pain, i wrote about practicing patience:

waiting for the right things to come at the right time is such an art, and it is so easy to feel like things are urgent... it is really easy for me to feel like things are urgent when i am desperate.

despite the seemingly calm exterior i’ve put on over many years of therapy, i’m still really uncomfortable in uncertain situations. i’ve been practicing sitting in it.

so many situations are nuanced af and full of contradictions—contradicting feelings, contradicting evidence of other people’s feelings, and parts of me that want to split off and make different decisions. in times where it’s easier to take a drastic action, i’ve been practicing letting the story play out longer. at some point, the answer usually reveals itself. wait til one of the sides wins.

How rigid or flexible should my desires be? Do I know what I am looking for? Can I move intentionally without being rigid?

over the last year i’ve seen how fickle my feelings are. i wrote about this realization last november:

it’s actually so scary how deeply and strongly and how much conviction i can have over something only for it to completely disintegrate within just a few weeks. this happens to me with different impulsive shiny things that are dangled in front of me.

sometimes i feel like i am on the brink of some sort of disruption. like things are so so good and balanced but like how if i just wanted to i could just fuck shit up and everything around me would fall apart.

in buddhism, there are these two types of desire: “chanda” and “tanha”. chanda refers to motivations that pull a person in, while tanha (“thirst”) is a reflexive craving that comes from lack.

i’m finding that while my tanha feelings are quite fickle, my chanda desires, once discovered, are way more stable.

since i’ve started naming chanda, i’ve been more and more in pursuit of states that marry the things i desire. the tough part is that these weird combinations of things are unique to individual people, and cannot easily be generalized into titles or descriptors.

for example, i like to write, work with people closely, and be creative. there are a bajillion jobs out there where you can do that, but it’s not always clear what combination is right.

all this to say that i don’t actually know the shape of the things i’m looking for. all i can do is start from identifying the threads i want to use. and hopefully one day i’ll be surprised by the tapestry i’ve threaded together.

photos of new threads from the last year <3

as i was compiling these i realized that it’s hard to know what threads are viable or will turn into anything substantial when it’s more recent. the last few months were way harder to compile than last year’s so i left recent events out.

can’t wait to see how it pans out 🍳

A few years ago, I had just moved to New York, started my first job, and wrote my first piece on authenticity. It was largely a series of open questions on how the heck to make friends and live somewhere with so much noise. In Amsterdam, I found part two. Here she is.

What does it mean to truly integrate?

The biking culture in Amsterdam blew me away. You could identify locals by how easily they biked, taking the quickest glance over their shoulder and throwing out a quick hand signal before carving into a turn like seasoned ice dancers on a freshly zambonied surface. Friends biked in sync next to each other with the same nonchalance that two people in New York would walk side by side. A woman sat on a man’s lap while he biked. Passenger princesses perched on ledges I didn’t even know existed on bikes, a man carried a lamp home in one arm, and children and pets rode in carts and baskets. The most impressive was a woman in the tallest, clunkiest heels, who wedged the pedal in the space between the balls of her feet and the heel as if the negative space was perfectly made for it.

Meanwhile, I’m learning that one of my friends is REALLY into biking. At an après ski party, I asked him if he liked to ski. He said he would never ski because the risk of injury is too high, and he can’t risk not being able to bike. In hindsight, I’ve never seen him without his signature neon green helmet, evidence of his journey to the plans. The other day, I asked him how far something was, and he answered in the time it takes to bike there, not walk there (in New York City! where the subway reigns supreme). The more I get to know him, the more I see that biking isn’t a hobby or a mode of transportation so much as a true part of who he is, while living in a city that doesn’t quite integrate it for him.

I often hold myself back from feeding the parts of myself that don’t fit into the environment I’m in. Part of me is waiting for my environment to integrate for me. It’s nice to remember that I can play a more active role in my own life, just like how my friend has embraced being an Amsterdam kind of biker in New York. Identity building by deep integration.

Who am I performing for?

The streets of Amsterdam were full of beautiful, warm interiors: windowsills adorned with signature statement tulips and rooms glowing with ambient light. Most people didn’t have blinds and lived their private home lives publicly, for all bystanders on the street to witness. Couples tag-teaming a home-cooked dinner, a post-work TV lounge, and families eating around the dinner table.

Walking through the streets was like watching a movie, catching a glimpse into hundreds of rich individual lives that come together to collectively embody the essence of a Dutch life. It left me wondering why, despite living in the most densely populated city in the world, it had never felt so open and full of everyday life back home.

Curious, I looked more into it. Turns out, Amsterdam’s Calvinist roots insisted: open blinds showed that honest citizens have nothing to hide.

I tend to be somewhat of an open book, but lately I’ve been feeling performative. As if my windows are wide open, but I’m far too aware that people can look in.

When my friend interned on the Instagram stories team, she’d misunderstood her feature because she had never seen an Instagram story. So, she installed the app that day to do her job. Feeling icked out by the accessibility of constant perception, I’ve been inspired not to know what the modern-day equivalent of an Instagram story is. I immediately downgraded my phone by deleting my social media and other non-essential apps.

Silencing the noise of parasocial influences, I’m left assessing: how much of my life remains a performance? How much do I enjoy doing the thing versus being the kind of person that does that kind of thing?

I used to have a goal of becoming a yoga instructor. The more I looked into it, the more it was clear that I just wanted to be the type of person who was a yoga instructor, instead of being excited to actually instruct yoga.

Recently, my roommate and I have been working on a series called Learning on the Loo, one-pagers we write and print out for our toilet reading pleasure. My first instinct, before even finishing the first one, was to figure out how to scale it. Perhaps we can email this to all our friends, or print it out and deliver it! To which my roommate brought me back to reality, “Let’s just start with our own bathroom.”

I suspect that most things I want to do actually have a bit of both — actual desire mixed with some level of performance. I love my inclination to share everything with the people around me. It brings me to put interesting output into the world and connect with different people. I want to do that while staying true to who I am without all the noise of perceived perception.

The Dutch tradition of keeping windows open reminds me to focus on building the interiors of my own home and think of people looking in as a secondary side effect of wanting to look outside.

doe maar gewoon

On my last day in Amsterdam, I stumbled across this Dutch saying:

This roughly translates to: just act normally, that is crazy enough.

Sitting in this busy park, I’m still trying my best to reduce all the external noise of this loud place to hear my own voice again. I’m bringing some of that chill Dutch lifestyle with me by 1) integrating things into my life so deeply that they become identity, and 2) living my life with my windows open so I can look out without caring if anyone looks in.

In the last few weeks, we spent many a night crashing out over spreadsheets, text message threads coordinating our artist friends, and print layouts. It was important to us to do each artist and patron justice, but as time went on, we grew repeatedly frustrated over the lack of responses, space, and time we had to execute. At times, it was unclear how the heck we’d pull this vision off in a comprehensible way.

The night before the event, we were still in the trenches and fighting demons figuring out food and beverages to be served, and how the heck to rearrange our living room furniture to nicely display 30 pieces of art in various mediums (not to mention the 50-70 guests coming) in our metal shoebox in the sky of a midtown apartment.

This panicked preparation carried over into the first half hour of the event, but eventually we figured it all out and we pulled it off:

On Saturday, we were able to showcase 30 works of art and accommodate about 50 patrons during our opening hours of 10 am to 5 pm!

One of the greatest privileges of my life is being surrounded by creative people. All of these brilliant friends I speak of are full-time corporate baddies who both rock at their day jobs and find time on the side to create. These creative endeavors range quite a bit in medium, the emotions they elicit, and in their process (from time-on-toilet bathroom trackers to emotional short story comics). And yet they all have one major thing in common: they are all clearly products of immense effort and care.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been blessed with peeks into the passions of my friends over brunches and hangs. The way my friends’ eyes just light up and the everlasting impressions their art leaves! Each peek nudged me towards the idea of this gallery.

Through sharing these joys, I’ve uncovered that inviting people to play in a shared pool of creativity is one of my life missions. And this gallery was a beautiful manifestation of it.

Watching people soak in the music, the visual art, and the interactive works — from intense focus to laughter and even tears. It was fucking beautiful. On their way out, several people told us that they felt inspired to work on their own creative projects from playing the piano to painting. Two girls even left our apartment to go straight to Michael’s to buy canvases!

learnings

We grossly underestimated the amount of work it’d take

Ramitha and I have a goal of hosting once a month, and we’ve well exceeded that goal thus far. Yet with all of our other events requiring relatively little effort to pull off, we were not prepared for the coordination this event would demand.

Personally, this became way more of an emotional journey than I had expected. At a few points, I had to force myself to follow through and give the prep work the full attention it deserved. I really dislike forcing myself against the current, and almost never do it. The event was ultimately a success and hugely rewarding because of all of those late nights. It was worth it at the end of the day, and in hindsight, the exhaustion I felt was more of a reflection of my general bandwidth than the actual gallery work. I think I would have enjoyed it way more had I not been traveling like a madwoman in the weeks prior.

But my gosh we were so naive!

Name specific intentions to communicate the vibe

Though my vision was super blurry at first, I knew I wanted to transform the apartment to resemble a legitimate art gallery. Throughout the event, there were a few moments where the vibes shifted away from that intention. Halfway through, we put up a “shhh art gallery in progress” sign at the front door, which helped for several hours. We had also gotten signal from a few artists and guests that they weren’t fully sure what to expect.

While we had thought about the implicit signals we’d send with the details of the event we curated, it didn’t translate to everybody correctly. Going forward, when hosting a niche event, I’d like to explicitly name the specific intent and vibe in the invitations themselves to make it clear to attendees.

reflections

Materializing a vague idea is super rewarding

The best things I’ve created are usually things that don’t quite hold their own shape at inception. When we decided on this, the only intention we had was to display about five to ten pieces. Slowly but surely, the number ballooned and the details all came together. Though we had scraped everything together in a panic, a few people assumed we did this regularly and asked to be invited to the next one. Even if it is not perfect, or the best, or even all that good just yet, it can be important to put it out into the world anyway.

Sharing inspiration is one of my life callings

(I already knew this, but it continues to get reaffirmed!)

It made me so happy and proud to see friends and strangers alike moved by the cool projects that Ramitha and I have been appreciating all this time already. I feel really proud that we were able to scotch-tape this makeshift pool of creative juice together for our community to come play around in for a rainy Saturday.

last summer when my lease in new york ended, i decided to pack up my stuff and move home; splitting my time between my parents’ suburban home and traveling the world. in my adult gap semester abroad, i met a ton of cool, interesting, and very different people from all over the world. it was especially thought-provoking to meet people my age ~ some also solo traveling, and others escaping war or difficult situations in their home country. i couldn’t help but wonder if i’d be them, had i spawned somewhere else instead. with each new person i’ve met on vacation came another alternate reality i considered. meeting and connecting with different people is my favorite thing about traveling.

what i didn’t expect though, is the different parts of myself i’d get to meet along the way.

it clicked for me in a recent conversation with my friend s, who splits her time between boston and new york. recently she told me about how each city brings out different sides of her. her life in new york is loud and exciting. she’s got back to back plans from 6 am tennis to 9 pm drinks. she hosts events, takes improv classes, and is constantly inspired to keep creating. in boston, her daily routine is much more, well, routine. she spends her days at her corporate job, and then goes home to chill. in contrast, her boston life is softer and quieter. it’s different, and yet equally her.

s and i actually met because a mutual friend of ours introduced us to each other after recognizing how similar we were. we both loved to host things, write, connect people. we even had similar jobs and chased down niche side quests like no other.

when she moved to boston and i stayed in new york, our similarities seemed to diverge. and yet her boston life reminded me a lot of the time i spent in los angeles, working a chill job and chilling at the beach all day by myself.

i’ve been coming to this same conclusion for the past few years as i’ve gotten to live in a few different places. it is crazy how different my life can look, even just a month apart, just because i moved. i am often merely just a girl so influenced by the environment around me.

if my life was one braided thread, i’d venture to guess that i had only started adding new threads when i started meeting new people and going to new places. the side quests we go on, the new relationships we form, the new experiences we taste when we temporarily live elsewhere kinda cause the thread to split. all of a sudden, we branch out to develop another thread. these splits represent the ways we could be or the ways we could’ve been. and maybe this thread gets integrated back into the main thread or maybe it never does.

in the last few months of travel, i’ve met a more carefree part of myself in the form of a sparkly iridescent, almost liquid but sturdy tinsel strand. she did things most of my other parts would never do. frankly things that i’ve never done before, ranging from falling in love in california to attempting handstands and sneaking into hospital parking lots to feed chickens in lisbon to kissing a spanish man under the christmas lights of taipei 101.

perhaps it was the magic of these new cities, or the prolonged vacation mindset, or just plain old getting older that brought her out.

now that i’m back from my travels and committing to staying in new york for a while, i’m finding that this carefree self has been beautifully braided into the main strand of my life. i noticed myself being more decisive and spontaneous, making some riskier medium-term decisions relatively quickly, like switching teams at work and signing a lease without too much thought. both of which have higher risks and rewards than similar decisions i’ve made in the past. maybe i’m not as free as i was when i was traveling the world by myself, but i’m still making decisions i would not have a year ago.

somewhere along the way, i realized that i’ve been practicing this in therapy all along in the form of internal family systems (ifs) — the idea that we are each made up of a collection of separate parts. its been cool to accept all of my parts, even when they feel separate or even conflicting at times. that the girl who attempts a handstand for the first time in a yoga class in lisbon, the girl who goes on dates with strangers around the world, and the girl who spends most of her days debugging code that doesn’t work in new york are indeed separate, but all parts worth keeping at the table.

some additional photos from times i felt free during my travels:

This post is a reflection through the lens of a series of essays I wrote about the experience.

An exercise in free will

Last summer, newly 23-year-old me went on a date with a 28-year-old man who felt really fricken old to me because it felt like he had lived all these lives. While I was just a year out of college and trying to figure out the basics of living and working in New York, he had seemingly figured it out. I was inspired as he told me about his improv side gig, the ecstatic dance classes he took twice a week relgiously, and how he just got back from a year in Turkey. These endeavors felt really exciting and foreign to me, and I mentally put them in the category of things I could do by the time I turned 28, but certainly not anytime soon.

But recently, I realized I had pretty much done some version of all of those things now at 24: an improv class and show earlier this year, ecstatic dance in SF in September, and now moving out of New York and traveling the world, working in Lisbon for a month.

This Lisbon month felt like a small way of practicing free will while pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone in a safe way. I first had the desire to live in Europe earlier this year, and as the year went on it kind of just fell into place with how my work was going and my lease ending. The whole thing was way easier to coordinate than I would’ve expected.

In hindsight, I’ve had the physical freedom for a while, but in the past year I think my free will got freer and willier.

I’ve been on this trajectory all year, but pulling off this trip was another piece of evidence that I can kinda just do whatever the heck I want. I’m quite proud of myself for overcoming my fears, from having to muster up an immense amount of courage to sign up for a volleyball league earlier this year to uprooting across the world, somewhere where I didn’t speak the language or know anyone for my October in Lisbon.

Discovering my free self

My month in Lisbon has brought out my free self.

In the last few weeks, I found myself in a few unfamiliar positions. For instance, I did a handstand for the first time ever in a yoga class, despite taking weekly yoga classes in New York, where I’ve never even attempted it. I made friends with a cute Russian girl at the top of a cliff at the westernmost point in Europe, where we chatted for hours about everything from escaping the war in Russia to international boys over the luscious sounds of the ocean crashing while the sun set. And during my first week, I went on a date with a Portuguese man, frolicking around unfamiliar streets and sneaking into hospital lots to feed the chickens.

My free self is a part of me that shies away in New York, where I’m further buried in work, responsibilities, and systems that I don’t normally realize might be mentally limiting.

My free-ness is also evident in a newfound openness to experience. When I started work full-time, my work asked me if I was open to an international six-month rotation, to which I remember thinking that was crazy and not even considering it. But during my second half week in Lisbon, I found myself super open to the idea of moving across the world.

Moving to Lisbon with nothing but a singular suitcase and no plan taught me that I don’t really need much to be happy. Just a few necessities physically, and the ability to stay in touch with friends and family. This realization made me feel more alive, light, and free than I have ever felt.

Although my mission was to come to Lisbon to experience local life, I’ve embodied a freer persona than the one I usually sustain in places where I live. Perhaps the free-ness comes from the energy and culture of Lisbon, or maybe it just comes from the vacation mindset of knowing it’s all temporary anyway.

I’m really glad I got to meet my free self during this month abroad. I like her. I know that the responsibilities of life make it impossible to sustain a fairytale, but upon reflection, nothing is really stopping me from embracing this side of myself more back home long-term. I am as free from constraint as I ever will be, and maybe it doesn’t have to be a temporary persona I embodied. I suppose only time will tell, but I’d like to keep this part of me around.

Experiencing déjà vu

During my month in Lisbon, I hosted 10 friends in my apartment. A different group every few days rotating out of my second bedroom.

The groups were varied, from people I didn’t know all that well to some of my best friends and my sister. Each person brought a fun and fresh perspective to the month.

As the month went on, I started experiencing some crazy déjà vu, doing the same exact activities week after week, but with a different group. This setup was unexpectedly refreshing and helped me experience the city from different perspectives.

I really loved that each group brought such a different vibe and energy. Some people were more chill travelers, where we’d spend our days sitting around different spaces and ending the night bingeing a new series together. Others were more adventurous, where we’d pack our days and walk a bajillion steps. I did a lot of day drinking with some friends, whereas others were completely sober.

It was exceptionally fun to be liquid and morph to interact with everyone’s unique ways of being as much as I could.

It was also cool to become increasingly familiar with the city. I was experiencing the city for the first time alongside the first few groups who came to visit. But by the end, I was able to compile a guide with recommendations and tips and tricks for my last guests.

The magic of slow living

My favorite thing about leaving New York City is the pungent sense of calm I immediately feel. Lisbon was no different and actually the epitome of magical slow living.

Lisbon feels like SF to me in many ways, with the palm trees and the temperate sun, cafe working culture, the hilly streets, and colorful architecture. Heck, they even have a Golden Gate Bridge of their own…

California and Lisbon also intersect in being the perfect balance of quirky, bustling, and slow. I loved that there was so much life in the city, people walking around at all times of day, and that the streets were so rich with culture. And yet people live so slowly.

While living in Lisbon as an English-speaking American woman was really quite easy, I did notice a few cultural differences that really made the city feel more slow-paced:

1. Takeout is not the norm. It usually costs extra to get food, or even coffee, in a takeout container. People normally sit down and eat for hours.

2. On a similar note, you can sit at a cafe or restaurant for hours and no one will rush you. And that’s also the norm. Service was often super slow.

3. When my friends visited, they were appalled by the lack of scalability of the subway system (lol). The routes were pretty inefficient and the lines were defined by a few colors of the rainbow. A lot of times it was way faster to walk or uber, even if the subway took you there relatively directly. But still, I loved taking it places.

4. Most people don’t have dryers and hang their clothes outside their windows on a clothes line. I actually found myself really enjoying the physical, intentional, and meditative act of hanging each piece of clothing outside and pinning them up. I told my Portuguese date this and he laughed at me…

The routine I created for myself there was reminiscent of my routine from when I lived in LA a few years ago. I’d go to the cafe in the mornings, walk around and try a new brunch spot, stroll around the streets exploring without a plan, log onto work for a few hours from a new cafe, and then catch the sunset from a new spot every day before ending the night either out or with a cozy TV show.

One of my friends captured what I think is the essence of this slow, non-performative European living in her Lisbon reflection:

I had just recently moved to New York and immediately, I found myself alongside everyone else running on the hamster wheel, taking part in this never ending motion. It’s hard to stop once you get in this routine of motion of baseline productivity and aiming to achieve.

On my first day in Lisbon, Ashley took us to this viewpoint near her home around sunset. Like many viewpoints it was filled with ambient sounds of people chatter, smoke, and intimate conversations. People around seemed to keep pulling out guitars, strumming a beautiful melody.

When I experience music in New York, whether in subways or outside, its focused purpose seems to be more around performance. To perform well for others. But when people were playing on the guitars it was for their own enjoyment alongside their friends.

It’s so easy to be influenced by our environment. It shapes what feels normal, otherwise it feels as though we need to constantly challenge the status quo.

I too feel the same way. As I continue to integrate back into the bustling city, I’d like to see how much of my chill Lisbon routine and state of mind I can bring back into my normal life.

To write is to poop.

One of the biggest reasons I moved to Lisbon was to spend many slow European mornings writing in different cafes. Lisbon is one of the best cities for a laptop worker. There are endless cafes perfectly packed with remote workers. There were about eight great ones within a five-minute walk from my apartment.

I spent most early mornings writing at cafes before exploration and work, writing.

In October, I had been doing a writing challenge called Inktober, where I had to write an entry every day based on an assigned word of the day. It was super fun to do it this year with a foreign city as the backdrop for each piece. There are pieces that I probably never would’ve written back home without the change in environment and the different experiences. For instance, in New York, I never would’ve been frolicking around an abandoned cult church off a coastal cliff where there also just happens to be perfectly preserved dinosaur prints. I’ve never felt so inspired to write creatively about our weight of our existence as a slice of history.

I’ll treasure these Inktober entries ~ how fun is it that they came out of this fever dream of a month? In fact, many of the pieces from this zine either are directly quoted or stem from Inktober pieces I’ve written this month.

While I’ve done a lot of writing, I feel mostly dissatisfied with the depth of the writing I’ve been doing. I really came to terms with the fact that good processing and personal writing work like a digestive system: living is like eating, processing is like digesting, and writing is like pooping.

On this trip, I was doing too much living … and now I’m a bit constipated. Even though I wrote every day for Inktober and journaled a bunch, I found myself resorting to writing recaps from the days rather than the thoughts and feelings I wanted to really flesh out.

Thus, I haven’t really had the time and mental space to process my thoughts and feelings deeply enough to write as completely as I’ve been yearning to.

I’m so rich and full: all of the Inktober entries I’ve written, all of the friends I’ve been able to share this chapter with, and of course all of the novel sights and memories I’ve experienced. all while balancing the responsibilities of my 9-5.

These are two of my favorite inktober entries that I think captured the vibe in a certain moment of the month:

inktober day 29 - “arctic”

i’ve started to realize that there are many things i enjoy for a brief moment in time, or regularly but not constantly. the cold is one of those things. once in a while it is super nice to be freezing your butt off and then drinking a warm bowl of soup afterward. it is so nice to be inside while it snows and accumulates. or to be able to go skiing or sledding. and obviously it needs to be cold and ideally snowing on christmas and new years.

but how nice would it be if we could rotate through each of the seasons every week? if i could have bangs one day and a head of red hair another day. be different verions of myself in different environments and mix and match every single day while still keeping some threads? like we could have the same jobs and friends and overall lives but some random variations of them alternating through the storyline of our lives.

maybe one day i’ll write these desires into a short story, or at the very least iron out who what when where why i really want to be and experience and how to make that happen in ways that align with reality.

as for now though, this gap semester is certainly helping me to peer through those windows of what a different life could be like while keeping some through lines. a life in in sf, vancouver, london, and lisbon. to live love and laugh through all of the seasons of life as different people in different places.

this is a window we walked past last night on my way home as we passed by several cutie wine and cocktail bars in the neighborhood. this window felt particularly special, like a literal and metaphorical window into a place with so much life and so much going on. i wish i could capture this window on several dates and seasons over years. i wonder how the people inside, the decor, the lighting, the vibe would change throughout.

inktober day 9 - “heavy”

yesterday we went to walk to pedra de mua trail an hour out of downtown lisbon. the views were beautiful and it was a cliffside coastal dirt path. the main highlight of the trail is supposed to be these dinosaur tracks that have been well preserved in the land. for me though the highlight was the view and the ocean crashing into the rocks and the sunset we got to watch in completion from the sacred land.

on the way back we read about some of the lore of the area. there was an abandoned building there which used to be a meeting place for a cult. a lot of history went down there although there is very sparse evidence of a cohesive history. the dinosaur tracks they were to have thought to have been the virgin mary riding up from the sea on a horse.

it was cool to be in such a random spiritually and historically deep place off the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. what a beautiful spot with such rich, heavy lore, and there was no one else there. we saw less than 5 people the entire time we were there (many hours).

if i thought back to the dinosaurs and really thought about them roaming around there, was this also still by the ocean? they must have been so heavy to have indented the earth like that. how has this been preserved all this time?

and for us to be there, five kids from new york, flying drones and taking jumping photos on the dirt path left by people who must have been there before us. roaming around where dinosaurs and cults used to.

a feeling of freedom and serenity and lightness atop the heavy lore of the dinosaur track land. a beautiful place.

And one of my friends’ essays that captured how it felt to stand along historic castle walls:

In Lisbon, Castelo de São Jorge sits a top a hill next to the water with sweeping views of the entire city, while the castle was rebuilt over the years to match the look of the nearby moorish castle in Sintra (sometimes leading to it be begrudgingly being called a Disney castle), it also holds the oldest remains of settlements in Lisbon, dating back over two and a half millennia.

Standing a long the walls of this landmark, all that I could think about was that this city has been the center of peoples lives for thousands of years. For much of that time, the place where I was standing was a symbol of power or governance, inaccessible to many. The city has become so much less important to us in an age of technology, international travel, and individual opportunity. My intuition is to look at this castle as an object of historical and natural beauty, missing the fact that this site has defined the lives of the residence of Lisbon for hundreds of generations. And now I can casually walk along the walls on a random Sunday…

The memories and the feeling of being in these places are so precious and a little bit indescribable, although we certainly tried.

While I didn’t get to write as much as I would’ve liked to on this Lisbon trip, a lot of writing opportunities came out of it: personal essays based on the experience, a goal to move to the mountains of Japan to write a memoir for my mid-life crisis, and making all my visitors create a digital zine with me.

Reflections on my fairytale month

My month in Lisbon was a lot of things: a break from New York, a fairytale of a side quest, a glimpse into a different life that could relatively easily be mine long term if I wanted it to be. It was pretty random, and maybe I didn’t come back an entirely different person like I wanted to, but it was certainly at least a little bit world-expanding.

Several people questioned why I chose to stay put in Lisbon for my month abroad. But I wanted as much as possible to experience what it might be like to live in a foreign city. I still stand by that decision and am happy I stayed in one apartment the whole time. Temporarily living somewhere is still, imo, the best way to travel.

In hindsight, I don’t even think a month is nearly long enough. Rather than full immersion into the local experience, it was closer to a month-long vacation, especially because I had different people come visit every week who were seeing all the sights for the first time. Subconsciously, I think the month-long set time frame stopped me from being open to more long-term pursuits, like friendships and relationships with locals, compared to if I were staying longer.

In some ways, I did feel like I lived there by the end. I certainly had some favorite go-to restaurants and bars, and cafes for work and such. I had found a favorite place to picnic, walking routes, and a few different sunset spots, too. I went on a date and made a friend. I went to yoga regularly, and after trying two studios, stuck to the same one repeatedly. Those things were pretty immersive.

From this trip, I wish to bring back with me the warmth and freedom I felt living in Lisbon. A gentle slice of sun and a pair of X-ray googles to cut through the invisible limitations that were previously opaque.

All in all, my time in Lisbon was an epic month with some semblance of local living, even if it was a relatively temporary regularity.

ps final pastel de nata count: 11 and 2/3 :)

My friends are often shocked when I describe myself as unambitious and undisciplined.

But… you work a fast-paced job, live in New York City, and have been writing a monthly email to 50 friends for the last three years?

The truth is that I am a big fan of quitting things that feel hard and only doing things when I feel like it. And recently, I’ve found my ambitions repeatedly questioned and immensely frustrating to explain.

All around me in New York, I see people working crazy hours and sleeping very little to chase their really cool and big dreams. In a city that admires hard work, I feel quite afraid to express my dislike of working hard. There is a pressure to follow suit to compete: stay late at the office, run marathons, and collect credentials and friends alike like they’re Pokémon. Sometimes it’s explicit, and sometimes it’s a guilt-inducing whisper.

And it is totally true. You can get places by working really fucking hard.

For a while I tried. I thought that fighting uphill battles was the key to happiness. But each time I reached a new peak I couldn’t help but wonder what it was all for.

I was raised by two immigrant parents who moved to the US with nothing and have been working hard for the last 30 years to survive. While I never struggled physically, I struggled mentally after repeatedly working through failed exams, jobs, and relationships. In hindsight, I was desperately competing against my classmates in competitions that just weren’t for me.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I never really cared about winning, but I was always afraid of falling behind. I’ve learned that I am not built to bang my head on the same problems over and over until I overcome them. Instead I’ve learned how to reframe ambition in gentler ways. I’ve come to love how I can make progress without working hard. And it’s grown to become one of my favorite parts about myself!

how i practice soft ambition

Two years ago, I wrote, illustrated, and self-published a childrens book just for funsies because I had a bunch of free time. The other day, one of my coworkers found it through the depths of the internet, recorded a video of him reading it to his child, and dropped the video in our team chat to “toot my horn.” It was sweet and made me happy, but I was surprised to see how impressed everyone else was, because it didn’t feel hard to do.

Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot better at following through and finishing daunting projects. Looking back, I have to thank my soft ambition. A lot of these life lessons are pretty obvious in hindsight, but I’m grateful to have gone through these arcs regardless because it’s unlocked a lot of joy and peace in my life.

This is how I’ve come to practice soft ambition.

committing correctly

The fun thing about life is that there are usually so many other things we could possibly be doing that when something is not working maybe it’s time to try something else.

I wasn’t planning on writing a childrens book in 2022 when I first started. Instead, I had been conducting research on the effects of social media on children for my college senior thesis. Coming off of two big tech internships working on major social media platforms, I was eager to create a pamphlet to educate children on the adverse effects of social media addiction. When I proposed this format to my thesis advisors, I was met with disapproval from my primary thesis advisor. Beyond the friction between us, I slowly felt myself falling out of love with the project, slugging through the research knowing I wouldn’t be able to land the impact I wanted to with this research in the format I wanted to present it in. Following some long-winded email attempts to convince her, I quit the thesis altogether and decided to pour the extra 20+ hours a week I had into figuring out how to create a childrens book.

The difficult thing about latching onto ultra-specific paths, milestones, and goals is that there are so many variables that can get in the way. Maybe it’s a stubborn thesis advisor, but it could be a lack of funds or an uncooperative client. It requires quite a bit of force to achieve. And there is nothing wrong with that—grit is an objectively useful skill. But really trying and failing over and over again is very hard and painful. I’d rather put it on the backburner and try something else, or come back to this again when the timing makes it easier.

I’ve also found that there will be signs of compatibility along the way. As soon as I pivoted to working on my childrens book, I was met with noticeably less roadblocks. Everything was under my own control and I could feel the compatibility of the project to my personal interests and goals. I spent a lot of time on it, but I was energized and motivated by it.

A friend at work once told me that our interviews are “easy for the right people and hard for the wrong people”, and I’ve thought about that quite a bit as I’ve been interviewing candidates more and more. A good interview is decently representative of the job. You talk to a person that works there and answer curated questions made to test fit. Landing the thing itself without working painfully hard is probably good signal of how hard you’ll actually be working on the job. This is another reason why cheating your way in can be harmful in the long-run.

The same thing applies to relationships, and everything you have to work for and work on. Now, when I look back at the people, places, and things that have rejected me, I see it as a blessing to not have forced myself in too hard because I likely would have struggled in those positions.

I know this because I’ve been there too. I’ve had easy relationships and hard relationships. Easy jobs and hard jobs. Working hard is really valuable and rewarding, but I’ve learned that it’s crucial to watch out for when hard work becomes forcing myself into a mold I’ll never fully be comfortable in.

forcing functions

A forcing function is a constraint that helps guide and facilitate action. They work by eliminating choice and help to unintentionally build habits.

When I had set the broader goal of publishing a childrens book, without fully knowing it, I set a bunch of forcing functions to make this easy:

• I had no background in how to put a book together. To learn how to use the adobe suite from photoshop to typography, I asked my local coffee shop if they needed any digital design help. That summer, I redesigned their website, created flyers for their events, and designed their new logo and merch. I took what I learned and immediately applied it to my book every day. All while sipping on the unlimited free coffee I was compensated with. I even got to give out copies of my book at the cafe at the end of the summer!

• I also travelled a ton that year, going to a different city every month. In every city, I made it a point to go into every bookstore I saw to flip through childrens books for research. This turned out to be an incredible way to explore the demographics and cultures around the world. I gained a ton of inspiration and motivation from it.

  

• The fact that I was starting my first full-time job at the end of the summer was the ultimate forcing function. I assumed that this book was either going to get published before I started work or it would never see the light of day, and that really motivated me to keep to the deadline.

The active energy of being disciplined is the part that feels hard. But motivation is often fleeting. This is why forcing functions are so incredible—they allow you to practice discipline and inspire motivation without feeling the friction.

For years, I’d been circling around this answer, and all along I had been doing it. This is why a few months of improv classes brought out my whimsy at work, why writing every day for a month with my coworkers made us more habitual writers, and why I’m never going to miss a solidcore class with a cancellation fee (even if its at 7 am). These are all just forcing functions and I am but a mere follower.

embracing what works for me

Overall, redefining what ambition can mean and look like to me has been super empowering.

Finishing the childrens book project, from writing to illustrating to compiling and self-publishing, was, in hindsight a pretty pivotal project, although it didn’t feel like it at the time. It was one of the earliest proofs that I could do hard things, completely for myself just because I wanted to! A lot of cool things have come out of it too—conversations and even friendships with unexpected people, writing growth, and most importantly, embracing the soft ambition I carry.

It is the same soft ambition that brings me to spend my weekend thinking about these things, reading people’s stories, and putting these thoughts into words. It’s pretty much responsible for everything I’ve done in the last few years and my mental health, and that’s why it’s become one of my favorite things about myself!

closing this out with some of my favorite related personal essays:

• Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process by Henrik Karlsson

• In praise of quitting by Cate Hall

• against brute forcing by Ava

• That Sounds Fun by Annie Downs (this is a book)

Earlier this year, I went to Japan with my grandparents and found myself really marinating in those ineffable eldest-daughter-to-Asian-immigrant-parent feelings again. The following is an essay I wrote on the flight home from that trip. An homage to the common app essay I wrote in 2018 that never saw the light of day.

foreshadowing

On the 14-hour plane ride from New York to Tokyo, I watched the movie Past Lives, a Korean American story about immigration, assimilation, friendship, love, and our past lives figuratively and literally. I related a lot to the main character, having also moved from Asia to North America at a similar age and experiencing a similar assimilation arc that also ends with me pursuing writing dreams in New York City. I too left behind childhood best friends and extended family members in Asia when I left. These people were once my entire life, and now I don’t remember some of their names.

The me that they know, the me that my grandparents know. She’s different than the one my friends know, and even different than the me that I know today. But how much of her and I are still the same? How has everyone else changed?

If you change out the parts of a car, one by one, until all of its original parts are gone, is it still the same car?

On the first day of the trip, I finished Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True from start to finish. Hsu is also a second-generation Taiwanese American who is one of the first super relatable memoir authors to me—summers spent listening to ICRT on the Taiwanese radio and school years spent trying to fit in at recess in a society that had no idea the difference between Thailand and Taiwan. He’s now a writer in New York. In Stay True, he tells another annihilating story from college on growing up Asian American, friendship, and grief. It was insanely gut-wrenching and beautiful.

As I consumed these stories, I had no idea how much they would foreshadow the trip.

shattering generational barriers

In a passionate midnight chat with my mom early on during the trip, I summarized the plot of Past Lives in hopes of swooning over the romanticism and gut-wrenching what-ifs together. I’d forgotten that she’s a deeply practical lady who, despite studying humanities, is now averse to overanalyzing the romanticism of life. I wonder what killed that part of her—immigrating to Missouri when she was 24? Having me at 25? Fighting to survive and pay the bills all of her 20s and 30s in a country that wasn’t hers?

I know more about my parents’ lives than most kids. We can recollect about our past lives for decades, but I will never get to experience my parents as they were growing up. And they’ll never have known each other growing up either before the fateful day they met in Missouri. In the same vein, the friends I make today will not know what I was like growing up. People I date, the person I marry one day, the closest people to me in each moment in time, will never have known my past lives. Nor me theirs. It killed me in Past Lives each time the main character’s husband found out something about her past self from the guy from her past. There’s a bittersweet pain in knowing that we can never know each other fully.

My mom and I feel different now. Surely I inherited both my pragmatic and romantic sides from her, but at some point she grew up and a realistic love killed off the idealistic lust within her. I can’t help but wonder if this part of me—the one that wants to know myself and the people I love as infinitely as possible, the part that thinks the impractical what-ifs are beautiful and a necessary pain—has an expiration date too. Perhaps one day I’ll read this and cackle with her at how naive I was.

The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories. - Hua Hsu, Stay True (2022)

Living on opposite sides of the world, I only see my grandparents for like two weeks every few years or so. They are so pure and appreciative of the little things it’s always a pleasure to 泡茶 (drink tea!) every day with them.

They don’t speak English, and my Chinese is not great. I already feel the limitations of language in English, but it’s way more of a challenge to tell them stories from my life in Chinese—what I do for work, bad date stories. Everything I say comes out as a clumsy description of the word I don’t know how to say in Chinese “the bacteria that might make you sick if you eat raw eggs” (salmonella) or “in math, two of the things that are away from the number in the middle“ (two standard deviations).

The language barrier paints another sad reality, one that further exacerbates the distance between people and the impossibility of knowing someone completely.

“You dream in a language i dont understand, It's like there's this whole place inside you I can't go.” - Celine Song, Past Lives (2023)

On the bright side, it’s fun to learn Chinese and stumble through lessons in linguistics. My grandma actually remarked “it’s so funny talking to an American” (she was laughing at me stumbling through my stories, not with me). My listening comprehension is pretty good, but there are a few words and slang I do not know. Apparently, “吃豆腐” (eat tofu) is to touch someone sexually nonconsentually.

But despite the language barrier, I learned so much about their past lives too on this trip. My grandpa had nine siblings, and my grandma seven. Back then, lots of kids died when they were babies, so they only grew up and old with some of them. I learned all about what all of these people who I can barely recollect have been up to for the last few years: some very good things, some very terrible things. It is bizarre how I used to share lives with these people so intimately, and now we are as far apart physically and metaphorically as we possibly could be.

piecing it all together

Hearing all of those stories and unpacking traumas from my parents and grandparents’ past lives, I finally for the first time understood some things about my mom—why she at times has been so adamant about which schools I attended, who I surrounded myself with, who I was dating.

Learning about all of the different ways my relatives have ended up, I can’t help but think about the what-ifs, the alternate ways my life could have paned out: if my parents stuck to their original plan of moving back to Taiwan after finishing their masters in the US (probably my Chinese would be better), if my mom hadn’t decided to visit Missouri for vacation of all places (would I exist?), or if I were born into a different lineage altogether.

All of these contemplations also lead to more practical thoughts my mom would approve of:

Amongst all of these hypothetical paths is one that I actually trotted down. Why am I the way that I am? What defining moments shaped me and how many of them can I even remember? Why do I live and care? And why do I write?

“One day, you realize that your parents speak with a mild accent, and that they have no idea what passive voice is. The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf—one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them” - Hua Hsu, Stay True (2022)

And then there’s the plethora of hypothetical paths our lineage goes from here. Will I ever have kids? Will I be able to teach my future children Chinese at all? What language will they use to talk to their grandparents? Will they care at all when they visit where I went to elementary school in Taiwan? Or will they be on their phones the whole time? And of course, how do I not fuck them up?

our past lives are just… our lives

In my dressing room of a modern American life, I’ve grown adaptable and accustomed to trying on new identities and wardrobes rather quickly. Somewhere along the way, I’ve become so used to shedding old skin like it’s nothing. I forget to look back and reconnect with my past lives and the people, things, and places that actually still matter because they once were my whole world. Maybe I don’t want to shed some of these things.

”Only the future can provide the key to the interpretation of the past; and it is only in this sense that we can speak of an ultimate objectivity in history. It is at once the justification and the explanation of history that the past throws light on the future, and the future throws light on the past.” - Edward Hallett Carr, what is history? (1961)

This trip was the first time I saw my grandparents since being out of school, allowing us to see each other more as adults and entire people. In Japan, everywhere I looked reminded me of my childhood: flocks of small demure children in matching school uniforms politely herded by their teacher in a park, townhouses where the first floor doubles as a street food stall, the after-school convenience store rush hour mad dash for baos. I remembered what it was like to go to school in Asia, where we learned how to mop our own classrooms, never talk back, and hide our feelings. Suddenly, I saw my past more clearly: why my American teachers always thought there was something wrong with me just because I was quiet, why I was so afraid of the other kids, and why I wanted so desperately to assimilate for so long.

In a single trip, everything and everyone that came before me collided. It was painful and beautiful and everything everywhere all at once, truly.

Heartbreakingly, Sahi moved out of New York to Boston last week. Her departure is super bittersweet because it feels like our story has only just begun.

The last two things we did together before she left: teach improv to our friends in central park and write this piece! These creative building projects were the perfect end to this chapter. Just two girls who had the fattest friend crushes on each other, finally building things together.

the slow burn 🔥

We finally became friends because of the nature of social entropy and our mutual friend Sam, the great connector. The universe led us to each other through a series of some serendipitous events:

• Sophomore year of college: Ashley slides into Sahi’s DM after reading her post in an online women in tech community. This leads to our recruiting pen pal relationship for the rest of college.

• Year one post grad: Sahi and Ashley both live in New York, but haven’t talked to each other in years. Sahi co-hosts a +1 party. Sam, a mutual friend, attends and tells Ashley about the host. Ashley realizes it’s the same Sahi she used to text about recruiting in college. Inspired by Sahi’s party, Ashley hosts a +1 party too, and Sam brings Sahi as his +1. Ashley and Sahi meet for the first time in person.

• Year two post grad: Despite only having talked about recruiting over text and meeting briefly at a crowded party, Sahi and Ashley continue to hear about cool things the other person is doing through mutual friends. Sam, specifically, continues to hype us up to each other and constantly suggests we reach out. This leads to the FAT friend crushes we had on each other.

our love story 🤭

sahi’s perspective

I had a friend crush on Ashley and knew that I definitely wanted to hangout with her. Neither of us reached out to each other for a few months though. I’m chalking this up to the craziness of life and NYC. Thankfully, Ashley slid back into my Messenger DMs on December 2nd, and we started talking about writing. She had read my Medium post about a recent trip to Guatemala, and mentioned that she couldn’t help but relate to the intro and a lot of stuff that I observed and felt about life. She invited me to a creative writing workshop at Book Club Bar which ended up being our first friend date! It really did feel like a date, even though another one of Ashley’s friends was also there lel 😂

Another data point for how we’re drawn to the same things: I'd actually attended the same workshop before! Not to sound cliche but from that night onwards, the rest feels like history. It’s a blur in my head. We started texting a bit. We started hanging out more. I invited Ashley to events that I hosted like wine night, matcha at the apartment, a fake wedding, and brought her as a +1 to some gatherings. We had a couple of 1:1 hangouts. We just really hit it off.

Now that Ashley and I know each other a little more, I get what Sam saw. I just grabbed brunch with Ashley’s friend from college who she introduced me to once I moved to Boston. On our post-brunch walk, her friend notably said “I feel like I met the Indian version of Ashley, you guys are so similar”. And, I GET IT.

ashley’s perspective

I am really grateful for the way Sahi and I have actively put in effort into befriending each other. She’s invited me to countless events and reached out about so many cool ideas. It is hard to form deep and meaningful relationships as an adult. I haven’t made too many new really good friends since moving into the city, but with Sahi it was really easy.

All of the mutual effort we put into exploring our friend crushes was critical. But for Sahi and I, I will still stand by that we were always destined to become friends.

For one, before we even ever met in person, we already spent our time doing a lot of the same things: living in New York, working in tech, playing casual sports, hosting events, and writing. We were already part of the same communities and had a ton of mutual friends.

Beyond our surface-level lives being rather parallel, I think we are also enamored by the same things in each other. We constantly push and inspire each other to do more and better. I admire how ambitious and grounded she is at the same time. We bond over thinking things aren’t that serious and channeling the silliness of everyday life. It’s all just wonderful.

For me, our relationship is the definition of women supporting each other. And we’re both very proactive, expressive words of affirmation type gals, which definitely helped our friendship to progress with a nice balance of effort and ease.

So yeah, it feels like it was always going to happen. We’ve been compatible and adjacent for so long. It just took some time and a few iterations of things moving around for it to all fall into place!

what it means to us 💌

ashley

I have always found several of my platonic female friendships to be particularly romantic in a lot of the same ways as my romantic relationships have been. Sahi and I have shared quite a serendipitous and romantic friendship thus far.

The older I get, the harder compatibility becomes. Making friends, dating, it all feels harder. That’s why modern matchmaking is so difficult. I miss the days back in elementary school when you become friends after a simple “do you want to be my friend” and now it’s do we have things to talk about? do i align with their values? blah blah blah… but with Sahi it was an easy slow burn that one day out of nowhere grew into a hot burning flame. It was never forced and it was profoundly rewarding.

To me, our friendship is also an amalgamation of so many relationship concepts I hold dearly. The whole friendship answers so many open questions I think about all the time: how to make friends? what makes two people compatible? what does it feel like? what role do communities play in our lives? It just makes me further believe in social entropy!

Sahi just so happens to spend a lot of time thinking about the same things. And being able to talk about our friendship, the communities around us, getting to write this piece together. This is what it is all about!

sahi

In my life experience, it’s incredibly rare to meet someone who you ✨spark✨ with. I always feel like I spark with a fellow human purely based off of vibes. But most often, I've found that we actually think about and explore similar hypotheses, have the same core values, and at least some common interests, all of which is most definitely the case with me and Ashley. I guess that’s “vibes”. This common ground is conducive to challenging one another with food for thought, and encouraging each other to push ourselves outside of our comfort zone, to do the hard and uncomfortable things that are worth doing with work, hobbies, side quests, friendships, dating escapades, and anything else. We listen to each other and admire one another deeply. We cheer for each other, much louder and more consistently than the next person. We lift each other up. To me, our friendship represents the best of humanity. And, she’s still in her infancy! 👶💃

More simply put, is this love!? It’s the type of connection that makes you believe in the universe and love. It’s the kind of connection that makes me feel like the luckiest girl on the freaking planet. Any trust issues I had from being burned in previous friendships (iykyk fr) somehow melted away quickly after our first hangout. Because I knew that it was going to be something special from there on out. It’s the type of connection that quite literally represents one of my favorite parts of the human experience 💓*insert the life is worth living TikTok background track*

I’m looking forward to building our friendship long distance, and I’m so glad that Ashley feels the same way about us. I believe that our friendship is worth “fighting for”. How lucky are we?

Thanks for reading about our love story teehee. It was so much fun to write this together. It truly has been the perfect end of a chapter that feels like a culmination of what it all means. At the same time, our story feels so fucking hard to articulate. This story was surprisingly hard to organize because it’s impossible to articulate the profoundness of how it feels. Well, they say the best things in life can’t be captured and replicated. That’s what makes it so special!

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About one year ago, I was on a work trip when my parents called me about a health emergency. One day I was 22 and blissfully unaware in cornfieldland and the next I was spending my 23rd birthday in crisis mode at the hospital. I then spent the subsequent summer months in autopilot as I split my time commuting between the hospital and cosplaying my normal life in New York. Thankfully by the fall, all was well again, but I had aged.

Since then, I’ve come to realize that aging is such a beautiful process and privilege, even with its ugly ups and downs. It’s a pleasure to live through it, share it, and bear witness to everyone around me growing older too. In my family specifically, how we’ve changed in the last year is super clear. This year has brought us all a little bit closer together. It’s made us a little less serious. And mostly, it’s made us grow exponentially more grateful for the little things in life.

Important calendar dates like birthdays act as natural reminders to reflect and celebrate — my two favorite things to do tbh.

So far, turning 24 feels surprisingly more noticeable than turning 23 did. I followed a traditional life path, moving to the city at 22 and starting a corporate job. So now two years in, it feels like I’m finally getting settled, like I’m finishing up my sophomore year of post-grad and becoming an upperclassman. Literally, this means having go-to spots to write in the city, favorite yoga instructors, and slightly niche recs for places to eat. Metaphorically, it feels less like effortful searching and more like the right things speaking to me. Like ease and momentum and serendipity.

My friends love to debate the technicalities of being in our 20s, probably to cope with growing up. I am of the camp that turning 24 means aging out of my early 20s and entering my mid-20s. For me right now, it feels fitting that turning 24 just so happens to coincide with mourning my early 20s, a chapter that definitely feels like it’s ending. Two years ago, I moved to New York and started my first job alongside a ton of friends going through the exact same thing as me. In the last few weeks, some of them have started moving out of New York and switching jobs. This week, my roommate and I also officially told our landlord that we will not be renewing our lease this year.

So now, it is time to mourn the current chapter of my life, which I’ll call the post-grad early 20s. The period where I started my first big girl job, where I was single for the first time since middle school, where I started building an adult life that is unapologetically mine. It’s bittersweet, and I’ll look back at this period fondly.

24 lessons for 24

Below is a list of lessons from my post-grad early 20s chapter. Each one has one or more stories attached to it that maybe one day I’ll write about.

on doing things.

1. some things don’t need to be that hard. plant hella seeds and water them. water them by being open to things, paying attention to signals, and listening to them. the things i notice and ignore naturally are telling. sometimes its a timing thing. the seeds that are meant to will grow!

   1. embrace seasonality. it’s less about a daily or weekly balance as the whole picture of a month, year, or life. there will be different seasons for different things and that’s how the story goes.

   2. neither motivation nor discipline is super sustainable as activation energy in the long run. use them to inspire and activate each other during different seasons.

2. sometimes it is that hard though. so much of life is about navigating opposing tensions. it’s hard and annoying but it’s also kinda the whole point.

3. in pursuing growth, i care to preserve human-ness. never lose the humanity, because then all of the on-paper success in the world loses purpose and meaning. i can chase growth without losing myself, but there are a bajillion ways ambition can blind me so make sure to always prioritize the why.

4. brain-dump writing opens up space in my brain to host and process more. it’s also obviously helpful for remembering and inspiring. some things that i document that i’ve found useful:

   1. a shit substack that is a safe space for unpolished thoughts. once i started using this regularly, my creative generation powers in all areas of my life exponentially skyrocketed.

   2. photo album of nice messages i’ve received and sent. huge confidence and mood booster album.

   3. letters to my future self. great format for slice-of-life-type writing.

5. write like no one is reading and edit like everyone is reading.

6. identify my strengths and weaknesses by paying attention to signals in feedback, how it feels, etc. then, figure out which weaknesses are worth working on and which ones to accept. do things that play to my strengths, develop the things i want to work on, and avoid the things i suck at that i don’t care to improve.

7. work-life balance isn’t really a thing. it’s all just life.

8. be invested in the process way more than the outcomes. outcome-oriented goals are a tool, not the point. coming to any conclusion is a good outcome.

9. i can just do things. i am probably less limited than i think.

   1. embrace being an amateur. i don’t have to be good at everything, or really anything at all to do it.

on relationships.

10. relationships work by collaborating to build frames, adjusting them, and maintaining them respectfully.

    1. the monogamy-polygamy spectrum is actually a plane. at the end of the day it’s easiest to follow societal definitions of relationships, but individual relationships can be empowered to define their own principles and frames. this is true of all societal frames: its easier to follow the status quo. sometimes its worth re-inventing the wheel for myself and other times it is not.

11. the space between people is so big. no one can be everything. accept having different relationships at different proximities for different things. connect with them in different ways.

    1. close relationships usually take years to develop, and that’s also the point.

    2. weak ties are likely to change my life. acquaintances bring fresh perspective in a way that the people closest to me cannot.

    3. appreciate the pointy friends, even if i really only connect at one point.

12. relationships are crazy multipliers. good ones will improve my life and bad ones will drain me tremendously. strength of effect strongly correlated with closeness. be careful and intentional: influence is incredibly strong and often subconscious.

13. call a guy before i go on a date with them to skip the low-commitment coffee first date. then do something memorable and fun together as a first date. this applies to deepening relationships with friends too. once i get a sense that we’ll get along, propose side quests and make some memories together. hang out with people in different environments to experience different sides of them and the friendship.

14. viewing people through a lens of detached attachment is incredibly useful for developing deep, meaningful relationships without as much pain.

15. building a beautiful social graph is about embracing social entropy.

    1. putting my insides on the outside (writing, talking, being myself) is how i will naturally find the right people.

    2. find people and communities that inspire me. spend as much time there as i can. i’ll be pulled naturally with the currents.

    3. at the same time, prioritize putting effort into important relationships. give as much as you can to these people. love them as hard as you can. this is what life is about.

16. the things i care most about in people i surround myself with right now are empathy and nonjudgment.

on dealing with feelings.

17. just go through it. sometimes, there is no other way to the other side! this becomes clear when i’m really desparate. don’t be afraid to break everything apart and put it back together. it can be more effective than working around a bad foundation. this is just as true for emotional life things as it is for engineering.

18. fear dwindles with exposure and repetition. at some point, it’s not noticeable anymore and i’ve effectively killed that fear (for now).

19. callibrating an intuition is extremely powerful. my gut knows things before my brain can intellectualize it. trust that bishh.

    1. i should trust other people’s lived experiences too. i don’t always have to live it myself to learn the hard, painful lessons.

    2. all the feelings that speak up deserve to be heard. there’s a difference between hearing them out completely and agreeing with them. sometimes the feelings i ignore are deeply intertwined or related to my favorite feelings. they are all important to acknowledge.

on being in my 20s in new york.

20. the amount of freedom i have is still going up. being single is a privilege and a gift sometimes.

21. i’m just a plant pretty much. drink hella water, get sunlight exposure, eat some vegetables and fruit, work out a few times a week, call my loved ones, and get some sleep and everything will be fine.

    1. mindfulness is necessary grounding for me. weekly yoga and building in little pauses in days to be present (while eating, walking, etc) goes a looong way.

extra credit (misc).

22. intentions and outcomes both matter in different ways. roughly, an intention explains the humanity and paints the potential. an outcome impacts our lives right now.

23. money definitely buys freedom.

24. celebrate the little things and everything i do. and the things that happen in the people around me’s lives too. life is hard enough, and the world sometimes be beating us down, so we just have to do that for ourselves because who else will?

That’s the list! Maybe in a year, I’ll look back and think these lessons are either wrong or totally a given. But for now, this is proof of where I am at the end of 23 :)

here’s to 24!

Recently, I spent an afternoon people watching at a park with a stranger. We talked about how adults are just kids with layers of life stacked on top and bonded over still seeing ourselves as children underneath all the layers. I never would have imagined that by the age of 24 I would feel like a child, but I do.

Fortunately, I’m still pretty optimistic about growing up. Several of my 25 year-old friends describe their frontal lobes fully developing at 25 as feeling more set in who they are and how they view the world. Talking to them feels like interacting with little previews of where my life might go next, and the lessons that I might be writing down next year. If I have the same experience at 25 in feeling more “cooked” and settled into my skin, then I’m pretty excited!

I already feel myself starting to become more set as well, especially throughout the last year. Recently, I’ve noticed that a bunch of new people I’m meeting can instantly profile me perfectly, from guessing my MBTI to what instrument I played in high school. Two years ago, this never would have happened. I’ll take that as a sign I’m becoming more myself, especially around strangers, than I ever have been before, which is kind of awesome.

While I super value traits like openness, flexibility, and understanding, I’m looking forward to everyone becoming less moldable and more sure of their differences as we age. A friend once told me a really corporate analogy I unfortunately cannot stop thinking about: that dating someone early on is like building a company with them, and dating someone later on is like a merger. The merger of two people is way more romantic than a merger between companies, but it paints a cool framework in my head. When I’m finding it hard to understand or work with people who are really different than myself, I remind myself how wonderful it is that we are just so ourselves. It just means that we’re growing up, and that we are indeed becoming.

So! Here’s to 24 and the growing up that will inevitably come with it :)

When I was 15 years old and frantically trying to make it through honors chemistry, I developed a habit of FaceTiming this one classmate whenever there was an exam coming up.

His name was A and I liked him because he was smart and patient and funny but most of all, I was curiously enamored by the way his brain worked so differently than mine. Our differences presented themselves as we tried to study chemistry together, but as the year went on they became obvious in all aspects of our teenage lives. At the time, he was known for talking back to teachers, never backing down from a debate, and quitting the cross country team after hitting a sub-5 minute mile time. Meanwhile, I was an intensely shy, conflict-averse, and fearful rule follower who ran a secret blog after school.

Somehow a few weeks into delirious study sessions balancing reactions and forming chemical bonds (hehe), we fell in love and proceeded to date for FIVE YEARS. By age 21, A and I had been together for a quarter of our existence when we decided to close our chapter.

Fast forward three years and A and I are now good friends! This is the story of how my ex and I morphed into the same person three years after breaking up.

the text that started this spiral

On March 9th, 2025, I woke up to a text from A asking me to take a personality test.

As a girlie who is constantly trying to understand, personality tests are one of my weaknesses. So I took the test immediately.

The test in question, Big 5 (aka OCEAN), is a popular one that we’ve started revisiting every now and then. It measures personality based on the following dimensions: extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and intellect/imagination.

Like all personality tests, taking the Big 5 for me is just a fun exercise in checking in on my self-perception at any given moment. I generally view it as nothing more than a way to notice changes like “wow I really did become more open to new experiences this year :)” or “damn what happened to my emotional stability?!”.

But this time around we found something super interesting!

As A and I compared our results, we realized that we scored eerily similar on all of the personality dimensions ~ kind of crazy given how we used to perceive each other as polar opposites!

the hypothesis

Being the overly reflective people we are, A and I have been noticing our converging personalities for a while now. Although we don’t talk very often, our occasional catch-up calls were increasingly just us noticing how similar we had become. Some examples include: when A got into practicing yoga, when he chose to join an edtech startup over continuing higher education, or when I started reading a graph theory textbook for fun, and every time I chose to confront someone about something. We noticed broader themes too, like how he became more realistic and careful and I became more starry-eyed and carefree. Most of all, over the years, I solved the mysteries I used to be so confused about in high school: how A could be so bold, secure, and logical in the way he moved around the world in his body. Somewhere along the way, I had become that way too.

“I finally understand how it feels to be you.” I’d tell him.

We came out of this realization with a hypothesis:

the scientific evidence

A and I live on opposite sides of the country, have had/are in different relationships, and just aren’t as in contact as we used to be. Yet, based on our 2025 personality results, we realized that we were becoming more similar year after year despite physically growing apart.

To complete my very scientific analysis on the Great Personality Merger of 2025, I did some math to support our claims with quantifiable evidence 🤓

As we recalled correctly, we were not as similar this time last year, with a whopping 58% difference in conscientiousness and an average of 27% difference across the five dimensions.

This year, however, we scored nearly identically on all of the dimensions, including 0 difference on the extroversion spectrum and a mere 5% average difference across all five dimensions.

I’m no mathematician but that’s a big (22%) increase in average similarity YoY for 2025! 📈 And notably, we have both shifted to approach convergence.

Note: I don’t have our personality results from before we broke up, but trust me they were always insanely different, and we also always perceived each other to be polar opposites prior to 2024.

on influence

Strangely enough, A and I influenced each other’s personalities more after we broke up than during our actual relationship in many ways.

This observation was blowing our minds because it’s so counter-intuitive. Spend more time with someone, become more like them. Spend less time with them, become less like them, right? Yet here we were, watching the inverse unfold. When our literal paths diverged in 2022, our personalities somehow began to approach a common path.

My personal theory for why this happened is that when we date someone, we become used to sharing personality trait influences, especially as we intertwine so closely with them for years. Suddenly, when it’s gone, we’re forced to learn how to bring out the good traits that the other person used to provide on our own if we want to keep it.

For instance, in a couple, if one person always wants to go out while the other person always wants to stay in, they’ll likely influence each other to do some of both. It’s possible that post-breakup, the person who typically defaults to wanting to stay in will start to appreciate and miss the days spent going out prompted by their ex, causing them to initiate nights out themselves. Or vice versa! Simply, this ex has left holes in their lives that they have to learn to fill on their own. Hence, exes have the potential to become more and more similar after a breakup.

Influence! I’d like to think that this idea has resulted in A and I becoming more balanced individuals. For years after the relationship, parts of him still live within me pushing me outside of my comfort zone, encouraging me to speak up for myself, and reminding me that the world is my oyster. Similarly, there will forever be an Ashley-shaped ghost in his gut reeling it back, reminding him to think about the consequences of his words and actions. The parts of ourselves that we give to others, they are profoundly lasting and influential ~ a thought that is beautiful, frightening, and human!

My takeaways from this rabbit hole:

• Are you the average of your five closest friends? I’ve always interpreted this saying by thinking of my current closest friends and questioning if I embody their collective essence. But actually I think it’s more like: you are the average of your five closest friends ever rather than right now—you are a mosaic of everyone you’ve ever loved.

• Who should I date? Someone who you’d be honored to influence and to be influenced by! Because for better or for worse, consciously or subconsciously, you might just become each other.

I’ll admit it’s cynically machiavellian to evaluate a relationship simply by the influence that a person could have on your personal growth. Still, I suspect that most people are undervaluing the long-lasting influences we have on each other.

Shoutout to A for collaborating on this piece with me! I’m grateful that we even have the unique opportunity to recognize these trends with bidirectional evidence and reflect on the ways that we’ve influenced each other over time in a way that most other exes cannot fully corroborate. Super epic!

I’m playing around with different forms of essays and storytelling! This one in particular was really difficult for me to organize. It was hard to balance simplicity with providing enough context for this story to make sense! Would love to hear feedback or personal stories via email: ashscaffeinatedthoughts@gmail.com.

Related ramblings on social connection and early 20s relationships:

The show was the perfect way to tie up eight weeks of level one improv classes in a funny little bow to share with the community. The fruits of our labors!

I’m already sad that the class is over, so it’s time to reflect so that I can relive it… and also compile my notes in case I need to refresh my memory before level two :)

This is a loong reflection covering everything I learned from improv:

• from the show

• how many nudges does it take to sign up for something?

• lessons from the actual class

• the subconscious effects of improv

• what i love about new york city

• where we go from here

everything I learned in improv level one

from the show 🎭

Before the show, I realized that I hadn’t performed anything on a stage in front of an audience since probably high school band. And I definitely haven’t performed anything spoken since probably middle school? Elementary school?

As someone who used to feel like she was going to projectile vomit in every school presentation, I was pleasantly surprised by how not nervous I was, how the show felt like just another class, and how much fun the performance was.

Some show highlights

• Two exes run into each other at the grocery store: “you still come here?” wistfully, “remember me when you introduced me to those chips all those years ago?”, then opening the bag of chips in the grocery store and eating them together “wow… they still taste the same”, full of love and nostalgia looking into each others eyes longingly.

• Me walking into a scene trying to act like a big bulky man and saying “your father is here”, before blackout (lights off, end of the show).

• My roommate blaming everyone his spaceship mate for clogging the space shuttle toilet, acting out what it would be like to send all the flying poop particles out into space, and then this scene inspiring the rest of the scenes in the show to be about poop.

• Learning that one of my classmates started a dog sauce company with his ex in a monologue prompted by the audience suggestion of “peanut butter”.

how many nudges does it take? 👊

In the journey that would end with me—anxious af presenter girl—signing up for a fricking improv class, I learned that there is a quantifiable resistance to starting something new: how many times does this need to manifest in my life before I can commit to it? For me and improv, it took 3 nudges.

One

This story starts seven months ago (last July, nudge #1) when I went on a first date with a 28-year-old man who raved about the effects of taking improv for the last ten years. He told me that it made him a better listener who was more in the moment in conversation and that it helped him to be in a looser state of play at all times. I thought it was awesome and we talked about it for like three hours. I left that conversation inspired and questioning if I would ever take improv classes. In the end, I concluded that maybe improv is something that 28-year-old me would do. I wasn’t ready! I was only 23!

Two

In November (four months ago, nudge #2), I went to a housewarming party hosted by three loose acquaintances who started telling me about their level one improv class. I was super curious about what it was like to be a beginner in a New York City improv class. They quelled a bunch of my fears that night, explaining that they’d start every class with a series of very effective improv warm-ups and that they’d become friends with the people they’ve been improvising with. I left this party not yet ready to commit to improv, but certainly further intrigued.

Three

Another month later (three months ago, nudge #3), I went to a wine night hosted by a friend who also happened to be friends with aforementioned improv boys. The wine night just so happened to be right after their improv level one final show. At the wine night, I sipped my wine and heard all about how fun the show seemed and learned that the wine night hosts too had signed up after watching the show. This time, I felt a strong wave of inspiration, which led me to pitch this to a few friends and finally my roommate (I am a sheep!). Turns out, it only took him one nudge, and that’s how we signed up for the class together, still aged 23.

from the class 📝

I have never improvised before, nor had I really even done any type of acting besides in my friends’ indie films (unless you count the old high school video projects we scraped together in exchange for a grade).

It was nice to learn a new skill from scratch. I learned a lot! Below is a list of the larger things that stuck.

On collaborating

• yes, and… THE core lesson in improv. At first glance, it’s relatively common knowledge that to improvise is to agree to whatever is happening, yes, and then to add onto it, and. While I was familiar with these concepts coming in, I felt myself really internalizing them halfway through the course. It was especially clear in the “yes” part of the equation: there is a difference between hearing someone and really succumbing to it and embracing the reality that someone else just created for you.

  • I think the big hurdle I had to overcome was the fear of not having anything to say. By letting go of that fear, I was able to stop focusing so hard on thinking of perfect ideas to say and judging them in my head while the other person was talking so that I could just listen completely. When I learned that I didn’t have to think, and that I could literally just react, improv became so much easier.

• Make your ideas clear because other people can’t read your mind. This is particularly important when initiating. When you start a scene with the idea, make sure to make it clear to anyone who joins the scene what you want them to say or do to enter. Other people can’t see what you’re thinking unless you say it or make it clear in another way. Don’t give them too much room to misinterpret you by giving a vague initiation, or else they can take the scene in a completely different direction.

  • I found this particular improv lesson actually super useful in giving written feedback in my job. I recently asked this guy I really look up to at work for writing good technical product feedback about the key to writing good feedback. He responded that he has this skill because he used to work in a different timezone than everyone else, and so he had one shot to write out exactly what he meant with no room for misinterpretation or else he’d have to wait another day for a response. Turns out, improv really does just highlight the basics of good human-to-human communication!

On keeping it real because real is naturally funny

• Trust that being real is funny. There are so many day-to-day interactions between people that have so much hidden humor embedded within. So many scenarios are inherently awkward or weird, and in class we practiced improvising real interactions, as opposed to things that would never happen, to bring out the humor of everyday interactions we can all relate to.

• Stop trying to be funny. The point of improv is not to tell a punchline to get a laugh, but to keep the scene moving. A big lesson I learned was how to focus less on trying to be funny and trust that being real would be both funny enough and help to keep the scene going.

• React to everything like you actually care. It’s easy not to care about something as a third-party actor pretending to be in a scene. Responding to everything like you really care about it always just made for a more realistic scenario.

• Use the emotional details as inspiration. We often practiced an improv show format called the monologue reconstruction. In this format, a person gives a short monologue about any real story that happened to them, usually based on an audience suggestion. The monologue is supposed to inspire new scenes. It was important to listen to the monologue for details that were particularly emotion-inducing, because those were likely the most memorable but also the most likely to birth realistic scenes.

On performing

• Establish a relationship and a setting early on in a scene. This helps to make the scene make more sense to the audience, and also to help ensure that the actors are on the same page.

• Mime things realistically. An object doesn’t just appear and disappear, you have to pick it up and put it back down. Use an object like how you would use them IRL instead of the symbol. For example, hold a smartphone like you’re holding a rectangle box instead of holding up the surfer dude hand signal 🤙 against your ear.

• A show should be a roller coaster of highs and lows. An important part of performing improv is to edit (cut/end) scenes for whoever is performing. To edit a scene when on the sidelines, run in front of the active scene to simulate a curtain closing. Edit a scene early rather than later to avoid it getting stale. Edit a scene after ~2 minutes at the next audience laugh so it ends on a high.

• Give and take. This basically just means that one person talks at a time. Shut up when someone starts talking to give focus and start talking to take focus.

the subconscious effects of improv 🙈

Altering my personality towards collaboration…

While I do not feel fit to evaluate my own collaboration skills, I suspect that there is a reason everyone says improv makes you a better listener. The heavy emphasis on collaboration in class has penetrated through the barriers of the improv studio into my life.

I recognized this shift because I’m admittedly a big personality test taker who takes all the fun new personality tests that come out, and I’ve noticed a huge increase in how high I score on traits like collaboration and being accommodating. I think this means that, at the very least, I perceive myself to be more cooperative than before.

Improv is so focused on intentionally listening to your stage partners and accepting whatever reality they create on the spot, then adding onto said shared created reality. It makes a lot of sense to me that practicing these skills so intentionally for two hours a week would permeate into the other interactions I have with everyone else in my life too.

I can’t stop miming shit.

This one is really fun. I have no recollection of whether or not I used to mime things out when I would tell stories, but I’ve definitely noticed myself doing it a lot recently. I catch myself starting to do the whole shabang with a fake prop in the middle of a conversation almost every day, making sure to follow all of the stage miming rules we learned.

bruh it’s just not that serious… and it was never that serious

Probably the best thing to have come out of this improv class is that I find it easier to be myself with strangers and people I think I should be serious in front of. I’ve always found it hard to let my inner goofball come out and so I keep her reserved for close friends and family. It’s one of my favorite parts of myself but I don’t know why I just could not easily unleash the silly parts of the depths of my soul very easily!

In all seriousness, it is just not that serious! I feel like the goofiness in improv has rubbed off on me because I’m realizing how fun it is to be not so serious and how okay it is to be that way even with a group of stranger adults who have very serious-sounding day jobs.

Since starting the class, I’ve found myself having more fun, cracking more jokes, and in general just having way better banter with people I wouldn’t have expected to like very tenured and respected people at work or strangers on the street.

I<3NY 🗽

New York is certainly not for the faint of heart (me, often). But this improv class experience reminded me of why I choose to live here.

On accessibility to the arts

After the show, I commuted home with one of my friends who was visiting from Boston. She told me that my improv show was a good example of why she wanted to move to New York.

Sure, Boston probably has improv too, but it’s like there’s one place and everyone there is probably really into improv already.

I’m not sure if these assumptions are true, but I can vouch that it was really easy to take beginner classes in improv in New York. In this economy, I thought these classes were actually really affordable and accessible physically (they also had scholarships and volunteering opportunities to help with the costs).

Beyond the barriers to sign up, I also found level one to be much more digestible for a newbie than I expected. I was pretty nervous for the first class, but I found those nerves dwindle significantly and it became something I looked forward to every week very quickly. It can be hard to cultivate a space where adults who work very corporate and serious jobs feel comfortable to let loose and play, but I found the warm-up games, the exercises in improv, and the camaraderie to be inherently community-building.

It was like a class where we just got to laugh and goof around for two hours a week after our busy work days, and I loved that.

Now that I’m out of school, I find myself gravitating towards taking classes and wanting to learn new things in general. This is an unfortunate irony, but at least I’m in the perfect city to experiment with that :P

On community

One of the reasons that I was compelled to join improv is that my friends told me that they met some really cool people in their classes, and that they sometimes hang out with each other before and after classes or go to shows together. I figured I’d really vibe with people with a propensity for signing up for beginner improv classes, and I was totally right. Over the last eight weeks it was super cool to build something together both so casually and intentionally with these interesting and diverse strangers.

I’ve also enjoyed sharing my new hobby with my friends and family. Lately, I’ve been itching to move across the world, but being able to share what’s going on in my life with a big community of friends and family is what keeps me actually tethered to this city. This improv class was a beautiful reminder of that.

If I lived in another city, I probably wouldn’t have been nudged enough times by different friends to sign up for improv, I probably wouldn’t have a friend to sign up for class with, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to share my final show with 20+ friends and my parents.

I’ve always found relationships and community to be multipliers (hence all of the essays on social connection). I feel very grateful to be surrounded by such a supportive community of friends and family here, who encourage me to do things that are very outside of my comfort zone. It makes all the difference!

I love New York because of what it is, but also because of what we’ve built here.

where we go from here 🛝

I think I will keep practicing improv and sign up for more classes. Probably level two, but maybe level one again after a bit of a break, especially if I can line it up with some friends who might sign up for level one after coming to my show.

I’m mostly doing this because it’s fun, but also because it’s rewarding to take classes and improve on something consistently. In this class, I’ve noticed myself improving at trusting my synapses more quickly and verbalizing whatever thought comes into my head first rather than questioning myself immediately. However, I think that I’m still not used to acting in a large expressive range. In the next class, I’d like to work on taking on more expressive characters who cry and yelp in pain or excitement. It’d be cool to increase my emotional range from between a four/six range to a one/ten range, as close as I can get to that anyway. This probably looks like not just changing my tone of voice but also experimenting with the volume, nonverbal cues, facial expressions, and the emotional oomph behind it all.

At the end of the day though, I’m really happy with what I’ve learned from my first two months of improv. I also just KNOW that there’s so much more depth to this art form even in each of those bullet points I’ve listed above.

Hopefully I can look back on this reflection after my next improv stint and chuckle at what a noob I was back then.

Tucked behind an unassuming bushy entrance off the side of a major highway, was a little tropical botanical garden with a plethora of ornately-themed gardens, scenic walkable trails, and a bird-watching tower smack in the middle.

There is this one particular garden I still can’t get out of my head. Near the end of the suggested path, there was a little fenced-off area resembling a scrappy suburban backyard. In a space full of über-polished-perfectly-curated gardens, this one stuck out like a sore green thumb.

The purpose of the “idea garden” was to inspire visitors to plant their own gardens at home. There must have been dozens of different easy-to-grow samples of different plants that anyone could grow on their own, each neatly labeled for them to jot down. Walking through it, I wondered how many people actually took inspiration from it and planted something they saw there at home.

Little did I know, this quaint little idea garden would go on to inform my own creative modus operandi!

watering my seeds

Ideas often come to me when I do not expect them to. They appear in conversation, during a sweaty down dog, and in the soul of a subway stranger I accidentally made eye contact with. Regardless, I’ve been trying to notice them when they come, and to write them down as soon as I can.

If each idea is a seed waiting to be brought to life, it must first be gently plopped into a suitable environment. For me, this has looked like brain-dumps in voice memos, word-vomit journal sessions, and frantic notes app entries.

One of the most nutrient-dense suitable environments to plant my ideas these days is my “shit blog”, a private substack where I started dumping all of my half-baked thoughts. It’s been the perfect safe space for me to experiment and work through my ideas. I started it to store my Inktober entries, but I’m happy to report that I’ve continued to use it after the writing challenge ended.

I plant a ton of seeds these days. Living in New York and being in my early twenties, there is so much to be inspired by all of the time. In a garden, some seeds don’t require much to flourish, while others require a ton of water and time, and a few will never sprout. The beautiful thing about keeping this garden is that you get to water all of the seeds without expectation. I’ve learned to plant my idea seeds and to water them when I can. The key here is to let nature run its course.

Even this very concept of the idea garden is a concept I’ve been thinking about for years and writing around for months. After several entries in my shit blog on what my creative process feels like, I’m finally reaching some slightly-more sensical conclusions.

cross-pollinating

In nature, cross-pollination helps to create new variations of plants and help protect them against disease. Some of the greatest natural foods, including apples and pears, were the result of cross-pollination!

I have always learned a lot from the people around me. Historically, I’ve loved connecting and building with people through conversation. Recently, I’ve been increasingly inspired by working together on creative projects too.

I’m surrounded by some crazy creative individuals, most of whom work corporate jobs but find time to create beautiful works on the side. They radiate passion for niche hobbies ranging from perfecting homemade pizza to creating full-length movies to hosting apartment cafes. I feel so grateful to not only be friends with them but to be part of the projects they work on. See a full list of creative side-projects I’ve been part of and witnessed this year in the footnotes1.

I love that each of these friends has a thriving idea garden, but like the original idea garden from the botanical gardens, I’m most impressed by the care they each took to share it with the people around them too. I’ve come to realize that this energy of cultivating creative communities is exactly what drives me, and I’m grateful to be building fun works of art and experiences with such epic people.

These days, many of my current projects have a social element. So far it’s been deeply rewarding. What new variation of fruit can we invent together?

harvesting fruit

A few months ago, I was struggling to recognize when one piece ends and another begins. At times, it feels like every topic is infinitely related and could be relevant enough to make it into the work. I asked one of my new writing friends if they struggled with the same thing, to which they offered some wonderful words of encouragement: “if anything the fact that your experiences seem to flow into each other should give further validation that what you’re feeling is valid and worth talking about.” I quite like this framework of a continuous idea garden. If life is continuous, the art we create only serves as a series of snapshots that stand on their own but come together to tell a greater story. Thus, every now and then, I pluck out the fruit that I feel is ready enough to harvest.

At the end of every year, I always create some sort of output to signify the end of a chapter. The harvest of previous years included recap newsletters, videos, and letters to my future self. This year, I decided to summarize my 2024 reflection as a digital magazine, which I plan to email to my friends and family. This year’s magazine follows my primary theme from the year: finding balance in chaos.

I had a blast creating this spread over the last few days and connecting the dots from the year. I found that having visual aids through the medium of a digital magazine has been a beautiful vehicle for reflection. Perhaps I’ll print out a physical copy too. That way, one day when I’m wrinkly, I’ll have a shelf full of these annual magazines to look back on and connect the dots over the years.

I’ve attached the 2024 spread and some of my favorite pages from it below.

These are just some of the main threads of thought that felt relevant from my year. Other important aspects of reflection include living in New York City, what work means to me, travel diaries, what I’ve learned, and goal setting.

There are times when it feels like I’ve come across a brain-breaking conclusion. Yet in reality, I’m realizing that the ideas I’m developing all stem out of seeds that I planted years ago.

This magazine and this essay are just some of the more mature fruits of all the labor that came before: the children’s book I wrote last year around sharing your passions with your friends, this essay I wrote in May about the value of creative clutter, and all of the conversations I’ve had before on these very topics. Looking back, it’s very obvious how we got here.

Looking forward, things are less clear. There’s no way to know what will be available for harvest next year or what those 2025 pages will read like. But perhaps that’s the fun of it all. For now, I’m going to continue planting my seeds, watering my plants, and plucking out the fruit that is ready for harvest.

These days, I find myself following the sun more than it follows me. This week, I followed her to Florida. Here are some photos of my old friend, the sun, at different times of day.

Farewell, and see you again soon.

Your friend,
ash :)

In an overcrowded three-bed flex in Kips Bay last Saturday night, I shared a delightful screaming match with a girl I had never met before. Upon being introduced, I admitted that I had seen her name on the rsvp list and had spent the last few hours trying to find her like a creep. She admitted that she had looked me up before on Google and read my blog posts already. All because we share the same full name.

During our maybe fifteen-minute conversation, I learned that we’d spent the same four years studying the same major and the same last year and a half working our first jobs in the same city. We bonded over random loose connections and finding solace in writing stories that nobody reads in our free time. It was a delightful intersection of two people living separate, but in many ways, parallel lives. At this party, our parallel lines defied the laws of mathematics and intersected. We exchanged contact information and made plans. A budding friendship born from a mere label at a party where we both knew nobody.

I’ve been grateful for slightly-out-of-the-ordinary encounters with new people lately. We can live our whole lives without ever knowing of someone else’s existence, and then suddenly you’re so aware of them…like, they’re right there in front of you yelling at you over the music and a room of yelling conversations. In each of those screaming matches, the potential of an inflection point or a new friend.

There are so many people we haven’t met who could change our lives, hopefully for better but maybe for worse. Hence why I care to spend so much time thinking about social connection, using my own life and my friends’ lives as vehicles for experimentation, and writing this very connection thesis. Part one is on authenticity, you can read it here.

playing catch with strangers

A solid conversation feels like a nice game of catch. I realized this while talking to a stranger on a bench in washington square park.

One person throws the ball and the other person catches it. They throw it back, and the game continues. It’s an easy kind of pleasure that has the potential to accidentally go on for hours. This game of conversation catch can look like back-to-back powerful overhand passes, or a series of gentle underhand tosses, depending on the people and the topics at hand.

For Ashley and I, it was easy to get the game started because we already had an easy point of connection.

You’re the my name twin!! I throw.

And you’re mine!! She catches.

And the game continues.

Usually, it’s harder to get the game of catch started and even harder to keep it going. These days I meet tons of new people, and most conversations are decent but remain pretty surface-level. Navigating beyond the small talk is difficult1. It requires engagement and openness from both parties, and the setting has to be right2.

But I think it is in part a skill issue, I often leave a conversation knowing I could’ve done better. Sometimes there’s a ball hurdling towards me and I can’t coordinate my arms fast enough to catch it. Other times I toss a ball at someone and my aim is laughable. Most of the time, it’s because I wasn’t present enough to hear them out to catch what they were throwing me and then not thoughtful enough to throw it back to them.

At the same time, there are many aspects of a good conversation that are out of my control. For one, I can’t control how engaged the other person is. I can’t control if we have things in common to talk about, or if maybe we were already doomed from the start because we’re incompatible in some core way.

observing entropy

As my circle of friends has grown more and more into unique selves, I’ve come to realize that even though we can have some tact in friend-making, there is also a significant natural unpredictability in the entropy of social connection.

Who could have predicted that Ashley was going to be at the same party? She was friends with a different host and admitted to having flaked for the last party. I too barely knew anyone there and almost didn’t go. A lot of my favorite friendships and relationships started out this way: as a series of unlikely serendipitous events.

Last month I participated in Ava’s matchmaking experiment and went on a series of blind dates with other bookbear readers. Three unlikely events happened:

1. I got an email from a certain boy A telling me I was his match and prompting us to meet up. I might never know if he knew that I was the same girl he had already been on a few dates with just the month before.

2. I met with boy B, who had a unique enough one-liner descriptor that several people in my life identified the exact person whenever I’d mention the date.

3. I met with boy C who reads a lot of the same substack essays as me and is good friends with one of those writers. We parted ways and ran into each other on the street again a few weeks later. We happened to be heading to the same area, and on the way, we discovered that he also knew of boy B.

The stories that take place in New York always feature the same cheesy romantic encounters. In Sex and the City, the main character Carrie is constantly running into Big, her on-and-off-again boyfriend with whom she shares a tangled past. Similarly, in the popular rom-com Serendipity, the main characters run into each other over and over again in a comically romantic way. I used to see these random encounters as nothing more than an unrealistic feature of the plot. But after bopping around the city myself for the last few years, the unplanned run-ins in the show have proven to be surprisingly realistic.

There are logical explanations for each of these encounters. I could spend forever over-analyzing why all of the social circles are so large but still so strongly connected: we gravitate to the same people and places because we already have things in common, we’re young and lonely and desperate for connection, and the list goes on and on and on.

I’ve stopped trying to explain why the connective tissue is so powerful. It just is, and the natural entropy of people has been screaming it to me lately.

agency in entropy

Imagine you are a molecule bopping around in the entropy of the city you live in. You’re focused on yourself, but you’re constantly running into other molecules. In each encounter, three things can happen.

It can be good. Sometimes, you can bump into someone new in the exact right position and time for you to easily uncover a spark of connection. This is rare, but oh so epic when it happens. Maybe you end up talking for hours. Or maybe even making plans. You leave wanting to be friends.

It can be okay. Most commonly, you bump into each other for a second in time and nothing notable comes out of it. Maybe you made awkward small talk for a few minutes at a party. Maybe this was okay enough to exchange social media accounts, or maybe it wasn’t. Then you part ways expecting to never intersect again.

It can be bad. Maybe they left a bad taste in your mouth with a weird comment. Or something feels off about them. Or maybe you had so little natural chemistry it was horrifically awkward. You leave not interested in encountering them again.

From each of these outcomes, there are many paths towards friendship. Some paths require active effort, but many more paths allow for that serendipitous entropy layer to play a magical role. You can look at it like a black box.

The older I get and the more I grow into myself, I’m finding that it takes running into a lot of people and having a lot of uninteresting encounters to have a few really good ones. Sometimes they are even with the same people. I have quite a few close friendships that took years of bumping into each other to develop on a deeper level.

Upon these realizations, I dove into trying to make sense of how we can connect more with each other in this stage of life by putting myself out there to see what happens. This works because 1) I generally have faith in people to not be terrible3 and 2) believe that any of these paths are okay no matter where they end up.

A year ago, I set up a coworker with a friend from college. Over a blind date at a coffee shop in Chelsea, they hit it off over a series of hilariously adorable anecdotes I’ll remember forever. Funnily enough, I only became friends with each of these people because of ways I put myself out there all of those years ago: last year when I asked R if he wanted to randomly go to the mall with me after work and five years ago when I asked N about her backpack on the street, and then we happened to be going to the same class!

A few months ago, I co-hosted a +1 party, where each person who came had to bring an additional person. In my friend’s slightly-larger-than-normal-high-rise-shoebox, 70 people showed up. I reconnected with a girl I met online in 2020, who was the +1 of one of my college friends, two strangers hit it off and started dating afterward, and two couples found doubles pickleball opponents in one another.

I look back upon these moments very fondly. They are some of the most meaningful things I’ve done in the last year.

So I will keep trying to expand my surface level of serendipity and believing in the entropy of the world. While the logical part of me is trying to explain the science behind these crazy stories, the romantic in me loves the unexpected way things have played out so far4.

During my first semester of college, I wrote a 10,000-word paper for a writing class. I crammed the whole thing in a month, drowsy on bronchitis medication in the manic throws of long nights in the musty dorm basement. This 20-page monsterpiece was once the bane of my existence.

Fast forward to today, and I’m writing more than 10,000 words in a month for fun?

why why why

My friend Zoe is a digital artist (@zoeartdaily) and participates in #inktober every year. It’s an art challenge where participants draw something every day in October based on the word of the day. It’s very popular in the online art community for developing habits and skills.

In late September, Zoe encouraged me to use Inktober as a writing challenge. I had been working to make writing a larger part of my life, and so I was super excited to challenge myself to write daily alongside her art journey!

However, looking at the list of words for this year’s Inktober prompt, I was not immediately inspired. I thought it might be a chore to upkeep, impossible to write about some of these words, or even that it might stunt my limited creative energy.

Despite my low expectations for the potential fruits of my labor, I was curious to try it out anyway, mostly because I wanted to learn how to do hard things! I set out two goals I was hoping to accomplish with this challenge: fall into a writing habit and exercise my creative muscles.

learnings from inktober

Inktober flew by and I was pleasantly surprised by how fun it was. Throughout the challenge, I felt my concerns being quelled by the joy of the writing process.

I’ll leave a summary of everything I wrote for each day below1.

The final word was “landmark”, and it felt very fitting to mark the end of this challenge. I wrote the original bare-bones version of this very post to close out the month. It was satisfying to write and to look back on the significance of the mental limitations that this challenge has helped me to overcome.

Here is what I learned!

letting my synapses fire freely

A few months ago one of my friends told me that he was in between jobs and that with his time off, he wanted to write something. He asked me for a writing prompt and so I thought long and hard about how to craft the perfect prompt for him. I wanted to come up with a question for him that was inspiring and conducive to his brain. I ended up sending him a quote and a paragraph that was curated to what I perceived he might be thinking about at that time.

In hindsight, I should not have thought so hard! Inktober taught me that human imagination is a wonderful thing, and our brains can generate such interesting and beautifully unsuspecting things if we let it.

My biggest concern in starting Inktober was that I would not have anything to write about for most of the words in the list.

But in contrast, I found the random, wacky adventure-themed prompts to be really inspiring! They became the catalysts for some of the most interesting things I’ve ever written because I was forced to get creative whenever I didn’t want to write about a literal rhino or pair of binoculars.

To dig deeper and get creative in working around the prompt word, I ended up experimenting a lot more than I normally would. I tried a lot of new things, not only with the topics I wrote about but also with the style and types of writing.

Some things I’ve written this month that were very outside of my wheelhouse:

• Several fiction stories from perspectives very different than my own:

  • A midwestern country breakup from a man’s perspective

  • A horror piece where you, the reader, are observing nature and having a peaceful ol’ time in a strawberry field until you realize suddenly that you’re an inanimate but conscious scarecrow

  • A love letter I’d write my future husband for our 50th anniversary when we’re 80 (I’m delusional, sue me)

• A rap… audio included

• A co-written relationship advice column with my ex

• Poetry galore!

I wrote a lot of weird stuff. And it was so fun.

After a few weeks of reading my Inktober entries, Zoe texted me: “your synapses fire in such a fun way”. Ever since that exchange, I’ve been noticing the makeshift ways I’ve been able to exercise my creativity because of this challenge.

I want to give myself that creative freedom to allow the unexpected synapse firing to happen! And if anyone ever asks me for a writing prompt again, I will make it give space for strangeness.

quality comes out of quantity

I prioritize my mental health and life balance beyond all else these days, so I didn’t try to uphold any quality standard for my Inktober writing besides trying to write at least one paragraph each day. As a result, I had a lingering worry that the quality of my writing would be so poor that there would have been no point in letting those sentences ever see the light of day. I started a private substack called “ash’s shit blog” to dump the unpolished work. But actually, I’ve been surprised at how not-shit some of the pieces are!

Having this safe space for continuous thought dumping has helped me a lot to overcome my mental quality barriers. As a result, this challenge became a beautiful daily exercise for hitting new ideas and generating different, weird, unique content. I never would’ve written down a lot of the things I wrote had I not done this challenge. I might not have even actualized the thoughts.

Two references that inspired the concept of my shit blog:

• Henrik’s shit blog 2

• Jerry Uelsmann’s photography class 3

As people, we’re probably bad at knowing what we are capable of and what is out there before we find it. We need to explore! And discover! Maybe they were onto something when they told us to fuck around and find out.

Throughout the first few days of Inktober, it became clear to me that some of the pieces I was writing were not thought out nor pieces I would stand behind with my full chest. Yet, within the unpolished writing often hid golden nuggets of potential, full-essay ideas I might want to explore further one day. Instead of stifling my creative energy, these nuggets made me want to write more.

There are so many ideas floating around abstractly in my brain at all times, patiently waiting for their turn to be picked up and investigated by my conscious mind. Some of these wander around for years, while others are luckier to be at the right place at the right time. Still, many of these ideas have high barriers to entry. That is, maybe they’re wrapped in a lot of blurry bullshit. To get to the crux of the idea, I’ll have to work to chip away at its protective barrier. For me, this means talking or thinking or writing around the point for a while—saying lots of things that are almost what I mean but not quite exactly—before I can figure out what I actually want to say.

During Inktober, I finally put in the time to write around those ideas so consistently that I ended up uncovering some of them. This made me want to write more and helped me to build a backlog of ideas to continue exploring.

I’ve also found that churning out ideas for Inktober has improved my life beyond my writing hobby. The nature of my writing can get introspective and often includes conclusions I’m making from my own life. Hence, exploring my thought patterns through writing has inspired me not just in my writing journey, but in several other aspects of my life!

accountability partners are the best

I have been working on making creative friends over the last few months and to be honest, they have been completely game-changing for how I view my relationship with writing and how I can talk to them about certain things.

It’s been super epic to do Inktober alongside Zoe and see how she interprets each word through her art. Writing and drawing are super different mediums, so I’m usually amazed at how differently she can portray the same word as me. The funky shapes of the feelings we conceptualize are so very interesting! Sometimes though, I can find the intersections in how we interpret the words and that also feels nice. It’s been a fun ride to have her as an accountability partner in this on top of our 9-to-5s (we work together too).

In general, I’ve been blessed with so many people who inspire me every day. It is so AWESOME. Inktober has been a beautiful and timely reminder of how having an accountability partner in someone you respect a lot is super useful for the days when you don’t respect yourself enough. Seeing her post her drawing every day, and getting her feedback on each piece I wrote made this commitment so much easier.

It was also exciting to wake up on Halloween, day 31, and the last day of Inktober to Zoe’s text message of her interpretation of landmark. She interpreted it in a similar way as I did, drawing us finishing Inktober, alongside two of her other friends who did their own versions of it too.

I am leaving this year’s Inktober journey with a poppin’ new private substack where I will continue to dump my unpolished writing and a new outlook on breaking through creative mental limitations!

Very satisfying :)

2

Escaping Flatland

Having a shit blog has made me feel abundant

From Giacometti’s sketch book…

Read more

2 years ago · 86 likes · 24 comments · Henrik Karlsson

Later that day, I stepped out of the shower and stood there for just a second longer than usual—just enough time to discover the cherry blossoms outside my own window.

How long had they been there?

Let’s go see this new show on broadway!

Let’s try this vegan restaurant uptown!

Let’s go away for the weekend!

In a city like New York, the infinite external sources of entertainment are so LOUD.

What if we could discover exciting things right here? Right now? Do you want to have some fun with me?

Let’s cook that same old recipe we’ve cooked fifty times before but this time really follow the directions, or not!

Let’s walk around the park we go to every day and guess other people’s backstories.

Tell me what’s on your mind, and let’s break thought barriers we never before dared to near.

So yes, let’s go on the trip next month. But also, let’s stay here for a while. Let’s discover ourselves and each other. Let’s unlock the doors right in front of us.

finding abundancy in infinite discovery

I’ve been marinating on the idea that our interiorities are infinite too, and that if we learn to keep looking inward we’ll theoretically never need to look externally to feel satisfied.

In an age where FOMO runs rampant and the opportunity cost of a decision feels so very heavy, this idea has been freeing: I am in a constant state of abundance, not because of where I am or anything I have but because of everything I already embody.

When I was little, I was an extreme introvert growing up in the mountains of Asia. I used to spend my weekends hiking with my grandfather and all of my free time drawing for hours. I was never impatient or bored until I moved into the city. When you live a quiet and slow life, you naturally notice more because all there is to do is to observe and internalize.

The silence can be quite fun and interesting and I am trying to guide myself back to that mindset to notice the things right in front of me.

Come with me on my morning commute.

Actually take a second to think about each person you pass by on the street. Where are they heading? Who are they on the phone with? What’s in their baggage (both physically and metaphorically)? Each and every one of them has a life as messy and complicated as your own, and you will likely never get to uncover any of their stories.

Maybe you’re aware that there’s infinite land to discover in others, but are you even noticing all of the little things that are happening to you?

Do you ever stop to think about the scratches you got pushing through the crowd? Did you even notice when it happened? What about how your body is involuntarily working overtime to repair them?

I only noticed these things when I was trying to notice, isn’t that tragic?

How many incredible details have I missed out on because I wasn’t paying attention?

ambition is overrated

When I talk to my friends about traits they look for in a partner, most of them include ambition early on in the list. This makes sense, ambition is attractive! I’d also say most of us are intrinsically ambitious too. But recently I’ve come to view ambition as a double-edged sword.

Throughout a lot of my school years, I was largely fueled by ambition, and I attribute a lot of where I am now to it. Even today, many of the choices I make still stem from my ambitious desires.

At the same time, these desires are what keep my life a full-blown sprint because the things that I want require momentum and effort.

I want to keep growing, and so the spaces I find myself in are inherently fast-paced by choice.

This ambition is evident in every facet of my life. My job demands eight hours of screen time five days a week, constant context-switching, and considering fifty different people’s opinions and feelings at the same time. I also live in New York, arguably the fastest-paced city in the US, and am surrounded by friends who want to take full advantage of what this city has to offer. It’s also in the habits I keep and the hobbies I pour myself into.

I love everything about this life I’ve been building out of my desires, but it can also be quite exhausting.

I too used to really admire people who are ambitious in a traditional sense. They know what they want and work hard towards it through a balance of motivation and discipline. Again, this is very attractive! But it also makes it so easy to get wrapped up in the rat rase and lose sight of what makes life worth living.

Dont’ get me wrong, I still admire ambitious people, but it’s just as aspirational to me now to be able to enjoy the little things. Those people are having the most fun!

adjusting to how the current feels

In my last newsletter, I polled my friends to see how they felt about their pace of life.

Turns out, most of us are trying to slow things down.

After marinating on this question more and talking about it with more people, I’ve learned that those who voted to lean into the chaos and the speed feel that their natural lives are too slow.

I am of the camp that how people perceive the world is more important than the objective truth1.

Going 100 miles per hour is an objective thing that is happening. But how it feels is subjective.

It can feel dangerously fast to a school bus driver and like a slow warm-up drive to a NASCAR driver. It can even feel fast to someone one day and slow to that same person another day. Context matters!

This subjectivity is especially evident to me when I catch up with friends. It’s very clear to me how each person’s natural pace of life compares on a linear spectrum. Yet, it seems that comfort and satisfaction do not correlate at all with pace. How we feel in each context is an individual human experience.

Hence, I’ve learned to pay more attention to how the current feels rather than how it looks. These days, the natural current of my life moves in a way that feels too quick if I fully succumb to the variables in play.

That’s why I find myself trying to slow things down. Right now, that looks like immersing myself in yoga, journaling, and very long walks along the water. During these moments, I find myself really noticing and it’s always very exciting.

this week in rediscovering

I’ll end on this anecdotal reflective note. I’ve been thinking about how to slow down while living in the city for a while now, but there is something sweet about the onset of fall that makes me want to really pump the brakes a bit further.

Fall is my favorite season, and over the last few weeks, I’ve been plotting on how to make the most out of this beautiful and rich time. I’ve been wanting to take a fall foliage road trip, but it’s been a logistical nightmare to plan and coordinate with friends. At this point, it really may not happen at all this year.

At the same time, the difficulty I’ve been having trying to organize this trip is reminding me to rediscover what is right in front of me!

Some little fall things I’ve been appreciating without the fall foliage road trip:

• The apple orchard I drove my friends and I to last weekend to pick apples and indulge in fresh apple cider.

• Bringing out my sweaters and jackets!!

• The pumpkin iced coffee I drank this morning outside at my local cafe while writing this very essay.

• The yellowed autumnal leaf my sister just plucked out of my mane after my morning outside.

• The horror movies my roommate and I have been binging.

• The extremely scary looking haunted house I’m going to tonight with my eight friends who are also eager to get into the spooktober spirit!

The things are really right in front of me, and so I’m going to try to keep noticing them.

It’s been amusing to learn how much I can manage to discover and rediscover in the mundanity of daily life.2 The shift has been very satisfying to me internally, but I think it’s surprisingly observable to other people too.

A few days ago I met a stranger. Within the first hour, he profiled me as an only or middle child.

“You seem like you know how to entertain yourself”, he cited.

I’m not sure if he meant it as a compliment, but I’ll take it as a hopeful sign that I’ve been successful in my quest to notice more things so far :)

This morning, I drove through some rainy country roads. Whenever I leave the city, I am suddenly aware of just how much of a toll my rather mundane daily life takes on me.

It’s been a hectic last few weeks. Driving through the corn fields of my hometown and finally tuning into the supple sound of nothingness, I let recent encounters with my friends replay in my head.

It takes years, decades, millennia even to build something worth preserving. It takes seconds for that same thing to be demolished. What a horrific thought.

There’s been a contagious air of mass destruction around me in the last few weeks in the shape of seven breakups. Over messy emergency late-night debriefs and brunch plans planned like a month ago, we have all been busy exchanging dramatic life-changing stories.

In my last newsletter blast, I polled my fellow early 20s friends: have you hit an existential crisis this summer? 70% answered yes, 30% answered no.

There is a collective sense of turbulence. So much is in flux, and often voluntarily so. I’m not sure what’s happening, but we are all choosing to completely demolish the homes we’ve been building and to build them again from scratch.

this mass destruction is … beautiful?

To break everything apart is, by definition, a destructive process. Why would we choose to do that?

Maybe it’s a curse, but what if it’s a blessing?

On one hand, this reconstruction shit is painful and hard. A year ago, if you asked me to draw a map of New York, I’d label the monuments. If you asked me today, I’d draw out where we were when my friend told me about how she got her heart broken, the parks where our souls touched for the first and last times, and every corner where I’ve shed a tear over things big and small.

But on the other hand, this collective rebuilding movement is beautiful. We’re building our individual homes for our souls to live in, but we’re doing it together. These new homes have stronger foundations with more complicated designs. Hopefully, by the end of this, we will be built to withstand more.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?

questioning everything

Three years ago, when I turned twenty, I was anxiety-ridden, ashamed in the face of instability, and overly passionate about the ten-year plan I arbitrarily created and never once stopped to question. It went something along the lines of: get married by 25, buy a house by 27, have a child by 30. I was so fixated on these dreams that I ended an incredible five-year relationship because we misaligned in those long-term plans.

Today, there is just no way I’m getting married in the next two years. And I don’t even want that. The irony is amusing.

How did we get here?

the cognitive dissonance goes crazy

I’ve been particularly intrigued by the tension between intentionality and flexibility. I’ve landed on this: I want to do things on purpose and work to make things happen while also giving myself space to explore, learn, and play in new unexpected territories. Simple right? To me, striking that balance doesn’t come that easily. It feels heavy like a wet towel in desperate need of being wrung out.

Maybe it’s all about perspective. To be motivated or disciplined is good. To be forceful is bad. To be flexible is good. To be apathetic is bad. To be invested? Well, that could be passion or obsession. Who’s to say!?

I tend to over-fixate on finding answers to questions like how do I connect deeply with people and how do I do hard things and how do I make the most out of my prime years. But I think by far my most important endeavor has been my underlying quest to find a sustainable balance because my heart and my head both constantly remind me that nothing else really matters if I can’t feel grounded long term.

From the outside looking in at my past self, perhaps I seemed put together because I knew exactly what I wanted and was working towards it. But in retrospect, I was clinging to society’s rigid plans for myself because I was ignoring a feeling that I was deeply lost.

trusting the gut

My friend D and I had a cathartic conversation about relying on our values systems last week and what happens when the different values we hold want to drive conflicting outcomes. He suggested that there is usually an answer that feels more inexplicably intrinsic to him.

Ah, can our gut access internal truths before our brains can even unravel them?

A valuable lesson I’ve learned in my twenties so far is how to facilitate conversation between my head and my heart. For me, the inner conflict between the two systems is really painful. But after a while, they tend to align when I’ve rationalized my feelings enough or when the senses finally manage to penetrate the walls of my gut. Learning to listen to my gut has helped me deeply to make better decisions and level up.

The next lesson I’ve learned is to continuously question my intentions with grace. There are so many possibilities with seemingly endless potential we could be pursuing. In comparison, our resources—time and energy—are so very scarce.

Do I even actually like the systems I’m pouring myself into? Do I actually enjoy doing this or do I enjoy the validation from telling people about it? Is this pursuit making me happy or do I do it to keep someone else happy? Do I want this or did society convince me to want this?

How much are these desires even different?

re-evaluating

When I imagine a conversation with my past self, she’s angrily bawling, mourning the plan she dreamt up for us. You moved across the country to live with strangers from the internet? Why did you change your major? What do you mean you’re not saving to buy a house?

My response? I wouldn’t have it any other way! I took some risks that made me question everything and in the progress, I’ve discovered new hopes and dreams. Along the way, I’ve also built up a stronger sense of self. Yes, I’m not on the track I wanted to be on three years ago and I am better for it. I don’t think I could have predicted most of the way my life played out.

And that is why we’re all rebuilding. Not just to build something bigger and better and stronger but something that is ours.

A tangential message to the lovely people in my life—I’m grateful our stories are intersecting at such a pivotal point in time. It's an honor to be rebuilding with you.

I’m always warmed when I look back at the series of tiny serendipitous events that have gotten me to this point, from random group arrangements in freshman year history class to silly side quests with compounding effects across several lives. I’m a sucker for moments insignificant now that turn out to be instrumental.

What secretly life-changing recent occurrence are we going to reminisce fondly upon together in twenty years?

Every conclusion I land on only leads to more questions. Thus, I’m closing this string of thoughts with these open questions to marinate in:

• How much is this rebuilding movement just a chapter unique to our early 20s? Or will we be perpetually demolishing everything and rebuilding?

• How can I simultaneously question everything and also not spiral down rabbit holes so I can do the things I want to do?

• Finding balance in the following contradictions:

  • How do I handle contradicting value systems in decision-making?

    • Is the efficacy of a decision inherently subjective?

  • How much should I rely on motivation versus discipline to do hard things?

    • Is it healthy to force an outcome?

    • Would I accomplish my goals if I relied solely on my motivations?

  • How rigid or flexible should my desires be?

    • Do I know what I am looking for?

    • Can I move intentionally without being rigid?

It’s been one year and three months since I graduated college and entered what they call the “real world”. For me, that journey has looked like a move to New York City, a year of working a corporate 9-5, and stumbling through the playbook of how to adult.

Despite there being a million things to do and eat and stare at, my brain space has largely been preoccupied with casual social experimentation and a developing thesis on human connection.

I’ve always been intrigued by people and their interiorities, but moving to the big apple and taking in this new environment has made me question everything I knew about friendship, love, and who we really are when we’re stripped of the exterior shells. In a city where the symbols, status, and aesthetics rule all, how do we develop genuine connection?

As I’ve been grappling with establishing new roots and routines, I’ve also been actively experimenting with different social environments, topics of conversation, and ways of getting to know people deeply. I've learned a lot this past year, and I’m tired of waiting until I have fully cohesive conclusions to share—so this is essay # 1 on my early 20s social experimentation thesis.

observing authenticity

A few months ago a friend sent me an essay about sparkly people and how to find them. I resonated a lot with the piece because I too have been trying to put into words the patterns of what makes certain people just so magnetic. Her essay does a great job of identifying some markers she's observed in the sparkly people in her life, and it’s inspired me to make some observations of my own.

One of my favorite qualities to find in another human being is a strong sense of authenticity. It’s a complicated quality that takes observed evidence over a prolonged period of time to confirm, but as I’ve immersed myself more in experimental social scenarios over the last year, I’ve noticed some similarities between people who I find to come across as authentic:

• They are upfront and honest with themselves, and then also with everyone else.

• They have a sense of self, they know what their values are, and they always act accordingly.

• They take great care to let down the walls to their head and their hearts. They allow themselves to be seen.

• They are just as curious about the details of how other’s interiorities are furnished—from the organization of their most complex thought patterns to the silly little paintings on the walls. They are gifted in identifying and accepting the mental models of others. They can see people.

• Typically, they are also great at forging unconventional paths and speaking out for what they believe.

But good authentic people do not just bulldoze through society to “be true to themselves”.

• They do not necessarily have a strong or abrasive personality.

• Nor are they necessarily extroverted. It does not matter how people express themselves to themselves and others, just that they do.

• They are not simply selfish, arrogant people who voice everything that they believe and push for their way.

• In disagreements, they are not argumentative but rather transparent and understanding.

Defining authenticity in words is interesting to me because it feels important and also nuanced in a tangly way. As a result, this list will always be a work in progress that I want to continue to develop through more conversation and life experience.

I will spend the rest of this essay divulging in some questions about authenticity that I have yet to answer.

what does it mean to be inauthentic?

To define what it means to be authentic, let’s first identify what is not authentic behavior.

It is not authentic to be fake. For example, to be nice to someone’s face while talking shit behind their backs is not authentic behavior—this is widely accepted. However, there are several examples of behaviors that are more gray on the spectrum of authenticity.

One of the hotter takes that I have is that I don’t mind when people fake niceties. In fact, I often prefer it. When I moved to LA from the East Coast a few years ago, several people warned me that the people in LA are “fake nice”, as opposed to people from the Northeast, who are blunt, honest, and “say it like it is”.

I never felt this way when I actually lived in LA. Everyone seemed to walk with more pep in their step and it just felt like the strangers I interacted with were just nicer. Strangers said hello, they complimented my shoes, and always told me to have a nice day. They keep the vibes up, and I think that it’s a beautiful thing regardless of whether they really meant it.

Perhaps I am naive, but some of the people I find most authentic are always great vibe-keepers when there’s no expectation for the niceties.

I understand that the niceness of strangers can be a performance, but it seems to me that that might be okay. There is a line somewhere where the "fake nice” performance causes real consequences. However, I think these consequences are much more likely to come out of deeper interpersonal relationships where there is a difference in expectations and vulnerability, rather than interactions amongst strangers around town.

Overall, the authenticity spectrum to me seems like it’s grayscale and we might all differ in where we draw the line on fakeness.

are you a cat or a dog or a chameleon?

I recently read a piece about how pseudonyms give us agency. One idea behind the essay is that we are all carrying multiple identities with us and these identities are how we interface with the outside world. I quite like this way of thinking about identity because I have always felt that we’re each too complicated to ever fully label. Yet, in this hectic and lonely world, categorization is one of the easiest ways to feel like we belong. Despite complaining about being perceived all the time, there’s a natural inclination to care about how other people see us.

I have been meeting a ton of new people lately and the topic of conversation almost always seems to land on first impressions, guessing each other’s personality types, or intense discussion about whether we are more cat or more dog. Recently, a coworker told me that I am dawn, but only after pulling an all-nighter…(1) I’ve also gotten that I give panda, eggplant, and a bijillion different MBTI combinations. (2)

I consider these conversations indulgent personal market research. They help us to identify how other people see us and occasionally help us to better understand ourselves. They can help us to feel seen or make us question everything. Maybe these discussions have the potential to cause pitfalls in how we perceive ourselves too, but mostly they are just good fun because the girlies love to be perceived.

The workplace is an obvious example of an environment where we may want to appear in a carefully curated way. Many of my friends and I have been working full-time for a year now, and for lack of a better word, it’s weird.

One of my friends, Z, joined my team at work recently. Since joining, she’s told me a few times that she’s noticed how non-performative I can be at work. I had never gotten this one before, and I think I don’t quite understand it. I’ll be the first to admit that I can be quite oblivious, and maybe that’s why I never noticed that people were performing.

After discussing this phenomenon with several friends over the last few weeks, I’ve learned that many of them have adopted corporate interfaces that are quite deviant from their hanging-out-with-Ashley interface. K even told me that his coworkers would be shocked if they met me and saw how we interacted.

The workplace is a great example of a nuanced social-political environment where we may choose to bring out more deviant identities. But perhaps these identities are not inauthentic but rather just different variations of our authentic selves—more on this later.

I used to have a friend who was always equated to a chameleon in those what-animal-would-you-be rabbit-hole conversations because she blended into so many different environments with ease. I always admired that about her. One day, she confided in me that she found it offensive that everyone thought she would mold herself into every environment just to fit in. This was a complete surprise to me because I thought of it as a compliment. Isn’t it a compliment that you can get along with everyone? You must be so multi-faceted, versatile, and well-rounded!

Years later, I’ve concluded that we all naturally chameleon into every new environment. Maybe some of us are more naturally versatile than others, but it seems only natural that different sides of ourselves are activated by different people and settings.

To me, being authentic is about letting those identities come out to play.

does authenticity exist without inauthenticity?

The next point I want to make almost negates my entire purpose for trying to define authenticity in the first place.

For me, it sometimes feels like defining authenticity is like asking whether the chicken or the egg came first. It seems impossible to be true to yourself 100% of the time. My theory is that to be authentic to yourself, you must at times be “inauthentic”.

I shall provide a few examples.

when our feelings contradict

Sometimes there are parts of ourselves that are at odds with each other and certain scenarios can cause the contradictions to rear their ugly little heads.

A common simple dilemma among my friends and I is when we face the decision of whether or not to attend a social commitment. On one hand, maybe I’m dead tired or feeling ill or have an early morning tomorrow—to be true to how I feel is to cancel on my friend. On the other hand, I only see these friends every once in a while or maybe it’s my best friend’s birthday party and it will mean a lot to her if I show up—to be true to myself is also to be a good friend, suck it up, and try to have a blast. Sometimes I’ll go with one option and other times the other. Usually, I pacify myself by deciding that what is most true to myself is achieving a balance. (3)

A more controversial value is the desire to fit in and whether that can be an authentic value. At it’s core, the desire to fit in is not inherently bad; maybe it’s even human nature. Usually, it’s easier to fit in because the paths are already paved and everyone else is already on that path too.

I find that interacting with common vices like alcohol and social media are great examples of wanting to fit in.

When I was in college, I experimented a little bit with drinking and going to parties even though I never actually cared for those experiences at their face value. I often felt plain bad when I drank, I’m not really a night person, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not see past how suffocating and sticky those frat basements were. But even in my present-day slightly-more-mature-23-year-old body, I sometimes find myself doing these things even though those environments feel so far away from who I am at my core and what I enjoy.

At face value, these excursions are inauthentic for me and sometimes just driven by a fleeting fear of missing out. Yet, these decisions are often also driven by my genuine desire for social connection, making friends, and exciting experiences.

Over the last year, I quit alcohol. As in I didn’t drink a single drop for more than 365 days. Being sober, even at bars, felt true to myself. Lately, I’ve been having a few drinks here and there again. Interestingly enough, this also feels true to myself.

I’ve learned that we can align with many contradicting feelings and thoughts. Maybe to be true to myself is to allow for all of it to coexist.

during periods of change

While discussing what it means to be authentic with Z, she suggested a potential litmus test for gauging if we are being authentic: how much effort does it take for me to act this way?

This seems to be a perfectly fair question to ask ourselves. To be someone else is exhausting while to be at home in ourselves comes naturally. In general, it’s a productive question for testing what we like and who we are. Yet, there are many other external factors involved in the outcome of this question.

Also, can we be fully authentic during periods of intentional change?

I have found that faking it is, to some extent, an inherent part of change. There are some behaviors that feel natural or almost innate. Like I could’ve come out of the womb this way. Oftentimes though, we are the way we are and do the things we do because we have become this way.

When I read Atomic Habits a few years ago, I learned that it takes 66 days to form a new habit. To me, those are 66 days of being true to your desires and values by forcing your actions and behavior to deviate from the natural norm. This begs the question of if, then, we are being authentic during those 66 days.

If I think back to how I’ve changed over the last few years, several of my current most natural qualities and habits today are the result of me channeling the “fake it til you make it” mindset. I was not a reader, until I forced myself to read regularly over a sustained period of time, and now I am a reader. This same arch applies to many of my favorite identities today.

in different environments

Some environments are especially likely to bring out our contradicting values.

For instance, how individuals behave in the workplace is another common example of authentic inauthenticity. In an environment where artificial power dynamics and natural competition are baked in (performance reviews, promotion standards, and the pressure of having to earn money to literally pay rent) are we ever really free to be our authentic selves? What if who we are at home or to our friends is not professional?

In just my first year of working in corporate full-time, it feels like I’ve exchanged a lifetime of corporate dilemmas with my peers that all come back to being our authentic selves at work. Over boozy brunches and frantic midnight facetime calls, we’ve confided in each other about sending emails that don’t feel like us, working overtime on projects that bore us beyond belief, and how to manage people when we maybe we shouldn’t have that kind of authority yet (or ever?).

It’s healthy to question whether our actions align with who we are. Sometimes we realize that they don’t and we stop doing them. Other times, we realize that they don’t but we continue playing the game because perhaps our desires to be different or for the outcome is still authentic.

At the end of the day, I’m left wondering if it is even possible to align our desires to our actions and to how we are coming across to everyone else. It seems tough if not impossible to do all the time. And even if we could, is that even what it means to be an authentic person?

why do i care?

As I meet more and more people in this exciting experimental chapter of my early 20s, I’m coming to the realization that right now is a critical time for me to build my character and my circles. I care deeply about journeying through life with interesting and inspiring people (amongst other important traits of course!). In this stage of life, authentic people are incredibly attractive and cool to me, and I hope to selfishly surround myself with an unashamedly authentic circle that encourages me to be more myself as well.

I share this work-in-progress imperfect compilation of thoughts about this because in general, I believe that writing, even in the form of a list or semi-scattered thoughts, to put vital topics around the human experience into words is a beautiful craft that can allow us to see each other. Maybe a clear definition of authenticity isn’t critical to our overall life satisfaction, but it seems plausible that agreeing on how to be authentic and how to find authentic people could make me happier.

:)

footnotes:

(1) He also made sure to point out the difference between dawn after an all-nighter and dawn when you wake up early. He explained that during an all-nighter, the vibes are chaotic at 3 a.m., but become deliriously and deliciously peaceful once the sun begins to rise and it’s morning. In contrast, when you wake up at the crack of dawn, the vibes are angsty and tired. I’ll try to take it as a compliment.

(2) I recently retook my 16 personalities myers-briggs test and got a different result (ENFJ-A) than what I’ve been getting the last few years (ESFJ-A). I feel like this further proves my point that we’re all multi-faceted and ever-changing. The fact that each of the categories is also represented as a sliding spectrum that you get a percentage score on reminds me that these classifications are not binary. In my opinion, they are not even linear.

(3) lol.