My friends and I are those people. We like going to the theater early, before the trailers start, and spend five minutes just catching up and making jokes about what we think the movie will be like. We’ll point out movies we want to see together when the previews do get started, and settle into our seats as we get to share in the joy of enjoying an art form together. Morning showings are the best for this. An empty theater just adds a lovely layer of special glow to the whole thing.

But this feeling goes beyond just theaters. What I’ve come to love is the whole category of weightless time, as I like to call it. The kind of time that would sound like nothing special when described to someone else, almost as though we were wasting time rather than anything else. Sitting across from each other with very little to say, showing each other funny TikToks that remind us of each other, or even just working side by side. The comfortable lull that would feel like an awkward silence waiting to be filled with anyone else feels so comfortable here instead.

There was a time when seeing this would have felt like the friendship was going to die, that we had nothing to say anymore and would probably be going in different directions. We would commit to big plans and lots of activities, mistaking the adrenaline for actually having fun together. Yes, we were having fun, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t always have to be that way. Adulthood dismantled that belief quickly.

After college, each of us started having very different life paths and responsibilities. Elaborate plans meant prepping weeks in advance, then something would fall apart, and we’d have to reschedule, with nothing happening in the end. What survived was just wanting to be around each other. The only agenda item was being in the same room. Somehow, these ended up being a lot more fun than the ambitious plans ever were.

Over a decade in, there is no warm-up period and no small talk tax. There doesn’t need to be a performed stiff hello as we settle into an evening. We slip straight in and pick up on the joke we left on the table six weeks ago. Five minutes later, the movie begins, and one of us shushes the others, and we get to just enjoy each other’s company. There’s nothing else, and no one else, I’d rather be doing this with. _{3 and a 1/2; this one’s for you ★.}

I grew up in a private school, went on to a private university, and eventually began teaching at one myself. For most of my life, education existed as part of the infrastructure around me. Good schools were normal. University was expected. Books, teachers, extracurriculars, advice, connections, and opportunities were all things that existed within reach. I learned because I wanted to, and had the freedom to go after a niche-ish field that isn’t seen as the most practical. I knew I was fortunate, of course, but there is a difference between understanding that you are privileged and actually understanding what that privilege looks like from the outside.

I started to see it differently after working at fellowship programs, volunteering, and spending time with people whose educational experiences were very very different from mine. Some of the people I’ve worked with have approached learning with a kind of fierceness that catches me off guard sometimes. They would come into a session with questions already prepared, and they voluntarily stayed behind because they were determined to understand something before they left for the day. They get excited about material that most people would consider painful and treat a scholarship, a book, a workshop, or simply the opportunity to sit in a room and learn as something incredibly precious. With time, it started changing the way I think about my own relationship with education.

I think somewhere along the way I had forgotten that, for most people, education is a privilege rather than an entitlement.

I don’t mean entitlement in the sense that privileged students are inherently spoiled or ungrateful. That explanation is too easy, and if I’m being totally blunt with you, it is not what I observed or experienced. There are so many of us out there who do feel grateful for our educational backgrounds without fully understanding it. However, when you grow up surrounded by access, that access becomes invisible (or ignored, really). If everyone around you goes to university, that achievement does not necessarily feel extraordinary. If your family can afford another class, another tutor, another attempt, or even a complete change of direction like I experienced during uni, failure becomes much less scary. If there are people around you who can explain how the system works, recommend opportunities, make introductions, or help you recover when something goes wrong, you have the luxury of taking your time figuring yourself out. I know this privilege well because I was one of those students.

It was freeing knowing that my future is not going to collapse because I made the wrong decision at twenty. I could change my major, take a time off, try something and hate it, graduate without knowing exactly what I want, or decide that the career I spent years preparing for is not actually for me. The ability to explore and change my mind is one of the greatest privileges of having a safety net. But that safety net also changes the emotional stakes of education. When there are always other options available, ambition can become something you develop gradually rather than something you need immediately.

That is what I have found so refreshing about working with people who do not necessarily have that same safety net. For some of them, education is not one possible path among many. It is the path. It might represent financial independence, social mobility, the ability to support their family, or simply the chance to build a life that looks different from the one they were born into. When the stakes are that high, learning carries a different kind of weight. I have watched people with considerably fewer resources approach education with a level of discipline and determination that I don’t think can be taught through a syllabus, a motivational speech, or an enthusiastic award-winning teacher.

It has made me really question the way we talk about motivation. During one of my semesters working at the university, I spent a lot of time lecturing about leadership development and personal improvement. We tend to treat motivation as though it’s a personality trait, intrinsic or extrinsic. We think some people are driven, some people are not; that it’s only natural that some students care, and others don’t. As educators, we spend countless hours thinking about the kids that need to be pushed more and trying to come up with reasons why they don’t seem to be engaged with what we have to say, often blaming ourselves for not doing enough. I think that explanation misses something important: Motivation is also shaped by circumstance. It is shaped by how much you stand to gain, how much you stand to lose, and whether you have the luxury of waiting for clarity.

That distinction has made me much more uncomfortable with the way we talk about ambition. It is easy to look at someone who has had every educational opportunity available to them and wonder why they aren’t more driven; but perhaps the better question is whether we are mistaking the absence of urgency for a lack of ambition. A person who has always had options does not necessarily need to know exactly what they want at eighteen, twenty, or even twenty-five, but someone who has had to fight for every opportunity may not have that same luxury. Privilege does not necessarily make people lazy. I think it just often makes urgency unnecessary, and those are very different things.

This exercise in self-reflection has been humbling because I am not observing this phenomenon from some morally superior distance. I benefited from the same system I am now thinking critically about. I went through private schools and a private university. I have worked almost exclusively within private higher education. I have had access to opportunities that other people have had to work incredibly hard to even find. I cannot pretend that my own ambition developed in a vacuum, completely independent of the circumstances I was given.

At the same time, I don’t think the answer is to romanticize struggle or pretend that having fewer resources automatically makes someone more hardworking, grateful, or ambitious. That would be another kind of oversimplification. People, regardless of their background, are complicated, and privilege does not determine character. What it does is change the conditions in which that character develops. It changes how much room we have to fail, how long we can take to figure ourselves out, and how urgently we need education to produce a specific outcome.

Maybe that’s why the people who are genuinely hungry to learn have affected me so much as a teacher. They have reminded me that education is not inevitable. It only feels inevitable when you have spent your whole life surrounded by it. Sitting in a classroom, having access to a teacher, being able to ask questions, having books available to you, being given the freedom to imagine a different future: none of those things are ordinary when you take a step outside the environments where they have always been guaranteed.

I think that is one of the responsibilities of teaching that we don’t talk about nearly enough. Our job is obviously to deliver content, build skills, and help students meet whatever learning outcomes are sitting on the syllabus, sure, but there is also something to be said for helping people understand the value of the opportunity itself. Sometimes that means pushing a student who has never had to think seriously about what education can give them. Sometimes it means just watching someone who already understands it and allowing their hunger to remind me why I became an educator in the first place.

The students who have taught me the most about education are not necessarily the ones who had the best schools, the highest grades, or the most impressive CVs. They are the ones who made me realize how extraordinary it is to be given the chance to learn at all… and once you have seen someone treat education as a precious doorway rather than a requirement, it becomes very difficult to look at your own access in quite the same way again.

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I did not think the first surprise of the morning to be the balloons themselves. Watching them fill up with air, slowly rising from the ground, felt like seeing them waking up. It was stranger and more beautiful than I had pictured.

I expected a dignified entrance into the basket. Instead, there was a bit of a scramble, a boost, and a laugh. It was colder than I expected it to be in the middle of July, but then we settled in under the fire roaring above us, and the heat rolled down. Just like that, we were warming up and floating off.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, could have ever prepared me for what Cappadocia looks like from above. I expected it to be beautiful, of course I did, but I guess the better word to describe what it all felt like was cinematic. The sun was just starting to come up, so the sky was pink, purple, and orange all at once. It was glittering with all different kinds of balloons, dozens of them all at once. We flew high above and quite low into the valleys, close enough to the ridges that I could see the details in the landscape.

What got to me, really, were all the little things happening on the ground. Cars chasing our shadows along dirt roads. Photographers setting couples up for photos. People standing around watching the balloons. At one point, I looked down and saw someone get down on one knee. It was funny, watching that proposal from a hot air balloon. From that far up, it was a tiny little moment, but to them, it was probably the biggest thing to happen in their lives up to that point.

One thing everyone over on Instagram kept asking was if we were afraid. I expected to feel at least a little bit of adrenaline, but there was no fear at all. I prepared myself for at least a little panic. Instead, it was quieter than I thought it would be. The whole thing was unbelievably smooth, almost suspiciously so.

My mom was beside me. The whole world beneath us. Balloons all around. I had this moment of true pause, for the first time in a long time. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

We were the first balloon up that morning, which also meant we were the first balloon back down. When we landed and got our feet back on solid ground, we had time to just stand there with all the people that had just shared this experience with us, watching all the other balloons come down around us.

One by one, the sky slowly emptied.

Reflecting back on it now, I think I understand why this little adventure meant so much to me, and why it was perfect that I waited until this exact trip to experience it.

I start my PhD next week, a goal I have been working my entire adult life towards. I turn 30 in a couple of months, a fact I am still coming to terms with. Just 24 hours after the balloon ride, I crossed my fiftieth country.

Looking at all those photos I took, admiring a landscape that has been shaped by wind and thousands of years, I found myself thinking about how much has changed in my life since I first started making these little goals for myself.

The balloon ride was something I wanted to do for years, with a million saved instagram posts to prove it. The fifty countries was something I set out to achieve after first learning about the Travelers Century Club on a trip a few years ago. The PhD is something I’ve been reading, writing, and studying for for as long as I can remember.

Now, somehow, all three things have happened.

It’s fitting, really. Going up in the air right before stepping into such a new chapter of my life. A new title to work toward, a new decade, and probably a new version of me waiting somewhere on the other side of it all.

Here’s the thing about me... I make a million plans a day and promise myself I’m going to be very productive, but I will then forget to actually follow through on 75% of those plans. I will decide, with total confidence in myself, that I am going to text my best friend at 4 pm, write for an hour before bed, and finally book that doctor’s appointment I’ve been “getting to” since last April. Then 4 pm arrives, and I am doing something totally different, because the plan lived in my head for exactly as long as it took to think it. My brain is running a thousand miles a minute, so my memory is not a filing system. It’s a campfire. Things go in, they glow for a second, and then they’re gone.

A few years ago, I learned to use my Google calendar, and so now I have a calendar full of actual commitments, meetings, deadlines, the immovable parts of my adult life, and then a parallel universe of intentions that never touch a single piece of paper or screen. The problem with this is if it’s on my calendar for a specific time, and I don’t catch that notification, it’s gone and I’ve forgotten about it. For a while, my solution was vibes. I would simply try harder to remember. This worked about as well as you’d expect, which is to say it did not work.

That’s where Reclaim comes in. It does something so simple that it’s almost embarrassing I needed software for it: it actually puts the task on my calendar.

And here’s the part that actually got me: when I inevitably blow through that block because a meeting ran long or I got sucked into a 45 minute Wiki hole about ancient Mesopotamian language systems, Reclaim doesn’t just let the task die in a to do list graveyard. It reschedules itself. It finds another slot and moves it like nothing happened, until I physically mark it as done. I don’t have to notice I missed it, feel bad about missing it, and then do the emotional labor of finding it a new home. It just handles the whole embarrassing sequence for me, off screen, without comment.

This might be the most honest description of the appeal: I am forgetful and slightly disorganized, and I have found a tool that behaves like a very patient personal assistant who has fully accepted this about me and stopped taking it personally. It doesn’t nag. It doesn’t guilt trip. It just quietly rearranges my chaos into something that looks, from the outside, like Type-A competence.

I have not become a different person. My days are still full, often overfull, even. Reclaim hasn’t fixed that. It hasn’t made me a person who says no more often or plans realistically. What it has done is make sure that everything I’ve said yes to actually has a fighting chance of happening, because it exists somewhere other than the campfire in my head.

My calendar looks horrifying to anyone from the outside looking in, but there’s a specific feeling I get when I open my calendar now and see the day laid out, work blocks and life blocks and the small annoying errands all sitting in their little boxes, that I can only describe as relief. Just pure relief that my life is now being organized by something that doesn’t get tired or distracted or lied to by its own optimism.

I don’t know if this is a personality flaw dressed up as a productivity win, probably a bit of both; but my schedule looks like it belongs to someone who has her life in order. For now, while this is working perfectly, I’m just going to keep showing up to the blocks it puts on my calendar, mildly delighted every time, like it’s the first time.

Reclaim, if you’re reading this, I love you.

I built this newsletter as one place for every part of my personality because that was the only option when I started, and honestly it worked while I didn’t know what I wanted to say or who I wanted to say it to just yet; but a catch-all only stays useful up to a point. Past that point it just means the reader who came for film has to sit through PhD prep to get to it, and the reader who came for the PhD updates has to wade through a travel essay to find them.

So I’m dividing the drawer. Three new spaces, each doing one job.

Dee Does Film is film and television, full stop. Reviews, the odd rewatch spiral, or whatever a movie does to me on a random Tuesday. No detours into anything else but my recent watches.

Dee Does Book Club is the one where I’ll get to talk books and invite you to read along with me. I’m tired of writing around endings I actually want to discuss. Each month’s pick gets announced at the end of the previous month’s review, so there’s time to read along instead of cramming. Check out my newest post there on the first of the month for August’s read.

Dee Does a PhD is linguistics, and lots of it. If you’ve been curious about my research, linguistics work, and the process of getting a PhD, that’s the one for you.

This newsletter isn’t going anywhere, and it isn’t losing its honest diary feel. It stays exactly what it’s always been: the journal, the observational essays, the space where fifty countries turns into a small reckoning about turning thirty, and a metro encounter turns into a full rant. If you’re here for my glittering personality, nothing about that changes.

I did wonder whether this is just four part-time jobs wearing a trench coat labeled ‘one newsletter.’ Possibly. But the alternative is the same quiet unsubscribe, over and over, from people who wanted one thing and got four. This way, everyone gets to choose their own adventure, and I stop feeling low-grade guilty every time the wrong topic lands in the wrong inbox.

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Either way, nobody has to sneak off unannounced anymore. There’s finally a door with the right sign on it for everyone.

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Fifty is a made-up number… a halfway point. I want to be clear about that from the start. The Traveler’s Century Club keeps a list of more than three hundred countries and territories, drawn up with a generosity that lets islands and enclaves and disputed slivers count as their own entries, and fifty of them is not an achievement so much as a tally. Nobody hands over a certificate for fifty. Nobody really cares about it as a milestone. The only person who ever cared about the number was a twenty-something with a sparkly sense of her own future, and she set the deadline the way a person sets a New Year’s resolution: cheerfully, and with no idea what she was signing up for.

A couple of years ago, it felt, for the first time, actually possible.

The fiftieth was going to be Greece.

There was a friend, and there were dates, and there was the trip-planning euphoria where the two of us sent each other photographs of white buildings at eleven at night for no reason other than that we could. And then her family had an emergency, the real kind, two days before takeoff, and the trip went where trips go when they die. Nowhere. It simply stopped existing, the way a plan does, which is one of the stranger things about plans.

So I went to Dubai instead, to my sister and my nieces.

Here is where the essay is supposed to make a joke about consolation prizes. I do not have one. Those two weeks were the best thing that happened to me that year. I got my sister’s daughters at an age they will not be at again, small and loud and absolutely certain that I was the most interesting adult in any given room, an assessment I have never received from anyone else and do not expect to receive twice. We did nothing. We did it constantly. Nobody logged a country and nobody was keeping count, and I came home with the distinct sense of having been handed something I had not thought to ask for.

The fiftieth stayed at forty-eight.

I would like to report that I made peace with this immediately and gracefully. What actually happened is that I made peace with it slowly and with a lot of unnecessary commentary, mostly to myself, in the same way a person picks at a scab. Thirty was on the horizon. The number of countries stopped moving. And at some point in the fall, I noticed that I had stopped being sad about it and started being faintly embarrassed on behalf of my younger self, who had believed that the shape of a life could be legislated in advance by someone with no information.

Nothing arrives on schedule. This is not wisdom. It is just weather.

December came with its own surprise. I got to forty-nine in China. A work trip, of all things, which is a deeply unromantic way to log a country. It overlapped with my twenty-ninth birthday. I remember doing the arithmetic somewhere over Central Asia and feeling very pleased with myself, because one more country in one more year is not a demanding schedule. It is barely a schedule at all. I had twelve months and one slot to fill and an entire planet to fill it from.

When my summer didn’t end up with any real plan, the goal quietly retired. Forty-nine countries at thirty years old became a fine place to stand. I told people about it at dinner as an amusing near-miss, and I meant it, and I had genuinely, sincerely, completely let it go.

And then my mother called me.

It was only a couple weeks ago, between two Qimam sessions, in one of those pockets of time that exist only so a person can drink water and remember her own name. My phone rang. She asked whether I would be up for a trip.

I said yes before I had the chance to think twice. I want that on the record, because it is the least characteristic thing I have ever done. I am a person who researches. I am a person who opens fourteen tabs. I said yes in the time it takes to say yes, and then I sat down in a hallway and started laughing, because the country I had spent a year mourning had been replaced by a country I had never once considered, offered by a woman who has never in her life used the phrase “bucketlist” and who was, I am fairly sure, simply in the mood to go somewhere.

This country was not on my list. It was not the plan for the milestone fifty. That is precisely why I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.

There is a difference between a trip earned through ten months of scheming and a trip that lands in a lap. The first belongs to the person who built it. The second belongs to nobody, which somehow makes it better, and I have spent the last several days reading about a language I cannot pronounce and a mountain range I cannot spell and a city that apparently smells like sulphur in the good way. I have loaded film simulations onto my camera and made no other solid plans. My anticipation has been frankly undignified.

Fifty countries before thirty was never the point. I understand that now with the clarity of someone who nearly missed the deadline and would have survived it; and who noticed, somewhere in the mess, that the year without a fiftieth country gave her three small girls in Dubai and a phone call in a hallway and a mother on the other end of it asking a question she did not need to think about.

I am posting this from Tbilisi, Georgia. I landed twenty minutes ago.

Fifty.

It means I have several uninterrupted hours to become the best version of myself.

Not after I land. The trip itself has very little to do with it. It starts the moment I walk through the sliding doors of the airport. Some people find airports stressful; I find them strangely... aspirational.

The airport version of me is a woman with her life together.

She arrives early. She has already checked in, downloaded her boarding pass, and inexplicably knows her gate number from memory. Her passport has a designated bag pocket. She drinks water voluntarily. She packs snacks. She has a portable charger that is, for once, actually charged.

This airport version of myself has her life together even outside the airport, albeit in an alternate reality.

She would never lose her keys.

She would never ignore an email.

She probably remembers exactly what it is she needs to be doing at all times.

None of these things are true about me outside an airport in this reality.

At home, I have been known to spend ten minutes looking for my phone by calling out for Siri to tell me where she is.

At home, I lose my train of thought so frequently that I have ten different little hobbies going at the same time.

At home, I am chaos personified.

But airports transform me into someone who could probably run a small country. I think it’s because airports are one of the few places where everyone is somehow experiencing their first day on this planet.

Because of that, the airport makes even the most mundane tasks feel consequential. Charging your phone becomes “preparing.” Buying gum becomes “being practical.” Grabbing a second cup of coffee feels like the kind of decision your future self will thank you for.

And then there’s the optimism. I don’t know what it is about airports, but they make me believe I’m one good flight away from becoming an entirely different person. Every trip begins with an internal monologue that sounds suspiciously like the opening chapter of a self-help book.

This is the trip where I’ll finally become someone who wakes up early.

This is the trip where I’ll start journaling consistently.

This is the trip where I’ll read all the books I’ve been carrying around for six months.

This is the trip where I’ll stop doomscrolling.

It’s incredible how much personal growth I expect to achieve somewhere over the Black Sea.

The evidence, unfortunately, suggests otherwise.

I’ve been on enough flights to know exactly how this story ends.

I board the plane convinced I’m entering a new era of my life.

I spend the first hour organizing my photos into albums I’ll never look at again.

I order a third coffee I don’t need because I’m bored.

I open up the show or movie I’ve been meaning to watch for weeks.

Then I watch the map loop for three hours and chew on some gum.

Somewhere during the descent, I remember that the old me was never left behind at departures. She was sitting in seat 1A the entire time.

Flying alone makes all of this even more noticeable.

Without someone to talk to, I’m left alone with my own strange little rituals. I notice how many times I’ve checked that my passport is still in my bag despite not having opened my bag since security. I convince myself that browsing the bookstore counts as cultural enrichment. I spend fifteen minutes watching planes taxi across the runway, as though I’ve stumbled upon one of the greatest spectacles of modern civilization.

And honestly, maybe it is.

Airports are one of the few places where thousands of people are all in the middle of something.

Nobody is finished.

Nobody has arrived.

Everyone is between versions of themselves.

Maybe that’s why they feel so hopeful.

An airport is one of the only places where it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that, in four and a half hours’ time, my life might look completely different.

It rarely does; but for a little while, while I’m sitting at the gate with an overpriced coffee and a fully charged phone, it feels entirely possible.

And I think that’s why I like flying alone; because for a few hours, it lets me believe in the very convincing fiction that I’m the kind of person who always remembers to pack lip balm.

It might be a throwaway comment. “Apparently they built the city in just a few years.” Or, “I read somewhere that octopuses…” Or, “This word actually comes from…” The statement itself is usually incidental. The conversation continues. People nod. Someone changes the subject.

I am no longer in the conversation.

Physically, yes. Mentally, absolutely not.

Without thinking, I’ve unlocked my phone. Somewhere between the last part of the statement and the polite “Really? That's interesting,” my thumbs are already typing.

This has become such an established part of my personality that my family no longer finds it remarkable. They find it predictable. If a question comes up over Friday lunch, there is a brief pause before someone says, “Dima?”

They think I’ll know… I won’t.

Dima will Google. The distinction is important.

Some of my nieces and nephews have not grasped it yet. As far as they’re concerned, I possess a miraculous ability to answer questions about countries, animals, history, flags, languages, weather, and why flamingos are pink. They have a wildly inflated opinion of my intelligence. They seem convinced I was born with an encyclopedic knowledge of the world. It’s a flattering misconception, but a misconception nonetheless. I have considered preserving this illusion for as long as possible, but the truth is much less magical: I simply have very little patience for uncertainty.

Not uncertainty in the existential sense. I’m perfectly capable of living with the fact that I don’t know where my life will be in ten years, or whether I’ll ever manage to keep a houseplant alive, or if I’ll ever visit 100 countries for that matter. Those are large uncertainties, and large uncertainties are strangely manageable. It’s the small ones that bother me.

Where did that expression come from?

Why is that country’s border shaped like that?

Who decided this was the accepted pronunciation?

Most people seem capable of encountering these questions and allowing them to drift out of reach. I seem incapable of doing so.

For a long time, I assumed everyone experienced this impulse and that some people simply had better self-control. It never occurred to me that another person could hear the exact same sentence I heard and feel… nothing. Not indifference, exactly. More like acceptance. A willingness to let the question exist unanswered. I’ve been trying to figure out whether this is something people develop or something they’re born with. Because once I started noticing it in myself, I started noticing its absence in other people. I don’t mean this as criticism… It’s genuine confusion.

And I find this fascinating.

We often talk about curiosity as though it were an intellectual virtue, evidence of a particularly agile mind, but I’m not convinced. Some of the smartest people I’ve met have been surprisingly very NOT curious. They possess extraordinary expertise in their fields but seem almost entirely unbothered by subjects outside them. On the other end, I’ve met people who would never describe themselves as especially intelligent yet approach the world with the relentless enthusiasm of someone wandering through a museum without a closing time.

The difference, I suspect, is appetite.

The internet has complicated this in an interesting way.

My parents belonged to a generation that could spend years wondering about something without ever finding the answer. If a disagreement arose at the table, it often remained a disagreement. Someone promised to check an encyclopedia. Occasionally they did, but most of the time it was forgotten by the end of the night.

Today, every unresolved question arrives with an implicit solution. The answer is almost certainly sitting in your pocket… And yet the existence of the answer doesn’t guarantee anyone wants it.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time discussing the dangers of information overload, but very little discussing selective curiosity. Surrounded by infinite knowledge, we still choose, moment by moment, what deserves our attention; and apparently, I have unusually low standards.

One question becomes another. I look up the origin of a word and somehow end up reading about Phoenician trade routes. I wonder why one country’s railway system differs from its neighbor’s and, forty minutes later, come out of it with opinions about nineteenth-century engineering decisions that will never once improve my day-to-day life.

People sometimes ask how I know so many random things.

The honest answer is that I rarely do. What I have is not a large store of knowledge so much as an inability to leave loose threads alone. I have spent years accidentally collecting information in the same way some people collect shells while walking along a beach. None of it was planned, and most of it serves no practical purpose. It simply seemed impossible to walk past without picking it up.

I find this habit of mine revealing… It’s what convinced me that I am an eternal optimist; because if we really think about it, there is a level of optimism embedded in every question. To ask “Why?” or “How?” is to assume the world is understandable, or at least understandable enough to be worth the effort. It is a small act of faith that an explanation exists somewhere out there.

I think that’s why I’m drawn to people who ask questions, especially the embarrassing ones. The ones willing to interrupt a conversation with, “Wait, I’ve never understood that,” or “Can you explain what you mean?” There is a humility in admitting ignorance that often goes unnoticed. It requires believing that looking foolish for thirty seconds is preferable to remaining uninformed indefinitely.

I’ve come to admire that more than expertise itself. Expertise is impressive, certainly. But expertise is an arrival.

Curiosity is movement.

And if the past twenty-nine years have taught me anything, it’s that the people who keep moving, who continue asking obvious questions and inconvenient questions and wonderfully unnecessary questions, are almost always the same people who remain the most interesting.

Not because they know more…

Because they never decided they knew enough.

And I can’t think of many better ways to move through the world than expecting, almost every day, to discover that there’s something you didn’t know yesterday.

I have been at Qimam the past two weeks, and at the end of every day I spent there, I noticed the same thing. I’m tired in the best possible way, the kind that sits in my shoulders and at the back of my eyes, where sitting down for more than thirty seconds feels like it’s an invitation to nap. It isn’t the tired I remember from other jobs. It feels earned. It feels warm.

It’s a strange kind of exhaustion, because it doesn’t leave me resentful of the days that caused it. If anything, I want one more of them. Throughout the year, I forget this feeling exists. I remember the long hours, the schedules, the endless attendance checks, the late nights that arrive before I’ve noticed the day slipping away. What I forget is what it’s like to end a day completely spent and still wake up looking forward to the next one. Most kinds of tired make me want to stop. This one, somehow, makes me want to come back.

I’ve been turning over what this post was actually about, why Qimam means this much to me. At first I thought it was the work: the days feel purposeful, we spend months planning something and then, all at once, it exists in front of us, different every single day. But the longer I sat with it, the less convinced I got. Plenty of meaningful work leaves you exhausted in ways that aren’t nearly this gentle.

It comes down to the people, I’ve decided. There’s a specific kind of energy that comes from being around people who are genuinely good at what they do and genuinely kind while doing it, and I forget, in the months between summers, just how rare that combination actually is. Put competence and kindness in the same room and something changes. People stop performing and start actually working, and that, somehow, is what makes the room feel electric.

Every summer we end up orbiting the same tall brown table outside Madina Hall. It’s just a hotel table, really, but somehow it becomes the center of everything. This year, it looked like this: Four of us full-timers are usually camped there, with the rest of the team and volunteers drifting in and out all day. People answer questions between sessions there, someone is always checking attendance, and someone else is asking whether anyone has seen a particular fellow in the last ten minutes. Laptops pile up, coffee cups get abandoned, and conversations that start out about logistics somehow end with everyone laughing at a joke that would make no sense to anyone walking past.

It’s funny how fast inside jokes turn into a language. Around day three, someone says something completely ordinary, everyone laughs, and for the next ten days it becomes shorthand for something else entirely. By the end of the program, people are laughing before the sentence is even finished. It might be my favorite part of coming back, watching a place slowly grow its own vocabulary until none of us notice we’re speaking it anymore.

I noticed it again a few nights ago. It was later than any of us had planned, and instead of the weariness that usually happens once a group of tired adults has been staring at the same screens too long, someone cracked a joke that only half landed, everyone laughed anyway, and someone else came back with drinks nobody had asked for. No one made a thing of it. It just happened, quietly, the way it always does here.

That’s the thing about a good team. The care is just built into how people move; nobody has to perform it or remember to do it. Someone notices you haven’t eaten and shows up with a plate. Someone else answers a question that technically wasn’t theirs to answer, because they happened to know it and you were standing right there. It rarely feels remarkable in the moment. Nobody is keeping score, which might be exactly why it adds up to so much.

I used to think a good team was one that didn’t need me to worry about them. I think now it’s closer to the opposite: a good team is one where the worry gets spread out evenly enough that nobody has to carry very much of it alone. When I hand something off here, I hand it off and actually move on to the next thing.

That sounds like a small thing to be grateful for, but anyone who has worked on a team held together by anxiety and email chains knows how huge it actually is. Trust doesn’t usually look dramatic. Most of the time it just looks like knowing someone else will catch the thing you forgot before it ever turns into a problem, ordinary and tiny and easy to miss until you’ve spent real time without it.

What gets me most is how little of it feels transactional. I’ve spent time in professional spaces that run on networking, where every kindness carries a small hidden question, some version of what does this get me? Qimam has never felt like that. Twelve days back in it and I’m reminded again why I keep returning: people check on each other because they actually want the answer, and they celebrate each other’s wins without that little performance of enthusiasm that usually means someone’s doing math in their head. It’s disarming, honestly, and I still haven’t gotten used to it even after all this time.

I wasn’t there last summer, and I think that’s part of why this one feels different. A year is long enough for memory to sand down the edges. I remembered loving it, remembered leaving tired, but the details had gone soft: the hallway conversations, the running jokes that somehow survive fourteen-hour days, the way everyone ends up back at that same table like there’s nowhere else worth being. I’d forgotten what it feels like to spend this much time around people who make showing up easy.

I didn’t expect to be moved by a night spent around a hotel table, but that’s what genuine looks like most of the time, small and unremarkable, people paying attention to each other for no reason except that they want to.

I was tired, but I kept coming back to that table every morning anyway, mostly because I already knew who was going to be there. That knowledge changes the whole shape of a long day. It turns effort into something closer to company.

I do not think I would have believed, a few years ago, that the people around you could be this large a part of what makes work sustainable. I would have said it was about the mission, or the growth, or whatever language we reach for when we are trying to sound serious about our careers. All of that still matters, but I wonder if we spend too much time talking about meaningful work as though the meaning exists only in the work itself. Sometimes it exists in the people you get to do it with. Sometimes that is the thing that keeps you showing up long after the novelty has worn off. Most nights, when I am packing up later than I meant to, what I actually feel is this: Lucky. Lucky to be surrounded by people who make the hard parts easier just by being who they are.

I woke up at home this morning, and a small part of me wished for one more day with the team.

Another year, and another twelve days down. I am curious what the rest of the summer holds; but mostly, I am glad to have spent those twelve days with them.

Before the first chapter, before the author’s note if there is one, before the back cover or inner flap, sometimes even before I’ve fully committed to buying the book. I flip past the title page, and I stop there, at that small line or two of text that most people would probably skip, and I read it like it’s going to tell me something.

It usually does.

The dedication page is one of the stranger conventions in publishing when you stop to think about it. It exists outside the book proper, exempt from the editorial scrutiny that shapes everything else. It doesn’t have a duty to do anything like every single other part. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to name someone, or something, or occasionally nothing at all, and that freedom is exactly what makes it interesting. Everything else in a book has been argued over, revised, edited, and sometimes even fought over until whatever last version made it in the published release. The dedication arrived fully formed, or it didn’t, and either way nobody was going to push back on it very hard.

That is exactly why I find it more revealing than almost anything else between the covers, including the back cover, which is where I’d argue the least honest version of any book lives. The back cover is a sales pitch. It’s been workshopped and focus-grouped and written, often by someone who isn’t even the author, with the singular goal of creating desire, and in turn, sales. The dedication is not trying to do any of that. It’s the author at the end of a long process, in a meaningful moment, deciding who gets named. That decision carries so much more information than most people give it credit for.

Take my latest read, The Wedding People by Alison Espinach. The dedication reads: “To all the strangers who made a dreary moment magical.” Before the first chapter begins, this tells us something specific about what the book thinks it’s doing. It’s signaling an interest in accidental connection, in the grace that arrives from people who have no particular reason to offer it. It’s also signaling a certain emotional register, one that acknowledges dreariness as a real condition rather than a temporary obstacle. A book that opens by thanking strangers for magical moments is not going to be cynical about human nature, even when the book opens with the main character telling us she’s about to kill herself, but it’s also not going to be naive about it. That’s a more precise piece of information than most back cover copy manages to deliver.

Or consider a romance novel instead. First-Time Caller by B.K. Borison opens with one of my favorite dedications: “for the hopeless romantics, and the reluctant ones too.” The dedication is doing something structurally interesting here. The obvious move would have been to dedicate a romance novel to hopeless romantics and stop there. The addition of the reluctant ones is where the book’s actual argument lives. It’s a signal that the novel is aware of its own genre, that it’s not going to demand the reader arrive already converted. It’s making space for ambivalence, which in a genre that often trades in certainty is a meaningful choice to flag before page one.

This is what dedications do when they’re done well. They’re not just expressions of gratitude or affection, though they can be those things too. They’re a compressed statement of intent, written in a register that’s more personal and less defended than anything in the prose that follows. An author can spend years refining exactly how they want to say something in the body of their work. The dedication often just says it. There are a million other examples out there, and the more time we spend with them, the more we’ll discover.

What gets me most, having read more dedication pages than I could count, is how precisely they reflect the author’s relationship to their own work at the moment of release. A book dedicated to a parent suggests something different than one dedicated to a lover, or a dead friend, or a dog, or a city, or a year. A book dedicated with elaborate inside-joke specificity suggests an author who was writing with a particular audience in mind. A book dedicated simply “to the reader” is either very generous or slightly evasive, and figuring out which tells you something about the journey we’re about to undertake.

The dedication page also tends to betray how the author feels about the act of finishing. Some dedications read as relief. Some read as triumph. Some read as grief, particularly in books written across long stretches of time, where the person named may no longer be around to receive the acknowledgment. There’s a whole category of posthumous dedications, books finished after a loss, where the dedication is doing real emotional work that the book itself may or may not address directly.

None of this is information that’s supposed to be there. The dedication page is, technically, just a formality. A line or two before the story starts. But I keep reading them because they keep being the place where something unguarded slips through, some piece of the author’s actual state of mind that the prose, for all its craft, is too polished to reveal.

The book hasn’t started yet. The dedication has already said something true.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted a PhD.

Never once has it been a “that would be nice one day,” or for a specific career-ladder purpose. I have wanted it in the same way people want a house with big windows or an apartment in New York City. I have wanted it so very bad for one reason, and one reason only.

I need to be disgustingly educated.

I need to read until my eyes blur and then read some more. I need to sit with a theory long enough that it drives me insane. I need to chase footnotes into rabbit holes. I need to care deeply about questions most people scroll past. I need to argue about language as if it matters. Because it does.

For years, I told myself it would happen eventually. After this specific milestone… after this one job… after this version of stability. It was never a question of if it was going to happen, just when.

What people don’t see is that this wasn’t impulsive. It wasn’t a sudden pivot after resigning from my job a few months ago. I have been building toward this for years. Every degree. Every late night. Every research paper I didn’t have to take as seriously as I did. Every conversation where I leaned too far into theory because I couldn’t help myself.

I had been waiting for the admissions decision for ages. Checking emails in between meetings. Holding my breath for a response without ever admitting I was. I needed an out, something to motivate me to really do this without a safety net, so I quit my job before I had a formal confirmation that this was finally happening. I needed to take the risk and choose myself for once. Make the jump and figure out the landing later.

But I’ve landed.

I’m here.

I got into my PhD program.

Applied linguistics. Of course. The thing I keep coming back to. The thing I’ve loved as an undergraduate, what I chose again for my master’s. The thing that has followed me through every room I’ve been in, every quiet obsession with how people use words and why.

This acceptance wasn’t met with an explosive joy. It was nothing like those videos all over our TikTok feeds this time of year. Instead, it felt like relief. Like something in me unclenched. Like coming back into myself after stretching too far in directions that were impressive in their own right, but not entirely mine.

Language has always felt like the closest thing I have to magic. It shapes power. It shapes identity. It shapes who gets heard and who gets dismissed. Somehow, despite the endless “the humanities are dying” roaring past, linguistics remains one of the most urgent spaces to think critically and deeply about the world we are building.

People have told me that I must be doing this for prestige. That a PhD is such an unnecessary thing these days. That academia is dying right along with the humanities. That I’m adding more school for what, exactly? That it makes me intimidating... As if intellectual hunger needs to be softened, justified, or diluted.

I’m not interested in being digestible; thank you very much for your concern. This isn’t about proving anything to anyone. Not to a workplace, not for a title, and not to people who think education should just be about practicality.

This is for me. Just mine.

Before turning thirty, the world has tried to convince me to be smaller, that comfort is a lot more charming than curiosity… I’m redefining the narrative for myself.

A while ago, I wrote about realizing my dream job wasn’t a dream. I thought it was leadership or impact; about building something visible and measurable and impressive. Maybe parts of that are still true, but underneath it all, there has been a more stubborn truth: I just want to know more.

I want to understand how language evolved in digital spaces. How identity shows up in syntax. How power hides inside discourse. I want to sit in rooms where the questions matter more than the answers. I want to write things that take years to untangle.

I want to dedicate myself to thinking.

So yes. I got in. More importantly, though, I chose this.

I chose the long road. The one with citations and drafts and intellectual discomfort. The one that asks more of me than it promises back. The one that will stretch me past the version of myself that thought she had already achieved enough. I walked away from stability for this; from a title I worked hard to earn, and a version of security that looked great on paper. I chose risk over reassurance. Growth over comfort. I chose depth in a world that rewards speed.

I don’t want to be casually informed. I don’t want to just be well-read. I don’t want to hover at the surface of the subjects that have shaped my entire being.

I want to be disgustingly educated…

And this feels like just the beginning.

If you’re interested in hearing more about my PhD journey, I will share much more here. Subscribe!

Holly Gramazio’s debut does something genuinely difficult: it takes a premise that could easily collapse into a gimmick and uses it to ask real, uncomfortable questions. Each new husband brings a slightly different version of Lauren’s life with him. Different job, different friends, different versions of herself. The book becomes less about which husband she should keep and more about the shape a life takes depending on who you let into it. It is a story that stays stubbornly, wonderfully grounded. Lauren does not float above the strangeness of her situation; she Googles it obsessively, tests it methodically, cycles through contentedness and curiosity and back again. That repetition is not a flaw. It is the point.

Lauren herself is a careful balancing act. She does occasionally make choices that are extremely questionable, but Gramazio earns every one of them. I fully understand the logic, even when the logic is panic. She never tips into the kind of plot-armored protagonist stupidity that exists only to keep the plot moving. She feels like a real person doing genuinely irrational things for genuinely human reasons, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. I found myself rooting for her not toward any particular husband, but toward herself.

The book is funny. Properly funny, not just charming. There are moments that made me laugh so loud that my mom started asking for updates on what happened to Lauren next, and the humor never undercuts the emotional weight, either. The pacing is close to perfect, knowing exactly when to settle into a groove and when to pull the rug out from under the reader. There are a couple of twists I did not see coming, and both of them made me gasp quite louldy at my book, which is always a good sign.

I will acknowledge that some readers may feel this is an absolute DNF. The repetitive structure is intentional, but it does ask for patience, and, spoiler alert (don’t say I didn’t warn you, this is your last chance to look away), the book offers no explanation for why the attic works the way it does. If you need your magic to have rules and an origin, this will frustrate you. I did not need that. I came to think of it as a modern fable, the kind where you are not supposed to ask why it is happening, only what it means that it is. The ending, too, has divided readers. I thought it was exactly right. Lauren made a choice not because it is the best option, but because she is done having options. It felt more honest than any tidy resolution would have been.

The Husbands is the kind of book that is fun on the surface and quietly devastating underneath, and the skill is in how naturally one becomes the other. I am giving it 4.5 stars.

I would give it five, but there might still be a better one in the attic.

I put my phone down.

I picked it up again.

I looked at the little graph.

The little graph looked back at me.

I already knew, Oura, I didn’t need the notification.

I am currently living through an emotional season characterized by so much change that it doesn’t need any drama or flair to be stressful. It layers, though. It accumulates. I wade through the sticky bits because I’m a functional person who has responsibilities and a routine and a reputation for having it together… then one morning, a ring on my finger generates a graph, and the graph laughs at me, and I think, oh, so we’re here now.

What’s annoying is that the body tends to know first. Before I’ve found the words for it, before I’ve even admitted there’s something to find words for, it’s already keeping score. The tension my eyebrow lady found in my brows and forehead. The stiffness in my shoulders without a clear origin. The sleep that isn’t quite restoring me the way it used to. The way I’ll be in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation and feel, briefly, like I’m watching myself from a slight distance.

My ring noticed. My ring filed a report.

A lot has shifted in my life recently, some of it chosen, some of it not, all of it significant. I'm not going to list the things because this isn't a debrief, and honestly, I'm still mid-process. But if you've had a year where the ground kept rearranging itself underfoot while you smiled through meetings and gatherings and outings and said "I'm great, just busy" to everyone who asked, then you probably know the feeling I'm describing.

The performance of fine is its own kind of labor, is the thing. I got good at it. I say the right amount, I laugh at the right moments, I answer “how are you” with something breezy and true-adjacent, and it works so well that sometimes I convince myself, too... And then I’m alone, and the breezy version of me clocks out, and I’m left with the actual inventory, which is longer than I’d been letting myself acknowledge.

The Oura notification told me to prioritize recovery. Reduce stimulation. Get more sleep. I read these suggestions and nodded like they were revelations, but really, I knew all of this already.

I’m trying. I am really trying.

That's the most honest thing I can tell you. I am trying to be gentler with myself in this weird in-between stretch, to take the sitting-with-feelings seriously even when it feels less productive than, say, a to-do list. I am trying to resist the urge to reframe everything into a lesson before I've even finished living it. To not turn every hard thing into content, every low moment into a growth arc, every season of difficulty into a before picture. Some things are just heavy for a while, and the work is just carrying them, not curating them. I am trying not to optimize my way out of actually experiencing what I'm experiencing.

Whether I am succeeding is, per my ring, a work in progress.

Which brings me to the part where I acknowledge that this post is a week late. I skipped last week entirely. I didn’t even try to draft anything, didn’t open a document, didn’t even feel guilty about it until just now, writing this sentence. The funk was real, and it had ruined my otherwise semi-consistent writing schedule.

But I’m here. That’s the thing about recentering yourself: it’s less of a moment and more of a direction. You don’t arrive at it, you just keep turning back toward it, ideally before your biometric data stages an intervention. I am turning back toward it. I am writing this post. I am, in the most technical sense of the phrase, getting it together.

At least I hope I am.

I have spent the better part of the last decade being somewhere, studying something, preparing for something else, teaching, researching, applying, departing, arriving. My twenties have been a series of very well-organized sprints, and I say that with equal parts pride in myself and pure and absolute exhaustion. So this unplanned summer? This is genuinely disorienting for someone like me. It is also, I am realizing, exactly what I needed.

I turn 30 at the end of this year, and I want to spend the summer before it doing almost nothing of consequence. I want to be, as the kids say, perceived only by myself. This is not a spiritual gap year of sorts. I am not finding myself. I found myself years ago. I am just actively choosing to be slow and have fun for once.

It took a surprising amount of effort to convince myself that leisure is allowed.

These are small things. I know they are small things. But for someone who spent the last several years treating leisure as something to be squeezed in between more important tasks, they feel enormous. The audacity of a Tuesday with nothing required of it! The sheer nerve of not scheduling anything important!

So in the spirit of accountability, and because I will absolutely need external pressure to resist the urge to fill my calendar with productive things, here is my summer list. A manifesto of leisure. A monument to finally, finally, doing nothing productive.

Dima’s Summer Bucketlist: 30 for 30

1. Read a book a week for the whole summer (fun novels only).

2. Make something with my hands (draw, paint, collage, anything)

3. Learn to vibe code.

4. Establish a regular gym routine.

5. Book a spa day.

6. Watch movies that have been on my list for years.

7. Try three new restaurants.

8. Take an art class (pottery, tufting, or the like).

9. Hit 1,000 TikTok followers.

10. Hit 2,000 Instagram followers.

11. Find fun live events happening around the city (comedy shows, a performance, something different from the day-to-day).

12. Write something every single day.

13. Go on a seaside getaway.

14. Take a morning yoga class.

15. Spend a weekend tech-free.

16. Plan a crafting day with friends.

17. Go to a private karaoke booth.

18. Watch a show with Mama.

19. Have a local tourist day/staycation.

20. Take a photo I’m proud of.

21. Make a video I’m proud of.

22. Cook my parents a dinner from scratch.

23. Finish a puzzle.

24. Have a 24-hour readathon.

25. Find a video game to be obsessed with finishing.

26. Watch 5 different documentaries.

27. Do something outside my comfort zone.

28. Find my new TV obsession.

29. Drink more water.

30. Sleep. Sleep. And sleep some more.

There is a version of all of us that is very good at this. The run. It has been rehearsed so many times before that it barely feels like a choice anymore. It’s become instinct, like breathing; a natural next step. Something frightens us, and we move. Not toward it, away from it, around it, past it, anywhere that is not directly in front of it.

We get very skilled at the justification. “I’m just being practical,” we say, “being wise.” These are the names we give the run, because in our heads, there will be a better time to deal with it. Fear is generous in that way, and it gives us a million different excuses not to deal with it like we’re supposed to. It will hand over as many as are needed for its survival.

Our bodies know the fear before our minds would ever admit it. The mind catalogs, explains, then files things away, but only when we give ourselves a moment to process. The body holds on to the fear before we ever realize its even there. A tension in the shoulders, a heaviness in the chest, a clenched jaw… it manifests in different ways for all of us, but we all recognize that same ache.

The sudden fluency with distraction, and how easy it is to find something else to do, something safer… This is the architecture of avoidance, and we’ve all been building it brick by brick for a very long time.

In the short term, running works. It’s incredibly effective at making us feel like we've gotten over whatever was plaguing us. We find ourselves thinking that wasn’t so bad, but what we don’t account for is that we brought the fear with us anyway. Fear is not something we can leave behind. We carry it, and the longer we run, the heavier it gets.

II. Stopping

At some point, we stop. The reasons, like the excuses, are many: we got tired, it was impossible to keep running, or fear found us anyway.

What we have to remember, however, is that stopping is not the same as facing. A prerequisite, at most. We have to remind ourselves that being ready to face a fear is a myth. There is no real resolution that makes us ready to move forward.

Stopping forces us to really see our fears for what they are. When we turn around, we expect the things we’re afraid of to be so large they loom. What I’ve learned is that it is never the size I imagined it in my head. It is either much smaller or something stranger than I expected, but never huge.

What we have to acknowledge, too, is that we can’t plan the stopping or the turning around. When it happens, it’s usually an ordinary day, in the middle of a sentence. The courage comes in the pause before we say yes to facing the fear instead of going for our usual later, and almost always never a moment before.

III. Going Through

After we turn around, we have to face the fear… and go through. There’s never a shortcut. I keep hoping that someday, some shortcut will reveal itself to me so I can make this easier to handle, but it never does. We spent so much time trying to go above, around, or an impressive amount of energy trying to find elaborate alternatives, but the only way out is through.

The fear never disappears, let’s all be very clear about that. What we learn when we tackle our fears is that their presence does not require our absence. Going through it doesn’t mean it’ll never happen again. Fear is not a threshold for us to cross and be on the other side of. It keeps coming back in different shapes, different stakes, and with different results.

What changes, slowly, is the calculation we do in our heads the next time we have to face our fears. A small, usually private, evidence base accumulates:

1. I have been afraid before.

2. I have gone through it before.

3. The fear did not end me.

This is not nothing.

We will be afraid again, but that is not a personal failure. Fear is not a problem to be solved once and filed away. It is a recurring feature of being alive, of wanting things, of caring about outcomes, of loving people, of trying to become something bigger. If we are never afraid, is anything ever really worth it? Will we be as satisfied with our lives if they were easy?

The work is not to eliminate fear; the work is to keep going through. Again, and again, and again. With each time, we become much more familiar with its shapes, a little faster to stop running, and a little more willing to turn around.

Not fearless, just practiced.

Fear will still be there next time, but so will I.

I never meant to stay this long. When I first walked through your doors in 2015 as a law student, I had a plan: finish, graduate, become a lawyer, and move on. This was meant to be a necessary detour before the rest of my life. Yet, I’m here now over a decade later, clearly not a lawyer. For the first time, though, I’m sitting with the realization that I have to say goodbye to a place that became, completely and unquestionably, home.

Eleven years. On and off, sure, but mostly still around, even in those months away. I don’t think I truly understood what that meant until I recently started counting backwards and realized just how much of who I am had grown inside your halls. I came to you as a student, always looking forward: the next semester, the next year, the degree at the end of it all, and whatever came next. I didn’t spend much time being present at first, not really. I was too busy anticipating the exit.

Then Linguistics happened. I found what lit my soul on fire. Somehow, somewhere along the way there, I stopped looking for my way out. The exit never came, and I stopped wanting it to, and somehow PSU became the place I kept returning to, kept choosing, kept building who I am inside of.

Within months of graduating, I came back to teach. I remember the particular weirdness of walking into a classroom I was just in, but being on the other side of it. They’re still the same halls, the same light through the same windows, but a completely different version of myself standing in them.

Teaching changed me in ways I never expected or could have ever predicted. It asked something of me that I didn’t know I was capable of. Day after day, class after class, semester after semester. I learned how to hold a room. I learned how to care about students the way my own professors cared about me. I learned, slowly and not always gracefully, what it actually means to show up for someone else’s learning… someone else’s life’s journey.

There was research, of course, and my Master’s degree. A necessary detour that expanded me in ways I needed and then pulled me back to you. Again. Always.

When I returned, I came back differently. I took on more. Within a year, I took on a course group, a team, and responsibilities that required me to think beyond my own classroom and into something larger. Then, and this still catches me sometimes, even now, I led my whole department.

If I’m being honest, this role was way more than what the title itself meant. It was the answer to every persistent doubt I’ve ever had about myself. Every time I had wondered if I was capable enough, good enough, whether I was worthy of being taken seriously in a room full of people I deeply admired, this role answered that I was. Loudly. Clearly.

Not long after I took on this role, I decided to leave. That sounds crazy, even now. Why would I leave when I got the exact role I was on the trajectory to get? The best way I can explain it is this: sometimes the clarity of arrival shows you exactly where you need to go next. Reaching a peak doesn’t mean I have to stay there. This time, it means I am finally stable enough to jump.

This is a jump. A real one into uncertainty, into my own terms, into the terrifying and necessary project of figuring out what comes next without a predetermined answer waiting for me. I don’t have a neat plan, but I do have a direction… a feeling… enough trust in myself, earned over eleven years at PSU, to believe that it’s enough to start with.

Before I say goodbye though, I need to talk about the room I walked into yesterday.

This week is the last week I will get to see my full team before everyone breaks for summer. Like every year, we organized our annual end of year potluck. This time though, my team organized me a farewell party during that get-together. I was surprised when I walked in to see more than just my direct team. I saw my professors, women I sat in front of as a student, hanging on to their words, wondering if I would ever know half of what they knew. Women I had worked alongside until the late hours of the night, laughing over shared frustrations and small victories. Women who became my friends somewhere along the way. Others too, people from the broader team, colleagues I had crossed paths with over the years… and one woman, a faculty member I had never formally met before, but who I always made sure to say good morning to every single day as we crossed each other in the hallway over the past two years. Just a smile, just a good morning, just a the small and reliable warmth of starting my day with a very small act of kindness. She came. To say goodbye to me.

When I realized the party was for me, really a send-off for me, a room full of brilliant and hardworking women who had taken enough time and care out of their incredibly busy schedules to celebrate me specifically… I cried. I looked around at every face in that room and felt with a fullness I don’t yet have the words for how extraordinary it is to be known. To be seen. To have built something real enough that people want to mark the moment I say goodbye.

I came home and opened the box of notes they had given me. Cards, sticky notes, and messages… formal and informal, both completely precious. Inside jokes I thought no one else remembered. Memories I hadn’t thought about in years. Good luck wishes that felt like they came from a place of real belief, not obligation. Reading through them last night was like holding a small archive of a life I built for myself at PSU. Evidence, written in two dozen different handwritings, that I had been present for something that mattered.

PSU, you gave me so much more than a degree. You have given me a craft and a sense of what I am capable of. You gave me mentors who became colleagues who became people I genuinely love. You gave me the confidence that only comes from doing hard things and failing, but continuing anyway. You gave me the space to grow so slowly that I almost didn’t notice it until I looked back and realized I am no way near the same person that walked in your doors for the first time at eighteen with a plan to get out as quickly as I can.

It’s time to say goodbye now. I am leaving, finally, really leaving. I am keeping my head high and taking the leap, because that’s how you taught me to deal with the hardest parts of life. Eleven years in a place like this either breaks you or builds you into someone ready for whatever comes next. I think, and hope, that I am the latter kind.

Thank you for the halls I walked through a thousand times. Thank you for the classrooms where I sat, then stood, then led. Thank you for bringing me the women who shaped me, challenged me, and celebrated me. Thank you for being, in every version and definition of the word, home.

I don’t know what comes next yet for me, but I know who I will be when I get there, and a lot of that is thanks to you.

With all my love and gratitude, always…

Dima

“How are you doing that?” she said.

I looked at her, “Doing what?”

“Typing that fast? You weren’t looking, none of it is wrong?”

Reader, I did not know how to explain that I have not really looked at a keyboard since 2005. That looking at a keyboard would feel as strange and effortful to me as looking at my own two feet while walking. I am, very embarrassingly, a creature built for this.

I learned how to type in the first grade. Those colorful iMacs of the early 2000s filled my school’s computer lab, and we’d spend a couple hours a week typing away on a program with some sort of animated animal that cheered you on when you got it all correct. I was 6 or 7, and was extremely serious about maintaining that record.

For all I knew then, world domination was at stake. I practiced and practiced and practiced, until I made my first email and logged into MSN Messenger for the first time. That was the true training.

If you weren’t there, I cannot fully convey to you the pressure that was the MSN era. You had, at any given moment, four conversations going on at the same time, a carefully curated display name (think ¯`·.¸¸.-> °º ĎÍᲝД º° <-.¸¸.·´¯), and a snarky and/or cringy away message that was essentially a signal of your personality broadcast to everyone you knew from school. The stakes were objectively zero, but they felt, subjectively, infinite.

Speed was survival. If you typed too slowly, the conversation moved on without you. You became the person whose messages arrived three exchanges too late, and the joke you LOLed had already been buried. I refused to be that person. Refused.

So I typed. And typed. And typed. MSN turned into BBM, which then turned into Twitter and WhatsApp. Thousands of words a day, none of them important, all of them formative. My fingers learned the keyboard the way a pianist learns scales. Doing it until thinking became unnecessary.

Back at my desk, Linda was still watching me type with the expression of someone watching a magician. Delighted, and still waiting for an answer.

“I guess I just grew up online?” I said, unsure how to explain that I am a late-stage millennial who probably did spend a little too much time in front of a screen. It made me laugh to myself a little. I’ve never had to explain what seemed like a basic motor skill to me before.

She nodded slowly. This was the first time it registered to me that I was working with people who had been in college before I was even born. They probably learned how to type on typewriters and did most of their schooling without devices to support them. She left then, but I sat with that for quite a bit of time.

The thing is, I never really thought of typing as a skill. It was just a thing I did. Automatic, constant, unremarkable, normal. It took Linda’s gasp to remind me that it had ever been learned at all.

Somewhere between the animated animal and the BBM away messages, something got wired into my hands that I no longer need to account for. A hundred thousand trivial conversations that built something.

The internet, for all its chaos, turned a generation of us into very fast typists with excellent accuracy and very complicated feelings about the early 2000s.

However… There are specific things, very cursed things, that short-circuit whatever politeness filter I have spent the past few years carefully constructing. Things that make me think about whether there’s enough time and if this person is worth the investment. Things that I hear and try very hard not to let them get under my skin.

But enough is enough.

“That’s not a real word.”

Real, according to whom? The dictionary? Great.

Grab a snack. This one is going to take a while.

Let’s talk about what a dictionary actually is, because I think there is a major, foundational misunderstanding of what dictionaries do. The answer to this question is going to reframe everything you know about words.

Dictionaries, at least reputable ones, are records of how language is actually used. They’re descriptive, not prescriptive. They don’t decide what words are real; they document words that have already become real through the process of people using them, which is the only process that has ever made any word real in the entire history of human language. Selfie was not a real word until it needed a word for taking a photo of yourself using a handheld device. Or better yet, let’s examine a more “real” word for those of you still unconvinced. Nauseous, at one point in time, meant causing nausea. Now, we’d say nauseating, and would use nauseous to mean feeling nausea instead. Does that discount the meaning of the word? Is it any less real?

Whatever word you think is not real was invented using perfectly standard word formation processes that have been in use in all languages for centuries. Simple morphology. What I think most non-linguists struggle with is the concept that language changes, as it has been doing continuously, since language first began. Without language change, we would be seeing a lot more language death.

“Kids today are ruining the language.”

People have been saying that young people are ruining the language for as long as there have been social civilizations. This is not a contemporary phenomenon. This is not a social media phenomenon. This is a long-running, recurring, thoroughly documented human tendency to perceive the linguistic innovations of the generation behind you as degradation rather than change. Every generation will always believe that the langauge they use is at its peak, and whatever they’re seeing happen with kids is the decline happening in real time. Every generation is wrong, and language keeps going.

Here is what is actually happening when young people change language: they are doing what humans have always done, which is using language creatively, indexing their identity and social group through speech, innovating new forms to fill communicative gaps, and occasionally doing things that will eventually make it into the dictionary and then become the new standard that the next generation will be accused of ruining.

The funniest example of this is the word literally. Many language “purists” will try to argue that using literally for figurative emphasis is a signal of a dumb millennial.

Well… F. Scott Fitzgerald used it in The Great Gatsby in 1925:

“He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.”

Need something older? Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1885):

[The Fourways] was literally teeming, stratified, with the shades of human groups…”

Older than that? The time the poet Alexander Pope wrote a letter to Henry Cromwell in 1708:

“Every day with me is literally another yesterday, for it is exactly the same.”

Need I say more?

“English is just more logical than other languages.”

I hear this one a lot, from native speakers of English who don’t speak any other languages and from Arabs who want to discount it as an “easy” and “stupid” language.

To the first group, I’ll say this: of course English feels logical to English speakers. It’s roughly the same reason our hometowns feel like the normal size for a city to be. Familiarity is doing a lot of the work here, and that is worth an internal examination. More broadly, every language is logical. That is the whole point. Languages are rule-governed systems that evolved to do exactly what their speakers need them to do. What seems illogical to you usually means that whatever other language uses a different logic than the one you already know. Which is, and I cannot stress this enough, a you problem and not a language problem.

The second group just needs to rethink what it is they’re calling logical or simple, exactly. Is it logical in terms of phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence? No, because English spells night, knee, and know the way it does, and that in no way is logical. Logical in terms of morphological regularity? English has an insane number of irregular verbs and exceptions that the Finnish grammatical cases (15 of them, in case you were wondering) that create a level of internal consistency that English could only ever dream of having. Logical in terms of syntactic clarity? Compare it to Mandarin, which expresses tense, aspect, and evidentiality through contexts and particles that are extraordinarily precise once you understnad that system.

If anything, English is an insanely complex language with a million different exceptions to consider.

In conclusion…

I could go on for so much longer. There’s so much nonsense out there that I feel very strongly about, particularly now that people rely way too much on AI to do their thinking for them. There are entire subfields I haven't mentioned, phenomena I haven't named, examples I've been saving, but I am aware that not everyone finds this as urgent as I do, and at some point, this would stop being a post and become a hostage situation. So I’ll spare you…

For now.

If I’m being honest, that’s my default. I don’t like the attention if it doesn’t feel big enough to warrant it. Keep writing, keep going, don’t make it a whole thing. But I looked at the number and felt something, so I’m making it a whole thing. A small win is still a win.

100 people subscribe to my Substack. Some of you I know well. Some I’ve met once or twice. Some of you are names I don’t recognize, from places I’ve never been, and I find that both strange and wonderful. You found your way here somehow, read something, and decided to stick around for more.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I’ve written about this at length before, so I won’t bore you. It’s just always been how I make sense of things. I’ve written through good years and bad ones, through phases where I shared everything and phases where I wrote only for myself. The only rule I’ve ever set for myself is to be honest. True to what I actually think, what I actually notice, what I actually find funny or weird or worth sitting with.

So thank you for reading. Thank you for the messages some of you have sent, for forwarding things to people you thought might like them, for showing up week after week. It means more than I can ever express.

As for what comes next... I hope there’s always more to write about. I hope I keep meeting people I wouldn’t have met otherwise. I hope I’m happy, and I hope you’ll stick around while I figure out this thing called life.

100 feels like a good place to say I see you, and I’m glad you’re here.

Until next time.

I have a slight tickle in my throat. Probably nothing. I should not be getting sick. I am disciplined, and I take my daily vitamins occasionally when I remember they exist. I will be fine.

I googled my symptoms anyway, just to be sure.

I have either a mild cold or, according to page three of the results, I may never speak again.

Saturday, 9:07am.

The tickle has invited friends. My body is sending signals I am choosing to ignore. My Oura ring is claiming minor signs. I have things to do today. Work. A life. A whole carefully maintained schedule that I am not prepared to abandon.

I take two tylenol and announce to no one in particular that I am fine.

Saturday, 3:10pm.

I am not fine.

The fever has arrived. It did not knock. It simply moved in, rearranged the furniture of my entire body, and started burning everything down from the inside.

I remove everything from my reclaim to-do list and justify it to myself by saying “something came up.” The something is me. I am the thing that came up.

Saturday, 6:32pm.

I am horizontal. I have been horizontal for three hours. I have watched four episodes of a show I cannot name because I was not really watching it. I was present in front of it. There is a difference.

I also, inexplicably, started reorganising my calendar. Sick and still trying to be productive. This is a character flaw I will examine later, when I am well enough to be ashamed of it.

I ate half a cracker and wash it down with a bottle of water. I consider this a meal.

Saturday, 8:17pm.

Normal people are out right now. Doing Saturday things. Eating dinner at tables, vertical, like mammals with working spines.

I am still horizontal.

Saturday, 11:57pm.

I have begun to have opinions about the ceiling.

The ceiling, for what it’s worth, is fine. White. Noncommittal. It offers nothing but also asks for nothing, which I respect deeply at this hour.

Sunday, 1:42am.

My body aches in places I did not know could hurt from a flu. My left elbow? Why is my left elbow doing this? What did I ever do to my left elbow?

I also just remembered I have a full week ahead of me. I stare at the ceiling some more. The ceiling remains unbothered.

Sunday, 3:31am.

I am awake. There is no reason to be awake. My body has simply decided that sleep is a privilege I have not yet earned.

I schedule an email to call in sick, then continue to stare into nothingness in the darkness of my bedroom.

In a moment of delirious ambition, I make a mental list of everything I will do once I wake up. Lesson plan. Finalize schedules. Reply to emails promptly like a person with her life together. Deep clean my closet.

I will do none of these things. But right now, at 3am, burning up and slightly losing my mind, the list feels very real.

Sunday, 9:14am.

I have survived the night. Barely. At my core, I am a different woman than the one who woke up yesterday with a tickle in her throat. That woman was naive. That woman had plans.

I sent one work email from bed. It said “Will follow up soon.” This is a lie I told in good faith.

Sunday, 12:48pm.

The work guilt has arrived.

I am lying here, shivering and still horizontal, while my phone quietly fills with notifications. A meeting I should be in. A thread I should be following. A message that ends with “let me know your thoughts!” words that have never once meant anything good was waiting inside.

I turn on my iMac. I stare at it. I turn off my iMac.

I tell myself this is a boundary. It is not a boundary. It is a flu.

Sunday, 2:16pm.

The fever broke sometime this afternoon.

I feel, cautiously, like a person again.

Not a good person. Not a fully operational person. But a person who can sit upright and form sentences and briefly consider washing her hair, which puts me well ahead of where I was at 3am, composing ambitious to-do lists in the dark.

Sunday, 4:48pm.

I’ve been sitting up reading a book, which feels like a major achievement and I will be treating it as one.

I am going to pretend the last fourty-five hours were a minor administrative hiccup in an otherwise continuous life.

The cracker incident will not be mentioned again.