L.A. heat is known to be dry. It beats down and blinds you. But this week, it’s been humid. I know humidity. I know humidity from the East Coast to India. Thunderstorms, mosquitoes droning, those damn cicadas. I thought they were supposed to come out every thirteen years, until I started seeing them every time July came around.

So I look outside my window expecting to see the sky in its usual blue (so bright it almost hurts), but instead, I see clouds. I leave the blinds open and sit cross-legged in front of my air conditioning unit like I do most days. I take cold showers for my newly dyed hair and to cool down before bed. At night, I lie in a state of undress (while remaining socially acceptable, though no one is around)—on top of, not under, my blanket. I sleep somehow and wake up sweating. The aforementioned air conditioning unit is not in my bedroom, but I can’t find it in myself to sleep anywhere but my own bed.

The heat is oppressive, but I recognize that some of this inconvenience is self-inflicted. I could sleep in my living room in front of the air conditioning. I get to work from home whenever I want. If anything, it is easiest for me to push the heat away, and yet, I still allow it to permeate into my lifestyle and throw it off balance.

The weather is not the only thing throwing me off balance. I keep feeling the way I did in high school. Like I was then, I am home, online, in my head, and parasocial—all four of these things in excess. There is a causal relationship somewhere between these things, but the directionality is uncertain. The anxiety that characterized my college years is washed away by the sadness that characterized my high school years. Whether I can still call it depression—dysthymia, maybe—I’m not sure, but I try my best not to depend on a diagnosis anymore.

What I know is this: I have been catching back up with the celebrities that I cared about so much when I was a teenager. I am reckoning with the fact that while their words supported me so much then, they are strangers to me who have disappointed me and will again. They are not immune to the distance that wealth and success can place between a person and the real world. I still dance to their songs. I laugh at their shows. I lean on their lyrics once again with the knowledge that it will never feel the same as it did years ago, but that I am allowing myself this indulgence as comfort when I need it. This part of my life makes me feel so much younger than I am, but I realize I am now the same age as one of them was when I first started caring about them eight years ago. I am 21. He was 21 then. I find myself getting genuinely, embarrassingly, emotional about his upcoming 29th birthday. There goes that parasocial feeling again.

In The Holdovers, Paul says he dreams of writing a monograph, but not a full book. Mary says, “You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?” I am trying to remember if I had a “whole dream” growing up. There is a video I filmed the night before I moved to California, detailing my desires and questions for the future, but I wouldn’t say it included dreams. I don’t think I have ever allowed myself to dream unrestrained. To dream unrestrained, to want something badly with no promise of getting it, scares me. That being said, I feel largely, and maybe controversially, apathetic about whether my dreams (even the fragmented, restrained ones) come true. I find that, while I need desire to avoid stagnation, I feel a lot less attachment to the outcome of said desires. What I mean is, the act of wanting something is more necessary than the act of having it. Much of what I have now I never wanted, and much of what I wanted I never got. I am more than okay with this.

Well, regardless of the dreams I may or may not have, what I do have is a full and complete life. I spend my days with my friends who know me better than I know myself. I play my music loud, and I dance. I know myself better each day. I often find myself still miserable and undone by inconveniences—like a heat wave—but I make my greatest effort to be resilient despite them. I may not be a very happy person now, or maybe ever, but I keep busy and I keep moving.

Feeling like I am a teenager again has made me more existential in a way that has made me sadder, but also more creative. Reader, that’s good news for you: I have a desire to write again, to edit videos, and to create! Please allow me to milk this desire while I have it.

Other than the heat-induced despair, August has given me so much: red hair, a BTS concert, many good eats, and a lot of movies. I hope the end of August treats you all well, and that we can welcome September (autumn, a new school year, etc.) with open arms!

Love,
Aarushi

I always tell people that I don’t believe that I can fairly say that I live in Los Angeles, and broadly, in California. Of the past three years, I have spent two here (segmented by school breaks). I have a lease here in my name. I just received the California Climate Credit on my gas bill. Yet, it feels wrong to say I live in Los Angeles. Most of my time is spent at the university. I don’t have family here. I don’t vote here. Most of my friends here are not from here. While I enjoy my life here, I don’t feel belonging in California, and most importantly, I think that’s how I should be feeling.

My feeling of estrangement may come down to transaction. I feel like I have taken so much from the state. What have I given it back? Have I made my greatest effort to learn from it? To know its history? To engage with the community here? I wonder if people who grew up in the suburbs of L.A. County feel this way too, or if I’m just fixating on my position as a transplant from the east coast. Do I owe L.A.? Do I owe it for its coastlines, museums, and culture? I feel as though it took me until my last few months in Los Angeles to truly appreciate it.

In the span of five days in March, I was able to see so much more of the city than I had seen in the years prior. We toured around Hollywood Hills (excruciating), visited centers that support the unhoused (emotional), learned about the new Metro projects (exciting), and danced in Olvera Street (exhilarating!). I learned from my classmates who grew up in L.A. and watched as they coolly guided us around. We visited the village springs of the Tongva people, and we met with a number of community and civic leaders. I felt so, so integrated with Los Angeles that week.

I wished so badly that I had done all of these things sooner and been more proactive with my time. It’s not like I was a recluse my first two years, but I think my idea of “exploring Los Angeles” meant spending 2 hours on the bus to get a trendy $9 iced latte (and don’t get me wrong—I love both public transit and an iced latte), but I did not realize how much was at my fingertips.

Furthermore, I wish I had pursued more reading and films about the city. A number of the films I watch may happen to be set in L.A., but I never sought them out with the lens of understanding the myth and the history of one of the most famed cities in the world. I’m currently in a class that has prescribed me a number of such media. I’m reading Babitz and Didion and watching Sunset Boulevard, and learning that no feeling I’ve had about this city has been unique.

Now, it is the end of July, and I write to you as someone who lives full-time in Los Angeles. While every single job I applied to was east, the one that I got was the one that kept me west. After realizing I would be staying, the rest of the spring swept me up: moving, graduating, going back home, going abroad, and finally being dropped back in L.A. the day before I began working full-time. The adjustment back has honestly been quite horrible, but it does get a little bit better everyday. All of a sudden, my life has become outstandingly ordinary. I am, like everyone else, just an adult. I work and I cook and I clean and I go to bed and I do it all again the next day (insert laundry and taxes quote here). While I have handled every transition in my life with grace and competency, I do so with a huge amount of cowardice and fear. I feel unsteady and scared and sometimes unqualified to be where I am. That being said, I have an inkling that what might help me the most these upcoming months is a return to form.

Writing this has felt incredibly difficult because I feel like I can’t express myself as well as I used to, but I’m sending this out as proof of life and of change. Happy almost 5th anniversary of Leaving Behind Gray. Here’s to growing up!

Love,
Aarushi

On February 13th, it rained, and I watched Saving Face over a bowl of hot ramen. I found myself thinking about lovelessness again. I tried not to let the fact that I had never been pursued bother me, but I also felt that, at my age, girls were supposed to be the ones with options. Girls were supposed to be able to pick and choose what, and who, they wanted. I wondered if my choice to ‘plan’ love for later years may have just been a deflection of my inability to attract it.

Maybe I mistook the absence of physical warmth for the absence of social warmth, or maybe I used spontaneity to push back at my sophomore slump. But, in a sudden burst, I scrapped my four-year plan to find love. It was stupid to believe it would ever find me if I didn’t even try to look for it first. I took this idea to one of my close friends, someone who embraces risk and rejects embarrassment in a way I can only envy. He, of course, encouraged me to do it.

So, to hell with the plan, and watch out world! I downloaded Hinge.

My first match was with a boy who had a family of raccoons in his backyard. He wished me happy Valentine’s day (as it was, then, the 14th) after we had shared a total of four texts, and I got icked out. One of my matches felt more like a carbon copy than a counterpart of mine. One unsuccessfully tried to convince me he was a Mormon, and as stupid as it was, it really did make me laugh. People complimented me, and for once in my life, I felt pursued.

After a week or two, the likes plateaued. I checked Hinge as much as my other social media accounts, seeking the instant but meaningless gratification of a like. It was scary how quickly the app took control of my attention. Every fear I had about Hinge and its users was true: I became the one mindlessly swiping. I became a player in the dating game, knowing that there was only one winner—the company. I knew the app prioritized money-making over matchmaking, but this awareness couldn’t change how plainly horrible it made me feel. Every like I didn’t get made me more self-critical. I have faith in my intelligence and kindness, so as the interest I received on the app dwindled to near-zero, I scrambled to figure out what it was that could be wrong with me. Every question led me to only one answer: my appearance. 

Within weeks of downloading Hinge, doubt crept into every moment where I felt beautiful. Maybe I felt pretty, but surely I wasn’t actually pretty. And if I wasn’t actually pretty, then it doesn’t make sense to artificially feel that I was. I second-guessed every picture I took, every compliment I got, and every look in the mirror. I felt permanently, unfixably ugly. 

I was miserable, and I was also keenly aware of how stupid my misery was. I knew my experience was nothing personal. I knew that it might be different in a different city, at a different age, or in a different month of the year. Yet, despite everything I knew, the fact of the matter was that a single app had dragged my self-esteem down to the worst it had ever been. 

The truth is, I didn’t actually mind how many Hinge likes I had as much as how many I was supposed to have. My female friends on Hinge talk about all the weird messages they receive, the ugly guys that like them, and reaching the match limit. Women online talk about how the gender ratio on dating apps, heterosexually, favors women over men. Women attract, and men chase. Women get to pick, and men have to be picked. That is what I was taught, what I expected, and selfishly, what I wanted.

A dating app ruined my self-image, but I was already fragilely confident, risk-averse, and sensitive. I was the perfect person for Hinge to hurt. I know some, thicker-skinned than me, who can stay on, and some, luckier than me, who meet their matches instantly. I also know some, smarter than me, who know better than to download it in the first place.

Three months have passed since I first downloaded Hinge, and despite every way that it hurts me, I am still on it. It has made a space for itself in the group of apps I check daily, and my self-esteem still shifts as a function of my success on the app. I take pictures of myself and see them through a lens of desirability and attractiveness. It’s embarrassing, really: me, a self-proclaimed opponent of online dating, joining an app and getting hurt. It’s like jumping off a cliff and feigning surprise when you drop, like crashing on the ground and ignoring the blood— like healing, then jumping again.

There is one month until my senior year of college. Like every meeting, lecture, party, and flight, I planned the right time to fall in love. What I wasn’t able to plan for was the fallout.

I wrote this in May for my dear friend Alex’s literary magazine and just now got around to sharing it here. My thoughts and feelings on the subject have shifted slightly in the past two months, but I have not edited the essay since then in order to honor the complexity and extremity of my feelings at the time. I have gone back and forth many times on whether to post this as it feels like putting the most insecure part of myself online for show. So, if you have any thoughts or impressions, please comment them to make this feel less isolating and lost-to-the-void :) 

This summer, I’ve been occupied with doing research, cooking, battling East Coast humidity, dwelling on the fact that I graduate in eleven months, and watching the new season of Love Island USA (which does not at all help with the longing). I’ve also added some of my recent rotations to the playlist.

I hope everyone is doing well, and thank you for reading!

Love,
Aarushi

The last time I posted was two weeks before I began my second year at university, and I ended that post with “#10: I will never write again if I don’t allow myself to write poorly.” Guess who hasn’t written since? While my expectations for myself have far exceeded what I’m able to produce, there are other reasons I haven’t written recently.

I feel like I have been in a transformative time of my life where I know that I do not know anything. I cannot be sure of anything, and I certainly cannot write about anything with full confidence the way I used to. I used to write almost as if I had a secret that no one else knew. It took just one experience for me to extract some cosmic, definite truth about life. It snowed, and immediately, I had something philosophical to write about. It has snowed many times since then, but now, I simply look at the snow and admire it in silence.

It is with both contempt and envy that I look back on myself as a writer from 2021 to 2023. What gave me the confidence to write so decisively about love, friendship, and the best way to move through life? What qualified me? When I talk about this with my friends, I joke that it’s like the lyric in “Nothing New” by Taylor Swift, asking how a person can know everything at 18 but nothing at 22. 

Anyway, it’s not to say that I’m deeply unhappy or unconfident right now. I feel comfortable in the fact that I am not too confident in anything. I try to learn without feeling the need to make a stance. In a way, maybe, I have mellowed out. I put my full effort and ambition into my coursework so I can become an intelligent and compassionate practitioner one day. I am comfortable in my position as a student not only of my professors, but of the world.

There are many moments when I wanted to write in the last five months. I wanted to write after the U.S. election, after a road trip, after every movie I saw, and after the fires in Los Angeles. I wanted to write when it rained horribly just a month after the fires. I wanted to write after I wore my heart on my sleeve and took a risk I wouldn’t have been brave enough to take a year ago. And in every single one of these moments, I realized, instead, that I have nothing to say about these moments that needs to be shared publicly. I experienced them, and that was enough. 

For a while, this newsletter was my Thing. It was my point of pride, and when I wrote less, it felt like I had nothing to show for myself. I used to consider my writing something that connected me with people, but I quickly realized that my writing was what I used to ‘prove myself’ to them—as if I were a peacock attempting courtship with my colorful feathered tail. After four years of writing this newsletter, the task of writing the next one hung over me like a burden. I eventually realized that, for something I do not get paid for, it really should not make me feel this guilty to not write. 

So: this is not a resignation, a breakup, or a hiatus. Instead, I am allowing myself to write when I want to. This could mean that you won’t hear from me for months, and this could also mean that you will hear from me every two weeks next year (as I reach the end of my college years, it’s highly likely that I start feeling like I know everything again). Here is my Letterboxd if you wish to microdose my writing in the form of shabby film reviews. 

I hope everyone is doing well, and I hope everyone also knows that there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve not thought about this newsletter and of my readers. Having an audience is a gift! There are so many things I want to urge everyone to do, but they all come down to learning: in an administration and global order that thrives and profits off of our ignorance, one of the most powerful things we can do is know. It is necessary to know about public health, queer and Black history, resistance movements, the struggles of peoples outside our own, and everything that the current administration seeks to defund and destroy. The list is endless. I can only ask that we do not look away and become complacent.

Thank you for reading, as always!

With love,
Aarushi

Well! I guess I’m back. I hope everyone’s doing well :) 

Updated Playlist

Love,
Aarushi.

I’m not calling our generation lazy (I actually just watched this video that changed my perspective on that word). But between growing up alongside technology and basically missing out on two years of school because of a pandemic, I do believe that we have been dealt a really poor hand when it comes to being focused. It doesn’t help that it is impossible to live our life without the internet: All of my coursework is online. What’s for dinner? Check online. Want to watch a movie? Stream it online. Want to read the news? Read it online. Want to listen to music? You guessed it! Find it online! I’m not implying that these tasks don’t have analog counterparts—they do. I own a number of CDs and DVDs, but both they and the objects to play them on are at my parents’ house, where I don’t live for 75% of the year. I have a physical copy of my course reading, but my assignments based on it are due digitally. I care too much about reading news from more than one source to read a newspaper (I also don’t know where to get one anymore). The loss of third places is nothing new, and I cannot explore the few that we have without spending at least fifteen dollars. And to have fifteen dollars to spend, I need to have a job. But guess what? My job is also online. Are you sick of this? Do you want therapy? Well you’re out of luck, because that’s probably also online.

It feels embarrassing not to know how people did things before technology. Driving with a physical map is the most stressful thing I could imagine, but is propping my phone up on the dash much different? I recently started penpalling with a friend in an effort to be more offline, but I still rely on her texts of “WE JUST GOT A LETTER” to confirm that it was received. And when my letter takes ten days to deliver instead of the usual seven, I begin to wonder what people did if they couldn’t text their friend to see if the letter was received or lost in transit. I call my parents everyday, and I think of what my grandfather said to me when I committed to college. He told me about moving to boarding school at fifteen, when all he could do to stay in touch was send infrequent letters. He told me how lucky I was. It still sticks with me. How lucky I am.

The internet and technology are so, so deeply intertwined with my own life, and it scares me to say that I don’t really know what or who I am without them. Even the word internet has been shifting from a capitalized, proper noun to a non-capitalized generic term. If everything shut down one day (which is not an impossibility), I don’t know what I would have to show for myself. Sometimes I wish I could be mysterious and off-the-grid, that I could go back in time to when I first downloaded Google Plus (or Google Hangouts or whatever I was on in fourth grade) and destroy my account. But then I remember that I met my best friend online, and I’d honestly rather know her and have my brain rotted by the internet than to not know her at all.

I’m not sure that I ever would’ve cared about writing without having the internet to read the work of others before mine, and I really don’t think I would’ve moved across the country for university without having the internet to stay in touch with everyone I grew up with. It’s been four years since the pandemic started and technology shoved its way into every crevice of my life. It’s been one year since I got into UCLA, and I have mainly the internet to thank for convincing me to apply in the first place. It’s today, and I wouldn’t be able to share any of these thoughts with you without such a platform to post it on.

What I mean is, I am a living, breathing, walking stereotype of my generation, and I don’t really want to be any other way. There are healthy and ethical ways to interact with technology (do not ask me about AI as I will explode on the spot), and it is our responsibility to learn how to do so. My journey to slow down, engage with long-form content, and shift certain aspects of my life offline can coexist with my journey to grow alongside the internet, familiarize myself with every cool new thing it can do, and not disparage a system that my peers and I are so squarely at the intersection of creating and experiencing. What a joy!

Related Reading:

1. "learned helplessness" & the tech literacy crisis | Internet Analysis

2. we used to say BRB. now we just live here. | learning-loving and meaning-making

3. It's not video. On AI "video" and post-cinema. | Thomas Flight - Field Notes
   

Random Websites (to spend time on more than the standard ten):

1. The Useless Web

   1. Mother of all niche websites

2. NYT Games

   1. Swellgarfo (DIY Connections!)

3. Depths of Wikipedia (@depthsofwiki on Twitter/X)

4. Substack (!)

   1. Recent reads: learning-loving and meaning-making, Chloé in Newsletter, My Curious Wishes, pasta social club

5. Framed

6. Letterboxd

7. JSTOR

8. Library of Babel

9. Google Arts and Culture 

10. Taylor’s Version

Hope everyone is doing well! As ever, thank you for reading.

Love,

Aarushi

I’ll spoil the ending: I never was able to pin down what it was. But over time, I fell in love with the album. It was my gateway into what I used to overgeneralize as “old music”. Now that I’m in college, my Hello Kitty CD player and At Last! collect dust in my childhood bedroom. Still, I often listen to the album online because it reminds me of home. It reminds me of that friend, and it reminds me of every year these songs accompanied me through. 

I think there is so much to admire about this album, and today, I want to share just some of those things with you. Like I did with Indigo over a year ago, I want to analyze not only the songs, but the artist, the genre, and the atmosphere that brought this album to life. If you are so inclined, I encourage you to listen to it as or after you read.

To me, this album explores loneliness. It yearns, it prays, it mourns, it celebrates, and it loves. James’ voice lends itself beautifully to these intentions. It is impossible to discuss this album without talking about its titular track, “At Last”. “At Last” is a musical standard, originally performed by Glenn Miller for the film Sun Valley Serenade. James’ rendition is slow and sweeping, with strings accompanying her. She plays with dynamics: sometimes, she is timid and longing, and other times, she is loud and powerful. She sings of finally falling in love, of her “lonely days” ending and entering a sweet, new phase of life.

Moving a few tracks up, “A Sunday Kind Of Love” is perhaps the second most well-known track from the album. This is another jazz standard, originally produced in 1946 by Claude Thornhill. In efforts to cement her as a master of many genres, James’ version has more of a pop tinge to it–on record and in some live performances, she is accompanied by saxophone, bass, flute, drums, guitars, and another sweeping string arrangement. It’s worth noting that, though these tracks are more soul and R&B, James evokes most classic characteristics of jazz in her performance: she repeats words and phrases, creates new runs, verbally interjects with adlibs, corporally embodies the tune, and initiates a call-and-response with her audience. This genre-bending was what made her such a powerhouse. Even her most lonely tracks are transformed into something exciting that the audience can actively engage with, not just sit back and watch.

As you might have picked up on, a large amount of songs in this album are covers, or as they’re known in the musical world, standards. Most commonly found in jazz and rock, standards are “reinterpreting a tune previously recorded by another artist”. In jazz, many of these standards came out of Tin Pan Alley, and it seems that different versions of the same song don’t share much more than lyrics and a vague semblance of melody. Look at “A Sunday Kind of Love”: Thornhill’s version puts more emphasis on the long i sounds. It feels a bit held-back, but this is how it stands out. It reminds me of the kind of yearning that is passive, making yourself physically small but feeling huge waves of emotion nonetheless. On the other hand, James’ version feels declarative. Her voice takes up space in a room. Even through a recording, it reminds me of yelling out to the world, claiming those huge waves of feeling as your own. Back to the standards–these two melodies of these two renditions aren’t that similar. Thornhill’s version has more improvisation and plays with dynamics and speed. James’ version maintains a more consistent, pop-like rhythm, likely a nod to the jazz, soul, R&B, and pop fusion of genres James was encouraged to embody.

One of my favorite standards off the album is “I Just Want To Make Love To You”, originally written by Willie Dixon. I find this song interesting because lyrically, it responds to its original. In Dixon’s version, he sings, “I don’t want you to wash my clothes / I don’t want you to keep you home”, and in James’ version, she sings, “All I want to do is wash your clothes / I don’t want to keep you indoors”. It speaks to the malleability of a jazz standard–some of the best renditions riff off of the core themes and sounds of a standard. No rendition is the same–lyrically, sonically, or melodically. Something else that stands out to me about this song is that this (alongside “Tough Mary”) is one of the most upbeat, brazen tracks on the album. Typical sweeping strings are replaced by a more bouncy arrangement. The horn solo, combined with her powerful delivery, veers the song into rock-and-roll territory, which James was also known for.

To speak generally, I imagine how difficult this period of time must have been for her. She was 23 when this, her first album, came out in the midst of the Civil Rights Era. Black women then (and now) struggled under the cultural phenomenon of the “exceptional woman”, where only one, outstanding “female creative voice … survives and earns a place in the historical narrative.” This, combined with the already tense atmosphere for Black women in America, fostered an unnecessary sense of competition among musicians. Etta James herself did not experience her highest level of success until the 1990s, three decades after this album came out. However, with a successful career spanning six decades, it can be argued that she was able to push back against racial barriers and use music as a unifier.

Here are some relevant links if you’re interested in learning more about her and her work:

• 1995 interview

• Etta James - At Last, Trust In Me & A Sunday Kind Of Love - Live Montreux 1977

• Tough Love: Etta James

Happy March! The playlist is here, as ever. Thank you for reading. 

Love,
Aarushi.

“Who am I?” What a question! If you say you can answer it, I don’t believe you. How can you describe yourself? These days, I find that rather than trying to figure out who I am, I am figuring out who I’m not. When you meet person after person after person (some of them only once, but some of them for as long as they’ll let you), you pick up on traits that you don’t like. Some may call it being a hater—I call it being observant!

I became aware of this observance (haha) during one of my philosophy lectures. In reading Plato’s Republic, we discussed the concept of definition. How can you define something abstract? The professor gave us two methods: demarcation and description. Demarcation is drawing boundaries around a concept, differentiating what is versus what isn’t. For non-abstract concepts, think of it like this. To define a tree, you can describe what is a tree (evergreen, palm, cedar) versus what isn’t (daffodil, water bottle, e-mail). On the other hand, description is detailing what is included in the concept, identifying its significant traits. This is your dictionary definition. But what about the things you can’t define so easily? Like the self?

I don’t think I can describe myself. Applications ask me to prove myself, but it always feels like I’m lying. I describe an ideal version of myself—a version that could exist if I gathered all my unused potential and made something out of it. My real self is lackluster and difficult to define. If description is bleak, maybe demarcation is the answer. Figuring out which categories I fit into and which I don’t is a more apt method of definition, and it’s a process made easier by the sheer amount of people I meet everyday. 

Back to my haterism observance, when I meet people who carry qualities I don’t admire, I become more cognizant of how I carry that quality in myself. Fine-tuning my personality. In my head, it’s as if I am hidden in a big rock (a geode?). The more people I meet, the more I chip away at this rock. Slowly, I hope I will approach the real shape of myself.

As I write this, I wonder if this isn’t a process of discovery, but rather, formation. I came into writing this newsletter with the idea that I am on a journey to find myself among chaos, but maybe “finding myself” is a euphemism for “making myself”. It’s kinder to think of yourself as complete. Maybe, instead of a geode waiting to be found, I am a sculpture being shaped. Could that be so?

It brings to mind one of my favorite poems by Pat Schneider, “Instructions for the Journey”:

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.

And if all that fails,

wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

If it is not clear to you already, I can’t pin my thoughts down on this. My thoughts leave me before I can flesh them out, but maybe sharing this mess of ideas will bring some meaning to them. Ultimately, I do want to be able to define myself fully. But I am 18. Frontal lobe underdeveloped, teenage angst not yet off my shoulders. I cannot expect to be able to define what is still forming. Until I can, I’ll note down all the things I’m not.

Reader, I am confused. Writing has been a lot harder recently, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m disillusioned by university or if I’m just out of practice. I hope to make writing a higher priority this year. Speaking of… happy 2024! Thank you for sticking with me for so long. 

Good Things:

• Went to a local poetry reading with Monica Youn! 

• Saw Hasan Minhaj live :)

• Watching new movies, listening to new music, admiring new art, reading new essays. 

  • Movie: Mississippi Masala

  • Music: Hope Tala, Laufey, and Lamp 

  • Art: Molded Dish with an Allegory of Love

  • Essay: “What Does It Mean to Be Palestinian Now?”

Here is the updated Spotify playlist of recommendations. :) Stay safe, warm, dry, and happy. Thank you for reading.

Love,
Aarushi.

There’s been a trend on TikTok of people (girls, primarily) talking about all the wonderful things they get to do because their life did not end at seventeen. They talk about subtler joys, like watching TV with their partner, and louder joys, like going to law school. I’m not sure if feeling like the world is going to end at seventeen is as universal of an experience as the videos make it out to be, but I definitely remember feeling this way. I feel this way now sometimes, and honestly, I’m thinking the feeling will not have an age limit. But there is something unique about being seventeen, sitting on the edge of childhood and adulthood.

When I was seventeen, my emotions were too heavy for my body. I often reread my old diary entries, texts to friends, pieces of writing, and emails to counselors from the past three years. The world didn’t end when I was seventeen, but how did I make it through constantly feeling like it would? I’m not far enough from these experiences yet to tell you the answers, but I think a lot of being persistent is just staying afloat until you end up somewhere better. It’s passive, but often it is all we have the energy to do. And when you end up somewhere better, you’ll realize how much you are capable of doing beyond just staying afloat. 

I’m hiding what I really mean under metaphor because I’m scared the plain truth may be too blunt. The truth is, don’t die. Maybe you think that it’ll come for you and you won’t fight it, or that maybe you’ll make it happen yourself. The world is difficult, and convoluted, and terrible, but you are here anyways. You owe it to yourself to make use of this potential, to create friendships and accomplishments that outlive their circumstances. So much awaits you. So much becomes available to you when you grow older. Because the world will not end when you are seventeen. Because the world didn’t end when you were seventeen.

I am barely past seventeen, but I have so much I can tell the younger versions of myself about now, even when it seems minor to my current self. My nine-year-old self would be happy to know that I’m still friends with the girls I met in fourth grade, my twelve-year-old self would be happy to know that I’m taller now, and my fifteen-year-old self would be happy to know I ended up at a college that will support my future goals. Now, when the world feels like it’s going to end, I turn to my loved ones, to my music playlists, to the neighborhood roads, and to the movies for inspiration and comfort. I remind myself of how far I’ve come, and how much farther I can go. These days, I often think of that trend, of all the things these girls are able to do now that they’re older: coming home to a partner and a baby, going to graduate school, fulfilling childhood dreams, living in new cities, traveling, settling, loving. Couldn’t these things be mine too?

I’ll close with this poem, “To the Young Who Want to Die” by Gwendolyn Brooks. Often, while writing this, I wished this was my poem because it puts so simply what I’ve taken nearly seven hundred words to say.

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.

The gun will wait. The lake will wait.

The tall gall in the small seductive vial

will wait will wait:

will wait a week: will wait through April.

You do not have to die this certain day.

Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.

I assure you death will wait. Death has

a lot of time. Death can

attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is

just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;

can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.

Stay here--through pout or pain or peskyness.

Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.

Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

Good Things:

• The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Chappell Roan

• NYT Connections

• Fall quarter is over :):):)

• Noah Kahan

• Reuniting with hometown friends

• Updated Leaving Behind Gray playlist

I once again want to echo what I said about Palestine in the last post. On top of the resources listed there, here are some more I’ve found and engaged in since then.

• https://decolonizepalestine.com/

• https://bdsmovement.net/

• bit.ly/BayBridge78

• [US based] If you are also finding yourself increasingly dissatisfied with both parties and uncomfortable with the thought of giving your vote to either, I encourage you to check out https://nationalpopularvote.com and search for the state you are registered to vote in. This website will help you reach out to your legislators advocating for a national popular vote, strengthening the chances of a third party candidate in the presidential elections. 

Stay warm this winter.

Love,

Aarushi.

When I first read this interview in December of 2021, I remember feeling jealous of him. I am someone who is never not thinking. My internal monologue is multiple streams of thoughts overlapping and fighting for my attention; my attention, as a result, lands on nothing of substance. In the midst of that noise, all of my streams of thoughts had to do with some sort of insecurity, anxiety, or sadness.  Nothing was ever “right”.

But these days, I find that though I’m still thinking all the time, it’s not as serious. I think about what I’m eating for dinner, when my assignment is due, where that person with the cool outfit might be going. I’m not as plagued by my constant thoughts as I used to be. My brain wasn’t the antagonist, I learned, my distorted thought patterns were. 

Later in the interview:

The last few years have been intense for him. “It’s not that I don’t try hard or that I work less hard. I think I’ve learnt to come to terms with it more than when I was younger,” he reflects. Indeed, he has clearly gone through a change. The rapper Agust D, with his highly contagious pessimism and melancholy, is nowhere to be found. “My first mixtape was all about anger, but then everything was sorted out, right?” SUGA explains with a laugh. “I realised that I didn’t know who to be angry with anymore. Finally, I was able to look at myself. I’d been making a weapon out of anger and a sense of inferiority, but around 2018, my self-destructive rage slowly started to subside. I realised that I couldn’t channel creative energy through only those sorts of emotions any longer.”

Maybe I’m just healing. I always wonder if Los Angeles has, for lack of a better word, changed my vibe. Am I better here? More relaxed? More pretentious? I guess I’ll find out when I go back home, but I suspect that I am simply getting better as I mature. My brain is developing, my independence is blossoming, and I am settling into myself. 

My attitude to things here have been almost nonchalant—what about it? I don’t really have a friend group here, but I have friends. I can’t expect to have made my best, lifelong friends in just 10 weeks, so I think my 2-3 good friendships are promising. I haven’t been keeping up with this newsletter as much as I want to, but I’m still writing, even if it’s bad. And hopefully, I still have an audience that will read my work, even if it’s bad. I miss home a lot, but I will go back very soon! On my bad days, these issues are world-ending, and I am back in my childhood bedroom, anxiety dictating my every move and non-move. But once I muster the energy to shower, have a good meal (thank you UCLA dining <3), and have a good night of sleep, it’s easier to be hopeful again. That cycle is how I keep going.

Here are some Good Things from the past two months.

Movies (2023 Releases): 

• The Holdovers (d. Alexander Payne)

• Saltburn (d. Emerald Fennell)

• Bottoms (d. Emma Seligman)

• Fallen Leaves (d. Aki Kaurismäki)

Music: 

• Something To Give Each Other (Troye Sivan)

• I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet (Del Water Gap)

• fruitcake (Sabrina Carpenter)

Essays: 

• “Want to Believe in Yourself? ‘Mattering’ Is Key.” by Gail Cornwall

• “The Empty Seat at Our Thanksgiving Table” by Sarah Wildman

• “It’s good to remember: We are all on borrowed time” by Anne Lamott

Poems:

• “Waiting for This Story to End Before I Begin Another” by Jan Heller Levi

• “After You Toss Around the Ashes” by Ada Limón

• “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” by Noor Hindi

Something I also wanted to touch on in this newsletter, unrelated but much more important, is the Palestinian genocide. While I have the privilege of living comfortably, writing about my silly little first-world problems, Palestinians do not have this luxury. Recently, many young journalists have posted letters of defeat, detailing how their hope of survival is low. Bisan, aged 25, writes:

I no longer have any hope of survival like I had at the beginning of this genocide, and I am certain that I will die in the next few weeks or maybe days. I have been sick with severe viral infection for days and cannot move from the mattress!

I suffer from nightmares that are so closely resemble reality that I no longer differentiate between reality and dream.

I live in a world other than the one I claimed to be building! I am a community activist who lived on the fantasy that the world was free and just, and I sought to bring rights not only to my people, but to many men and women in third world countries!

The Israeli occupation of Gaza is an issue that began far before October 7th, and I highly encourage my readers to learn about this history. At this point, with how saturated this genocide is in the media, there is little to no excuse for turning a blind eye to Gaza: if the news is overwhelming for you, imagine how it must feel for it to be your daily reality. 

I’m trying to figure out how to phrase this well. I can’t. I don’t really understand how and why people can choose to ignore a case of textbook genocide. Furthermore, I am reminded of those who support Palestinian freedom in concept, but find it difficult to support it in practice. What Palestine needs right now is attention. The less people that support Palestine in material and monetary ways, the more dangerous it becomes for those who do. My point is, if it is so hard for you to boycott, donate, or protest, the very least you can do is learn. Here are some resources to learn more about the Palestinian genocide that have helped me understand more on this conflict:

• “on condemnation: terrorism, violence, and the question of palestine” by pranay somayajula

• “Letters from Gaza, Part 6” from Protean Magazine

• Palestine Resource List (from UCLA SJP)

First hand accounts from Palestine:

• Bisan Owda, 25

• Motaz Azaiza, 24

• Plestia Alaqad, 22

(I also encourage you to be critical of reports from mainstream media on this conflict. Not all the time, but often, it is financially safer for news outlets to take a pro-Israel or neutral approach towards the conflict.)

Love,

Aarushi.

I have been both busy and achingly lonely here, but never really at the same time. Sometimes, you are occupied and empty at once (like running on autopilot), but here, these feelings take turns. Sometimes, I am alone in an independent way. Sometimes, I am lonely. Sometimes, I am lost in an exploratory way. Sometimes, I am aimless. There are days where social connections come seemingly out of nowhere (like the friend I made at Dunkin’ Donuts), and there are days that pass with nothing more than some small talk in class.

My friend and I often talk about homesickness. I talk about how I haven’t felt as homesick as I feared I would by now, and she talks about how homesickness doesn’t come on strong. I guess I thought homesickness would just be crying that I missed my room, my parents, my neighborhood, my friends. It is, but more often, homesickness feels like this:

I have to introduce myself to everyone I talk to. I have to tell them what I like and what I don’t. I have to tell them I’m from the East Coast and that I’m vegetarian and that I’m a psychology major. This is fine and all, but my friends know who I am already. They know what I like and what I don’t. They’re from the East Coast, just like me, and most of them are still there. They know I’m vegetarian, but also that I want to be vegan one day. They know I’m a psychology major, but also that I want to work with children one day, focusing on preventive care.

Homesickness is wishing I could be around people who already know me. It’s realizing that as much as I have to share my life with people here, I now have to share my life with my hometown friends too. It’s realizing that my friends are now my “hometown” friends. It’s realizing that I won’t be home until mid-December, so I can’t be as pessimistic as I have been recently. 

I keep thinking of this tweet, copied on my laptop screen as a reminder:

it takes a surprising amount of courage to be enthusiastic about your own life. to resist the urge to hedge and self-deprecate, to distance yourself from the fear of failure and miscalculation. to express your desires, declare your convictions. can you be brave

And I keep thinking of Waymond Wang, in Everything Everywhere All At Once:

You think because l'm kind that it means I’m naive, and maybe I am. It’s strategic and necessary. This is how I fight.

Being optimistic has become “strategic and necessary” in this stage of my life. I chose this university over proximity to my loved ones and lower tuition. I am grateful that I got to make this choice, and now that I have, I want to make the best of it. The loneliness is sinking in. I will not deny that. But in this new city, this is what I have to learn to adapt to if I want to reap the benefits of being here.

I take care of my health better here. I take all my pills and I eat three meals and I sleep through the night. I walk everywhere, all the time. I try to call my friends and my parents whenever I can. There are flowers at every corner, and I’ve seen more live music in my 3 weeks here than I have in the past 3 years. I take a class about learning how to thrive and make the most of our limited time here. I eat well. I think of my high school self, who wished she could just hit a big red button that would take her to the next chapter. There is no button, but there is a next chapter. Patience brought me here. Life is not perfect, but I think there is potential. Maisie Peters sings “There It Goes”, and I cry my eyes out because I’m finally moving on. She sings about doing better and making it to September and about sleeping through the night and going where you’re wanted. Near the end, she sings “The universe is shifting / and it’s all for me, all for me”.

A few people told me they were eager to read my newsletter in college, to see how my new experiences would shape my thoughts. Well… here it is! I hope next time I can write a more narrow newsletter, but I thought a life update would be good for now. I hope everyone is doing well, and I’d love to hear some sort of update on your end as well. Happy autumn :) 

I’ve added some of my fall rotations to the playlist. Take a listen if you want.

Love,

Aarushi

I didn’t know a lot about the butterfly effect, other than how it’s portrayed in modern media, until two weeks ago. In my research, I’ve come to know that the butterfly effect is rooted in physics, a subject I’ve spent my whole educational career avoiding. It’s based in chaos theory. In the 1960s, mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz discovered the effect while running a predictive weather model. First, he inputted initial values for certain conditions, like temperature and humidity, to see the effect they would have on the weather for months to come. He reran this computation to look further into it, but the initial values were rounded off. When he came back to the model, the results were completely different from the first run. Lorenz's system highlighted what is known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions. 

More abstractly though, the butterfly effect, in popular media and culture, refers to the way seemingly unimportant actions can be amplified to unexpected, large outcomes. When I answered that question in eighth grade, this is what I was thinking of.  If I had just tried harder on one small thing, maybe I could’ve ended up with a different life path, a completely different ending to my story.

We can never know these different endings though: Lorenz’s research has shown us that the future is set—every action has a set ending, but it is an ending impossible to predict due to the sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Simply: we cannot track the long-term effects of our small changes. 

At its worst, the butterfly effect encourages regret. But at its best, it encourages action. If all it takes is a small change, then it must be worth our time to make the bolder, harder decision. This is something I still struggle with, but it brings to mind two things. First, a quote from Earl Nightingale that regularly makes its rounds on social media: “The time will pass anyway.” The things we want might will be hard. The time will pass anyway, whether we expend the effort to get the things we want or not. Second, a chart from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. The excerpt accompanying the chart goes as such:

In the beginning, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse. (In other words, it won’t impact you very much today.) But as time goes on, these small improvements or declines compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between people who make slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don’t. This is why small choices don’t make much of a difference at the time, but add up over the long-term.

If we don’t make those small choices or take those daunting leaps, we lose the opportunity they provide us. I would rather try something bold, fail at it, and then change my course. Ideally, I would like to live a life without regret. It’s hard, but I am beginning to recognize the value of being an active participant in my own life, no matter the failures it may come with. In an “Ask Polly” advice column, Heather Havrilesky writes: 

You are not damaged. You are not socially handicapped. You are young and you are learning how to live. Write that down. I AM VERY YOUNG AND I AM LEARNING HOW TO LIVE. Tape it to the wall by your bed and read it every morning.

You are very, very young. You are learning how to live.

I feel lucky to say that every bad thing I’ve experienced has been outweighed by some sort of long-term growth. The growth has taken and is still taking its time. Getting bad grades taught me to pay more attention in class. Losing a friend helped me identify my values and principles. Struggling with my mental health helped me be more empathetic to others. Grief reminded me to hold my loved ones closer. All of this gives me hope that one day, if I just stick with it, I can say the same about the things I’m going through right now. 

Ultimately, you just have to commit to things. That's what I think. Make a goal and stick with it. See it through. If you really can't do it, then change your course. Don’t forget giving up also decisively counts as courage. AT LEAST YOU TRIED. Fault is inevitable. Success is inevitable, too. Now start again.

More Like This:

• Chaos: The Science of the Butterfly Effect

• This Tiktok

• “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

Today is my two-year anniversary of Leaving Behind Gray. I nearly forgot because it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long at all! I cannot put into words how grateful I am to everyone who chooses to read these. As I face the next chapter of my life, this online space remains something secure and unchanging, no matter how far away I’m about to move (2,636 miles, in case you were wondering :/). I can’t wait to share my upcoming journeys with you all, through all the good and bad. After all, I am very, very young. I am learning how to live.

Love,

Aarushi.

Whether a product of my introversion or something else, I’ve always been anxious in social situations. It scares me to be dependent on people, to love them to a point where if I lost them, I’d become weak. In January, I was hell-bent on self-reliance. I wanted to be someone who was only at school to pay attention in her classes and leave, someone who focused only on herself and her ambitions, and someone who needed no one. Part of me knew it was unrealistic. But another part of me was running on spite, a need to prove myself as independent.

Still, loving is inevitable. As much as I wanted to be someone who could do it all myself, I’m not. I am endlessly inspired by people. I find myself in this beautiful intersection of youth and ambition, surrounded by people who have both big dreams and the motivation to achieve them. If I do not rely on others and learn from them, I am missing out. 

To echo a sentiment I know you’ve heard before, what am I but a mosaic of those I love? My go-to blush is one a friend got me in October. My favorite pasta recipe that I always make for guests is one that my aunt made years ago. My vocabulary adapts to that of the people I talk to. I began journaling consistently after watching one of my friends do so. The best books I’ve read have been recommendations. The ring on my middle finger was my mother’s, and the chain around my neck was my grandmother’s.

In an era of hyper-individualism, where people online will encourage you to cut people off at the smallest hint of conflict, it becomes increasingly more important to maintain a community. We cannot hold ourselves to an unreachable moral standard, where anyone who can’t reach it can’t be a part of our lives. If that is true, then no one can be a part of our lives. What a sad thought, to be so lonely. I don’t mean to encourage infinite forgiveness—not everyone can be forgiven, and not everyone will apologize. Still, people deserve a fair shot. People are not perfect. Neither am I. It makes me think of this comic I saw on Twitter.

We will never be perfect people. We have a moral code, and sometimes we’ll break it. We’ll judge others for what they do and not always hold ourselves to the same standards. We will make rash decisions and regret them later. This is the human condition. From a song called “People”:

Am I a good person?

Or a bad person?

The assessments are all different

I’m just a person, too

I’m just a person, too. You’re just a person, too. Part of me wishes I knew this a year ago, but I know that this is something that I had to have learned the hard way. People change and grow, and I am no exception to this. I hope that going forward, I am able to lean on the community that has uplifted me and give back to it. I hope I can live quietly and slowly, with intention and with forgiveness. I want to be comfortable living in the in-between, acknowledging those messy, complicated feelings and making peace with them anyways. When I need to dig my stick into the sand, I hope I will. And when I need to stand back and let time heal my wounds, I hope I will, too.

Good Things:

• My journal. I love her.

• My Astro Poets horoscope for the week of 04/30

• This song, this song, and this song.

Thank you for being the people that inspire and uplift me. Thank you for reading.

Love,

Aarushi.

Every Friday, our P.E. teachers wanted us to run one mile in under 15 minutes. As a kid, I’d tried to learn how to ride a bike, but ultimately, I lost the skill faster than I learned it. I’d taken swimming lessons too, but never made it past learning breaststroke. With this track record in mind, my imagination went into overdrive. Maybe I’d trip and be teased, or maybe I would be too slow and be scolded by my teacher. I was so afraid that everyone would be running faster than me. I was so afraid of being left behind. 

I was used to finding competition in every corner—why even run if you’re not going to win the race? On those nights where my thoughts would get noisy, pounding at the confines of my skull, I had to remind myself that worrying wouldn’t fix my problems. Each Friday, I’d defeatedly tie my sneakers, trudging my feet to the track. I’d prepare myself for the loud shrill of the whistle, and I’d run. One day, during the final stretch, I saw my friends waiting and cheering me on. They didn’t care about how long it took me, a sobering reminder that my fears were far from reality.

I witnessed my peers and I develop from kids who only knew what our parents taught us into teenagers with our own goals and complexities. This allowed me to shift from seeing people as competitors to seeing people as the deeply passionate and motivated individuals that they are. Eventually, seeing others this way would teach me to see myself that way too.

As I watched the people around me grow, I realized that I, too, was growing. One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, in her poem “Wild Geese,” tells me, “You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.” Resenting myself was not necessary. I didn’t have to carry the weight of what I wasn’t; instead, I could strengthen what I already was.

Beyond that, my hobbies as a child became my passions as a teenager: My endless contemplation on the brain and behavior cultivated a deep interest in psychology. The stories I wrote as a kid turned into these personal essays that I publish online. I realized that everyone runs a different, unique race. In fact, even calling life a race implied that I could win it or lose it. I now know that I am not falling behind. Instead, I am creating my own course.

While I don’t look back fondly on the anguish one mile caused me, I do find a sense of comfort in the success story it represents. It taught me that it’s imperative to just do things, even if they’re difficult. Even if I do not succeed, there is a value in having done the thing at all. In high school, I have chosen to live life on my own terms, finding comfort in my passions. Even when I learned to love running again last summer, my mile time didn’t change much from what it was in middle school. But now, I’m not as nervous about it. I run, and I remember the days when it felt like my life had to be a race. As my feet hit the ground and the breeze filters through my hair, I think that, instead, maybe life is a winding path with countless detours. And maybe, the point is not to win the race. Maybe, the point is to take your time, to pave the road as you go, and most importantly, to just keep moving.

Good Things:

• The song that largely inspired me to write this essay (lyrics!)

• D-Day by Agust D. I love this guy. I genuinely feel like he outdoes himself on every album… might write a little review of it on here sometime!

• Beef on Netflix. Absolutely incredible!

• Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. I finished this and have been planning to write a MMC about it!

• Ada Limón is the first U.S. poet laureate appointed to a two-year second term!! She wrote a poem that is going to be sent to one of Jupiter’s moons!!

• I committed to college. :)

I wrote this essay for my applications, and it continues to be one of my favorite things I’ve written. I’ve been wanting to share it since November. Finally, I can! Spring is always difficult in terms of motivation to do things other than what’s strictly required of me, but I promise the newsletter will come back! Thank you for reading.

Love, 

Aarushi.

Scientists say that when babies are in the womb, they have some degree of auditory processing, meaning that when mothers sing or talk often during pregnancy, it builds the likelihood that their child will recognize their voice after birth. They begin hearing around eighteen weeks, and around twenty-five weeks, they are even able to form some sort of response to what they can hear.

Tara cannot recall her mother’s voice now, but she wonders if she were to hear it, if she would recognize it like she did when she was born. Her mother is not dead, but when Tara ties her worn down sneakers to take herself to her final soccer game of the season, she catches a glimpse of something blue, a magnet their real estate agent had given them in 2009, holding up a note. On the counter beside the fridge lies a grocery list on gray-blue paper, the corner missing like a piece missing from a jigsaw puzzle. Her eyes drift back to the fridge, catching sight of the slate colored paper the note is written on. 

“TAKE OUT THE TRASH. WON’T BE BACK TILL LATE.”

Sometimes, Tara wonders if she should write a note back. Today, she does.

“No need to write a new note everyday. It’s a waste of paper to say the same thing each time.”

Tara hates her mother. And she hates her house. Still, when she’s at school, all she wants is to be home. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to her, the aching feeling of needing to be home, even though home isn’t a welcoming place. Like gravity brings her back to the floor even when she jumps, she feels some sort of pull whenever she’s too far away from home. This pull strays her away from her friends, who she knows she won’t keep in touch with after high school. She’s bound to her mother until she turns eighteen (547 days away), but she never sees her mother in her own house. Their connection is a game of tug-of-war, withered and pulled taut, yet still the strongest connection Tara has. Her hands are calloused in some places and bleeding in others. Still, her grip on this connection is constant and unforgiving. 

II. Neural Network

Scientists say that for the first two years of a baby’s life, the number of synapses in their brain grows exponentially. Then, from ages two to ten, the brain undergoes rapid neural pruning, where synapses are removed because they are unused. This process continues throughout a child’s adolescence, sometimes until the age of twenty. 

Tara moves out the day after she turns eighteen. Her mother bids her farewell in the morning, a simple good luck and goodbye, before she hears the all too familiar sound of the front door closing shut. Those words, though few, plant seeds of guilt in her body for leaving. It feels as if the unused synapse is firing to escape its inevitable fate. Finger skimming over her checklist of things to pack, her eyes fall on the magnet on the fridge door. There is no paper shoved under it today. Tara hastily unties her shoes, kicking them off haphazardly. One hand finds the thick cardstock of a letter from college, and another finds a blue pen. With some resistance due to the quality of the paper, she tears the corner of the letter and writes.

“Sorry. And for what it’s worth, thank you. Probably won’t be back soon.”

Pen hovering in the air, she stares. The previously sown guilt urges her to draw a heart on top of the sentence as a final show of apology. The synapse fires again. Clicking the pen shut, she brings the note to the fridge, left hand grabbing the magnet. As she adjusts the paper so that her words can be clearly seen, she realizes the magnet covers up the heart she drew. She stares. Shifts her eyes to the clock, indicating that she has two minutes to leave to make it to the bus station. The guilt hasn’t grown enough for her to fix it. 

She drowns out the guilt with music on her way to the bus stop, trying to resist any urge to turn back and fix the magnet. There’s another urge, deeper, that wants her to not only fix the magnet, but to stay, to not get rid of this synapse she’s been fostering for eighteen years. She turns the volume up even higher. When Tara finally settles onto the bus, she thinks again of her mother. This is her first step to freedom, right? As the landscapes that paint the window to her right grow less and less familiar, her heart sits heavy with the sobering realization that home will no longer be home for her. Now, Tara’s neural network undergoes its own kind of neural pruning. As the number of miles between her and her mother grows, the connection is broken. The child has matured into adolescence. She is removing the synapses she no longer needs, growing into a more ideal body.

III. Contagion

Scientists say that when a person’s friends are happy, the person is more likely to be happy. A person with only a few happy friends is better off than a person with many not-so-happy friends. Friendship creates a sense of belonging and personal fulfillment. So, joy is contagious. 

Near the end of her junior year, Tara decides to return home, just once. She doesn’t inform her mother of this. She breathes slowly as she walks, hoping that the guilt that haunted her when she was a freshman has died out now. A part of her hopes her mother’s car isn’t in the driveway. It’s not. Relieved, she takes her key (which she still has, after almost four years) and walks in, embracing the smell of sandalwood and honey. She feels like a stranger in her own home even though it looks the same. Her heart begins to beat a little faster.

Melancholy overcomes her as she continues to walk through the house. It’s getting harder to think straight. Has her mother been okay? Guilt grows again like a weed in the ridges of her brain, wrapping around her limbs and holding her to the old floorboards in the kitchen. Her vision is growing blurry, but she can still see that stupid magnet on the fridge. Her note is still there, tilted slightly so the heart is visible. The same feeling that her mother’s goodbye evoked in her four years ago takes her over again upon seeing that her mother cared enough to do that. As if all strength is pulled from her body, she falls to the floor and breaks. Everything she had avoided for the past three years—the detachment, the self-doubt, the fear of abandonment—hits her in waves, a forceful wind meeting her carefully built house of cards. Her phone pings with a text from Florence.

hi, did you make it home okay? love you!!

Tara cries. She types.

can you come get me

She doesn’t know how much time passes, but soon there’s a knock at the door. She knows it’s a courtesy, because the door swings open moments after. Her head hurts, the world is blurry, and her heart is beating faster than it ever has before. Some shuffling noises, and then there is a hand in her hair and another holding her right hand. The hand in her hair goes down to press against her eyes, the cool palm a relief to her red eyelids. 

Soon, she’s in the backseat of Florence’s car, head on her shoulder. “How did you even know where I lived?”, Tara asks. Florence chuckles, “I have your location, remember? Plus, if I really needed to, I could probably find a way to hack your phone and find your address.”

Tara laughs, and Florence’s hands move to take out the braids in her hair slowly. Her fingers run over the slightly curled strands of hair, lightly massaging her scalp in the process. She tells stories about the dog she saw on her way to get coffee today, the essay she wrote for her class, and the movie she just started watching. Tara wonders if she’s been cared for like this before. It seems like the kind of thing mothers do to their daughters to get them to sleep. She hates herself for thinking of her mother again in this moment. It’s over, right? She’s replacing what she should’ve had with her mother with her friends. She is finding new voices to become familiar with and new individuals to form synapses with, seeking out joy through connection like it is a contagion.

IV. Oxytocin

Scientists say that a person’s levels of oxytocin increase in reaction to physical touch. Higher levels of oxytocin are associated with lower levels of anxiety and depression. This is why people call it the “love drug”. Oxytocin works in a positive feedback loop—its release provokes an action that further stimulates its release.  

When she’s thirty-two, Tara marries a boy. She met Anwar in her senior year of college, and though she had been unsure of a lot of things in life, she felt very certain about her future with him. He holds her when she cries and surprises her after long days. She buys him flowers on her way home from work and kisses the mole above his lips. They wed in July. Florence’s dad walks her down the aisle. Tara isn’t sure if she’s allowed to feel as loved and pampered as she is in those moments, but she embraces it wholeheartedly. 

After the reception, when all the guests have left and the couple and their families are left to pick up fallen decorations from the floor, Anwar’s mother, Suhana, approaches Tara, who prepares to say “thank you” for the millionth time that night. Suhana waxes poetic about how beautiful the wedding was and how grateful she is to have Tara in their family. She gives her a necklace with an ornate heart-shaped pendant and clasps it on her nape. His mother turns her around, holds her hands in hers, and looks, just looks, at her for a moment. She brings her in for a hug and remarks, “I’m so happy to have another daughter in our family.” 

That comment stays with Tara for the rest of the night, even the next morning when she and Anwar are sitting in the airport terminal waiting for their flight. There is a pang in her heart, an aching, bittersweet feeling, when she thinks about the way her mother-in-law had held her the previous night. It begins to remind her of her own mother, who she hasn’t seen since high school. Still, she isn’t sad. She’s fascinated by how she has managed to fill the void her mother’s neglect created with her own chosen family, people who welcomed her with open arms when she had nothing else to offer them. Her husband’s hand holds hers as if it is second nature. Her heart floods with love at the tender feeling of skin on skin. She can’t help but to wonder what sixteen year old Tara—who, despite how much it hurt her, held onto her connection with her mother because it was the only one she had—would think of this. She holds Anwar's hand a little bit tighter. The positive feedback loop continues on.

V. Family Line

Scientists say that when babies are in the womb, they have some degree of auditory processing, meaning that when mothers sing or talk often during pregnancy, it builds the likelihood that their child will recognize their voice after birth. 

Throughout her pregnancy, Tara speaks to her stomach as much as she can. She sings lullabies, she tells stories, and she goes through her daily list of tasks. She makes sure that her child will recognize her voice when she is born. Tara reminisces on her adolescence and how eager she was to forget her mother after moving out, blocking her number and submerging herself in classes and clubs. She knows now that it was the better decision for her future, but a part of her wishes she could know how her mother is now. She can still remember her voice. Sixteen year old Tara would’ve scoffed at this—all she wanted was to cut her mother out of the picture. How would she feel knowing that, even at this age, she still thinks of her mother everyday? She holds this thought close to her heart as she keeps talking to her stomach.

Tara cries a lot after giving birth. She holds her daughter, counting her five fingers that curl around her own, and realizes that this is life now. She was Layla’s first home, and hopefully, she will be someone her daughter can always come home to when she needs. She thinks of junior year, crying on the floor within minutes of coming home. All her efforts to forget her and to leave it all behind proved futile as the mother-shaped hole in her heart still remained. She attempted to patch it up with as many people as she could, with the most golden friends and lovers. Nothing ever seemed to fully replace that space in her heart. Moving out was meant to be the end of the connection they shared, but Tara still endlessly seeks to find that connection in all the new ones she makes. Cradling Layla in her arms, she figures that maybe connections can’t ever be broken. Maybe it’s impossible to ever cut your mother out of the picture she created. Maybe, despite your efforts to cut her out and paint over her, removing the synapse and calling it unnecessary, her presence will always be felt. And maybe it’s better that you paint over her with every color, build over your family line with someone more family than your mother could’ve ever been. Tara kisses her daughter’s head. 

Also published here.

Thank you to Conan Gray for writing “Family Line” and ghostwriting this story for me.

Your regularly scheduled programming (newsletters) will continue soon! Thank you for reading as always :)

Love,

Aarushi.

I’m well aware that I’m painting myself out to be some sort of antisocial-vampiric person, which I am not (I think). But I’ve never been able to rid myself of my aversion to the outside, no matter how much I know this can affect my physical and mental health. By some stroke of fate, life has been dragging me into nature this past year: beach trips, essays about nature, lake visits… I’ve ended up spending more time outside than I normally would, but I don’t hate it.

There is a lake near my house that I’ve driven by for years. I’d seen it so often that this sprawling expanse of blue had blended into the background of this town. I ended up there at the beginning of this month for a school project that should’ve only taken 15 minutes. As it ended up, I stayed for well over 45. After finishing my work, I sat at a bench and watched the water. There, life moved slow. Still. Quiet. It was as if my mind, the one that typically trips over itself in thought, had been put on mute. My anxieties were distant, muffled like the sound of chatter behind a closed door.

Pacing up and down past a bed of rocks, I noticed the water as it moved in the same pattern over and over again. Over and over again. Pushing up against the rocks and retreating. Over and over again. It felt so outstandingly simple. Back in the car, it brought to mind the myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll the same boulder up a hill for the rest of time. It brought to mind Mary Oliver, whose work considers this repetition of nature and embraces it wholeheartedly. It brought to mind an essay I wrote in June about how different poets, like Oliver, use nature in their writing to create a sense of optimism towards life.

I went back to the lake today and got to share this experience with a friend. We sat on a bench and watched as people walked out to the water and their dogs enjoyed the outdoor air. It was cold, and we probably should’ve brought our jackets. But it is so nice to not be alone. Joy is so much more abundant when shared. I plan to go back again on Friday. I regret not placing myself here sooner.

I always resisted nature because I hated interacting with it. I’ve never been one to roll around in the grass or jump into water, but through my experiences at the lake, I’m beginning to realize that I do not have to interact with it. I can just be there. I mentioned Mary Oliver earlier, which brings me back to this poem that I wrote that essay about, “Wild Geese”:

You do not have to be good. 

You do not have to walk on your knees 

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. 

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves. 

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. 

Meanwhile the world goes on. 

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain 

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers. 

Meanwhile the wild geese, 

high in the clean blue air, 

are heading home again. 

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 

the world offers itself to your imagination, 

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- 

over and over announcing your place 

in the family of things.

The sun, the clear pebbles of rain, the wild geese—they follow these repetitive motions too. The sun goes up and down, and up and down, and up and down. Does it ever get tired? Or is it gratified by the life it creates and sustains? What about the rain that falls, collects, vaporizes, condenses, and falls again? Or the wild geese that migrate with the seasons—are they bored, or are they choosing to live? Every day, nature rolls up a million of its own boulders and watches as they roll back down. Still, it stays, assuming and embracing its “place in the family of things.” 

What I mean is this: we are no different than these wild geese. As Oliver says, “you do not have to be good.” You just have to be. When I watch the water and let my head go empty, I am choosing to be. That is the benefit of nature. It will not make me feel better. It will not do my assignments or revive my mindset, suddenly reinvigorating me. It’s merely a way to mitigate the everyday tensions of life. 

The world is burning, and wars are raging, and people are dying, and the oceans are rising, and people’s rights are getting revoked, and that test was really hard, and my friend might be mad at me, and being a teenager is weird and hard, and I’m leaving my life behind in six months, but hey, isn’t that a beautiful lake? Isn’t the wind in your hair so refreshing? Do you see the way the sunlight filters through the wildflowers, the way the flowers are beginning to bloom, the way the sky bursts in pinks and reds in the evening? 

It’s nice, isn’t it?

All I have to add is that “Wild Geese” is one of Oliver’s most famous poems for a reason. I have not once gotten tired of reading it! It is the last day of February! I cannot believe we made it to March. February went by quicker than I’d like, but I’m glad it’s over. Here are some Good Things:

• Good Riddance — Gracie Abrams

  • This is my favorite album of hers. I cannot believe this set of songs is mine. At the same time, it feels just out of reach, written about experiences I can’t entirely relate to yet. I look forward to growing with this album.

• Cooking. 

• National Museum of Asian Art

• My friends :)

• This song, this song, this song, and this song.

• Playlist of songs from the newsletter

Thank you for reading! I hope you can sit and space out at a lake sometime soon.

Love,

Aarushi.

mono., the second mixtape by RM of BTS, marks my memory of that trip. At the time, I was 13, so I don’t think the lyrics resonated as deeply as they do now. This is what I admire most about music. The song is still, frozen in time by the musician, but it grows as you grow. What a song means to me is unique from what a song may mean to someone else.

In high school, as I began experiencing more complex and, to be frank, more dark feelings, mono. grew to be a companion in that dark room. It became a friend to my solitude. mono. is not a happy record. It’s an honest record, bittersweet. It’s introspective and wistful, discussing things like RM’s love-hate relationship with Seoul and the gap between his ideals and his reality.

I digress—this isn’t about mono. I bring up the mixtape to establish the distinctive quality of RM’s music: its ability to be so raw and vulnerable that it doesn’t only hurt, it comforts. I also bring it up to acknowledge the crazy ability of his music to come out at crucial points in my life. His newest and first official solo album, Indigo, came out in the final stretch of my college application process and the final stretch of childhood before adulthood. 

I thought for a while about how I want to break down this album. Track by track? Recurrent themes? I think it’s best to discuss the resonance of this album, specifically with regards to creation.

Indigo, released in December of 2022, has been in the making for four years: one of the tracks, “Forg_tful (with Kim Sawol)” is unchanged from how it was recorded in 2019. “Lonely” reflects his emotions from while BTS was on tour, and “Change pt.2” was recorded drunk, the grittiness and angst of his voice left untouched from the original recording.

This album first touched me as a creator. Text on the physical album and in its promotion reads: 

Record of RM: Indigo. From the colors of nature, human, etc.

Use it while taking a walk, a shower, a drive, coffee-break, work, dance, read a book, when flowers bloom or fall. 

the last archive of my twenties.

Documentation of my youth in the moment of independent phase. An honest, unadorned record with shades.

Sun-bleached record faded like old jeans.

Before it even came out, reading these phrases confirmed to me that Indigo will be introspective, but a different kind of introspection than mono. The insistence not only to listen to the album, but to use it. RM is known for his lengthy, reflective letters he posts to fans. A section of one he posted before the release of Indigo reads:

It would be nice to have everyone like it, but with a daring attitude of “well, if not, what about it” and with the confidence of believing that there must be one shade of blue that pleases you out of the ten, I will see you tomorrow.

It reminded me of this newsletter. My ultimate goal is for readers to gain something from my work, whether they like it or not. If someone agrees, I hope they have this as something comforting to return to. If someone disagrees, I hope my writing helps clarify what they do align with. Likewise, he encourages listeners to take his work and use it, even if just one of the ten tracks resonate with them. 

As I listened (and relistened.. and relistened..) to the album, I felt a familiar flame light up inside me, the flame of creation. It’s what got me to start this newsletter. The flame is an itch to make something, to gather up a part of your soul and express it. Hearing RM describe his work as a “documentation of [his] youth” made me so badly want to create something and call it mine. 

In the film describing the making of the album, RM says, “In my opinion, the greatest work of art is taking the most personal story and telling it in the most universal way.” 

Let’s pause. Something I admire most about life is when someone explains something a certain way and makes you realize that you’ve known that all along, but haven’t been able to put it in words. My psychology teacher would probably call this latent learning—learning something subconsciously and not realizing until the knowledge is applied. When I first heard that, I texted my best friend about how I made it four minutes through the video before I had to pause and process.

Telling the most personal story in the most universal way. I knew this all along. Intuitively, this has been my goal through every newsletter I write, but hearing it articulated this way made it glaringly clear that this was my goal. What I am able to do with my writing is take my most personal experiences and express them so that they’re relatable. I am not alone in them, and neither are you. What RM, and so many like him, are able to do with their music is put vulnerable feelings out into the world, allowing millions of people to resonate and identify with them. 

If mono. was my companion in a dark room and a friend to my solitude, Indigo is the friend who encourages me to live a little and break out of my shell, to open my eyes and embrace the world. Just as mono. reminds me of New York, I can’t wait to see how I will remember Indigo in the future.

Here are some relevant links:

• Indigo on Spotify

• RM’s letter

  • English Translation

• RM 'Indigo' Album Magazine Film

• English Lyric Translations (and cultural context)

• Tiny Desk Concert with NPR

• RM Live in New York @ Dia Beacon

• RM Live in Seoul @ 롤링홀

I have so much to say about this album and its tracks, but I think I’ll never have enough time for that. The tracks that resonate the most with me today are “Wild Flower (with youjeen)”, “Change pt.2”, and “No.2 (with park jiyoon)”.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you give it a listen.

Love,

Aarushi.

I reminisce on the pieces of my past self that this room keeps: the twin bed that I’ve been sleeping in since 2007, when I was two. The shelf and the side table that have followed me from our old house. The armor with old nail polish stains and penciled doodles on it. The red music stand gathering dust in a corner. I glance at the holes in my walls from every poster that I’ve tacked on it. They’re now rolled up in my closet, but the first things I hung on these walls were posters from my elementary school Scholastic book fair. Later, photos from middle school, a paper plate award, and other memorabilia adorned the room. Sometime in the pandemic, I took everything off. That wall stays empty now, but the one opposite it adorns two movie posters. 

As much as I have changed in the past nine years, this room serves as the record of my growing up. I often think about this room in the past tense—my childhood bedroom. I am mourning the present before I leave it. How will it feel to come back here after going to college for the first time? How will it feel to come back when I’m married? What if we move out, and my childhood bedroom exists only as a memory? 

When I think about everything this room has witnessed, my body experiences a sort of grief-gratitude-shock-disappointment-fulfillment all at once. These walls have seen so many of my friends, scattered on the chair, the bed, and the floor, talking about our lives. I’m trying to notice, really notice, this room. I’m afraid that I only have six more months until I begin to lose my familiarity with it and the way it feels under my fingers.

I photographed my room for a film assignment the other day, which forced me to take a closer look at the elements that composed it. Unsurprisingly, I had gotten used to the small details, like the birds on the bathroom tile or the homemade mobile that I made in kindergarten hanging right outside the door. I began feeling like a stranger in the space—had that crack in the paint always been there? The assignment forced me to prioritize noticing, something I never really did before. It reminds me of this quote from Thich Nhat Hanh: 

“When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.”

To make where you are and what you’re doing “the most important thing in your life” is to challenge yourself to be present in a way that’s borderline uncomfortable. I often tend to get lost in thought while showering, walking, or eating. But to make yourself focus on the feeling of water on skin, of shoes on pavement, or of textures on your tongue obligates you to appreciate them and not let them slip away. 

Often, those moments of presence are where I find my creativity. My creativity is inspired by the seemingly mundane patterns of life and human behavior; That is, the small things we don’t tend to think twice about, like the way the sun sets, the stories of the faces that pass by us, the way trees grow and wither, the ways in which we love and are loved in return. There is no one person or thing that inspires my creativity continuously, but I find heaps of inspiration in the living world that surrounds us. These meetings of myself and the world, when I’m staring outside at the sky or sitting watching the snow fall under a streetlamp, remind me the value of being present.

If you look closely at the corners of my bedroom walls, you can still see glimpses of purple and orange that the new paint didn’t completely cover. I see them sometimes and find it a bit funny. These walls, alone, contain a coming-of-age story of their own.

Happy 2023! Apologies for no newsletter in December :( It has been such a strange and busy month! In no order, here are some Good Things.

• Indigo - RM

  • When I say this album changed my life. I have way too many thoughts on the songwriting, context, production, and narrative of this album that I will simply not explain right now because I plan to write the next newsletter about it. The album, though only ten tracks, spans a wide variety of genres. I think there’s something for everyone (ask me if you want a rec :P)

• teenage girl bedroom songs

  • Adjacent to the theme of today’s newsletter, this is just a playlist of my favorite teenage girl bedroom songs. I think it makes more sense once you see the songs in there.

• Bullet Train (2022), Glass Onion (2022), and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003).

  • Movies that I have enjoyed in the last month! All are recommendations.

• Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto

  • I have not finished this book yet but I included an excerpt of it in this newsletter. So far, though, I am really really enjoying it.

• This song, this song, this song, this song, and this song.

• Leaving Behind Gray (Spotify Edition)

  • Made a playlist of every song I’ve recommended through the newsletter :)

Thank you for waiting. Thank you for reading. Happy new year!!

Love,

Aarushi.

Whenever I hit one of those days where I do everything, I remember how unsustainable this lifestyle is and how anhedonic it makes me. Happiness isn’t a waiting game. Happiness is built into our days, I think. It’s weaved in the branches of the trees, leaves of opportunity falling in front of my feet. I usually step on them and keep walking. 

During our long, four day weekend, I received a taste of something different. I was busy, sure. Almost all of those four days I was whisked to a different social gathering, but I had fun. Each interaction renewed my soul: I saw family friends I hadn’t seen for months. The little ones are not as little now. I saw my best friend from kindergarten, my first friend. I hadn’t seen her since the summer. I played a game with a group of my closest friends. Honestly, I came late and didn’t totally understand the game, but it was so wonderful to just sit in their presence outside of school.

In my hours outside of seeing people, I stuck to myself. I had come off of an overwhelming, truly busy, and chaotic week. All I needed was to rest in the comfort of my favorite four bedroom walls. And to my surprise, I did end up working. I finished school assignments before they were due, I worked on college applications, and I got caught up with my extracurriculars. I realized in those days that I couldn’t continue my lifestyle of living fast and burning out.

And so, I’ve been trying to be slower these days. It’s hard to be slow when it’s been atrophied by the pressures of hustle culture. I try to take things as they come, creating and changing my boundaries by the day. Some days, I can text back. I can call. I can work on a million little things. Other days, I can only keep to myself. I can reflect and look inward. Some days, I can time-block to the hour. Some days, the mere thought of a to-do list is too much. I’m trying to learn to accept these changes and mold myself to them instead of forcing myself into the binary of productive or unproductive based on how many tasks I can get done. 

It is more important, I think, to reach your full potential in a day. Even if the potential today is 20% of what it was yesterday. If all I could do today was get out of bed and eat, then I did all that I could do. I was productive to today’s standards. If what I can do tomorrow is ten times more, then I will have been productive to tomorrow’s standards. And that’s fine.

I am always reminded of this song, “Run BTS”, from the most recent BTS album. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m reminded of it or if this song just hasn’t left my mind since the day it came out. It became my #1 song of all time within five months, if that says anything. Anyways, there’s a line that has always stood out to me: if we live fast, let us die young. At first, I thought this was a mere rephrasing of the more common live fast, die young. As I thought about it, I realized it might be the opposite.

If we live fast, let us die young. If we rush through life, let us suffer the consequences. If we work too hard, let us burn out. If we run and run and run, let us fall and fall and fall.

I find this such a refreshing take. I know I should live slow, and I know not to work too hard and burn out. But the phrasing of “if we live fast, let us die young” is unique. They’re not strictly discouraging living fast. But if they live fast, then let them experience the consequences. I find this aligns quite well with BTS’ journey so far, too. They ran so hard for ten years, and now they can slow down. Now, they explore their individual strengths. To live slow is a rebellion against a world that asks too much of us.

Instead: if we live slow, let us live long. If we live consciously, let us be rewarded. If we take our time, let us experience the best of life. If we stay and stay and stay, let us rise and rise and rise.

Further Reading:

• We Manage Most When We Manage Small — Linda Gregg

• The Letter — Linda Gregg

• I Worried — Mary Oliver

• dis-ease from my friend’s newsletter :]

• Notes on Slow Living from Devotions

Living slow is hard. But it’s my attempt that matters. My attempts will build into habit, I hope. I took a walk the other day, just me, my headphones, and a tube of bubbles in hand. The children and their parents were leaving the nearby elementary school, two dogs barked at me very aggressively, and I listened to a really good podcast. I plan to write more in depth about that podcast in my next newsletter. Other than that, life has just gone on. Some good things, some bad things. Here are the good ones.

• Midnights by Taylor Swift: Favorites right now are Snow on the Beach, Mastermind, and You’re on Your Own, Kid. Please do not play Bejeweled or Vigilante Shit around me. So sorry.

• “The Astronaut” by Jin: I just love this song. And I love the meaning behind it. And I especially love the music video. 

• Homecoming!! I love dressing up and I love my friends.

• My school’s South Asian cultural fair, where my dance club performed. Happy belated Diwali!

• Love is Blind: I don’t think this is a good thing, but I did watch the entirety of season three yesterday.

• Abbott Elementary: This is an incredible, incredible show. Absolute recommendation.

• This song, this song, and this song.

Keep warm! And thank you for reading.

Love,

Aarushi.

I finished On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong a couple weeks ago, and one paragraph stopped me, prompting me to keep reading and rereading. As if reading and rereading could lessen my awe.

“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.” 

I asked my friend, a year older than me, if she missed high school. She told me she didn’t miss it because she had done everything she had wanted to do, known the people she was meant to know, and enjoyed it as much as she could’ve. It served its purpose, and so it could be let go. I have been thinking a lot about the end, as I begin one of the first major endings in my life.  My friends and those I look up to are helping me realize that ending a good thing doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I can miss something and the value it provided me without wanting to go back and change it.

Vuong continues, 

“Like right now, how the sun is coming on, low behind the elms, and I can't tell the difference between a sunset and a sunrise. The world, reddening, appears the same to me-and I lose track of east and west. The colors this morning have the frayed tint of something already leaving. I think of the time Trev and I sat on the toolshed roof, watching the sun sink. I wasn't so much surprised by its effect-how, in a few crushed minutes, it changes the way things are seen, including ourselves-but that it was ever mine to see. Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.” 

Vuong’s words always strike a certain chord in my heart, one that scares and soothes simultaneously. It scares me because I feel like I haven’t lived well. If my survival “exists only on the verge of its own disappearing”, have I made it beautiful? Have I made my life gorgeous, even if only briefly? It soothes because it reminds me that because my survival “exists only on the verge of its own disappearing”, it will be beautiful no matter what. Every good thing I’ve lived through will have made my brief life gorgeous. It makes me think of this poem by Jack Gilbert,  “Failing and Flying”:

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

I really, really like this poem. Beyond the incredible style of writing (which makes me feel like I loved her too), it resonates. It’s not like I’ve ever been in love (romantically, at least), but I’ve loved things and I’ve lost them. The loss is always so much heavier than the love. Of course, the loss is rooted in love, but we’re always so sad when we lose something, instead of remembering the love that something brought us. 

People are different. If we love experiences enough, like school, we don't have to miss them once they end. We can thank them for helping us grow and move on. But people, people are different. I wonder why I love some people more now that they’re gone. It makes me wish I loved them more at the time, but I think that this could go on forever. It’s not possible to love someone enough to not miss them once they’re gone. I saw a tweet questioning if healing could be an individual pursuit if the problems many of us face are systemic. To me, it can’t be an individual pursuit. When it comes to survival, sometimes, our instinct is to save those who we love first. So it makes sense, then, that it’s just different when it comes to losing people compared to losing experiences. 

All these musings on loss and love float around in my brain, and I get confused sometimes. As the clock counts down on my high school experience, I try to remember to love this as much as I can, to talk to as many people and form as many friendships, to work hard and be inspired by my teachers, to grow as a person so I won’t regret anything. I want to form relationships that outlast the circumstances they were found in. 

It’s not a bad thing for things to end. I keep learning and relearning this.

Further Reading/Listening/Watching:

• Saigon — Luke Hemmings

  • “Oh, you never know inside those moments, / How good it was and how you wasted, / All this time alone / How long can we hold?”

• Girl Of My Dreams — Juice WRLD, SUGA

  • “You realize it was love when it ends, and so, it ends.”

• Chapter 4 of Life Lessons by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler

  • “Trying to find permanence is impossible, and we ultimately learn that there is no safety in trying to "keep" everything. And there is no safety in trying to prevent loss.”

  • “There's an old Jewish saying that if you dance at a lot of weddings, you'll cry at a lot of funerals. This means if you're present at many beginnings, you'll also be there for many endings. If you have many friends, you'll experience your share of losses. If you feel that you're suffering great loss, it's only because you have been so richly blessed by life.”

Good Things:

I feel like I took a bit of a new approach with this newsletter, did it work? This felt more like a congregation of my different thoughts on loss and love, rather than forming a single conclusion on them. I don’t think these are things I can form large, general conclusions on. These are things that are so dependent on the circumstance, stage of life, and personal experience, that I can only provide different ways to see things.  

Good Experiences:

• I got to see Ada Limón, one of my favorite poets, speak at her Inaugural Reading at the Library of Congress in September. One of my absolute biggest inspirations ever. I picked up a copy of her new collection, The Hurting Kind, as well. I even got to speak with her at the book signing, which was so… life changing.

• Seeing Sabrina Carpenter live for the third time! She is just my most favorite person in the world. 

Good Movies/TV:

• A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), d. Ana Lily Amirpour — I watched this for school, but the more I think about it, the more I just love it. It falls somewhere between the lines of horror, Western, romance, and a feminist film. 

• Community — I finally started watching this! Not a lot to say because I’m three episodes in but I am enjoying it.  

Good Music:

• When Facing The Things We Turn Away From — Luke Hemmings

  • I mentioned  “Saigon” earlier, but I finally listened to this, and it’s just so good. My favorites are “Starting Line” and “Diamonds” as of now.

  • Addendum to this album is the new 5 Seconds of Summer album. My favorite is “Bad Omens”. I listened to this song on repeat for like three days after hearing it for the first time.

• Hold The Girl — Rina Sawayama

  • This was just one of the best albums I have ever heard in my life. I have so much to say but this was so good in a way that I don’t know how to talk about it. Favorites are “Minor Feelings”, “Phantom”, and “Your Age”.

• FLO. All of their songs. 

• I feel like I could keep on listing songs, albums, and artists for forever, so here is my Spotify so you can just check them out yourself! 

Thank you so much for reading and for sticking around. Happy fall.

Love,

Aarushi.