This year, I was diligent. I’d managed to snag two of the last few opening night showing tickets (two rows away from the screen, but it really wasn’t that terrible) at the local AMC a month prior for me and a friend, blocking the time off on my Google Calendar as soon as the confirmation email hit my inbox and immediately sourcing a $30-something Spider-Man graphic tee from Uniqlo the next time I was at Valley Fair.

The day of the movie was a blur of movement—I rushed home early after a work event and headed over to the theater with my friend, where we realized neither of us had ate dinner, which meant we speed-ordered and speed-ate at the nearest Shake Shack, which was all fine and dandy until my friend realized he had a work call at the exact same time the movie started, which meant he had to get his laptop from the car and bring it into the AMC (genuinely chopped).

As a Marvel fan, I’ve held a personal rule ever since Spider-Man: No Way Home (the first ever Marvel movie I watched in theaters), which is that I’ll always watch Marvel movies on opening night. There’s something about walking into a crowded theater on opening night and feeling the vibrating energy of excitement from the other fans there—people who similarly woke up early to get opening night tickets, who similarly spent their well-earned money on a fandom shirt to wear to the movie, who similarly cleared their calendars that day for this and who similarly will laugh and shout out loud together at all the exciting parts of the movie without a second thought—that makes the atmosphere feel so different. I never know any of them personally, but these are people who love this franchise and these characters as much as I do, and it’s always more fun sharing new experiences with people like that!

The community of fan culture in any fandom is half of what makes a fandom so enjoyable and easy to love. With Brand New Day, it started before I even entered the theater: my intern friend excitedly complimented my Spider-Man shirt when I wore it to work that day, and a random girl sitting outside the Target next to AMC shouted “I love your shirt!” when I walked by. Inside the theater, I passed by person after person wearing Spider-Man shirts, Spider-Man masks, or Spider-Man apparel of some sort.

It was so cute—it felt like a community had come together to the Sunnyvale AMC 12 in a collective sort of excitement, and I felt so inexplicably happy to be a part of it. I sat in my movie seat—the screen distortedly-close to me and the free opening night Spider-Man socks the theater attendant was handing out on the swivel tray in front of me—with a warm, fuzzy feeling in my heart, which steadily swelled into exhilaration as the red, blocky Marvel introduction filled the screen to signal the start of the movie.

[Spider-Man: Brand New Day spoilers ahead!]

Regarding the movie itself, that was genuinely 2.5 hours of peakness. It felt so Spider-Man—from the local New York City feel to the first-person perspective swinging scenes through the city (which reminded me of a blend between Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man and a video game brought to life), I felt grounded in Peter Parker’s story the entire time. There were distinctly less fan-service moments of throwing random mixes of familiar characters together, which was something that might’ve worked for No Way Home but was something I was glad Brand New Day didn’t accumulate in order to avoid straying away from the central focus on Peter’s growth himself.

(Still, certain scenes of character integrations felt so natural—at one point, I had to mentally pinch myself to remind myself that I was watching The Punisher, Spider-Man, The Hulk, and Jean Grey all in one action scene. So awesome!)

I surprised myself with how much I appreciated the more serious, grounded tone this movie had compared to the past MCU Spider-Man films, though I do acknowledge that it was expected given the gravity of Peter’s predicament at the end of No Way Home. I loved seeing this side of being a superhero—the loneliness and alienation as a result of sacrifice that we don’t get to see often, and I think a lot of the lessons the movie conveyed can be translated to real life for most of us viewers.

I think one of the main points of the movie is the importance of seeking a support system and community of loved ones despite the pull to hide deeper and deeper into reclusion. In Peter’s case, he spends four years scraping by in isolation—which was more so surviving than living, if I have to say so myself—and convinces himself that isolation is the only selfless choice to avoid the burden others would experience if he were to expose them to his inner problems and predicament. Nevertheless, Peter still inevitably seeks out Ned and MJ, which I think is a pointer to the fact that we all inherently need human connection. When he overcomes his avoidance and lets people like Frank and Jean into his life, with Frank acting as a support system for Peter and Peter in turn acting as a support system for Jean (nice full circle), he realizes that he doesn’t need to shoulder his troubles alone.

The cherry on top is the final scene at the hospital, when Peter sees everyone cheering on Spider-Man’s recovery, and realizes how many people care about him. On hard days or in tough times when you feel that innate urge to pull in and avoid “burdening” loved ones, it’s easy to forget that people do care. Connection makes life brighter, and someone will always care if you let them!

I think the movie also does a nice job of instilling within the audience the brutal truth that people move on! Those who are in your life may not always stay in it; cherish your time with the loved ones around you, and for those who leave your life, they’ll move on—it’s up to you to move on as well. As a viewer and Spider-Man fan, my heart broke for Peter when I heard MJ’s “I don’t love you” line; as a person, I recognized it for what it was, which is change. The only one who suffers from dwelling on something or someone who has changed a long time ago is you. Throughout the movie, that’s a lesson Peter learns as well, whether that’s with his interpersonal relationships or his abilities that he tries to suppress before eventually embracing.

On the subject of change and growth—I think this movie hit so much more personally (especially for my age group, which is literally age-aligned with Peter in both No Way Home and Brand New Day at the respective times both movies came out) because the last Spider-Man movie came out five years ago. Since then, I’ve grown and changed so much, as have all Spider-Man fans, and—especially with the time skip—it feels in a way that we’ve grown alongside Peter in the movie.

When I think about who I was in 2021 at the release of No Way Home, it’s baffling because I feel like that was a completely different person. I was in 11th grade and at the peak of my Marvel/Spider-Man fanaticism; to this day, that’s the only movie I’ve ever watched three times in theaters. Back then, my biggest worries were college applications, and I spent my days in 7-hour high school blocks or roaming around my small hometown with friends with absolutely no idea what was in store for me even within a year. My world was Johns Creek, Georgia, and I couldn’t even fathom the places I’ve now gone to and accomplishments I now have under my belt five years later.

It’s crazy to think that between the time No Way Home came out and Brand New Day came out, I:

1. Grew so much into who I am as a person and my confidence

2. Went through an entire 1.5 year long-term relationship

3. Graduated high school + started (and am about to end!) college

4. Began working and started my professional career

5. Changed/altered so many of my personal and professional goals

6. Took a semester off from school and lived/worked in California for 7 months

7. Got 46 tattoos

8. Became probably 200x more social

(to name a few out of many crazy milestones)

In fact, a few weeks ago, I woke up to an out-of-the-blue text from my hometown friend, who was actually my very first friend I made in Georgia when I moved in 6th grade:

It was such an extremely sweet text, and it reminded me heavily of how things can change so fast through the years. Whether I look back to 6th grade or look back to December 2021, my entire social circle, worldview, environment, and responsibilities have done complete 180s. I’ve gone through so many stages in life and grown so much in just the past few years alone, and sometimes it’s very easy to forget where I started out.

Nevertheless, a constant that’s stayed with me throughout these past few years has been Spider-Man! I’ve gotten a Spider-Man tattoo, steadily accumulated Spider-Man Funko Pops and plushies, which now fill up my apartment at school, and a heavy attention-grabber is always the life-sized Spider-Man cardboard cutout in my living room. In my opinion, that’s the beauty of being a fan and growing up experiencing excitement for franchises like this—as my Spider-Man collection has grown, so have I!

(Anyway, follow me on Letterboxd and see my review for Brand New Day here!)

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It’s crazy to think about the fact that I’ve been in California for half a year. I couldn’t have asked for a better 2026—I feel so undeniably grateful to have had the opportunity to spend this time here, where I’ve met some of my closest friends, built some amazing relationships, experienced endless opportunities, explored the Bay + seen the world, and gone on so many fun weekend trips.

However, for the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling a creeping sense of burnout, and I’ve started to really miss home. Working a 9-to-5 for half a year and getting used to a schedule where my plans all need occur on the weekends or after an 8-hour workday has become tiring instead of invigorating; I find myself eagerly counting down the days until I can be unemployed again.

This final month is jam-packed with plans and responsibilities, and while I’m looking forward to it all, I can’t wait to go back to school again for my final year of college, which is so insane! Final year. Wow. I have so much I’ve missed and so many things I want to do to make the most of my last year, and here are a few of them:

• Moving back into my off-campus apartment, living in a high-rise again, and being reunited with my roommates

• Publix runs with my roommates for energy drinks/Diet Coke

• The Taco Bell in Midtown (that establishment has seen so much…)

• The energy of football games

• Sleeping in without having to make it to the office by 9am

• Waking up in my comfortable bed in a room that feels like my own

  

• Seeing all my friends again, catching up, and hanging out with them!

• Mid-day naps

• Late-night studying in the Hub lounge

• Running into people on campus (surprisingly miss this)

• Re-decorating my room with all the drawings, photos, and prints I had to take down

• Having friends over at my place + friend group sleepovers at ours with my roommates and our friends

  

• Atlanta concerts! The Neighborhood, Phoebe Bridgers, and more TBD

• The sound of Atlanta traffic outside my apartment

• Life4Cuts

• Hanging out with the new Georgia Tech friends I’ve made/gotten closer with here in Cali

• Pulling up to hella club events for fun because half my friends are now Directors/Presidents of orgs

• Duluth flow states (YGF + Molly Tea)

• Getting more apartment visitors to sign the back of my Spider-Man cardboard cutout in the living room

• Chilling in my friends’ apartments

• Friday nights on a college campus

• Reviving my Notion and adding all my class deadlines to my assignment tracker

• Views of Midtown at night from my apartment

  

• Saying hi and catching up with the Scheller advisors

• Getting lit on the weekends

• Potentially fostering a cat for a month with my roommates!

• Apartment parties

• Turning 21! And exploring the Atlanta bar/club scene

• Wet weekend

• Honestly just being a senior—I feel like it’ll be such a different mindset shift and will be such an exciting time

• Writing about new experiences I have on Substack!

• “r u locking in”

• Halloweekend and planning out my costumes (and throwing a pre like last year)

• Wearing cute going out fits on Friday nights with my friends

• Having classes with friends

• Walking around campus

• Studying at Apotheos and saying hi to the baristas

• Xi’an and the Chick-fil-A on campus

• Late night grinds with friends

• Rotating around campus and studying at different locations

• Sitting in lecture halls

• Frat formal maxxing with Maya, Julia, and Katie

  

• Throwing parties (me + 2 of my roommates all have birthdays in November, so a rager will be happening!!!)

• Semi-continuing the California habit of occasional weekend trips

• Drawing/reading for hours in my room without the pressure of work or plans

• Back-to-school clothes shopping heheh

• Seeing my roommates in the kitchen after waking up/coming back from class

• In general just seeing people I haven’t seen since the fall

• Grad season and grad photos

• Studying in BH with Amy

  

• Digi grad photoshoot around campus with Sarah

• Actually graduating

• Getting Starbucks before class at Scheller or Blonkey when I’m locking in at Student Center/CULC

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The one year anniversary of my time at Walmart came and flew a few weeks ago, and as I was nostalgically looking through my old photos from Summer 2025 with the close friends I made then + reminiscing on the fun memories we somehow managed to make those 2.5 months in The Middle of Nowhere, Arkansas, it hit me that it’s really been a year. I showed up to Arkansas knowing nobody last June, made some amazingly-close friends through the intern cohort, fell into a steady routine of work and play, and then—in what felt like the blink of an eye—my life has suddenly moved on from that era, leaving it behind long ago. I no longer see or talk to my Walmart intern friends daily, nor do I get to open my door and see Samyu standing behind it on a Wednesday. Instead, I’ve lived an entire year since then and have been living in California for the past half year, surrounded by completely new friends, workplaces, and environments. My time in Arkansas has all but become a fond memory in my head.

Recently, I’ve been feeling a sense of urgency—like I’m running out of time. The comfortability of where I am now is crumbling; I’ve been interning in California for about half a year, and I only have 1.5 months left before my permanent flight back to Atlanta. The life I’ve grown so used to and people I’m so used to seeing routinely will just be memories soon, like my time in Arkansas now is to me.

I think I’ve always known that. Every fun adventure or weekend trip I’ve been on since January was always tinged with a hint of bittersweetness because I was somehow so aware in every moment that this was an experience that I’d one day miss as a memory. I knew before I ever stepped foot across California state lines that my time here in 2026 will be a time I’ll look back at fondly for many years to come, and I still know that to be true. It’s been weird to realize this as a young person because for me, at my stage in life, it feels like I’m especially living nomadically, and I should be used to picking up and leaving and living out temporary lives for a while. With every new semester and out-of-state internship, that’s just the norm, but I still can’t stop myself from sadly anticipating the ends of my short-lived domiciles anyway.

I was lucky enough to meet a group of three girls that I just fit into like a puzzle piece when I first arrived here in California. Within two weeks, I’d gotten so close to them that it was hard to believe that we’d all started off as practically strangers, and for those first four months of the year, it felt like I’d jumped onto the set of a sitcom—the four of us did everything together, from side-quests and trips every weekend to hanging out at their house nearly daily after work. I was at their door every Friday with a duffle bag in hand, and we’d dilly dally through the weekend until I left Sunday night to get ready for the next seven days of fun. These three girls, along with other friends I made, became a regular part of my life, and I fell into a comfortable social rhythm that felt unbreakable.

Now, halfway through the year and in the midst of the summer, everything feels a bit more scattered. Maybe it’s because there’s that unavoidable feeling of ticking time with the fall semester approaching closer and closer, as well as the hustle and bustle of work picking up for all of us, the influx of new people who’ve infiltrated the Bay this summer to meet, and the arrival of old friends to catch up with as well (probably all of the above), but it feels like everyone who had a steady, undisturbed presence in my life this past spring has started to fade in and out of my weeks more often than I’ve ever been used to. I don’t get to see those friends as much; our schedules aren’t always aligning, and with more of a new community coming into the picture in the form of new interns and new people to meet, I’ve had a lot of trouble balancing my social life and sorting out where to adequately output my time/energy.

I struggled adjusting to this change, even though it was gradual, and I think up until recently I spent a lot of [moot] effort chasing preservation of that routine and social lifestyle I’d become comfortable with at the expense of new experiences, new friends, and a healthy dedication to my personal time and health. While I knew it deep down, I disregarded the fact that time was passing, and change was happening.

It makes me melancholic because I know my time here—and, subsequently, the life I’ve built here—will end, and that is just inevitable. Time has always been passing, and with passing time comes friendships that evolve and change. That’s what has happened to me, and I’m acutely aware of the fact that some things just aren’t the same anymore, even if there wasn’t a specific catalyst.

Something that’s populated my brain along with all these thoughts and realizations is how crazy it is that the closest people to me in my life all started out as strangers. Whether these are friends from home who were strangers ten years ago when I started middle school or friends from California who were strangers to me just half a year ago, I happened to cross paths with every single one of them at one point in my life, and we’ve stayed intertwined since then. We’re so vulnerable to each other, and we tell each other our hopes and dreams, and all the while we met maybe a few weeks ago—and I think that’s so special.

I often say that I have a high social battery, but I think I’m motivated to always talk to new people and be social because I truly never know what connection I’ll find on any given day with a stranger I meet. As I reflect now, I’m so grateful for how my life has played out in terms of the people I’ve come across; I’ve gotten extremely lucky with the friends I’ve made, old or new, and it excites me to think about who the universe is going to send my way in the future.

Similarly, it’s a bit of a jarring feeling to realize that close friends have become strangers at the same rate that strangers have become close friends to me. People I used to spend everyday with—eating at dining halls, hanging out in each others’ dorm rooms/hotel suites, or studying together around campus—are no longer in my life, whether from a natural occurrence of having grown distance throughout the years or something more intentional. Even if we’ll like each others’ Instagram posts or occasionally wave to each other on campus, many regular characters have slowly dissipated into the backdrop.

I think about past best friends, boys, and mentors, who I used to bear my heart to and who knew everything about me. Close friends I once saw everyday I now text maybe every few weeks or months to wish Happy Birthday! or to tell them that something I saw that day reminded me of them; people who were so woven in my life once—whether for 1.5 years or 3 weeks—are people who I no longer talk to, and I don’t know anything about their lives anymore. For them, how I exist will always be a snapshot of one specific time in my life, a person I’m not anymore living inside their memory. It’s kind of bittersweet to think about but interesting all the same to realize that so many people in the world have varying perceptions of me at different stages in my life that remain in their heads forever.

I wonder who from my life at the moment will stay in it even within just half a year from now and who I’ll have drifted from. As sad as it is, it’s also somewhat of a comforting epiphany that it’s only the natural order of things that relationships eventually distance to make way for new connections and blessings.

Regardless, I’m endlessly grateful for the memories I’ve made and people I’ve met, from the moment I could synthesize what a connection even meant to now. Every person I’ve either stayed close with or distanced from still lives in my mind. I used to think that my brain only had so much capacity for that, but as I’ve met people and built memories with them, that reserve only seems to expand—even if I don’t actively talk to them anymore or we aren’t regularly in each others’ lives anymore, I still remember every single connection that made somewhat of an impact in my life. Isn’t that so crazy how the mind’s capacity can stretch? It’s such a gift to me that I can hold all these memories, and those people will never truly be strangers to me anymore.

In a year, like how I reminisce about last summer, I’ll look back on this summer and realize that my life is entirely different, and so many people have gone in and out. I’ll never know if today is the last routine day I have with a close one, so I’ll treasure every day that comes and every friend I spend time with while staying excited for what new connections the future holds for me.

—

Writing this has me reminiscing heavily on some routines I once had that’ve dulled into the past, whether temporarily or permanently, so I thought I’d end off with a few of those nice memories:

• Getting Arby’s curly fries with Helen in 12th grade, parking the car in my neighborhood pool parking lot, and just talking until it was dark outside

• Writing for hours with Anika in a local cafe the entirety of the summer after 11th grade

• Staying over every weekend at 711 and side-questing around the Bay with Maya, Kelly, and Lindsey at the start of this year

• Sam’s Club Fridays with Samyu, Leo, Om, and Zach last summer + stealing Diet Cokes from the office with Samyu

• Friday Functions last summer in my hotel room with my intern friends (and the inevitable walk to the local park at 11pm)

• Writing brainrot Wattpad stories with Helen and Katrina in Anatomy class in 11th grade

• Dropping bands with Rish and Nela on the Japanese food stand next to Tech Green in between math class and accounting class in sophomore year

• Waking Michelle up in the mornings of freshman year when she didn’t wake up to her heavy alarm

• Going out to the frats with Joane in freshman year when I was just getting familiarized with the party lifestyle

• Studying on-campus for hours on end with Amy in BH and the torturous avoidance of cockroaches on our walks back to NAV in sophomore year

• Fooling around in Writer’s Workshop and thirsting over this one teacher in 11th grade with Aryaa and Maryam

• Getting fat off Uni-Uni boba with Anna in high school (still a routine when I’m home tbh…)

Anyway, don’t be a stranger!

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• Writing [on Substack] - Of course, this blog has been a huge constant in my life for the past two years. I’m a big proponent of writing out my feelings, and the limbo I enter is always very therapeutic when I take an hour or two to sit there and just write, especially when everything else around me feels so fast-moving. This makes me think back to early summers in high school many years ago where I used to frequent a local café from my friend from home, and we would just stay there for hours writing. I miss that a lot. My writing journey has definitely had its ebbs and flows and maturation across different genres through the past ~seven years (fanfiction, voracious journaling, Substack, etc.), and staying active on this blog is my way of continuing that forward.

• Being a fan - I talk more about this in a previous article, but fan culture has always been a very prevalent aspect of my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve always found so much internal excitement and community from being active in different fandoms across different media forms: music, book series, movie series, etc. Continuously going to the concerts of artists I love and watching movies of series I love on opening night is my way of feeding my inner fan. Recently, I had the best time at the BTS concert at Stanford, and I loved that I could still feel the same reinvigorating sentiment of excitement I used to cling onto in middle school almost a decade later. Looking ahead, I can’t wait for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and the Don Toliver concert in June 😄

• Customizing my character - I have 43 tattoos (a number that almost gave my dad a heart attack a few weeks ago) and 18 piercings. I started out with ear piercings back in 10th grade, which eventually built up to body piercings in high school and a plethora of tattoos. My tattoos and piercings definitely contribute heavily to my self-identity; I find a lot of fulfillment and confidence in the self-expression and personal style I’m able to amplify by customizing my character this way (as some people like to call it). My most recent addition was a lip piercing two weeks ago, which was something I thought I’d never even consider, but here we are! If anything, the expansion of my tattoo/piercing collection has taught me to never say never hahahahah.

• Trying new food places - I will say this is a constant that has more recently become more intensified by my relocation to the Bay Area, but I’ve always had a lot of fun trying new food places. I café-hopped a lot in high school, and in college it was always a fun time to go try a new coffee shop or new Korean food place with friends on the weekends. With the burgeoning realization that I’m attaining more independence with every second that passes of every day, I’ve come to realize that I am the only one who can make myself get into the car and go explore the world somehow, and that epiphany has clearly materialized in a very distinct category of food. Also, trying new places has been one of the sole anchoring social activities for people my age, so there’s that too. I’ve somehow maintained a 25-week streak on Beli since January, and I plan on having that run indefinitely into the end of the year, thank you very much!

• Brandy Melville - I am basic and I love Brandy Melville clothes and have always loved Brandy Melville clothes. Maybe 95% of my closet is Brandy. Sorry.

• Oversharing - I think there’s a negative connotation associated with oversharing, but I’ve come to the realization throughout the years that I am not and was never meant to be nonchalant. I find so much joy in sharing my life with my friends—writing on this blog obviously, spamming Close Friends stories on Instagram, curating fun spam dumps, and I would also like to say that I had a very fire streak going on last summer of making DIML TikToks (that lowkey went viral too!) of my summer internship (though I did unfortunately have to retire heading into this year because of privacy concerns at my new companies). As I get to know new people and also lose touch with people at an identical rate, it gets harder for me to intentionally try and stay in touch with friends I don’t see as often, so oversharing with my friends online is a way for me to try and maintain that communication at least from my end. I always get very happy when I receive texts from friends I don’t talk to as much anymore about their thoughts on a Substack I published or comments from friends I’ve somewhat lost touch with on a spam dump I posted. I will continue to overshare!

Those are a few constants in my life that have yet to dip out on me. A lot of those bullets actually have their own specifically-dedicated articles that I wrote in the past on my blog, which I guess further proves their unwavering presence in my life. I am ending this magnificent listicle here. Have a great June!

(If you read that Super-Man typo no you didn’t)

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Nevertheless, I made it back home perfectly fine, and today’s Tuesday back officially marks the third week of my summer internship, which is pretty crazy for me to type out and read. My workdays have flown by in a whirl of meetings, networking, and coffee chats (soooo many coffee chats) as well as recent stress from my project, and they always end in us intern friends all gathering at the headquarters for free company dinner before heading home and starting the cycle all over again.

Within these past three weeks, I feel like I’ve been constantly on the move because I’ve done so much across such a wide spectrum, though that’s pretty much the norm of interning here in California: aside from Yosemite and the work grind, I screamed my lungs out at the BTS concert in Stanford two weekends ago and felt like my seventh-grade self again, took my brother around the Bay when he visited one weekend, and have been spending an absurd amount of time with my best friends from college who recently infiltrated the Bay for their summer internships as well (along with about half my campus population).

With all this recent excitement and new characters, it’s finally now that I feel the start of summer creeping up on me. For some reason, that sentiment’s been delayed, but I have a feeling that these next 2.5 months will be jam-packed with meeting new people, trying new experiences, and balancing new dynamics.

This excitement for the next new thing isn’t a novel concept for me. Especially when I reflect on the past year alone, I feel as though I’ve crammed half a lifetime of new experiences into 365 days, which mostly has been a result of an internal proclivity I think I have to feel impatient when life feel stagnant for too long. Work, weekend sidequests, boys, new friends—as a 20-year-old in a new state with an income, fun friends, and no boyfriend, I can’t recall a time as of recently where I chose to sit down instead of run towards the next new experience.

I always believed that chasing spontaneity and hustling towards the next exciting thing is how I should be living my life as a young person, but I’m starting to wonder if it should be that black-and-white. I’ve spent most of my free time these past five months with the same group of intern friends I met in January, and I hadn’t seen them much this past week because of work, the long weekend, and some internal urge I felt to meet the plethora of new faces in the Bay and make new friends. While it was a great time meeting new faces and spending Yosemite weekend with a newer mix of people, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed my friends until the whole entire group of them burst through the door on Monday afternoon, where I was waiting after coming back from Yosemite, and bombarded me. Amidst the clamor of hugs and yells and urging from them to hear about my weekend (and vice versa), I felt such an inexplicable sense of happiness and fondness as the ten-or-so of us all gathered at the tiny kitchen island, and everything just felt so normal again.

I had a short thing with a guy a while back, and while we both agreed at the end that it wouldn’t work out, it got me thinking—how long will it take of this continuous cycle of short novelty until I get tired of it? Especially when it comes to boys these past few years, I’ve always sworn off relationships; I’ve been diligently avoidant of anything serious and have been perfectly content being single with no emotional baggage of a boyfriend. I’m sure it’s also because any guy I’ve had anything with just hasn’t been the right person for me, or else things would be different, but so far the metrics in the past two years are at 0 boyfriends and a 3 week maximum duration of anything romantic, and that’s mostly been a result of my doing.

However, with this guy, it was the first time in a long time where I felt that deep longing for a boyfriend that I hadn’t felt in years, more in a general sense than in regard to this specific person. Maybe it was because it was a fling that consisted of more than just something casual (at least to me, when I think back to certain conversations and talks we had), but I was reminded of what it was like to be with an actual person in some sort of relationship that consisted of more than just physical intimacy. This confused me because I know that logically both anything casual or more serious with this specific person probably wouldn’t work out. A part of me really wished he was the one and that it would work out, but I guess it’s true that some people just aren’t meant for each other no matter how much you wish differently.

Nevertheless, I spent the entire day after hating this foreign sense of vulnerability that I wasn’t used to feeling and which seemed to have washed over me uncomfortably. After all, when it comes to guys I had anything with in the past, I was never the one to get attached, and I prided myself in my ability to cut things off when I thought it wasn’t going anywhere. I do suppose this reinforced to me that I can still want things I don’t usually want, and in a romantic context, when the right person does come along, I won’t let them pass by.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t dejected anyway. I spent the 24 hours following the end of my little fling moping around and texting/calling my friends, which leads me to my second takeaway from this experience, which is that I absolutely love my friends. Immediately after, when I was feeling that strange sensation of low spirits in my heart and didn’t know what to do about it, my friends gathered around me on the bed, and they spent the rest of the night comforting me and chatting, and I fell asleep in their house. The next day, when I texted a few of my friends from home about how gloomy I was feeling, every single one dropped what they were doing and called me, despite the fact that one was in the middle of his first week of work, and another was mid-gym session.

As my social circle grows and strengthens, I find myself feeling so immensely grateful and lucky to have such an amazing community around me. Whenever I stop to truly think about it, I realize just how huge of a jackpot I’ve hit with the friends that I’ve made, whether that’s ones that’ve lasted from middle/high school, or ones I made in college, or ones I made at my internships. If anything, with how much I’ve needed to lean on friends in certain personal or familial situations in these past few years, it’s been reinforced to me how valuable my friendships are and how important fostering those are to me.

I think I’m one of the luckiest people in the world to have met the people I have around me today and to have all these opportunities at my fingertips. I mean, I get to experience new adventures like Yosemite trips on the regular and get the choice to pick between which friends I want to see on Friday nights, which is such a trivial problem I sometimes find myself stressing over that I almost don’t realize how much of a privilege it is! My greatest gift has and always will be my friends and social circle; at the moment, I’m blessed to be in one of the nicest states in the country this summer with so much to do, a great job, countless opportunities, and the most supportive community a girl could ever ask for.

When I think about my life like that, no problem seems that big anymore! :-)

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Am I really seeing that? I hobbled over closer (I’d just gotten off the leg press machine and was in excruciating pain) and—yep. Right there, illuminated by the Planet Fitness overhead lighting, were indeed the noticeable shadows of my outer quads on each leg, no flexing needed.

To say I was ecstatic was an understatement. I sent photos of my suddenly-defined quads to my mom, practically leaped through the rest of my workout that day, and ceaselessly bothered my gym buddy coworker about it at work. I lived off that dopamine rush for the rest of the week because—noticeable quads! This was the validation I’d been desperate to see which finally told me that I was truly making progress at the gym. After torturously getting up at 6am everyday before work for the past 2 months, forcing deathly dry chicken down my gullet for lunch at the office everyday, and consistently tracking my protein intake, this was a humongous deal for me.

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Then, a few days later, I was mindlessly scrolling through my camera roll when I came across a full-body mirror selfie I’d taken back in February 2025 (a time when I was as active as a rock, mind you) where the exact same quad lines with the exact same depth were displayed upon my thighs. In that moment, I wanted to just choke on the next piece of horrendously-dry chicken I ever swallowed.

I know I can’t rush the process—or any process, in fact—but I’m aware that I’ve always struggled with impatience as a character flaw. When I’m actively working towards a goal in the future, it’s pretty difficult not to fixate on it day-to-day and actively seek out noticeable results on a short-term cadence, whether it’s gym gains or my eyebrows that I’m trying to grow out so that I can reshape them or the new finger tattoos I got 1.5 months ago that keep fading every time they heal so that I keep having to go in for a touch-up (and desperately praying that each time is the last).

However, my experiences in California these past 4 months have drilled within me more than ever before the truth that time seriously does pass anyway. Next week marks the end of an era: I officially end my current internship, fly back home for the first time in months, and then come back to the Bay to start a new job with completely new people and responsibilities. That excitement for the next best thing has steadily been rising in my chest; it’s exhilarating to approach a new chapter in life, and I’m awestruck when I reflect back on the new experiences and personal growth I’ve somehow squeezed into this past spring.

Pre-California in early January, my biggest fear was that I’d struggle to cultivate strong friendships and need to work hard to fill my calendar outside of work, succumbing instead to the stereotype of an overworked, office-loving Silicon Valley tech worker.

Now, mid-California in late April, I find myself plopped in the midst of a wonderful group of friends and endless side-quests stuffed under my belt. The Google Calendar blocks for my Friday-Saturday-Sundays are bombarded with events: a new beach to explore, a new mountain to climb, another day in San Francisco to dilly-dally. A growing cast of regular characters revolve around me in dinner dates and post-work hangouts. My camera roll has doubled in size. Despite my lack of quad definition, my trust in my personal discipline has expanded tenfold with every morning gym session I incorporate into my week.

From a bird’s eye view, the previous paragraph might’ve been pulled from a sitcom synopsis. From a retrospective point-of-view, I recognize it as a result of months of daily effort stacked on top of each other: saying yes to dinner plans after a tiring workday, losing out on sleep to force myself to the gym on a Monday, staying late at the office to compensate for a non-work experience I decided to prioritize instead. Consistency, sacrifices, and regular investments into new friends, experiences, and personal growth that were sometimes really hard to choose.

Despite my false quad alarm recently and the corresponding difficulty of motivating myself to workout, I still drove to the office last Friday morning and hopped on the office treadmill. It was super nice and peaceful—the window overlooked the rolling Palo Alto hills, and when I was done, I knew that my choice to show up added another layer to the confidence in my own discipline that I’ve been building slowly with consistency.

Progress neither happens linearly nor is something I feel is recognizable day-to-day, as much as I sometimes wish it were. If you told January-Me what April-Me has achieved, I’d be flabbergasted, especially at the consistent rate I’ve kept up with my goals given the lack of visible returns on the regular. Patience is a virtue! And so I’ve learned to enjoy the process of growth, because it’s not worth the mental effort to fixate on a lack thereof when time flies anyway!

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$550 each for four seats together in Category 2

what game?

My heart sinks as I type out Qatar v Switzerland. This is always where the deal falls through (sorry Qatar and Switzerland).

hmm, I’ll pass for now

Gahhh. The $550-shaped hole burns in my metaphorical wallet, and I sink further into a pickle of how I can resell the World Cup tickets I bought on whim with friends because we convinced each other it’ll be a once in a lifetime chance! for four non-soccer fans to drop 10+ hours of intern pay on tickets. I’m also desperately trying to somehow remedy the astronomical cost of my singular ski daytrip to Tahoe this Saturday; my combined ticket prices for BTS, Don Toliver, and The Neighborhood concerts later this year; and the probably-absurd amount of money I’ve blown on the jasmine milk tea from the Sunnyvale Molly Tea.

The truth is that since arriving in California a bit over a month ago, I’ve been unfortunately and uncontrollably quite extravagant with my money. In fact, my Beli is currently booming on an insane 11 week streak because I have literally been eating a hole into my bank account. My only justification is that now I have a big girl job, and I’m making money on the weekdays that I can thus blow on the weekends. In fact, the weekdays pass so monotonously in blurs of Diet Coke office refills and rush hour traffic that when Friday comes, a girl just wants to have fun and say yes to things!

The repetitive dullness of the 9-5 workweek definitely peaks around mid-afternoon most days. While I literally cannot screenshot my company messages unless I prefer to get fired by InfoSec, below is an excerpt of a short and sweet exchange over Teams with my intern friend from yesterday:

i feel chud

i wan go home

ugh me too

Last Friday afternoon specifically, I reached an all-time slump high by simply staring at my Outlook inbox for what felt like the 100th hour in a row, which spurred me into slamming my laptop shut and dipping out of work early around 2pm. All my friends were still at their offices, so I sat in my car and thought about what to do, and after realizing that I’m literally smack-dab in the middle of the Bay Area and have autonomy to go wherever I want, I winded up at the Intel Museum of all places in Santa Clara.

“Is it your first time here?” The lady behind the front desk asks when I accidentally walk into the museum store instead of towards the displays.

“Yeah, I finished work early—” which was somewhat true “—and didn’t know what to do with myself.” We laugh together. “Do you have any recs on where I should start?”

She points to a little arcade game nestled in the corner that Intel apparently created in the past with a microprocessor, so after looping around the general museum displays, I spend a few minutes trying and failing miserably to shoot the little aliens on the screen before leaving to the sounds of dying pew pews. By now I’m on a Silicon Valley campus crawl, so I hit up the NVIDIA headquarters, fail to infiltrate but make small talk with the parking attendant, and then spend the rest of the day at the Google Visitor Center in Mountain View, enjoying a nice sunset atop a nearby a hill and all in all have a great time side-questing by myself.

It’s been really nice to have autonomy and an endless amount of things to do in California. I realize that I realistically will probably end up in the Bay after college just because of the nature of my career field and the amount of tech companies obviously in Silicon Valley, and I find myself similarly asking my intern friends often:

Do you want to stay here after grad?

Most say that they do, and I nod along—but if I have to be honest, I yearn to spend my 20s in a true, bustling city instead of in San Jose suburb confinement. I’m equally grateful for my opportunity to be here as I wish I could experience an NYC summer of Brooklyn brownstones and six-feet-tall Wall Street eye candy instead of a summer of dystopian AI billboards lining the highways into San Francisco and flaky millionaires fading dates because Google Calendar is apparently a foreign tool compared to secretaries (this one is personal). In another life, my Substack is filled with anecdotes about breezy, glamorous nights out on the town and interested interactions nestled between the NYC city skyscrapers instead of seeing Sam Altman at Stanford’s annual hackathon and witnessing my first fenty fold at an SF gas station at 10pm. Alas, the grass is always greener on the other side.

I think I’m also not feeling too hot about the fact that every single trip into the metropolitan part of the Bay requires a 40-50 minute drive (or twice as long by train) and a palpitation-inducing hunt for narrow street parking. I’ve never been one to feel completely at ease behind the wheel in the first place, as I don’t drive regularly back at school for fear of the terrifying Atlanta streets, and so it’s been an adjustment whipping a Tacoma around California. Just thinking about trying to parallel park a pickup truck in the city on a regular basis makes me intensely miss the Chicago public bus system.

Though, I might also be totally dramatizing this. I drove into SF alone two weeks ago to meet up with Bora, my friend from college who’s interning this semester and graduating in the summer. She was visiting the city that weekend, and I miraculously pulled off a mediocre parallel parking job in the admittedly less-crowded Dogpatch neighborhood, where Bora was staying with her YC-founder boyfriend Jeff.

Over dinner at a cute ramen place in the city, we somehow landed on the topic of Ruzz, a portmanteau for rich huzz that has become somewhat standardized as the nickname for Flaky Millionaire Man mentioned a few paragraphs above.

For context: Ruzz is Jeff’s friend, and Bora was the one to attempt to set us up. From the little knowledge I know about him, Ruzz works at a robotics startup in Palo Alto, really wanted a girlfriend, is kind of a genius, makes millions, and is all-in-all the exact archetype of a Bay Area tech bro. After a text exchange of maybe 10 messages in total across the two of us, we had a somewhat-confirmed date planned for a weekend in January that quickly deteriorated into me never hearing from him again after his final message:

(Investor party should’ve been my first red flag. Secretary should’ve been my last!)

“Sorry about that, Deborah,” Bora says over her ramen with a frown, referring to Ruzz. “I don’t know why he never reached back out when he was the one who wanted to be set up in the first place.”

I shrug and feign nonchalance. “Nah, it’s chill. I’m sure he’s super busy or isn’t interested anymore.”

“Noooooooo it’s definitely not that he’s not interested. Trust—he’s just insaneeeeeeeeeely busy. Like he’s actually so busy it’s insane. But yeah, I’d be super frustrated too.”

Bora then pauses for a moment. “Would you still be open to going on a date in the future?” She grins. “Maybe when his company IPOs?”

I laugh at that and say Maybe, and then I dig into my ramen, but I wonder to myself in the back of my head—would I really be open? Am I truly a shallow gold-digger at heart who would go on a date with some rich dude who couldn’t even plan a date in the first place just because his startup IPOs?

Truthfully, I would do it as a side quest. I agreed to Bora’s set up proposal in the very first place because I was intrigued by the idea of interacting in that sort of setting with someone who feels very removed from the type of person I see and spend time with on a regular basis. I’m not friends with millionaires; I can’t even name a singular young millionaire I know. I would consider me and my friends very normal 20-year-olds, and so the appeal of this entire date admittedly was the chance for me to uncover first-hand a new species of Millionaire.

That said, however, I think I’d much prefer to stick with my fun-loving, normal-feeling, adventure-seeking intern friends after this. The idea of getting sucked into the world of Bay-Area-tech-bro-startup-founders, with conversations that constantly revolve around Tesla stocks and Claude and the latest AI news on X and What do you do for work? makes me want to highkey end myself. Maybe I’m stereotyping here, but I’d rather stay out of that bubble for as long as I can.

Anyway, Bora and I finish our food, and Bora calls a Waymo, and we freak out in the middle of the street because her phone dies just as she’s about to click the button in the app to unlock the Waymo door. It jumps back to life after a stressful minute, and we take the Waymo back at Dogpatch, where young-looking startup founders are still walking around in the dead of night with backpacks hoisted over shoulders. I say goodbye and drive through the streets of SF back home, thinking sadly most of the ride back about how I’ll probably never see Bora again on campus.

A thought that has been infiltrating my mind constantly is the fact that I’m approaching my final year of school. It’s so mind-blowing and depressing to realize that the first batch of my friends have already started to graduated—a few from last semester, a few this semester before I get back, and many the upcoming semesters like Bora. The cognitive dissonance of thinking about how I’ll soon never be in the comfort of a school environment again, where friends, shared dreams, and camaraderie are both mentally and physically so accessible, has been extremely disorienting.

Especially recently, I’ve been battling a internal conflict of feeling like I should be doing more vs. wanting to live in the moment, both born from this rising awareness of limited time. When I dwell on the short time I’ll have to enjoy my last bits of student life with my close friends, I then realize that I’ll one day in the near few months be reminiscing the exact same way about the exact life I’m currently living, a golden opportunity so many would give to experience: I'm making money in sunny California, where I have an endless bucket list of activities I can do, a wonderful group of new friends to do them with, and countless opportunities for career as well as personal growth at my fingertips.

There’s no other time than now to enjoy the moment. I shouldn’t feel guilty for enjoying a pasta night at a friend’s place or attending an Uncrustables party from Luma at the Golden Gate Park (another story) on a Saturday instead of cramming for the GRE or interview prepping for full-time recruiting! That is genuinely blasphemous. Last weekend alone, I traveled into SF with friends for a showcase of Formula 1 race cars along Marina Blvd., and afterwards, we just laid in the grass in front of the Palace of Fine Arts as other people nearby milled around in the sun.

In that moment, I found myself thinking, This is so nice. I just want to lie here forever!

Now, I truly get the appeal of California weather and why people say that weather is such an affecting factor of mood. I’ve been used to cold, gloomy Canadian weather and bipolar Georgia weather for most of my life, and now I find that I seriously feel such an insane boost of dopamine every time I step outside in the morning to a beautiful, sunny day. Maybe it’s a bit cheesy, but I can’t stop smiling whenever I drive down the streets of California with my windows down so that I can feel the breeze on my face and can soak in the sun, and I’m blasting music, and in my direct line-of-sight are palm trees lining the streets and the snow-tipped mountains in the backdrop.

Life is honestly pretty great!!!!

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I feel pretty apathetic to the new year because I think my excitement for 2026 ran its course last year (hah), and now I’m just impatiently waiting for the ball to actually get rolling. Now that I’m 3 weeks into winter break and thus 3 weeks into being cooped up at home with nothing to do other than anticipate the upcoming exciting events for the year, I’m about 1% away from having an aneurysm.

Truly, the grass is greener on the other side. When I’m at school, I find myself burnt out from the constant studying and eagerly looking forward to break. When I’m actually on break, I can’t wait to go back to school/work so that I no longer can feel this all-consuming sentiment of being genuinely so unemployed at home. These days have just comprised a limbo of waking up at 11am, doomscrolling for hours, binging true crime videos for hours, and plodding around the house looking disheveled in my pajamas.

I hate having no routine. I’ve been trying to feel some semblance of normalcy and productivity like in school by frequenting a local cafe to do work so often these past few weeks that the girl behind the counter definitely knows I’m about to order a medium iced Americano when I walk up to her (but I’d rather just have that aneurysm before I ever attempt “the regular please.” That will never happen.). It’s a weird feeling because a part of me acknowledges that I barely have any school breaks left to experience in my adult life as a rising college senior, so I should just let myself rot and be unproductive before I never get the chance to do so during a period of time specifically dedicated to doing absolutely nothing ever again, right? (Well, retirement.)

Since when did coming home from college feel more like a temporary limbo? My life isn’t here anymore. My bedroom is completely stripped of anything really self-identifying for me, and we have about 10% of the furniture we had 3 years ago in the house, all in anticipation for a move that’s been in the books for the past 1+ year. Whenever I’m back, my entire schedule consists of cramming dentist/doctor/dermatology/haircut appointments in before I have to leave again, timidly walking around the local Target in fear of bumping into old high school peers, and spending excessive money on food when catching up with hometown friends.

(Sooooo much money on food. There is legit nothing to do around here but eat. One can only walk around the same local park so many times, so I’ve blown a small fortune the past 2 weeks eating out with the friends I wanted to see one last time before I leave for California next week.)

All of this has made it so that I’m nonstop thinking about where I want to be after graduation, which—crazily—is creeping up faster than I would’ve ever thought. It’s still a year and a half away, but I also told myself it was two years and a half away this exact time in 2025, so time is indeed a fickle thing! I find myself dreaming so much about making it to a big city and living out my early 20s in a bustling metropolitan, a dream I’ve known to be truth for a very long time. I feel as though I’m made for so much more than the small, typical suburban town with an astronomical amount of Honda CRVs driven by moms on the streets. In fact, I despise having to coordinate who gets to use the family car (a Honda CRV) at what time these days; I miss having the freedom to walk wherever I want whenever I want in the city back at school. I miss having activities to do with friends other than spending a shit ton of money on food.

I miss college! The worst thing is that college is definitely a bubble, which is currently bad because I’ve realized recently just how sad I’m going to be to leave it. The ease of spending 4 years in the middle of a large campus, with a big community at my disposal and people the same age as me with similarly big dreams and aspirations to become my close friends is something I’ve really taken for granted. I know that it’s not universal to have a great college experience, which makes me feel so lucky to go to a college that has kickstarted so many opportunities for me, that constantly hosts community activities, and that has given me some of my closest friends and best memories.

While entering the real world and achieving that final form of independence is exciting, I know I’m going to be so sad in my senior year, and I just keep dwelling on that lolllll. I feel like I’m experiencing post-grad depression especially since I’ve been thinking so much about life after graduation these days as well. For some reason, I’ve made it onto the post-grad sides of TikTok and Reddit, and I’m absolutely terrified because it’s post after post about post-grads being depressed from a lack of jobs, distance of friends, or excess amount of FOMO for the classmates that did make it into cool, large cities together. Everything about post-grad life to me at this moment seems so uncertain, which has always been a point of exhilaration for me but is also starting to inject fear into my bloodstream at what I’ll have to leave behind.

I’m a pretty sentimental person, which makes me think that every day of my senior year is going to be blanketed by a cloud of impending doom and sadness. Even the thought of taking grad photos makes me feel lowkey miserable. I want to make the most out of it: check all my senior year bucket list items, go to as many school events/football games I can, participate in all the school traditions, go to all the parties I can go to, sacrifice grades a bit to spend time to close friends—the whole shebang. It’s still a while away, but I hope I can end my final year of college strong.

Anyway, these have been my recent somewhat-random thoughts. Being stuck at home inevitably just gives me food for thought, and I just happen to be thinking excessively about the future at this moment in my life. I can’t help it! Everything feels like its moving very quick, and 2026 if anything feels like it’s going to be an extremely pivotal year. We will see!

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It was supposed to go like this: my friend Amy and I leave Atlanta around the same time on separate planes, arrive at JFK around the same time, take the train to pick our friend Joie (who was taking the train in from Boston) up from Penn Station, and then take the train together to Amy’s house, which was around an hour away from NYC and was where the three of us would be staying for the week.

It went like this: I flew into JFK at my normal planned time, waited patiently around for Amy to land, got a text that her flight was delayed for a bit, waited patiently around some more, got another text that her flight was delayed some more, waited patiently around some more, got another text that her flight was delayed some more, got a text that Joie had arrived at Penn Station and would wait for us at her brother’s place in downtown, waited some more, bought some overpriced airport food, sat down by a charging port, doom-scrolled, interview-prepped on a Notion document, and basically rotated around JFK until Amy landed 7 hours after when we originally thought we’d be out of the airport (we got to her house at 3am).

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In retrospect, I totally could’ve used that time to leave the airport and go do something interesting, but I had no idea that I’d be sitting on that dirty airport floor for so long, and I was laden with a heavy suitcase, and I was nowhere near Manhattan (which was the only borough I was any bit familiar with). I also downloaded the MTA app and was admittedly confused on how the trains out of JFK worked, so I instead spent $8 on a Diet Coke and Twix Cookies-n-Cream bar and sat down to half-ass some preparation for an interview I had the next morning at 10am.

Before this trip, I’d only been to NYC once back in May 2023 for my senior year trip. I went with two high school friends; it had been my first time traveling anywhere with friends and without parents as well as my first time doing so to a major city, and I just remember feeling so overwhelmed by everything. I suppose any first visit to NYC would be overwhelming, but I also chalked it up to the fact that we were constantly migrating left and right to hit every spot on our food+destination itinerary, which grew very tiring very fast. I was also a sheltered suburb girl back then who at the time had yet to start college/living in an apartment in Midtown Atlanta, and so my highlight of the trip was when I freaked out because I thought a random sketchy dude on a deserted subway platform we were standing on was following us.

This time around, there were no sketchy subway dudes or meticulous, down-to-the-minute itineraries. Amy and our friend Jasmine, who joined us around the city on Wednesday and Thursday, were pretty much local, and Joie had been to NYC plenty of times. At one point, I realized they were just accompanying me to whatever landmark or museum or restaurant I—the noob of NYC in the group—wanted to see, which I thought was very nice and showed my appreciation for by immediately dragging them to Din Tai Fung so that I could finally participate in the DTF TikTok trend.

@skyguy1126#aiasians #noob #baby #jungkook #huzz

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In fact, NYC was so chill this time around that as I walked through the streets of Manhattan those few days, staring up at the tall buildings around me and expecting to feel that magical rush of air everyone attributes with New York City to hit me like a yellow cab, I…didn’t feel anything.

I didn’t understand—I was standing in the concrete jungle Alicia Keys preached of, the city Substack girls rave about and Carrie Bradshaw continuously drained her savings for, but it didn’t feel like that. I spent Tuesday to Thursday shoving through the crowds on the sidewalks, diligently avoiding stepping on pigeons, ceaselessly updating my Beli reviews, craning my neck to stare up at giant LV suitcase buildings and an approximate amount of thirty humongous Christmas trees around the city, and all in all having a really great time. During it all, though, I would just find myself thinking, I don’t think I can see myself living here in the future.

As I approaching college graduation faster and faster, I’ve found that I’ve become hyper-focused on evaluating whether or not I can see myself settling down post-grad in any new location I find myself traveling to. The vast unknown of where exactly I’ll be after college is such an all-consuming thought for me these days, and I think I confirmed for myself during this trip that it probably won’t be New York City. Maybe the city has been perpetually romanticized too much to me by friends, word-of-mouth, and—most significantly—mainstream media. After all, I’m an avid consumer of media in all forms: books, shows, movies, articles. So many depictions of NYC that I’ve consumed throughout the years displayed a glamorous, romanticized fantasy of a city that I really did not fully feel like I got to experience this past week.

As stupid as it sounds, I also found myself fully expecting to see Spider-Man swinging past the tall offices and above the honking traffic as I walked through the streets. That didn’t happen, and I was sad.

This is all not to say that NYC wasn’t jaw-dropping. When I landed at night on Monday, I was plastered to the plane window, probably to the annoyance of my neighbor (because I was that neighbor at takeoff on Friday, and I wanted to see out the window too, goddamnit!), and I just couldn’t believe how beautiful the city looked. I saw twinkling golden lights for miles and miles into the horizon, and it felt as though there was a beautiful skyline every single direction I looked. Even as I strolled through the city itself, I couldn’t comprehend that some of the buildings I was looking at were real, or that people actually function living in a buzzing metropolis like this, or that the nighttime view from SUMMIT One Vanderbilt observatory was the regular daily view for some people outside their apartment windows.

I think the beauty of the city is truly the beauty of the suburbs. As someone who’s only ever grown up in suburban, traditionally-boring areas, every visit I’ve paid to a major city in the past few years has held an extra element of magic to it. Because I’ve only ever been used to the boringness of small suburban towns, cities like NYC and Chicago are so captivating to me because I feel as though my brain cannot even comprehend the scale at which they operate. There is a heartbeat and buzzing energy to every city that I really don’t think can be said the same for suburban towns, and a part of me feels so lucky to have grown up away from the city because visiting one gives me something to dream about—a place to aim for and make it to in the future (Chicago, I will be in you one day!!!!!).

On a sadder note, I do believe that this trip to NYC would’ve been 10x more magical had I not let myself get fear-mongered by my mom into thinking that it would be extremely, devastatingly cold in the city when I was packing my suitcase. It definitely was cold, but I’ve pretty much only been used to 50-60 degree December weather in Georgia for the past few years, so seeing those low 20s and 30s in the weather app paralyzed me so much that I believed I MUST trade fashion for warmth. Thus, I packed one puffer jacket and spent the entire trip dressed like a college boy, with my puffer thrown over a gray hoodie and baggy jeans that ended up so dirty after a walk in Central Park sludge at the end of the trip that they were completely unsaveable.

I did not feel glamorous at all during this trip. I was smack in the middle of the most glamorous city in America, and I did not feel glamorous at all. As I admired the hordes of beautiful, fashionable women in long trench coats I passed on the streets, feeling chopped in my what-felt-like-continuously-expanding puffer coat and sweating slightly because girl it genuinely was not that cold, I berated myself for leaving my beautiful, non-debuted black trench coat my closet at home. I have since learned how much of a dopamine boost a trench coat can give me. Unfortunate learnings.

Speaking of a dopamine boost, I will say that the number one lesson that this NYC trip taught me is to never lose hope because there is always better out there. My dopamine was boosted every ten seconds I was out on the Manhattan streets because I would look up, and there would be a beautiful man. Then another. Then another. Sooooo many beautiful men in New York (very rare in Atlanta indeed). Wow. My head was swiveling; I had a perpetual smile on my face. I remember when we were walking to dinner on Tuesday night when a pack of especially hot men in suits walked past us on the sidewalk, and I just couldn’t help the big grin that slid onto my face when I turned to look at Amy and Joie. It was truly amazing.

Anyway, the conclusion I came to is that NYC is all in all personally more of a weekend-trip-city than a settling-down-city for me. In five years, I’ll visit Amy/Joie/Jasmine post-grad in their high-rise Manhattan condos. Plus, who knows who else that I know might end up there? Even during this trip, I got to meet up with my friend Leo from my internship this past summer who lives in Brooklyn—he met us at the Roosevelt Island tram station, and then we got dinner and walked the Brooklyn Bridge. I loved getting to see him and catching up, and later I think it hit me just how cool it is that I now know people scattered across the country.

“It’s so crazy that I can just meet up with you here,” I remember telling Leo as we walked towards the subway station to get birria tacos. “I can’t believe that now I just know people in NYC and different places around the country and can meet up with them if I ever visit.”

I don’t think I even realized up until recently how geographically-vast of a network I’ve gotten to build throughout college. I was so used to my community being literally all of my high school peers, who I physically saw everyday in the same building, that I didn’t even recognize that I’d already begun maintaining relationships across the country and globe as my high school friends went to school out-of-state, I made friends from out-of-state at my own college, and I met so many new friends from different places at internships and jobs. Even opening my Find My and seeing all those scattered locations is a bit startling; I’m reminded of all the cool people I’ve met in the past few years as well as how much more spread out that map will be as we all disperse further after graduation.

I suppose these are the introspective thoughts plopping myself into an urban metropolitan will lend me. There are always cool realizations that infiltrate my mind after traveling, so I guess what they say about traveling being transformative and eye-opening is true. I can conclude that this past week in New York City either taught me or reinforced some deep truths about my personal preferences and what I may be a bit less partial to in regards to things I like and dislike in life:

• Like: hot men in suits who look like they work in finance, trench coats, Birria-Landia, the Upper East Side Brandy Melville, the people at Capital One Cafés, Type B traveling

• Dislike: wearing a hoodie + puffer coat combo in a glamorous city, Din Tai Fung portion sizes, Delta Airlines, the mini donuts at that one Bryant Park stand, interviewing on vacation

Happy holidays!!!!

when i rewind time and look back on everything that’s happened since November 2024, it feels as though i’ve gone through at least 5 different eras of my life. in that one year alone, i’ve written a lot about my personal growth, achievements, and dreams, but i think there can be just as much learning to gain from reflecting on some of the mistakes i’ve made as well, especially as i enter a new decade (scary! 20 is scary!) of new expectations.

thus, here are 19 mistakes i’ve made at 19:

1. sought too much external validation from social media - this has been an ongoing battle for me and probably 99% of people my age, but there was one specific point where it peaked for me earlier this semester, and i found myself just so consumed by how i thought others perceived me online, with insignificant factors like comments and likes and views bombarding my focus all the time. it made me feel so meaningless, especially as i now come to realize more and more that genuinely no one truly gives an f about what anyone posts online, so why should i care so much?

2. deprioritized my physical health - 19 was truly my year of gluttony (especially its latter half)…while i do believe that constant balance is a mostly myth, i perchance dipped too far to one end when i started to crave taco bell on random thursdays instead of solely after a night out, which is just so strange because i do know just how good eating clean and working out feels!

3. canceled plans when i was behind on work - this only applies to situations where i found myself behind on work because i was the one that chose to procrastinate beforehand, and then i found myself panicking when deadlines closed in and plans i’d said yes to coincided with them. i’ve realized through trial-and-error that in cases like that, even if i cancel plans or force myself to stay in, i still end up using that freed-up time to dilly-dally anyway, so it was all for nothing—so might as well go have fun.

4. chased lore at the expense of my time - i feel like this could be an umbrella bullet for a few different bullets further down, but i think it’s still so relevant by itself: i chased eventfulness a lot this year because i think its really fun and whimsy, but at times i disproportionally sacrificed my time, which was not very ideal.

5. always expected more out of myself than i knew i could handle - this could look like jam-packing my calendar with no breaks or saying yes to back-to-back-to-back social plans when i knew my social battery would be drained long beforehand or setting an unrealistic goal that i just knew wouldn’t happen. i always thought expecting more from myself would make me feel more prosperous and successful, but that was only illusory, and when i eventually burned out, i only felt worse.

6. didn’t take more/rigorous-enough classes - literally the opposite of #5 (but a bit more specific), so crazy how i experienced both. it’s now happened in multiple semesters where my fear of getting overwhelmed with too many responsibilities in all aspects of my life leads to me to specifically sacrifice the college classes i take, and i end up regretting the low amount of credits or intellectually-light classes i chose because i know i could’ve done more. on the other hand, a part of me is definitely taking this freedom for granted.

7. chose not to delegate - i’ve always been very independent when it comes to work and school; in class projects, i always prefer to take on all the work i can at the expense of my time and effort instead of hounding teammates to get a possibly-mid result. i recognize how skewed of a leadership/working style this is, especially with how little i delegated this past year in school and work, and i know it’s neither realistic nor healthy to always take on everything myself because i distrust others.

8. not exploring the city more - it was only last week when i realized that i have a sweet hut, bbq chicken, dunkin donuts, whole foods, a plethora of cool office buildings/restaurants/establishments, and approximately 5 different cafes all within a ten-minute walk from me. i’ve always been more of a homebody, but i’d never realized how much i’ve been missing out on the city i’ve now spent 2.5 of my college years in.

9. lacked discipline with interview prep - it’s happened so many times now where i’ve landed interviews at companies i like for intern roles i want only to realize that i’m not as prepared as i need to be, and there’s not enough time left to cram preparation. it always feels like i wasted an opportunity i totally could’ve landed if i’d just been more disciplined with consistent practice, which sucks so bad.

10. became too dependent on AI - ahh, the classic college student dilemma. while artificial intelligence has been a godsend of a tool when it comes to convenience of certain daily tasks like homework support or travel planning, my usage of it alone this past year has been so astronomical that any little task (school or personal) i need to complete is immediately entered into chatgpt like it’s second nature. i sometimes feel like i have half the brain i used to have, which i do not love…

11. spent money recklessly - it was exactly last November when i earned my first ever paycheck, and since then, i’ve been lucky enough to constantly have some sort of income flowing in from a job or internship. the only problem is that i’ve been spending that money pretty recklessly, and as i enter my 20s, i know i need to be more mindful with the money i earn that’s supposed to fund my full independence as i graduate college and help me become someone who’s intuitively smart with money.

12. worried too much about external factors - this year, i worried so much about things that i ultimately have 0 control of. most significant has been my visa status and its implications for my future career, where i’ll live, and what i can even do with my life. at times, it was hard for me to remind myself that i was worrying over things i can’t control and to put that effort instead towards things i could.

13. put sleep on the back-burner - i’ve never had a great sleep schedule to begin with, but it’s gone so downhill these past few months that it’s been noticeably affecting my class attendance, mood, and productivity. this week, i felt guilty for napping, which is when i know i need to start sleeping early.

14. generously damaged my hair - it really did not matter if i blew out my hair that one random weekend in july or left it natural, but i still used heat. anyway, i had to cut out a knot of dead ends in my hair with scissors today after waking up because it wasn’t smoothing out.

15. let job recruiting consume me - i am not my linkedin i am not my linkedin i am not my linkedin i am not my linkedin i am not my linkedin

16. compared myself too much with others - also a constant struggle! in tandem with #15, it’s been extremely hard to watch strangers and peers around me hard-launch amazing internships or crazy career achievements or insane travel journeys with seemingly unreal friend groups. comparison really is the thief of joy: just because someone else is successful or thriving doesn’t mean i’m not either!

17. equated my worth with my hobbies - i’d say that i mostly have a really good relationship with my hobbies—i’ve sustained the same ones for so long (reading, writing, drawing, etc.), am never bored of them, and always feel productive when i do them. however, because i tie a lot of my personality to my hobbies, i found that times when i slacked on them or wasn’t as consistent with them made me feel worthless and boring when i was most likely just burnt out as a whole and needed some space. i can’t expect myself to always be on a read-write-draw rotation—hobbies drain effort too!

18. gave male validation any significance - this year, i wasted so much time with boys that either i didn’t really like or who didn’t care much for me. while male validation has never played a large role in impacting my own confidence, i still sought it out a good bit, and it was only a big waste of time.

19. applied to jobs i knew i wouldn’t interview for anyway - this one’s a bit specific. i have a habit of doing this, which is bad because it’s really just waste of time under the illusion of productivity—and then i end up cancelling interviews because of a lack of motivation, visa sponsorship misalignments, salary dissatisfaction, or location dread. better off reading a book instead.

and those were 19 mistakes i’ve made at 19! if you gave me the time, i could sit here and name 19 more, and 19 more after that, but those were the central ones that popped into my head as i was writing. i’m glad i got to experience them this year; after all, i’ve come to value mistakes so much—without mistakes, how am i to learn anything and grow to be a better person? i can only hope for more mistakes and, subsequently, more growth in my 20s!

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recently, i’ve found myself counting the days until january 2026, which is when i get to leave my current life behind and start anew—aka when i take a semester off from school and move to the bay area in california for an internship. it really only hit a week or two ago that in 1.5 months, i’ll be starting the new year off by moving and spending 4 months in a whole new state with new people, new settings, new responsibilities, and new things to do. i’m extremely nervous, but i more so feel a sense of hope for a new beginning that i haven’t felt in a long time.

however, as a byproduct of this excitement, i’ve found that i’ve in turn been willing to throw away progress and effort in all aspects of my life. i think this has been extra prevalent due to the fact that i happened to enter a dry slump just as the realization that january is creeping up closer and closer hit me: in the past few weeks, i’ve withdrawn out of so many things (extracurricular responsibilities, interviews, plans), spent so much unnecessary money, slacked on my hobbies, and overall have been so generally unmotivated that i’m very conscious of the fact that i haven’t been trying my best at school or job recruiting.

i suspect that this has come from a long-overdue period of burnout, though that’s a topic for a whole separate essay. i joke to my friends that i’m just in another ‘flop era,’ but i truly feel such a sense of disproportion because the lack of motivation and hard work that’s been underlying my responsibilities/actions recently doesn’t match how i perceive myself or how i know loved ones externally perceive me at all. i feel myself settling and slacking instead of always trying to do better, which usually is the marker of how i perceive myself positively. as a result of these negative feelings, i further crave that new beginning in california to cleanse myself and start again. while i know historically that sooner or later that i’ll crawl out of this slump, it doesn’t help that in this current moment there’s nothing else i want more than for january to just come and whisk me away to new beginnings.

i think the basis of why fresh starts are so appealing to us lies in that perceived opportunity to build your dream life back up again. fresh starts mark a target date/destination in the future for you to feel like you again—and better! acknowledging a fresh start in itself is like setting a goal—you’ve planned it out, you know it’s coming, so getting back on your feet will happen (you say to yourself)! especially if you happen to be in a slump, you now have an excuse to wait it out and continue wallowing in whatever pit you’re in because you’ve set a date to crawl back out later!

that’s the fallacy of fresh starts to me. not to say that i should wake up every morning with self-improvement as the first thing in my mind, necessarily—which is exhaustingly effortful and completely unrealistic—but i know that i can’t expect myself to just snap and do a 180 once it hits january when i could totally start dragging myself out of this drought now. at one point, it crosses the line from feeling hopeful for the motivation to improve that comes with a change in the seasons to completely depending on external circumstances so that i can wait out something i could very much actively be working on in the present.

the idea of a fresh start gives me an excuse to depend on external circumstances when i feel antsy and perhaps a bit unhappy with my current circumstances; for me personally, it feels like heavy anticipation for a fresh start only comes when i’m in a slump. i’ve felt this feeling many times: last spring semester, when i reached peak laziness and craved the beginning of summer to whisk myself away for my summer internship; the end of freshman year fall, when i was freshly single, lonely, and couldn’t wait to put myself out there the following spring semester, and so on. yearning for a fresh start is pretty much a regular occurrence during fluctuating times in my life, and that’s something i definitely need to work on overcoming.

of course, the fallacious aspect of fresh starts during a slump in my opinion makes up only a small subset of what makes them so exciting. i think that if there’s a balance between that dependence on waiting for a fresh start to aim higher and proactivity with starting now—which there usually is for most people—then a fresh start can be an amazing thing. as long as you don’t depend on a fresh start to suddenly to fix everything going downhill in your life, then the exciting novelty of one really does wonders with motivating someone with hope for achieving bigger and better things (whatever that may mean to them). fresh starts are so powerful because a belief in them allows you to mentally separate your past failures with the possibility of future successes moving forward as this fresh start begins.

even today, i found that balance for the first time in a long time by walking from my apartment and heading to a new coffee shop in the city that i’d never been to before (and is where i am right now writing this). that was my take on a mini fresh start for the week—it allowed me to crawl out of a weekend slump of sleeping in and hangovers and doing nothing, and i now feel so much better and excited for the week ahead because i feel as though i’ve restarted on a clean slate.

for me personally, newness and change excite me. i grew up moving around between cities, states, and countries, so fresh starts were regular to me. i can’t imagine myself settling down somewhere and never leaving again, which is ironic because that’s exactly how the past few years have felt like to me. i moved to georgia almost 10 years ago and have been here since; now, having been surrounded by the same peers and places from middle school to even college (where i sometimes admittedly do hate seeing high school peers around) for a decade, it feels like i haven’t had a real fresh start that’s not only mental in terms of determination/motivation but also physical in setting/scenery in forever.

not only does that factor into my excitement to finally experience a fresh start in california, but it also feeds into my desire to experience new things as a whole—new people, new locations, new jobs, new opportunities. while dependence on the physical date of a fresh start to bring immediate positive change should be avoided, i also think about how college graduation is the next big milestone and fresh start in my life and the lives of most of my peers around me, and the eagerness that stems from that thought alone makes me think that it’s all the more important to lean into the excitement that fresh starts foster.

fresh starts provide an avenue for motivation that things can get better and will get better; the impact they have on my hopefulness is half the reason i count myself as an optimist in the first place. i think there’s nothing better than to feel that sense of inspiration when you go all-out brainstorming your new year’s resolutions or that feeling of exhilaration at how you’ll use up that illusion of infinite time on the first day of summer break. the psychological boost of renewed purpose and motivation that we feel from the anticipation and beginning of a fresh start can be so powerful, and i think it’s such a privilege to experience the high of renewed productivity and purpose that fresh starts let us feel.

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fig jam & brie cheese - this is my current food fixation that i keep snacking on. such an elite combo. i think i’ve gone through 3 jars of fig jam and 3 wheels of brie cheese in last 2 weeks.

diet coke - i have a publix right underneath my apartment, and this convenience has been fueling my diet coke addiction. i’m always going on publix runs with my roommates and have probably been going through four or five 2-liter dc bottles per week. i’ve been justifying this by telling myself that diet coke is replacing my celsius addiction, which is worse for my health i think, so…

halloweekend - HALLOWEEN IS THIS FRIDAY!!!! SO EXCITING!!!! i’m especially excited for halloweekend this year because my roommates and i are hosting a pregame with our friends on friday night (our first time throwing in our apartment!). i discovered how much i like hosting functions over the summer when i’d host friday get-togethers in my hotel room with intern friends, so i’m super super excited for the pre and to just have fun this weekend in general!

jobs and recruiting - the interviews have definitely picked up, and i need to lock in like crazy…

the neighborhood’s comeback - biggest blessing of october has probably been the neighborhood’s new music. SOOOOO GOOD. i literally can’t stop listening to it on loop, and i feel so annoying because i keep making my friends listen to it LOL

edc orlando - i can’t even believe it, but i dropped $300 on edc orlando whaaat. it’s november 7th to 9th and will be my first proper big rave. i’m not sure if the rave lifestyle is really for me, but i think it’ll be a fun experience, and i’m going with friends, so we’ll see how it goes!

cali - i finally feel myself getting excited about california! i’ll be moving there and staying from january to may for work, and i think it’s finally hitting. i haven’t been to california since 2019 i think? and now that i’m much older and will be able to get around more by myself, i think it’ll be such a fun experience (and i miss in-n-out soooo bad). i already have a to-do list that i’m going to add more and more to as january creeps closer: erewhon, dintaifung, pacific coast highway, etc.

diverse social circles - i feel like i’ve been splitting my social time between so many different social circles these days. i think my junior year has definitely brought so many different crowds of friends, which has actually been really enjoyable. i’ve met a lot of new people so far into the semester yay!!!!!

tron: legacy - i think the daft punk soundtrack for tron: legacy is SOOO lit. i kept seeing edits of the movie to end of line, so i watched the movie (at least most of it until the myflixer buffering was just too much), and it was actually so cool. the lightbike scene makes me want to learn how to ride a motorcycle. garrett hedlund is also fine asffffff.

“fade” - fadeeeeee. literally such a fun word to say.

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however, it feels like boys and dating and relationships have been extra prevalent as talk in my life these days; all of a sudden, it seems as though half the population of my friends have either gotten into relationships, talking stages, or are in something with a person of romantic interest. maybe it’s the sudden drop in the weather alluding to the official start of ‘cuffing season’ or a random spike in my natural disposition to be a bit boy-crazy (which i own up to proudly now, because i’m a 19-year-old girl, and what the hell is wrong with that?) allowing me to notice these changes, but something is in the air, no doubt, and it seems to be swooshing over everyone but me—and i’m completely okay with that!

in fact, i was talking to my roommate the other day about relationships, and both of us were agreeing on the fact that neither of us want to date right now (more on this later), and it got me thinking about how enjoyable being single really has been so far. my last (and only) relationship ended over a year ago, which maybe doesn’t seem like very long ago for some people, but it seems like forever ago for me. in the time between then and now, i feel like i’ve become such a different person and have grown so much; however, i feel like i’ve retained a lot of positive traits i learned from that relationship to this day as individual qualities now internalized. nevertheless, when i reflect on being in a relationship vs. being single, there are some really stark differences to how life is now.

the most noticeable change that occurred during the shift from relationship → single is the amount of free time in my hands. that seems like a no-brainer, but it’s been pretty astronomical to recognize just how much more freedom i have since becoming single. i’ve had so much time to dedicate towards my hobbies, social life, personal pursuits, work/school—basically everything. until i actually got out of that relationship, i never realized just how much time out of my 24-hour days i was sacrificing not just to be with my ex-boyfriend physically (going on dates, spending time with him, doing things together) but also how much time i put towards him/the relationship emotionally and mentally, having always had to consider a whole separate individual’s needs and wants as well as how those could be balanced with my own.

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when i think about sacrifices, i remember compromising or contemplating compromising my own desires at so many moments in my past relationship for my ex-boyfriend. he wasn’t the type to party going into college, so i gave up that opportunity and didn’t party. he didn’t like tattoos on a partner (more on this here!), so i hesitated getting any at the time despite the fact that i loved tattoos so much. things like that (some more trivial, some more serious).

at the end of the day, my decision to follow through with those compromises on my end was nobody’s fault but my own and was probably something i should’ve challenged in the moment. still, in hindsight, just being in a position where i even considered those sorts of concessions was tiring, and it made me realize that being in a relationship could place me in that vulnerable position where i’d want to appease another person’s possibly-differing beliefs on something. that position just seems unnecessary compared to now—now, i get whatever tattoos i want at nobody’s expense because i don’t have to spare a thought for anyone’s opinions but my own!

that was just a different headspace; that sort of dual consideration took place in a constantly-active part of my brain that’s since naturally turned off in order for me to wholeheartedly focus on myself. i say constantly-active because being in a relationship with another person meant that if i wasn’t with them, i still spent an absurd amount of time in my daily life thinking about them. they were always in the back of my head—if i came across something while shopping online, i’d think maybe they’d like it as a gift; or if something of slight interest happened to me, i’d immediately text it to them; or if i took a long nap, i’d text them to let them know i’d be m.i.a for the next two hours for that exact reason (so glad i’m free from these shackles specifically).

my life was just so closely intertwined with someone else’s, and i needed to balance that, and it got really exhausting at times. that part of my brain that used to be locked in on finding that constant balance has since gone completely quiet now, and i feel so glad.

being single means i can be selfish without any guilt. now, i fully control my own schedule, priorities, and what i spend my time on; i can be fully selfish unselfishly. i don’t feel the urge to put someone else’s needs or feelings above mine. i can fully focus on myself and take four-hour naps whenever i want without needing to let anyone know and go wherever i want at any time. i have so many more hours in my day where i’m alone, and i can use that time however i want without thinking or being with someone else—that’s more free time i can dedicate towards enriching activities like social activities, being with friends, or hobbies (like writing on substack!), and that sort use of my time always feels so personally-fulfilling. i can have silly little crushes whenever i want and gush about cute boys to my friends whenever i want and fully go crazy on celebrity crushes LOLLL. it’s a new level of freedom i hadn’t realized i’d missed until i got it back.

of course, none of this is meant to bash on relationships. i think dating is so fun and can be so fulfilling, and there are times when i miss it a lot. i also think extreme growth can happen in relationships too—for me, i think being in a [good] relationship made me grow in tremendous ways when it came to my communication, empathy, and awareness because i needed to be so vulnerable and so closely intertwined with another person. i had to constantly learn how to balance being with someone in such a close physical and emotional capacity, and i will say that in my experience, that specific sort of exposure and growth has unfortunately stalled quite a bit after i became single. after all, when i only have to take care of myself, i’m not actively improving as much in that communicative, dual-sided regard.

sure, there are my close friends, but i do think the friendship dynamic is a lot different from the dating relationship dynamic, and i question when people disagree with this. it’s just a different relationship, and while i love all my friends so much, i can definitely acknowledge that it was really nice to sort of have a built-in, go-to person to default to for anything when i was in a relationship.

truthfully though, i say i don’t want to date at this point in my life because i really am happy single, and i also happen to be at a stage in my life that really does feel transient. i’m in my junior year of college, a pivotal year in my educational career when it comes to academics and job recruiting and such, and i have two months left in my fall semester before i ship myself out-of-state to go intern full-time in a new place with new people for the spring before coming back for my final year of college (and then graduation)! everything feels like it’s on the move right now, which is sosososo exciting, and i’m perfectly content with how things are. i want to dedicate all my time and effort into focusing on myself and making the most out of this period.

however, i’m pretty aware of the fact that i don’t want to date right now is also a very flexible mindset and is only true now because i haven’t met anyone i’d be willing to make the effort/time for. if i did, then that’d change up pretty fast (in fact, that’s how it happened with my ex-boyfriend). for now, though, i’m happy with how things are being single, and in terms of prioritizing, a relationship is lowest of the low compared to self-improvement and finding a j*b at this moment (kms).

ultimately, being single is just really fun. i love this feeling of full independence and freedom i wake up to every day! but i think for me, a part of the reason why it’s so fun and why i’m so satisfied with being single is that i’ve become so much more comfortable and confident in who i am as a person than i used to be. i recognize my individual value and can entertain myself (and when i can’t, i have a full network of supportive friends to fall back on); it never feels like i need a boy in my life to fill any sort of gap other than additional fun.

this is a big contrast to how i was a few years ago—i was still just as boy-crazy, don’t get me wrong, but i remember when i literally CRAVED a boyfriend. i’m sure part of it also had to do with the novelty of the idea of a boyfriend in the first place for teenage me, since i’d yet to experience dating by then, but i was also not invested in my hobbies or self-improvement, and i fully harbored this notion that i was incomplete because i didn’t have a boyfriend (which is really crazy, because i look back now and marvel at how much i had going for me at that time in my life).

ultimately, i’m young and single, and it’s great. there’s so much more to life than boys and dating, but they sure are fun to think about! for now, i have yet to hit any sort of life crisis yet, and being single is pretty lit, so i’ll enjoy it to the max.

while i’m happy that i’m no longer doomscrolling instagram reels as much as before (which was a lot), it seems i’ve just replaced my unhealthy consumption of one platform with that of another.

i’m well aware that this obsession is fueled by the fact that i’ve been struggling a lot with wanting more in my surface-level achievements. this extremity all started after i received and accepted an offer for what would classically be considered a somewhat coveted internship in big tech back in early september. at the time, it felt as though i could’ve rode through the streets on a rainbow of gratification—all my hard work balancing classes and applications and interviews had finally paid off, and i felt like i could finally let out a breath of relief as a proud, employed student. i’m still super grateful for the offer; however, since then, it feels as though my greed has expanded tenfold, and i feel as though i’ve fallen into the trap of the corporate bot mentality.

let me explain: the high probably lasted around two weeks before the urge for more eventually overshadowed it. while i’m still super proud of myself and thankful for the offer, i set my eyes on the next big thing and quickly forgot about my accomplishment, which suddenly didn’t seem that appealing or impressive anymore now that i’d gotten it. in fact, i started to hyper-focus on the negatives of the offer and company—the bad work-life balance i heard about, the random layoffs that seem to pervade the company, and an apparent low rate of full-time return offers (instability in my eyes).

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okay, i thought to myself, i’ll just do even better! now that i’ve broken into the tech scene and silicon valley, i want more! i want the next big thing. i want to work for nvidia. i want to break into faang. i want apple on my linkedin and resume.

ambitious? maybe. greedy? definitely. i even find myself occasionally logging into a throwaway linkedin account and literally staring at how my ‘dream jobs’ would look like listed under the experiences section of a linkedin profile, hoping that i can replicate that on my own one day. that sounds hella bot and lowkey sad when i write it out, and i’m very aware of that.

how do i fight this greed and corporate bot mentality? my focus and dreams seem to revolve around this all-consuming desire to continuously climb this ladder into big tech and the corporate world and cracked internships, and it’s a clinical pursuit that has nothing to do with my genuine hobbies or creative passions or who i am as a person and friend—things that i know truly matter.

it doesn’t help that i’m also fully immersed in this mentality around me and continuously bombarded with the high achievements of other people. i go to a large tech/engineering school full of insanely-smart people where a large subset of success to the school population means breaking into faang and making it big in stem in silicon valley, so this detached frame of mind is highly championed. it pervades what feels like every single conversation i have these days: talks of return offers and superdays and resume reviews and coffee chats and first rounds and second rounds and final rounds and i got the offer!!!!

it’s definitely hard not to compare myself to others when i constantly see new announcements of “i’m excited to announce that i’ll be joining [cracked company] as an intern” on linkedin from classmates. especially as a junior, which is the year where everyone is recruiting for internships or full-time jobs, i seem to hear about a friend or classmate getting an interview from a prestigious company every other day, and then i think to myself: that should be me! why isn’t that me???

i feel like i was primed to embody this mentality since childhood. with chinese immigrant parents and a dad who works in engineering at a faang company, i grew up in a household where the goals for success i was taught to aim for were good grades, a prestigious college, prestigious internships in a high-paying career (ideally stem), and then a prestigious job, specifically in big-tech—which is the most prestigious, stable, high-paying, and coveted job industry of them all, of course. i never felt like i could deviate from this path set forth for me; as a result, it’s come to represent stability to me. if i could achieve those goals, then i’ve succeeded.

it makes me wonder if this—my major i’m studying, the classes i’m taking, the career path i’m currently pursuing—is what i really want to do. or was i only conditioned to want it? but that can’t be the case, or else i wouldn’t feel so greedy or want to further ascend career-wise so badly, right?

i do feel lucky because i find lots of self-fulfillment in activities outside of work and school, whether that’s through friends or extensive personal creative hobbies. because of this, i realize that i’m someone who doesn’t necessarily need to work in a role that i feel so extremely passionate about—that is to say, i’m not necessarily prioritizing passion over stability in my career. maybe that sounds a bit torturous to those that preach that everyone needs to do a job that they love! but i’ve never felt too strongly about that take (though maybe i’ll agree with it 10 years into my career when i’m burnt tf out). i think i’d personally rather feel neutral about the job i do and come home able to provide for the lifestyle and hobbies i actually love outside of work, though that’s coming from a place of privilege when i consider that not everyone may be lucky enough to have hobbies or activities that give them that level of fulfillment outside of work.

fulfillment aside, when it comes to those aforementioned goals, some things are just out of my control at the end of the day. i was talking to a friend today about this entire stream-of-consciousness, and we discussed the merits and flaws of being a planner, which we agreed is a double-edged sword. i’ve always considered myself a big-time planner, especially in this regard—like i said, i’ve always had a set path for myself towards success that i expect to follow ever since i’ve been able to recognize my own priorities, with education and career at the top, and i’ve luckily not deviated from that set path too much so far. however, what if i do? in the future, if i fall off this path, what would i do with myself?

i think i’d ultimately adjust okay, but my contingency plan has always been to work as hard as i can so that that just isn’t even a possibility that ever happens lol. i read an newsletter recently about the rise of the 996 workplace trend in silicon valley—this refers to the rise in workers who are grinding away from 9am to 9pm, six days per week, aligning with the overall rise in this work-hard-work-harder mentality that’s becoming more common amongst my generation and the tech/startup scene in general. “workaholic teenagers,” new york magazine calls them, and i can definitely say that a majority of those around me in my community and school are a part of this crowd.

i’ve basically been talking about this throughout this entire essay, but i just feel so discombobulated and almost confused with myself because i’m perfectly aware of how self-destructive and unhealthy this workaholic mentality is. as much as i know that, i equally admire it in a twisted way and feel as though i should be embodying it more than i already am. a small part of my brain (and a small part of most of my classmates’ and most young people’s brains, i’m positive) believes that if i continue to put in more hours studying and applying to roles and interview prepping and participating in extracurriculars and networking everyday, then i can achieve those goals of greater internships and a cracked, high-paying job and quick career growth+stability. while that may be true to a certain degree, it definitely neglects my health and plays into an all-or-nothing fallacy that i also know will burn me out just as quick as i started.

i’m just glad that i have some sense of awareness to how unhealthy this mindset is, even if i fall into it often myself, and i have enough recognition to keep myself in check when i sometimes play too much into the extreme. it’ll get to a point where i’m tired of scrolling on linkedin and will close it, or i’ll just go to sleep if i’m too tired of studying late at night, or i’ll choose to go out with friends over finishing a project because it’s been a long week, and i’m a college student, and i know i should be having fun!

i think my biggest saving grace is my social circle and my hobbies: i have a great network of friends to lean on who make me feel supported and do fun things with me and—most of all—relate to me (or support my worries) when it comes to stuff like this, because they’re almost all going through it too! making silly comments to each other about how “i’m so cooked for this interview” or “twin can you get me a referral when you get the role” makes everything feel so much more manageable on a daily basis, and when the urge for solo time prevails, i try to put in the maximum effort i can to balance schoolwork/career things with hobbies: writing on substack when i can, drawing on a spare piece of paper for even 30 minutes in my free time, reading a new book or article i’m interested in for a bit. while i wish i could just drop every responsibility and indulge in my hobbies for the rest of my life, divvying up my time to focus just a bit of it onto them regularly is still enough to keep me feeling sane, grounded, and like myself.

ultimately, i consider myself an optimist. i’m positive that everything will work out for me in the end. i think this essay just really dove into the nitty-gritty of a specific subset of my current worries and concerns at a certain point in my day when i’ve just been extra overthinking, but if you were to infiltrate my mind and zoom out into a birds-eye view of it, i think you’d find a pretty serene picture. i’m quite happy with how my life is right now, and i do try to take time the best i can to feel proud of my accomplishments and have the most fun i can. i have so much to look forward to and a great group of people around me—at the end of the day, there isn’t really much more i can ask for other than that!

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for some reason, the entrance into october hits me like a truck every single year. i think it’s because october as a month to me marks the official start of the end of the year—i feel like that doesn’t register in august or september, but when my phone lock screen updates to ‘october,’ it’s like oh, the end of the year starts now.

that in itself is even counterintuitive personally because october marks the start of so many good and exciting things for me (at least historically). if you made me choose, i’d say that october is my favorite month of the year: it’s always so eventful, and i always run into this month with so many things that i’m looking forward to. with october being the month of halloween and cooler weather and all, it’s always just been the natural mark of the start of fall to me (ignoring what google says about september 22).

that’s especially important to me. in fact, my first substack article ever was literally about fall and how much i love fall. i could wax poetic about fall in this essay word after word after word, but i feel like what i wrote there a year ago pretty much sums up exactly how i feel about the season, and it’s always the same feelings year after year. for that reason, october feels so special—this past week alone physically felt so much cooler than the entirety of the past half year, and the slight temperature drop made me feel so much lighter and happier walking down the street. i can finally blast my fall playlist on repeat, which didn’t feel appropriate beforehand during the single-digit months!

looking back at how the year has gone so far, i’d say that 2025 has been one of my best years yet (out of 20 so far) in terms of experiences and self-growth (though i also fully expect to say that about every single year i live through moving forward, and i feel like it’d actually be quite concerning if i’m not able to say that about a future year). it’s so broad to reflect on the full year, which i’ll save for a possible deep dive in a 2025 recap essay, so i’ll narrow that scope down to my fall semester of college so far, which i think has been prospering along quite well!

i never fully expected to completely adhere to the fall ins and outs i set for this semester, but i took a quick look back and am pleasantly surprised to find that most of the ins i wrote have indeed been in, and most of the outs have indeed been out: the social life has been thriving, parties have been attended, hangouts have been intentional, tattoos from different artists have been gotten, have talked to many strangers (in the form of coffee chats and such) and met manyyy people, home has been visited a lot more, halloween is in the works, daily starbucks + chick-fil-a + frats have been faded, plans have been canceled less in favor of work—so on and so forth.

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i had a coffee chat with a mckinsey consultant the other day, and after i gave her a spiel about my worries about senior year in preparation for my post-grad plans and my goal to map things out as early as i can to avoid burnout, she said, “when you talk, i see a lot of myself in you—i’m a big planner too, and oftentimes that’s a double-edged sword” (or something along those lines).

i definitely am a planner. i’m proud to say that organization is one of my strongest skills; i love planning out events and my entire life and my 4-year class plans and my post-grad educational plans and what my schedule for tomorrow looks like and i love gcal and notion and just having set plans for everything in my entire life and blah blah blah. while it definitely can be my downfall at times, since no one can really fully prepare for everything and see their plans 100% come to fruition in the future, it’s especially satisfying for me when things do work out exactly as i’d hoped, and that’s surprisingly how the semester has been laying itself out in front of me.

timeline wise, i feel very optimistic about how things have been panning out for me so far. i entered my fall semester with a good number of set goals and dreams i wanted to achieve by a certain time this year, and it’s been so satisfying to see things mostly all fall into place exactly how i wanted them to. it’s only motivated me to set even higher bars for myself, which is really awesome, but part of me recognizes that half of it’s ambition, and half of it may be greed, and i’d be fully devastated if this fortuitous streak were to get damaged.

anyway, my hope for october and onwards is that my climb upwards—whether that’s in the sphere of classes, job recruitment, extracurriculars, social life, or personal growth—continues steadily and that i’m also able to balance that with my thirst for eventfulness. i can definitely admit that i get antsy especially around this time of the year, which is oftentimes when i come to the realization that things have been peaceful…a little too peaceful…and i don’t wanna self-sabotage and seek disruption but…LOL. we will see where that thought takes me this month.

anyway, it’s almost 3am, and this was a really random brain dump, but october 1st always seems too significant in my mind to let pass without acknowledging somehow, so here we are. the latter half of 2025 has officially started (for me)! and i sense big changes incoming.

right before the dinner, as we were getting ready, my friend turned to me and confessed: “deborah, i’m worried it’ll be awkward.” the five close friends (including me) she’d invited to the dinner were all individual friends, and none of us had ever met each other before, so she wasn’t sure how the dynamic would look like once we all got together.

spoiler alert: it was fine. however, as i sat there in the restaurant, surrounded by these new people i didn’t know, it got me wondering—is this what a birthday dinner with my own closest friends would look like as well?

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i do tend to consider myself a “floater friend”: someone who moves around between different social groups, acquaintances, and friends without belonging to a single, core group of friends. most of my close friends are individual friends from different periods of my life, and while there is some slight overlap between some of them, they’re generally all one-on-one friendships instead of friends that belong to the same single friend group.

in fact, the term “friend group” almost seems like an outdated concept to me. i haven’t truly been a part of a friend group since 9th grade, when i was part of a classic large, co-ed friend group. at the time, i was just happy to belong to a friendship dynamic that was oh-so-coveted when we were all 13 years old and to be able to post instagram photos of group halloween costumes or whatever, but i look back sometimes and think about how i wasn’t actually close with half of the “friends” in that group. there was constantly new drama that popped up amongst ourselves, and while i do have good memories of that friend group overall, i recognize now that we were all somewhat putting up a false exterior of how close we actually were with each other.

my closest friends now couldn’t be more different. they’re a mix of high school friends and college friends, of class friends and mutual-friend-turned-friend friends. some i see every single day, and some i see every few months. most have never met each other, while some are even closer with each other than with me. if i were to host a birthday dinner with them all, it’d be the first time most of them would be in the same room together.

honestly, i do like being a floater friend. i think that term has a lot of negative connotations to it, but in my case, i just view my social situation as belonging to someone who has many separate friendships of high quality. i love all my friends, and i think my individual friendships are so strong because we’ve mutually put in the effort to maintain the individual friendship without the pressure of doing so in a group setting.

in fact, i’d rather have individual, one-on-one friendships of substance than belong to a friend group of people i don’t really connect with. it’s always harder to cultivate something meaningful or connect deeply with someone in a larger group—i could be in a friend group of 10 people but feel a lack of true closeness to 5 of them, and so i’ll always choose 1 singular close friend over 10. quality over quantity!

in fact, something that i think is true for most people that i’ve concluded through observation within myself is that becoming a floater friend is inevitable. as i’ve gotten older and grown out of my high school bubble of people, i’ve naturally gotten to know more and more individual friends in settings all detached from each other. it’s only natural as we grow older and find ourselves expanding into more varied situations that we expose ourselves to so many new people and friends with completely different backgrounds, and then we acquire close friends cherry-picked from all of these siloed origins.

for me, the biggest expansive change to my social pool has been caused by going to college (and i know it’ll expand even further post-grad as other social clock setting milestones are unlocked). instead of the same people i’d always known through middle and high school, i found myself completely immersed in a new pool of possibility for friendships and connections. now, i’ve cultivating new friendships through the innumerable different classes i’ve taken, the different work/extracurricular experiences i’ve gone through, and the friends-of-friends that i’ve met along the way.

in fact, being a floater friend is such a great opportunity on both ends because you get endless exposure to the friends of your friends. i’ve met some of my closest friends through mutual friends at first, and it’s just a really awesome thing. meeting new people through others in general has opened so many doors and led to so many great experiences, and that’s a major revelation i think i’ve realized throughout my years in college so far. it’s really a privilege.

being a floater friend has been great to me. throughout these past few years, i’ve met/maintained friendships with some of the most amazing people ever, and i’m so lucky to call them my friends. if i were to host a birthday dinner in the future with them, i just know that the room would be filled with the best people in the world :-)

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as a college student, i find myself constantly being revolved by a plethora of different social circles and different spaces where the new faces are just endless. i can’t even count how many times i’ve searched up someone i don’t know on social media or linkedin (the usual two defaults) with the goal of learning something about them—in fact, it’s almost second nature now to hear an unfamiliar name, pull up instagram, type in the search bar, and do the customary scroll through their profile to glean a bit of insight into who the heck they are.

that routine repeated itself numerous times just this past week alone: i searched up the names of my newly-assigned random roommates on linkedin and instagram, the name of my friend’s opp from school (who i don’t even know) on linkedin, the names of some classmates i was told would be joining a club i’m in on instagram, the name of a guy i thought was cute on practically every single platform i could think of, etc.

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we as humans are naturally curious, of course. access to the modern world wide web is mostly a wonderful thing that satiates our curiosity and hunger with its infinite access to learning and resources, but that can be a dangerous blackhole as well and is why it’s so easy to fall into the habit of doomscrolling into the never-ending internet.

when i actually stop to think about it, the internet’s a scary place because it’s really quite terrifying how accessible vulnerable information is and how easy it is to dig up the past of someone i don’t even know through a quick google search. that’s obviously why the importance of the digital footprint is so emphasized: i know that if i really wanted to (and don’t underestimate the stalking power of girls!), i could undoubtedly find the facebook profile of the mom of a guy i think is cute at the moment or the vsco of a friend’s crush’s ex—or something like that—with just a few clicks of my finger.

it’s also a two-way street. i sometimes wonder to myself what people who come across my internet accounts think of me—what judgement they build off of my instagram page or my tiktoks or my spotify playlists, or what assumptions they create about my book taste from my goodreads or my style from my pinterest or my intellectual ability from my linkedin (or even what thoughts are formed from coming across my substack!). i know that it’s inevitable that people who don’t know me [well] will construct a type of image in their head about me based solely off of what they’ve seen of me online, just as i oftentimes do them. besides, we all know that the internet (social media especially) is performative, yet its ease of access makes it oftentimes the only source of information we can get on people we’re even slightly curious about—so it’s hard to not give in anyway.

i’ve realized that it’s also very easy to overthink when all you have to craft your impression of how someone is like is their online persona. aside from just silent social media stalking, this is also a very prevalent phenomenon even when actually interacting with someone online. i’m sure you’ve been in a texting situation at least once in your life where you were unable to read the tone of the other person and found yourself overthinking their texts—if them using that period at the end meant anything, or if it’s ok really meant they’re ok, or if the text they just sent was meant to be so short.

with such digital interactions, we only have so much we get to see of the other person. there’s no full exposure to tone/body language/facial expression as we’d have with in-person conversations, so we default to overanalyzing the smallest things—emojis used, response times, and such.

this essay actually came to be because i’ve been texting with someone who i haven’t ever spoken to in real life before, and i realized a few days ago that i was making so many assumptions about this guy solely based off of the persona he emits over social media and messages. i was overanalyzing his style of texting and the emojis he used, and i literally crashed out over one long response time. this analysis gave way for so many initial assumptions to pop into my head: he responds slow, so maybe he’s not interested and he hates me and he’s a red flag or he doesn’t know how to talk to girls or blah blah blah blah.

in reality, i was reading way too much into something as trivial and inconclusive as texting style without taking into account external possibilities for those previously listed factors. he’s working a 9-5! how should i jump to the conclusion that he’s not interested when he could very well just be extremely busy at his full-time job? when i anchor myself back into real life and put myself across to the opposite side of the screen, i think as well: if someone was trying to communicate over text with me, and i’m texting sporadically throughout the workday, it’s probably because i’m just busy at work!

that’s just one personal example of how digitally-induced overthinking comes to play in my life. it’s strange because i feel like i know many personable and great people in my life who emit very different energies online—through text interactions or maybe just how their social media profiles visually look—versus how they authentically are face-to-face in-person. a person’s digital persona is by no means fully indicative or reflective of who they are in real life, and i definitely sometimes forget that.

that’s why i think we should all err on the side of caution when faced with all of these easily-accessible pipelines to people online. while we do live in a generation where technology and the internet are so profoundly anchored to our everyday lives, it’s important for me at least make sure that i don’t get too lost into that digital sphere or put too much weight into evaluating someone through digital channels only. it’s not healthy to rely too much on online interactions or internet stalking alone to ‘get to know someone’—the only truly natural and authentic way to understand who someone is is to go outside and talk to them!

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yays:

• i finished 2 books! it’s not as much as i would’ve regularly liked, but it’s more than the dismal 0 from june sooooo

• had a really fun 4th of july—i took pto for the day and spent it with friends! we got taco bell, drove to the top of a colorful parking garage, and watched so many different firework going off across the horizon. very good memory!

• got over my nasty habit of napping after work everyday, which sapped me of energy every time i woke up to complete blackness outside and what felt like barely any hours in the day left to do anything at all

• less heat damage on my hair (this topic somehow always makes it into these monthly recaps)

• cross your mind by shelly on repeat

• took full advantage of the free diet coke at the office (good)

• watched the new superman movie in theaters on opening night and it was so good EEK wow the music was everything and i left feeling so inspired and happy

• succeeding in forcefully reducing the brainrot in my daily vocabulary by a substantial amount

• finally bought groceries and cooked a bit instead of solely eating out

• bagged an insane W that still confounds me to this day

• met a friend who brought her cat along with her to our internship this summer, and it was such a serotonin boost every time i visited

• FINALLY went to the art museum that’s considered the ‘must-visit’ location in town (i have been here for 2 months) (it is 10 minutes away) (we went to study in the library there)

• more tats hip hip hooray!!!! i love them a lot, and they’re healing a lot better than expected as well

• going back to school soon! as much as i dread the work and stress, i’m excited to get busy with classes and everything again, and i’ve already found myself enjoying getting back into the grind mindset as a whole

• found myself in some absolutely unreal situations and have gathered some insane lore (is this a yay?)

nays:

• literally thought i was going to get heat stroke every time i stepped outside wow

• had to unfortunately lock in—the first half of the month was lowkey unreal and still all play, but then it was like some stress switch was flipped, and everyone just locked in soooo

• ^along with that, no more friday homewood functions like before because everyone’s locked in now :’(

• watching season 3 of the summer i turned pretty with my friend and it’s making us crash out so bad but it’s also sososo entertaining and a great reprieve from work so tbh this should be a yay

• 2026 recruiting is officially fully underway and i am so stressed

• took full advantage of the free diet coke at the office (bad)

• absolute MESS of a housing situation that i’ve been dealing with all month: first got separated from my 3 original roommate friends and then got put with a MALE ROOMMATE and thus am dealing with this currently

• unfortunately was highkey disappointed at the box office when i watched the fantastic four: first steps on opening night (my letterboxd review) :( what happened to a goated summer movie lineup????

• got spammed with stupid red robin

• think i’m done with the 9-5 life for now

• literally ate shit roller skating

• crashed out so much over response times, stocks, and uncs

• kind of definitely dreading fall and the workload i’m going to have to balance once classes, internship, job, and everything starts back up

• battled scrolling addiction like crazy

• spent so much on food that it’s a little unreal

• paid $2.6k for a miniscule tesla ding

• overall just felt very stressed especially because everyone else around me has been worrying about return offers and final presentations, and i think the anxiety definitely got to me at the end as well

andddd that basically brings me to the end of my summer as well! that’s pretty surreal to think about. july was extra strange in that i feel like i knew that i’ll miss those days while still i was still living them.

summer 2025 was a completely new experience and new step into independence; for now, though, i get to head back to my little campus bubble. see you in august!

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specifically, i feel extra motivated to set up some sort of game plan heading into the semester because i’m already anticipating some crazy stress to occur! junior year fall is going to be no joke—with classes, an internship, a research job, extracurriculars, summer 2026 interviews, and a social + personal life to balance, i really want to ensure that i head into the semester with a clear idea of what i want to prioritize just to make everything a bit easier.

thus, fall semester ins & outs!

in:

• parties & social gatherings - last fall, i let the stress of school and external responsibilities overtake my social life, and i want to do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen again. i’m young and in college! i enjoy partying, and i should be doing it more!!! i REALLY want to make an effort to go to more social events, gatherings, and parties instead of isolating myself. constantly being with friends this summer especially made me realize how enjoyable spending time with others truly is, so even if it might be a bit exhausting to balance my social life with school, i’d rather lose out on sleep to make memories and new friends (also, this is the year most of my friends turn 21! everything is about to get so litty!!!).

• intentional hangouts - in tandem with that^ though, i do want to be more intentional with what events/social gatherings i say yes to. i’m aware that if i say yes to every single little thing, i’m going to burn out veryyy fast, so i’ll make sure to remind myself that it’s okay to say no to events i don’t feel excited about.

• getting tattoos from different artists - putting this here because i’m sure i’ll be getting more tattoos in the fall. i have ~30 currently (it started getting hard to count after getting tiny, abstract finger tattoos), and they’re from 4 different tattoo artists. i think it’s so cool to see the different art styles shine through; i got a few from a local artist in the state i spent this summer interning in, and i’m reallyyyyy glad i did because i love how the tattoos turned out. i think it’d be so cool if i got a tattoo from every destination i visit—but for now, i’d love to continue expanding artists.

• cooking for myself - i somehow scraped by my last two years of college by scrounging on fast food and snacks. for the sake of my bank account and health, i really want to cook more meals at home this upcoming year. i’ll be living in an apartment with a kitchen and will be a 5 min walk away from the closest publix, so i have no excuses.

• talking to strangers - i don’t count myself as a social extrovert by any means, but i can definitely say that my capacity for striking up conversations with people i’m unfamiliar with has grown larger and larger, especially after this summer. it’s really not that hard to introduce myself or say hi to someone, and i’ve enjoyed it every single time i’ve ignored my fear and talked to someone i didn’t know.

• some heat damage - i just really really really love how my hair looks when i use a curling iron so whatever…

• visiting home more often - i live ~40 min away from campus, but i barely visited home on weekends these past two years like many of my other in-state classmates. most of it was because i didn’t see the point of hauling myself back just to stay for a night or two, and i also just enjoyed living my own independent life on campus so much as well. however, now that i’m halfway through my undergrad career, i’ve realized how little time i have with this accessibility to home before i graduate, so i want to go back a bit more often.

• going all out on halloween - first of all, halloween this year is on a friday, so i’m already super excited for that because i know there’ll be so many things happening on campus. i’ve also always been super lazy when it came to halloween, putting in minimal thought and effort into my halloween costumes, so i really want to plan out some fire costumes this year and go all out that weekend!

• small trips - one thing i really enjoyed from my sophomore year was visiting a variety of different places on weekends and during school breaks: i went to gatlinburg, tennessee for a weekend cabin trip; chicago during winter break; columbus, ohio for a weekend hockey game; charleston, sc for a frat formal weekend; and hilton head for a quick summer trip. i’d love to make more small trips like those to new places this upcoming semester/year.

• study spot rotations - i have my same campus buildings that i’ve always gone to during the school year to study, but i’m really itching to discover some new study spots just because i think i’d implode if i have to spend another semester locking in sitting in the exact same places i’ve sat at for the past 2 years. so hopefully i can rotate around to some new buildings or something this fall.

out:

• daily starbucks - i had a nasty habit this past school year of getting a drink from starbucks every single morning on my way to class because there’s conveniently a starbucks right underneath my business school building. i need to stop this because that was around $7 gone every single day, and it’s not like caffeine even affects me like—i’d only drink it for the placebo effect to feel productive. actually i’ve just deleted my starbucks app soooooo bam.

• frat parties - fade thatttttt. now that i’m going into my junior year, it just feels strange to pull up to frat parties, especially now that most of my social circle is living in their own off-campus apartments, and everyone can host there. other than friends’ frats and events like halloweekend, i don’t think i’ll be stepping foot much into frats.

• chick-fil-a - please no more. i think i survived solely off the campus chick-fil-a last year because it was convenient to get and because i had dining dollars to spend, and i was genuinely so tired of it by the end of the school year. however, i don’t plan on buying dining dollars this year, and i do want to pack my own food more often to save money, so.

• “i’ll wake up early to do it” - no i will not lol

• doomscrolling - bad! i’m barely on my phone unless i’m doomscrolling, so i’d like to avoid that altogether this semester, especially since the last thing i want with so many things to do this fall is spending 2-3 hours a day consuming useless content on social media. i did pretty good with this last fall (i just didn’t have instagram/tiktok downloaded on my phone), but i’ve regressed this summer, so i need to reorient myself…

• canceling plans because i’m behind on work - oh my lordddddd this always happens and i hate it so much. whenever i choose to procrastinate or fail to manage my time well and then am swamped with work before social plans, i end up dreading the plans so much and feeling so anxious about it that i just want to cancel entirely. it’s a pretty terrible balance on my end, especially since i usually never regret going to those plans.

anyway, i’m excited for the fall semester! fall is my favorite season, and i already know that there are a lot of exciting experiences and growth incoming :-)

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1 surprise call from the police, 1 filed insurance claim, 1 tesla footage video, 1 in-person meeting with the tesla owner, and innumerable crashouts later, i’ve now found myself in an unfortunate predicament of needing to cough up $2.5k out-of-pocket to pay for the damage.

even just typing that number out makes something in my heart tug unpleasantly. i never thought i’d find myself in the midst of a circumstance like this; this is one of those expensive state of affairs i always unconsciously thought i was safe from—an extreme, foreign situation found only on reddit forums and by word-of-mouth from paranoid parents that i thought would never touch me, because i’d of course be careful opening car doors! what kind of concern was that?!

i’ve spent these past few weeks torturing myself. how could i have let something so small and preventable happen? how could i have been so careless in the moment with the simple action of opening a car door? $2.5k is no small amount of money to me, and the mental torment of this whole ordeal has been exponentially worse because the actual dent on the tesla is genuinely so small that around 90% of the people i’ve shown close-up pictures of it to couldn’t even find it without me pointing it out.

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externally, i was mad at the unfairness of it all at first: the unfairness of the fact that the bill came out so high, the unfairness of the fact that i’m being charged that for the tiniest dent, the unfairness of the fact that this all stemmed from a genuine mistake in which i really didn’t realize i’d grazed the car at all, the unfairness of the fact that this kind of mess just had to happen with a second party who’s clearly completely devoted to and fastidiously-concerned with his vehicle (an unfair thing to be mad about in the grand scheme of things, but i was very frustrated), the unfairness of the fact that my friend whose car i got into had to spend these past weeks dealing with this hassle as well—i could go on and on.

nevertheless, i do feel like i need to preface that from the very start, there was never the question of whether or not i was going to take responsibility. the heaviest underlying sentiment of this entire situation has been the guilt i feel for indirectly dragging my friend into this situation and causing this inconvenience for him, as he’s proportionately had to deal with parents, police, the insurance claim, and communicating with the tesla owner as the official owner of the vehicle at fault. i of course never considered anything else but fully covering the damage (as well as bombarding him with so many sorrys).

i’m just mad and disappointed at myself for having even gotten into such a seemingly-preventable situation in the first place. admittedly, i was focused at first on the material aspect of it all: thinking about how all of that money, which is legit half of what’s in my bank account right now, is just going to disappear in the blink of an eye with a single transaction is like a gunshot to my heart. that’s money i worked so hard for on an intern salary and put in hours of work to earn, and it just hurts to think about it all flying out of my savings at once as well as what i could’ve used it for instead. all the work, effort, and time i put into earning that $2.5k makes its value seem so disproportionate to that miniscule dent in my eyes.

the fragile nature of money has not been lost on me. i remember when i started my first job (a low-paying on-campus job at college), i suddenly found myself measuring expenditures like meals and activities by the thought this costs __ hours of work. working to earn my own salary expanded the personal value of money rampantly to me, and it wasn’t just something i gratefully yet somewhat mindlessly accepted as needed from a external provider (my parents) anymore.

at my current job, this $2.5k is what i earn from around two full weeks of work, and watching it go down to drain towards an external expenditure that doesn’t directly affect me in any way is a new type of internal torment for me.

i can’t say i’ve fully stopped thinking about the money-oriented side of things. however, i think it’s so detrimental and uselessly draining to dwell on matters like this. the damage is done, and the money needs to be paid, so what is there to do but move on?

obviously, that’s easier said than done, but i personally am pretty lucky in the sense that i generally don’t have too much trouble recovering emotionally from purely clinical situations like this one, so i’ve reconciled with it and have tried to pivot this entire incident into something i can view as a learning experience instead (albeit a very expensive one) and treat as another step into my independence.

in fact, in a kind of twisted way, i feel a tiny sense of almost pride in myself for overall handling this situation head-on without relying on external parties. this is technically the first time i’ll be using my own big girl money independently to pay for an ‘adult matter’ of this nature. besides, something like this was bound to happen one day; now that it’s happened, there’s nothing for me to do but lift my chin and hand over my credit card.

of course, this is all written from an advantaged standpoint. it’s important for me to acknowledge that i’m very much in a place of privilege where i can afford to think of my current predicament like this—because i do have a job, money saved up, and not just emotional but financial support within reach from loved ones around me if worst comes to worst. i’m lucky enough to be in a situation where dipping into my own monetary savings to pay $2.5k won’t be seriously detrimental to me financially, and for that i’m very grateful.

while all this has on a low level reinforced to me the importance of opening car doors carefully from now, i’ve really been reminded of the mercurial nature of money in a broader scope. money really does come and go so fast—while money as a whole concept is such a concrete, overarching theme in everyday life, it’s difficult when it comes to monetary ownership to cling onto such an impermanent thing because of how quickly and often money moves in and out of one’s possession.

money is constantly being earned and spent, and that’s just the natural, fickle cycle of it, so there truly is no point in dwelling on specific fluctuations. i’ve seen my fair share of bitter dwelling over financial matters growing up and unhealthy dynamics that rise as a result of fighting over money in my lifetime, and i know how ultimately useless and draining that kind of unnecessary, toxic focus on money can be. at the end of the day, i’m just grateful in my case that nobody got hurt and that a solution was reached peacefully. financial situations can change, and money comes and goes, so i’d rather just move on.

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