He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannot unlearn the feeling.

… And yet, he reminds himself, loneliness is not hunger, or deprivation, or illness, it is not fatal. Its eradication is not owed him.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

A couple of weeks ago my therapist told me that I need to let myself be bored. She said this sternly, without budging, without compromise. When I see a day on my calendar with absolutely nothing planned after a long week, she said, it needs to stay that way. This essay is the result of me contemplating, strategizing, and most of all reckoning with her now painstakingly obvious truth: I have spent the past few years meticulously over-scheduling my life because I refuse to spend time alone with my thoughts. I would rather have no time to think at all than to sit in my own company.

This is probably the most vulnerable I have been here, and also the first time I have written while in the midst of trying to understand something about myself. Historically, these thoughts have been ignored. Now, they are finding a place in an essay that I am posting on the internet (for some reason). Interesting turn of events.

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It never occurred to me that having a perpetually busy schedule might mean that I am overcompensating for something, perhaps even running from it. Honestly, I thought I was just ambitious and extremely motivated. I’ve always known that I don’t do well with empty time, but that’s just because I love a good routine, right? I like to keep busy, that’s just a trait of mine. Well, I’m not so sure anymore.

I sat down in my therapist’s office, telling her that for some reason, I was feeling really anxious again. I’ve been doing so well, I told her, I’m not sure what’s changed. She told me to walk her through my last week, pointing out what might be different about what I was going through at the moment. As I started listing it all out, I realized that I kind of sounded insane. Who schedules their days like this? I thought. It doesn’t even sound feasible. Yet I was living it.

Living in a city by myself in my early 20s, so far away from most of the people that mean everything to me, how else am I supposed to spend my time other than to fill it?

Graduate school allows me to easily keep myself occupied with obligations, but it also lends me a distraction from what’s going on in my personal life. There’s always a long to-do list, but there’s also always something I can add once I complete it. Although I assumed this just made me a highly productive person, I’m now realizing how much it’s blocking me from connecting with my true self. It’s not that the productivity is a bad thing, it’s the ulterior motive lying under it.

For me, excessive productivity is avoidant — it’s unhealthy, and it’s making me afraid of thoughts that are sometimes unfriendly but also completely part of life.

He said positive liberty is self-mastery — the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions, and all other forms of self-coercion… None but ourselves can free our minds.

Tara Westover, Educated

So yeah… I think I’ve been in a years-long Halloween film starring me and my own brain. My thoughts are Michael Myers, knife in hand, mask on, and I’m in a constant race to outwit him. I run, I walk, I hide. I’m always moving in some way or another. And so is he.

This idea of positive liberty that Tara Westover talked about in her book Educated shifted a gear in my brain. Taking control of my own mind and the thoughts inside of it will require ending the race. It will require facing Michael, and somehow, becoming his friend. However, I have to figure out how to make him put the knife down first. How will I do it?

I’ve read this passage by Nicola Jane Hobbs over and over and over again, and I think this is where I’ll start. Living at the “natural pace of my nervous system” necessitates boredom. It demands me to slow down and find pockets of rest. It entails listening to the thoughts in my head as they come and accepting them with open arms rather than bolting in the opposite direction.

Silence and empty time make me deeply uncomfortable. I have a habit of quickly filling boredom with screen time, reading, or anything that will block my mind from being able to form a coherent thought. Especially in times where these coherent thoughts may be undesirable.

For example, after I went through a breakup this past spring, I promptly took melatonin every night at approximately 7:30pm. That way, as soon as it got dark at 8 o’clock, I would quickly fall asleep. Jokingly, I told my friends, “I just don’t trust my thoughts when it’s dark outside.” I was afraid that my mind would assault me with memories and feelings that I simply did not want to feel. I thought that loneliness was nocturnal, that it would wake from its slumber as soon as the sun went down and then creep through the window and into my head.

But as Yanagihara writes in A Little Life, “loneliness is not hunger, or deprivation, or illness, it is not fatal. Its eradication is not owed” me. Loneliness is not inherently bad, and I’m starting to think it’s actually completely healthy. People have been feeling lonely for centuries, it doesn’t make me unique or different. It just makes me human.

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I no longer have to go to bed at 8:00pm (thank goodness), but this coping strategy hasn’t left me, it just transfigures itself, adapting to whatever feeling I’m avoiding at the moment. I read this quote while reading The Anxious Generation:

We are forever elsewhere.

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation

Although terribly simple, this is exceptionally true. I find myself using every moment of free time to be somewhere else, to live in a world other than my own. My phone is the easiest way to do this; it’s like a portal that transports me out of my head and into the lives of others. As much as I love reading, it works in a similar fashion; I can leave my head and enter the narrator’s. When there’s something I’m running from, these habits are not helpful. They’re destructive.

Now, I’m trying to make a system with myself. I’m feeling lonely? Be lonely. Sad? Feel sad. Missing someone? Miss them. Bored? Be bored. There are much worse things to be. And really, to be anything at all is a gift.

If you struggle with this too, here is what is currently helping me:

Blast your favorite songs and dance around the kitchen, using a spatula as a microphone. Color yourself a picture and hang it on your fridge as if you’re your own child that you’re immensely proud of. Thank your body for all it does for you every day, for being able to be productive in the first place. Cook yourself a five star meal, but instead of listening to music or a podcast during the process, spend it in silence, asking yourself questions. Add some salt and pepper to the pan — what feels heavy today? Chop up the veggies — what could I do to process these feelings better? Let the sauce thicken — am I embodying the person I want to be?

If you know anything about me, you know that I have a strange, parasocial almost, relationship with trees. I have a tattoo of a tree on my lower bicep to commemorate this weird (but justified) niche of mine, and I thought it was about time that I wrote a long-form explanation about why trees mean so much to me. In hopes that when I’m done, they will mean something special to you too.

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This all started because trees have a calming effect on me. For as long as I can remember, I have just really loved trees. It sounds silly, but it’s true. I grew up in the suburbs of Nashville, and before that in Appalachia, so trees were always around, looming and inescapable over the days of my childhood. I spent a lot of time outside as a kid, playing both invented games and real ones. I spent hours in the woods, building forts and houses out of branches and leaves. I pretended I was in Bridge to Teribithia with my friends, building a magical kingdom to serve as our sanctuary. Some of my fondest childhood memories exist beneath the trees, and somewhere along the way, they became a comfort. They meant I was home.

Throughout high school and college, trees remained an anchoring force for me. Every time I became stressed, overwhelmed, or frustrated, I would take these drives, deep into the suburbs where I could put the windows down, blast alarmingly sad music (that probably didn’t help at all), and simply look at the trees. I always hunted down the roads that were lined with them, so I could watch the branches sway in the wind while my hair flew into my eyes. I felt connected with home, with my younger self, and with things much bigger than me and my current problems.

As I started graduate school, trees began to represent something else, something wholly singular. With more work, obligations, experiences, and perspectives flooding my consciousness, my brain became inundated in ways that younger me never could’ve withstood. In these moments, plagued by anxiety, fear, and the lovely emotions in between, my strategy for coping remained the same — the trees.

I started taking these walks, finding neighborhoods rife with trees or hiking trails teeming with them, and I would walk for hours. I’d listen to music, of course, that has always been a constant for me as well, but mostly, I would be looking up. I’d think about how many people these trees had seen walking below them, how many years they had stayed in one place, how many storms they had endured, how many times they had shed their leaves but then grown them again, somehow a bit more beautiful than the last time.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte (Trees: Reflections and Poems)

Around this time, trees changed from a simple fondness to a necessary part of my daily routine. I began to see them in a new light; something I had always loved were now speaking to me in a different language. They became a representation of wisdom, resilience, and patience, and they served as a reminder of my ability to embody all three.

We have a lot to learn from trees, if only we have the willingness to care.

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argues that children are anti-fragile, and he maintains the necessity of a play-based over a phone-based childhood. Healthy psychological development requires repeated exposure to both physical and emotional challenges. As a metaphor for this argument, Haidt mentions what scientists learned about young trees from the Biosphere 2 experiment in the Arizona desert. As soon as he mentioned trees, I took the opportunity to go down a rabbit hole.

In the late 1980s, researchers at the University of Arizona conducted a grand experiment in which they attempted to build a closed artificial ecosystem in an enormous glass and steel enclosure in the middle of the desert. This study was carried out in preparation for life beyond our planet, and if it succeeded, it could one day be replicated in space.

The effort ultimately failed (for many reasons), but mostly due to an unknown fact about growing trees. Young trees, it turns out, require wind to grow properly. When wind blows on growing trees, the movement tugs on the roots, which in turn expand to provide a firmer anchor into the ground. Without wind, trees in the Biosphere 2 greenhouse could not develop stress wood, also known as reaction wood, which forms when the physical strain signals the tree to alter cellular structures and thicken its trunk. Stress wood is denser and stronger, and it allows the tree to reach full maturity and withstand severe weather.

As the stoics and Buddhists said long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all triggers from life. Rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you.

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation

Lacking the wind to support their growth, these trees literally fell over from their own weight. Put simply, trees must experience stressors to become strong. Resilience is not just an occasional perk of “treehood” (lol), it’s a prerequisite, a condition of survival, a foregone conclusion. It’s either figure out how to withstand the wind or crumble underneath your own weight. Every single tree you see outside chose the former, and in reality, the choice was already made for them. Withstanding the wind and thriving despite hardship was built into their very DNA.

And here I go. In a way, it’s also built into yours. All the things that I love trees for: their ability to overcome adversity, their wisdom gained through experience, their capacity to bear fruit, their longstanding patience, their overwhelming beauty, their connection with rest of the ecosystem — it’s all present in you too.

We share so many eerily similar qualities with trees. Humans are cut from the same cloth, created with the same methods of efficiency in mind. Our nervous system and a tree’s root system look practically identical because of fractal branching, a naturally occurring pattern that is the most effective way to condense a large surface area into a small space. Our fingerprint and a tree’s stump are almost indistinguishable due to their concentric patterning, a geometric phenomenon through which nature repeatedly finds the most efficient way to signify growth. The way a seedling sprouts into the ground is directly comparable to a neuron firing in our brain, and both are governed by the laws of physics and mathematics that maximize resource coverage and minimize spent energy.

We share approximately 19 to 25% of our DNA with trees. With the very same trees that are in your backyard and have watched you grow up. With the same trees that are thousands of years old and still standing. With the same trees that have endured winds, thunderstorms, and tornadoes. With the same trees that have shed their leaves countless times over endless years, only to grow again come spring.

Wouldn’t their methods of resilience and wisdom apply to us too?

I believe this is where my sense of peace comes from. I know that what a tree is capable of, I am capable of too. I connect with the most resilient part of myself when I go on a walk after a storm, seeing all of my beloved trees still standing. I become the wisest version of myself when I take a blanket to the park, lay under the shade of a tree, and let the scary and inescapable thoughts flow out of me. I find the patience that so often evades me when I watch a sapling slowly climb towards the sky, the word “rush” completely absent from its vocabulary. I know that I can endure anything when I watch the leaves grow back, completely unfazed, after a long and harsh winter. Like Mary Oliver writes in When I Am Among the Trees, “I would almost say that they save me, and daily.”

I hope that after reading this, you too have a weird thing for trees. Welcome to the club.

Mary Oliver, When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness. 
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say, 
"and you too have come 
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

The Trump Administration has introduced major budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service and scaled back environmental protections on tens of millions of acres of national forests. This is occurring while our forests are already fighting a climate crisis of severe heat, droughts, and devastating wildfires. The below foundations support initiatives to counteract this reality:

National Forest Foundation

USDA Plant-A-Tree Program

National Parks Conservation Association

Save The Trees

Green Fund Initiative

Read more here: Unprotecting American Lands: How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Bipartisan Conservation Legacy

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Here is something that makes me happy:
I believe that there is a restaurant somewhere in the 
universe that serves nothing but first meals and last meals.
The first time you ate with the person you loved.
The first time you discovered you enjoyed something,
you always thought you'd hated, and the last time you ate
with someone, without knowing it was the last time.
Somewhere, you can stretch every moment into a kind of forever.
Iain S. Thomas

I turn 23 this week. Which means it’s time for my yearly spiral. You know, the one when you’re supposed to be celebrating another trip around the sun but instead you get super emotional about time moving too fast and growing up and the immense existential dread that comes with all of that. Just me?

As a part of this yearly reflection, I’m always thinking about my happiest moments in life. All of the times that I have felt the most alive over the years. What each of these memories have in common with one another, and which of them stand wholly on their own.

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What makes a memory memorable? Are the ones fully documented by photos and videos the ones I remember best? Or the ones where I brought home a souvenir, something I can hold in my hand to transport me back to a certain moment in time? How about the ones that I meticulously copied down into my journal? There are also those with nothing tangible attached to them, yet I still can recount every detail.

To me, these questions are important to ask because they dictate how I should memorialize my future moments. What’s the best strategy to make sure I never forget the joy I experience?

Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.

Susan Sontag

I recently saw this video of Isabelle Radford talking about photography, and it inspired a major shift in my brain, I’ll link it here. She’s talking about this quote by Susan Sontag, who wrote On Photography in the 1970s as an effort to dive into photography’s connection with the human experience. Isabelle argues that “our phones sit between us and our experiences,” mentioning Sontag’s claim that we document our life as a sort of coping mechanism, an effort to “manage discomfort.” What’s insane is that Sontag wrote this in the 1970s, either completely oblivious to the fact that this matter would only get worse, or genius in her ability to predict the future.

Sontag said that photography is a defense against anxiety, a defense against the fact that nothing lasts in a physical sense, and we fear our memory alone will not suffice to do our experiences justice. It’s a means of gaining control in a world that asks so much of us and often gives so little. As I grow older, this resonates more and more with me because unfortunately, memory is not infallible over the life course. I’ve seen it in myself, my friends, my parents, my grandparents. Growing old spares no one and nothing, but at the same time, there some memories that even age cannot touch.

When I think about some of my favorite childhood moments, many of them feel as vivid as if they happened yesterday. I can still feel the terror and thrill of the first time I rode my bike without training wheels. My dad was holding me and keeping me upright as we took our normal route around the neighborhood. Finally, at the top of a hill, all of the sudden his grip on my bike loosened, and I hear: “Meet you at the stop sign!” I was horrified, so sure that there was no way I could make it on my own. But wait, I was still going, wasn’t I? I wasn’t falling, I hadn’t crashed, and honestly, I felt free. I was pedaling on my own, and I was invincible (I wasn’t… I was 6 years old).

Not a single photo or video documented this experience. But I can close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and the smile tightening my cheeks as I realized I could do this. I can still hear my dad’s whoops as he ran beside me, cheering me on all the way to the stop sign at the bottom of the hill.

But I can also remember other cherished moments that do exist preserved in a photo album: screaming my favorite songs at a concert in the rain with my best friend, exploring Europe with my sisters, hiking at Zion national park, and so many more. However, I’ve noticed that I cannot always physically transport myself back to these moments. Many times I can, but other times the memories are fuzzy, not able to elicit the same visceral reaction when I close my eyes.

Does this mean recording an experience prevents me from being fully present?

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I don’t think so, fully. But I do think that the answer has to do with the intention behind your actions. Are you recording to document something in its pure form, to create a lifeline to a moment that you are afraid of forgetting even while you are living it? Is this why you have your phone out, trying to capture every detail? Or, are you recording just to post it on Instagram? To show others that you are living a “meaningful” life?

Ever since I read Every Word You Cannot Say by Iain Thomas, I often find myself thinking that I want to stretch a particular moment in time into “a kind of forever,” even as I’m experiencing it. Sometimes, this leads me to snapping a photo of it, or picking up a token that will encapsulate the memory in a physical form. Other times I try to encode every detail into my brain, closing my eyes and noticing my heart beating, the feeling of the sun shining down on my face, hearing the sounds all around me. Occasionally, these moments are even more memorable than the ones that live in my phone, simply because I was entirely focused on experiencing it.

And there are people who forget what it’s like to be sixteen when they turn seventeen. I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all become somebody’s mom or dad. But right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening. I am here, and I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful. I can see it. This one moment when you know you’re not a sad story. You are alive. And you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you’re listening to that song, and that drive with the people who you love most in this world. And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite.

Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is one of my favorite movies and books of all time. It’s one of the only films that, in my opinion, completely captures the world created by the author and brings the stories to life in a real way. This is a direct quote from the book, but it also appears in the movie as a voiceover at the very end, as Charlie stands in the back of the truck as they drive over the Fort Pitt bridge. The combination of the voiceover, Heroes by David Bowie playing in the background, Charlie holding his arms out wide, and the Pittsburgh skyline at dusk is one of my favorite moments in film.

It has me thinking: would you rather a memory be a story or a photo? Is one better than the other? Obviously, this took place in a movie, but the scene is a direct reenactment of Charlie’s journal entry from the book. Charlie will not have a picture of this moment, but he can go back and read what he wrote after this night. And truly, even if he didn’t write it down, there’s no way he would ever forget it. The moments that we feel infinite make marks on our soul.

But mostly, I was crying because I was suddenly very aware of the fact that it was me standing up in that tunnel with the wind over my face. Not caring if I saw downtown. Not even thinking about it. Because I was standing in the tunnel. And I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite.

Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

So yes, these will all be stories someday. I always go back to Frank Kafka’s quote: “the meaning of life is that it ends.” Quite literally everything we do in life is inspired by the fact that we know it is all finite. This means that our happiest, most perspective-shifting experiences are finite too. There’s nothing wrong with trying to capture them with a photo or a video, but there is something wrong with letting your phone be the bridge between you and your full experience.

Our lives are fecund, our futures teeming with joy, laughter, love, happiness, grief, sorrow, and everything in between. There will be so many times that you wish you could freeze a moment and live in it forever, so you whip out your phone in hopes of creating an indestructible memory. But you cannot forget to feel.

Memories can and will be tainted. You will likely forget the detail of what you were wearing, exactly what someone said, or the order in which things happened. But if you make an effort to be present, you will never forget the way you felt. That is one thing time cannot take from you. Let that be your coping mechanism.

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“Marriage.”

There ought to be a different word for it once you’ve been married for enough years. When you’ve long since passed the point where it stopped feeling like a choice. I no longer choose you every morning, that was a beautiful thing we said on our wedding day, I just can’t imagine life without you now. We aren’t freshly blooming flowers, we’re two trees with intertwined roots, you’ve grown old within me.

When you’re young, you believe that love is infatuation. But infatuation is simple, any child can become infatuated, fall in love. But real love? Love is a job for an adult. Love demands a whole person, all the best of you, all the worst.

There ought to be a different word for it after a while. Because there’s no such thing as “eternal infatuation,” only love that lasts that long, and it’s never simple.

It requires a whole person, everything you have. The whole lot.

Fredrik Backman, The Winners

I’m hitting that age. You know, the one where you open social media and all you see is engagement post after engagement post after wedding post after baby announcement, etc. etc. And as someone with a relatively dormant love life, sometimes this frustrates me, and other times it makes me feel relieved (depends on my mood).

A huge realization for me as I’ve gotten older is that love is a lot less predestined than we think. The high school sweetheart couple getting married after 10 years together are not luckier than me; they didn’t just hit the romance jackpot freshman year of high school. The couple that met 6 months ago and just got engaged are not soulmates that found each other at the perfect time. It’s not a matter of fortune or chance, and it’s not something beyond our ability to comprehend. What matters is that two people met at a time that their lives were compatible, they capitalized on mutual attraction, and they have chosen each other ever since (or so we assume, to be determined).

The number of times my friends and I meet someone new and then immediately text each other: “I just met my husband” or “I think he’s the one.” Honestly, I think a small part of us just thinks that this text would be amazing for our maid of honor to read out loud on our wedding day. Which is kind of an embarrassing reason to send it.

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But really, I’ve realized that I can convince myself that anyone is the love of my life. That doesn’t mean that they are. If they check enough boxes on the imaginary (and completely irrational) list that I have in my head, that would mean that they were made for me, right? It’s just too perfect to not be true. I’m starting to think, in the ways that matter, it really doesn’t work like that.

Everything that is truly right for you will make you feel at ease. Everything that is truly right for you will seem so simple, so obvious, so comfortable. Everything that is truly right for you will choose you as quickly as you choose it.

The things that are truly right for you will find you, and they will stay. They will grow you, challenge you, and change you. It is their undeniable presence that will ultimately put your heart at ease.

Briana West

Remember when you were a kid, and you were still learning how shapes and objects and life works, and you got one of those little puzzles where the pieces fit perfectly into the predetermined holes? Upon further research, I have now learned that this is called a shape sorter. And although I’ve grown up now and understand object permanence among other things, I’m still shape sorting my life.

It’s like — I was convinced that this puzzle is my life, and it has been set in stone since I was born, and the right people and places will come along and fit perfectly into the outline that was formed just for them. This applies to my life partner, my future home, my job, basically any part of my life that involves a choice on my end. I’ve learned that having this mindset allows you to become complacent. You think that what’s for you will find you, and you assume that you will know when you have it. That a feeling you get will signal that something has found it’s rightful place.

I’m not a religious person, but I do sometimes think God made you for me.

Sally Rooney, Normal People

But here we arrive at the square-peg-round-hole problem. I’ve found myself working so intently to make something fit into a hole that simply was not made for it. Trying so hard to file down the harsh edges of the rectangle, to form it into a circle. Because you’re so captivated with a person, or a job, or a place, you think it was made specifically for you. You make excuses, you rationalize, you convince yourself that it will just take more work, more time, or more effort. You do whatever it takes to make yourself believe that this is worth the sacrifice, because it feels right. It’s supposed to fit, you can feel it. But you can’t always trust your feelings.

When clouded by infatuation, everything feels right. You think that you wouldn’t feel this strongly if this person was wrong for you. You think you can feel it in your very bones that they are the one. That they were made in a lab specifically for you. But in reality, anyone could be the love of your life. It’s not about feelings, that would be too easy. It’s so much more than that.

“I don’t know, I’m starting to think maybe you just pick a place and stay there. You pick a career and do it. You pick a person and commit to him.”

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Maybe in Another Life

It’s not fate. There’s not someone coming to fit perfectly inside the puzzle that is your life. And the shape you’re trying to fit them in changes too — it won’t always be a circle. Maybe it’s a circle for you in this phase of life, and you’re looking for the right circle that fits. Maybe in a couple months you’ll realize you don’t want a circle anymore, and then it’ll be a square that’s meant for you, and a year after that, a triangle, and so on and so on. But if someone comes along that fits at that particular moment, from there on out it’s on both of you. You don’t have to stay the same forever, but you do have to want to grow and change together. “We’re two trees with intertwined roots, you’ve grown old within me.”

We so often mistake infatuation for love. Or we mistake love for love (emphasis added). Anyone can feel infatuated. And you feel love every day, it’s truly not hard to find it. I can simply walk out of my apartment and easily fall in love with a stranger; all it takes is concocting a version of them in my head that fits what I want at the moment.

Infatuation is checkers. Real love is chess.

“Loving someone is like moving into a house,” Sonja used to say. “At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake has been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this.

Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love the house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it’s cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.”

Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

I’ve thought about this quote almost every day since I finished A Man Called Ove six months ago. It’s a perfect explanation of how love is a battle of will rather than about simple desire. The result is you becoming the owner of a house, one that only you understand the secrets and nuances of. How beautiful is it to have that degree of knowledge on someone, to access a deeper level that no one else has seen? It’s so much more than a feeling. In fact, the feeling itself is child’s play.

Now, there are definitely people who are more right for you than others. There are those who will never be compatible with you, no matter what phase of life you’re in. And sometimes you have to learn this criteria the hard way. But there will also be those that, in theory, seem like they could be your person, but somehow it just doesn’t work in practice. It’s important that you let these people go. “Everything that is truly right for you will make you feel at ease.”

If it doesn’t work out, that doesn’t mean you made a bad decision. It doesn’t mean you failed colossally, and it doesn’t prove that something is wrong with you. How could you be so sure that they were the one when they weren’t sure about you? It’s simple — things just weren’t aligning when and where it matters.

I don’t think that “right person, wrong time” exists. I don’t think “right person, right time” exists either. In fact, there’s not even really a “right” person at all. There’s just a good person that you meet at a good time, and the rest is up to both of you.

Anyone could be the love of your life. That’s scary, but it’s also comforting. Because you can be so convinced that you got it right this time and still be wrong. It means that you didn’t miss your chance, and actually, there are infinite chances. The love of your life is entirely relative, completely arbitrary. When you realize this, you remove the pressure on yourself to recognize fate.

Feelings are fleeting; they come and go as they please. Real love is permanent. But it takes all of you—the whole lot—at a time that you’re ready to give it. And it takes all of your partner too. Everything you have. Anything less will always fail.

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If you don’t connect with bigger things (sunlight, history, art, nature, love), you will make the ill mistake of believing you are the big thing.

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I have been feeling a huge lack of creativity lately. Usually, when I sit down to write, the words just flow out of me and the thoughts string together into a cohesive picture. I thought that it would always feel that way because inspiration has found me on a consistent basis. Writing every week has been a constant source of fulfillment, and it has kept me in touch with the parts of myself that mean a lot to me. It’s a pure form of expression, and I love creating art that I’m proud of.

However, as I have learned, inspiration is a privilege.

Where do I look to find that spark that usually finds me? Where can I go to cultivate inspiration when I feel empty? Am I less of an artist when creativity evades me? These are questions that race around my mind. Even when something is supposed to only be an outlet for me, it somehow becomes tied to my sense of self-worth.

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I have learned that inspiration is inextricably linked to my mental state. If I’m not taking care of myself, myself will not take care of me. That’s why the quote, “if you don’t connect with bigger things (sunlight, history, art, nature, love), you will make the ill mistake of believing you are the big thing” is a powerful truth. It puts words to what I have always known. When do I feel my best? When I go on a walk in nature, when I look at the trees, when I meaningfully connect with others, when I consume art, when I listen to music, when I feel the sunlight on my face.

Why do these things bring you back to yourself and ground you towards what matters? Because they remind you that it’s not about you.

I Go Down to The Shore, Mary Oliver
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says 
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Reconnecting with nature is healing because it gives you insight into the continuity of life. No matter what’s going on in your head, nature doesn’t care. The birds still fly, the waves still roll in, and the trees still sway. “Excuse me, I have work to do.” It’s a hard truth, but it’s a comforting one.

You are not the big thing. If you were, nature would respond. The wind would stand still, the leaves would stop falling, and the rivers would dry up.

“I go to my favorite place in London,” said Jem, “and I stand and look at the water, and I think about the continuity of life, and how the river rolls on, oblivious of the petty upsets in our lives.”

Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

It’s hard to not be selfish in tough moments. When your head feels like a cage, it seems like an impossible task to leave it. But you know that meme, the one with the bird “locked” in the cage that’s open everywhere else? That’s you. When you’re only looking at the bars in front of you, you can’t see anything else. It’s self-sabotage.

Mary Oliver, from Evidence (2009)
7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
         though with difficulty.

I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
         somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

The world doesn’t stop spinning for you. It never will, and that’s not a bad thing. I think this is a sentiment that mostly all of us are forced to learn through experience. There comes a moment when it aligns — when we realize that putting ourselves at the center of our universe might not actually be serving us.

Instead, you can orient yourself around the continuity of the world, knowing that it will always carry on, despite your personal circumstance. Doing so brings you out of the invisible cage you’ve built and into connections that, coincidentally, will bring you back to your true self. It’s a reinforcing circle. But it starts with looking outside yourself and into bigger things. What are those big things for you?

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One thing that I wanted to talk about before getting into all of this is a new practice I started this year. I’m big into underlining and highlighting quotes as I’m reading, and as I finish each book, I have been copying down these quotes into a notebook. Not only has doing this helped the words stick with me for longer, it also has shown me where themes connect across different books and genres. Additionally, it has been a huge tool in writing these Substack essays. Usually the themes that I write about at The Journal Factory are inspired by the books that I’ve read, so I can very easily open up my notebook and take my pick of the quotes I’ve accumulated. But really, I highly recommend doing this. It helps you to not just finish a book and wipe it from your mind.

I’m going to separate all of my reads out by genre, go through a little of what I’ve learned from each group, and then include some quotes I copied down. At the end, I’ll provide a list of my favorites that I recommend (with links)!

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Academic(ish)

I’m starting with these because I honestly credit these books for pushing me out of my comfort zone this year. I took Seminar in Criminal Justice Theory this semester as a part of my PhD course load. We essentially had to read a book per week and be prepared to talk about it during the next class. Some weeks, we were also required to write a paper synthesizing the book’s ideas and connecting it to other areas of research.

At first, this seemed absolutely impossible. I thought I was going to be suffering miserably for five months straight. However, this class made me realize that there is actually a lot more time in the day than you think (when you get off your phone), and you can also read a lot faster than you think (especially when you’re forced to). Some of these books were full of academic jargon and very textbook-y, yet I was still able to knock most of them out in 3-4 days to give me enough time to write my paper. I was in a groove by the end of the semester.

I would be reading one of these books for school, one book for myself, and listening to one Harry Potter audiobook at any point in time. I used to think I could only read one book at a time, but I proved myself wrong. And most importantly, I learned a lot from each of them. Shoutout CJ Theory.

My favorites from the semester were The Culture of Control, Misdemeanorland, How Doctors Think, and The Imperative of Integration. The Imperative of Integration is one I picked up about a month ago to better understand racial residential segregation before I started working on a new research project. I was so used to always balancing one academic book with my personal reads because of CJ theory, so I have kept up the practice. How Doctors Think is an in-depth account of medical decision-making that highlights how commonly used mental shortcuts and cognitive biases create errors in medicine. We read it to compare the criminal justice system to the medical model (super cool). Misdemeanorland reveals the system of control that operates in marginalized communities through misdemeanor courts in New York City. The Culture of Control traces the United States’ shift from a rehabilitative model of criminal justice to the get-tough punishment movement that ultimately produced mass incarceration where it stands today.

Literary Fiction/Historical Fiction/Memoirs

These books absolutely changed my life, and I’m still thinking about so many of them almost every day. If you read my essays, most of those included here inspired my ideas. Fredrik Backman’s quotes are everywhere throughout my articles. After reading these five books by him, he has solidified himself as one of my favorite authors. The way he writes and communicates such complex feelings is so beautiful. I wish I could read all of his books again for the first time.

The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.

Fredrik Backman, My Friends

But we are always optimists when it comes to time; we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.

Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

It’s impossible to measure love, but that doesn’t stop us coming up with new ways to try. One of the simplest is space: How much space am I prepared to give the person that you are so that you can become the person you want to become?

Fredrik Backman, Us Against You

He has seen good people capable of great evil, but also terrible people capable of great goodness. It’s the same everywhere: almost everyone loves too much, hates too easily, forgives too little.

Fredrik Backman, The Winners

I have also really loved reading Kristin Hannah this year. I always thought that I wouldn’t like historical fiction, but I was completely wrong. Hannah’s writing style blew me away, and I think I read most of her books this year within two or three days, despite their length.

In this crazy, chaotic, divided world that was run by men, you could count on the women.

Kristin Hannah, The Women

Finally, she’d stopped expecting to feel better, and that was when she found a way to live. She couldn’t control her grief or her life or much of anything, really (that was what she knew now), but she could control her emotions.

Kristin Hannah, Night Road

Life was like that, full of quicksilver changes. Joy reappeared as unexpectedly as sunlight.

Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

I just wrote a whole piece a couple weeks ago talking about Tweak and Beautiful Boy. I’ll link that here. After watching the movie with Steve Carrell and Timothee Chalamet, getting these first hand accounts from the real-life father and son was truly gut-wrenching. Loved these books and cannot recommend them enough.

The last two I want to mention are Notes on Heartbreak and The Fiddler in the Subway. I read Notes on Heartbreak while going through a breakup. It’s Annie Lord’s personal memoir as she navigates the dissolution of her five-year relationship. The book was truly perspective-shifting, and it was so helpful to me in that season of life. The Fiddler in the Subway was recommended to me by my mentor and was unlike anything I usually read. The Pulitzer Prize winning book is a collection of articles written by renowned journalist Gene Weingarten. I also just wrote an essay about one of the articles included in this book, I’ll link it here.

I know I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with you, but I am going to spend more of my life with the lessons we learned together, the person you made me into. So in that way, I’m so thankful we broke up when we did, because it means I get to spend more time with her.

Annie Lord, Notes on Heartbreak

There’s nothing wrong with denial, of course. It’s how we get through life without being consumed by the inevitability of our own death. You know, whistling in the dark. It explains a lot of human behavior, things big and small, including the xenophobic dance we do to hold on to our pride and self-confidence — denying our own weaknesses by ridiculing others not like us.

Gene Weingarten, The Fiddler in the Subway

Romance

Couldn’t leave the romance out this year! I don’t read as much romance as I used to, admittedly because I have gotten tired of reading the same plot over and over again. Regardless, I did indeed binge the Off Campus series after watching the show. The books were mid at best, but they were entertaining for the most part. Just lacking depth, which is fine when you don’t expect depth.

The two Rebecca Yarros books really surprised me. I had only read the Fourth Wing series by her, and quite honestly was not aware of her game outside of romantasy. I cried like a baby reading both The Last Letter and The Things We Leave Unfinished. They have absolutely insane plot lines, and I honestly am a little worried for Yarros’s well-being after coming up with them.

“You are the culmination of every lightning strike and twist of fate. Do not settle for the love that hones your edges and turns you brittle and cold, Georgia. Not when there are so many other kinds of love waiting for you.”

Rebecca Yarros, The Things We Leave Unfinished

"Because I love you.” He said it with such incredible certainty, the way someone said the world was round or the oceans were deep. His love was a foregone conclusion.

Rebecca Yarros, The Last Letter

Finally, I recently read Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid. This was also an insane plot line, and I could definitely tell it was one of her earlier works, but I still loved it. The book got me thinking a lot about the choices we make and how they shape our future. Interesting commentary into whether there are alternative universes in which we chose differently.

“An infinite number of versions of ourselves are living out the consequences of every single possibility in our lives. What I’m getting at here is that I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices that led me somewhere else, led me to someone else. And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn’t end up with you.

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Maybe in Another Life

Fantasy

Of course I had to throw some Fantasy into the lineup. Most of these consist of the Harry Potter audiobooks that I have been listening to this year. I literally cannot recommend these enough (despite J.K. Rowling lately, ugh). These books are so much better than I remember them, and I have been having a great time reliving my childhood.

Jim Dale narrates these, and he was so exponentially locked in it’s not even funny. I know exactly who is talking before it’s revealed just based on the tone of his voice. He won two Grammys for his performance reading these books. It feels like I’m watching the movies in my head (but better… as you know, the books are always better). I’ve started listening to audiobooks when I get my daily steps in, and it has made working out a lot less boring. I listen to these on Libby for free with my local library card!

Also to mention here, do not read Zodiac Academy. I finally had to DNF (reading slang for “did not finish”) the 7th one. I know what you’re thinking… but Shaye how did you get 7 books in before you finally put them down? Don’t ask. I’m not proud of it. These books were written horribly, but for some reason the plot got me. I’m not really sure why. They were like fantasy brainrot. I guess if you like that you should read these.

My 40th book of the year was actually Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare. This is the first in the prequel series to The Mortal Instruments. I was absolutely obsessed with these as a teen. It’s been so long since I’ve read them that I’ve forgotten what happened, and I’m having a great time. I just finished it last night, and it was even better than I remembered. I probably will end up reading all of these before the year is over.

“Whatever you are physically,” he said, “male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy — all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. Whatever the color, the shape, the design of the shade that conceals it, the flame inside the lamp remains the same. You are that flame.”

Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

Okay, I’m almost done. Thanks for sticking with me. Here is my finalized recommendation list with links (if you want them) from the books I’ve read this year:

• Harry Potter audiobooks (Jim Dale version!)

• My Friends by Fredrik Backman

• A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

• Beartown Series by Fredrik Backman

• The Things We Leave Unfinished by Rebecca Yarros

• Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord

• The Women by Kristin Hannah

• The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

• Beautiful Boy by David Sheff & Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff

• The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten

• How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

• The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society by David Garland

• The Imperative of Integration by Elizabeth Anderson

I update my Goodreads pretty regularly, so also feel free to connect with me on there!

My Goodreads

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You will survive, but you will become someone else.

Unknown

I read Almond by Sohn Won-pyung a couple of weeks ago. It’s a book about a kid, Yunjae, who is born with abnormally small amygdalae in his brain, and this resulted in him being practically incapable of feeling emotion. The story follows him as he navigates learning how to live in a world full of emotions that he doesn’t understand. Yunjae was forced to learn the appropriate reactions to external stimuli in an effort to seem “normal” and fit in with his classmates.

I liked the book, but I think it could’ve gone a lot deeper than it did. Mostly my point in mentioning it is that it got me thinking more in depth about the amygdala. I took both a psychobiology and a sensation and perception class when I was an undergraduate, and I actually did a project on this small, almond-like structure during my junior year.

The amygdala is the primary center for emotion, emotional behavior, and motivation. It ties emotion to memories, processes fear, detects threats, and activates responses to danger. Our fight-or-flight response is housed here, so the amygdala plays a huge role in how we react to external stimuli that are perceived as dangerous.

When our fight-or-flight response is triggered, our amygdala essentially tells our brains to encode this situation as an important memory. For example, if you were hiking through the woods and saw a bear, your fear response would be activated because the bear would be perceived as a threat. What’s so important here is that your brain clicks into focus mode, and it tries to remember key details and store this memory in its most vivid form.

The brain does this so that if we encounter another threatening situation in the future — say, another scary animal in the woods — future us will be more prepared. This is our amygdala’s effort to keep us alive, and it has thus played a pivotal role in the survival of the human race. The evolutionary process has preserved the amygdala’s function over centuries.

So why am I talking about this? This isn’t a school project after all, this is The Journal Factory. Stick with me, I’m getting there.

The more emotionally arousing a situation is, the stronger the memory will be due to the amygdala’s involvement. Enhanced memories of stressful situations is an adaptive process because your brain wants to remember best how to deal with threatening situations in order to be prepared for the future.

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“Did you know that our brains are biologically programmed to remember painful memories better?”

“It’s true,” he continued. “It’s our way of protecting ourselves, to remember something painful so we don’t repeat the same mistake.”

“A defense mechanism,” I mused.

“Exactly.” He turned his head to look at me. “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do whatever it was again. Just means we have to push past the pain our brains won’t let go of.”

"What do they say about the definition of insanity?" I asked, tilting my face so I could meet his eyes. "Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome?"

“It’s never the same. There are a million variations of any situation. No two people are alike. The tiniest change to any encounter could leave us with very different results. I like to think of the possibilities as a tree. Maybe you start with the one path —" He tapped the nearest trunk. "But fate throws all the branches out and what seems like a tiny choice, left or right, becomes another and another, until the possibilities of what could have been are endless."

Rebecca Yarros, The Things We Leave Unfinished

As someone with, one might say, an overactive nervous system, sometimes my body truly doesn’t know the difference between encountering a bear in the woods and basic forms of human connection. Which can be a problem, because my anxiety-ridden memories often feel more vivid than my normal ones.

Our brains are still biologically programmed for the primal nature of our ancestors. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived much more risky lifestyles than we currently do. They legitimately needed their amygdalae to protect them, to better encode memories so the next time they encountered a snake or a bear or another threatening animal, they would be better prepared.

However, the threats that we currently face pale in comparison. Human beings are now, for lack of a better word, soft. Which can lead to what we perceive as threatening — an unwanted text, scary social situations, a breakup, embarrassment — to become the type of memories and feelings that our brains think are the most worth remembering.

One of my favorite movies of all time is The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The movie follows the main character, Joel, as he navigates a life-altering breakup. He learns that his ex-girlfriend, Clementine, was so heartbroken that she got a procedure done to erase all of her memories of Joel and their relationship. Joel is so distraught that he tries to get the same procedure. For both of them, the memories were simply too painful to bear.

I wonder — how did the amygdala play into this? I know these are not real people, but this situation is very real. It’s so common to go through a breakup and wish that you never met that person in hopes that it would make all the pain go away. But this pain, although very real, might be slightly exacerbated by the fact that your brain won’t let you forget how you felt. It thinks it needs to store this memory in its purest form, just in case you go through something similar again. It’s trying to protect you.

I’m going to use a breakup as an example because it relates to the movie, but I think that this applies to anything that has the potential to bring us pain. I think the amygdala, although historically so essential to our survival, may now be holding us back.

Are we scared to put ourselves out there, to be vulnerable, and to love fully because our past heartbreak still feels so vivid? Is our brain tricking us into self-sabotage in its effort to protect us from the pain that once felt earth-shattering? Does our past handcuff our future because we cannot let it go?

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“My advice to you is this: remember that the brain grows. The more you use it, the better it becomes. If you use it for bad, you’ll grow a bad brain, but if you use it for good, you’ll have a good brain. I heard certain parts of your brain are weak. But if you practice, you can make them stronger.”

Sohn Won-pyung, Almond

Our brains have neuroplasticity, which means that they are able to grow and change. The younger that you are, the easier your brain is able to adapt, although your brain never fully loses this ability. It will create more neural pathways as you learn new things, keep the pathways that are deemed important, and get rid of synaptic connections that are not used.

Essentially, your brain is able to rewire itself over time. This is why building good habits are important — walking, reading, listening to music, learning something new. Your brain is always striving to be the most efficient version of itself. Now, you can’t train your amygdala to stop telling your brain to vividly remember the things that hurt you the most. That’s its job, and as a reminder, it’s just trying to keep you alive. It doesn’t know the difference between heartbreak and a legitimate threat.

How many times do people swear off love because they don’t want to risk getting hurt again? Clearly, this has a biological basis. But if you know how your brain is going to process and store painful memories, you can “train” it to overcome this obstacle. It takes intention and commitment, but it’s possible.

Know that your memories are real, but also know that they may be exaggerated because of the emotional intensity attached to them. You have to find a way to not let them impact the decisions you make in the future, especially when those decisions can lead to joy and happiness that you may be currently lacking. No two situations are the same, and don’t let your brain convince you otherwise. Your brain vividly remembers the bear, but what’s rustling in the woods might actually be a bunny. The fear may be completely unnecessary, but you won’t know until you’re brave enough to find out.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic pentameter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music too.

Gene Weingarten, The Fiddler in the Subway

The Washington Post conducted a social experiment in 2007 in which they hired a world-famous violinist to play in the Washington D.C. subway system during rush hour. When I say world-famous, I mean it — Joshua Bell had just played at the Library of Congress a few weeks prior, and he was widely renowned in the music world as a genius. He had played for royals in Europe and his talent was worth almost $1000 per minute. Interview Magazine once said that his playing “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.”

Gene Weingarten describes the social experiment as a “test of whether, in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius.” The result was this: out of 1,097 people who walked by during Bell’s “set,” only 7 stopped to listen for at least a minute. Read the full article here.

As the team at the Washington Post analyzed the footage of the scene, looking to see if there were any commonalities among the very few who noticed Bell and his expertise, they saw that only one thing united them. Age.

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There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Gene Weingarten, The Fiddler in the Subway

Bell was playing classics like “Ave Maria” and “Chaconne” on a violin crafted in the 1700s. The children who walked by Bell in the D.C. metropolitan center perhaps recognized that there was something special going on here. Or perhaps they just thought, “Pretty music. I like it.” Even if they couldn’t put it into words, it was clear that each child detected something that their parents did not.

As a reminder, it was rush hour. Later, whenever people were asked about the violinist, many could not even remember hearing the music. They said they were in a time crunch, running late for work, or thinking about what they had to get done that day. Their children were different; their youth gifted them the ability to be present, to notice the extraordinary in the ordinary.

They might not have even realized that the music was extraordinary because of the widely acclaimed talent producing it. Rather, as a child, everything seems extraordinary. A metal spoon is the perfect entertainment. Keys are completely mesmerizing. A playground is anything you could imagine it to be: a castle, a battlefield, a pirate ship.

Childlike wonder is having a deep appreciation of everything around you. It’s seeing everything with fresh eyes. It’s finding beauty everywhere, both when it’s staring you in the face and when it’s hiding behind your long mental to-do list.

We’ve all heard it from a kid: “Hey, watch this!” Most of the time, the act they perform is completely normal and nothing crazy, which can be frustrating when you stopped what you were doing to give them attention. In their mind, the performance was captivating, spectacular, and absolutely worth showing anyone who will watch.

Sure this is an effort to get external validation, but no matter the reaction, children remain confident in their talents. This is a kind of confidence that gets choked out of us as we grow older. Slowly, over time, we become self-conscious, doubtful of our capabilities. We begin to focus less on ourselves and more on those watching us, and this leads to uncertainty in who we are.

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“I mean, it’s hard to describe… but like, did Brooke know when she was young that she would change? That she would grow old? That she would end up looking completely different from her youth? You know in your head that you’ll age and change, but it’s like hard to imagine, right?”

Sohn Won-pyung, Almond

So much of being a kid is being completely immersed in the present. When life is so good, when there is nothing to worry about, it seems impossible that things will ever change for us. Peter Pan said we didn’t have to grow up, right?

As a child, I felt invincible. My dad used to be the head coach of the basketball team at our local high school, and my sister and I were basically the team mascots when we were little. One night, at an important rivalry game, I was walking around the gym at the exact time that the national anthem began playing. I happened to be standing directly under the American flag, and all of the sudden everyone in the packed gym was standing still and staring at me. Music was playing (note: the Star Spangled Banner… which I didn’t know yet, I was four), and I assumed this meant everyone wanted a performance from me. I thought I’d never get the chance! I started dancing and doing cartwheels, so excited that I had the full attention of hundreds of people.

Honestly, I don’t really remember this exact moment. My parents have told this story many times because they were (rightfully) mortified, so that’s the only reason I know the details. What I do remember is how I felt. I was so sure of myself, so confident that everyone was looking at me. Why wouldn’t they be? It didn’t even cross my mind that they might have been focused on the flag right above me. They wanted me to show them my cartwheels and cool moves, duh. I was completely awesome, I was sure of it.

But other than that, I have no memories of that period in my life. So maybe everything happening in Lucy’s life right now is going to be a blur in her memories. Still, children seem like empty vessels who pick up on everything and are so affected by their surroundings. I mean, that’s what they tell me in therapy and it seems to be true. Stuff I don’t consciously remember affects my behavior every day. I see that now. So even if Lucy has no conscious memories of today, she still is taking everything in like a little sponge. And, moment by moment, she is developing her skills to cope with the situations life throws at her. If she is full of terror, she will grow up terrified. If she is made to feel safe and accepted, she will grow up trusting herself — confident and self-assured.

Nic Sheff, Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines

I loved reading this quote from Nic Sheff. It made so many things from my childhood make sense. That’s what we were — little sponges, empty vessels, observing our surroundings and storing them for future use. Even if our memories are not easily recalled when we get older, the coping mechanisms and skills we developed stick with us. I remember so much of how I felt and how I dealt with those feelings.

I’m not saying my childhood was completely perfect, but I did feel safe and loved and accepted. I think this is where a lot of my confidence in who I am comes from today. When that confidence begins to falter, I try to tap back into the version of myself that did cartwheels under the American flag. She’s never left me.

So why do we change so much when we get older? Why do we so easily lose sight of our deep appreciation for life and who we are? Younger me would never believe that I would lose confidence at times, that I would stop looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary, that I would no longer fully believe in myself.

Life happens. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” When we grow older, we become keenly aware of this. And it changes things. But really, it shouldn’t.

Knowing that our lives are finite inspires cowardice, which is actually kind of backwards. We learn that everything can hurt us at any time and that we can fail miserably, and with this knowledge comes fear. No longer are we afraid of the dark or monsters under the bed, now we’re afraid of getting our heart broken, disappointing people, and not achieving our goals.

That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.

Fredrik Backman, My Friends

The awareness that life can end causes us to lose our unconditional love for it. There’s always stress to do something worthwhile, to meet real and imaginary deadlines, to find your purpose before it’s too late. This mountain of stress clouds the endless beauty that exists in our every day. We ignore all of the little things around us that once made childhood so special.

I wonder if I would notice if a world famous violinist was performing on my morning commute to work. I really hope so. Would I stop and appreciate his music, or would I be too caught up in the things I had to get done that day? Would my noise-cancelling Airpods drown him out? Asking myself this question made me realize how much I need to slow down. I need to rediscover my childlike wonder for myself and everything around me.

The child within you never left. You’re still the same person, the same little kid who did a trick on the trampoline and had to show someone. The cool thing is that now the ceiling is so much higher. I don’t need to show someone how I can do a somersault anymore. Now, I can show them how I can change the world. “Watch this!”

Prejudice is the child of ignorance. It is sure to prevail, where people do not know each other.

Charles Sumner

How you respond depends often on what you have seen.

Gene Weingarten

Right now, I’m writing a research paper on how racial residential segregation affects communities, and I’ve been reading The Imperative of Integration by Elizabeth Anderson (highly recommend). As a student of the social sciences, I am no stranger to the fact that racial segregation is not only unjust, but also creates harmful consequences. My project focuses on identifying how segregation impacts overdose deaths at the county level. I’ll save the academic-y talk for that paper, but becoming well-versed in the literature on segregation has led me to expand my thinking.

I also just finished reading Beautiful Boy by David Sheff and Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff, which are truly heartbreaking tales about navigating drug addiction from a father and son’s point of view. Since much of my research has recently been involving overdoses, I think it’s important for me to try to understand addiction and its consequences not only for individuals, but also their families.

These books got me thinking about how so many of the “problems” that we cannot see eye-to-eye on are attributable to the fact that many people refuse to go out of their way to hear about the experiences of others. Experiences like racism, poverty, addiction, homelessness, and so many more that are so often points of contention in sociopolitical spheres.

It’s easy to remain naive and indifferent about these issues when they feel so far away and unimportant to your personal situation. But when you know someone who has experienced them, when you see these issues every day, it’s something you can’t ignore. Empathy is impossible without exposure.

Incoming anecdote. I grew up as a mixed kid in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee. This particular suburb was about as painfully un-diverse as a place can possibly get, with my high school being less than 3% black. Of course, this had many effects on the development of my psyche, but for the purposes of this topic, it taught me a lot about how lack of exposure breeds apathy.

Entering my senior year, we were just coming off of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Movement. During the fall of 2020, my high school had multiple “scandals,” in which some of my classmates were caught saying racial slurs. The results of this were school-wide conversations in which it was very clear how my classmates felt about the issue, and I was disheartened by the reactions (or in most cases, lack thereof) of many of those who I had been friends with since elementary school.

Now this was 6 years ago now, and it’s honestly not something I think about often, but the results of that year led me to completely despise my hometown. To this day, I feel like I regress as a human being when I go back there (so I never do). I barely talk to anyone from high school, and I think it’s because now I just associate the entire town with deep frustration and disappointment.

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My gut instinct was to feel offended, to never talk to anyone from high school ever again, to completely dismiss having any sort of conversation to create understanding. I still think those feelings were valid, but I now have a little more clarity on why everyone thought the way they did.

Now, although still important, this really is a mostly harmless example. There are much worse outcomes of racial segregation than teenagers at my high school that did not see the problem with saying racial slurs. As much as it affected my relationship with race and my identity, I think the real issue arising from segregation is apathy — ignoring the experiences of minorities and their communities, diminishing those struggling with addiction, and much more. Please note that I’m not trying to make comparisons between these two experiences, I’m more of trying to highlight how a lack of exposure leads to indifference towards both of these contemporary issues. This indifference leads to a complete disregard of humanity.

Where you are born and who you become is a cruel lottery. He wonders exactly what it was that divided him and his sister from happiness, and if it is even possible to measure all the “if only”s and “if that hadn’t”s, because when it comes down to it, that’s really all life is.

Fredrik Backman, The Winners

What’s crazy is that growing up in a certain area and a certain way is, exactly as Backman says, a “cruel lottery.” In this way, it is absolutely imperative to recognize your privilege, because who you have become is, essentially, due to completely random chance. This same cruel lottery also allowed you to grow up insulated from the effects of addiction, and it also gifted you stability in your home. You won, somehow.

The result of your victory is this: It’s easy to say that racism doesn’t exist anymore when you live in a predominantly white, wealthy suburb. It’s easy to dismiss poverty as a result of a lack of motivation and effort when you don’t know anyone facing it. It’s easy to think addiction is not a disease but an egocentric choice when no one that you know struggles with drugs. There are some things that you simply cannot learn without a degree of familiarity.

Isolating our problems to certain geographical areas and social groups allows those lucky enough to avoid such obstacles to forget them, to deem them nonexistent, a figment of a delusional imagination. But in reality, these individuals are really just the winners of the lottery.

I’ve been thinking about how to counteract these effects. Elizabeth Anderson says that residential segregation and racial discrimination are “mutually reinforcing,” suggesting that stigmatization is a product of a lack of intergroup contact between Black and White individuals. I agree with her, and I think this goes for almost all stigmas that exist today. A stigma remains when there is a lack of evidence to discredit it.

So what’s the answer when you can’t control where you grow up or who your family is? I think it lies in the “freedom from the bondage of self.”

This is a concept that Nic Sheff touches on in his memoir as he recounts his journey in recovery. Oftentimes, we operate in a deeply self-serving mentality. Nic faces this truth throughout his struggles with addiction, but this struggle is faced by all of us. Read this below.

“We are two people helping each other through life. The satisfaction of being there for someone else is unparalleled. This has been a fucked-up way to learn that lesson, but in my mind, it’s been worth it. And you also get to see now, without a doubt, that the more you give to others the more gifts you receive. That is a universal truth. It will never fail you.”

Now that Spencer has pointed it out, I realize that the times I have known some sort of inner peace in my life, those have always been times when I focused on helping others more than myself.

Those have been the moments when I get to stop obsessing about myself and really feel a sense of liberation. “Freedom from the bondage of self,” that’s what they call it in twelve-step language. I never really understood that before, but now I do.

Nic Sheff, Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines

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A lot of people would completely dismiss the twelve-step recovery model, maintaining that it is only applicable to those struggling with addiction. They would also dismiss reading Nic Sheff’s memoir, seeing it as something not worth their time. Personally, I learned a lot from reading both Nic and his father’s memoir, not only about addiction, but also about life. Particularly this one piece about serving others stuck out to me, because I think living for others is the key to neutralize the effects of segregation.

If we emulate true selflessness by intentionally seeking out the experiences of those we are isolated from and recognize their experience as a result of “losing the lottery” rather than an intentional choice, we are primed to learn how to live for others. With the knowledge of their experience, it will be natural to care, to try to do everything in your power to both understand and help. It’s in our human nature.

And as Nic says, this is where true inner peace will come in. Serving others gifts a sense of liberation, a relinquishing of the chains of being solely focused on yourself. This process is beneficial to all, as Spencer says: “the more you give to others the more gifts you receive.”

I truly think this is what we’re missing. For the most part, the problem right now is willful ignorance, not intentional marginalization of certain groups. Choosing to continue to remain separate from those struggling is a choice, and it’s the wrong one.

“How you respond depends often on what you have seen.” Make an effort to see everything and everyone. Intentionally step out of your bubble of privilege. I think this is the first step.

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Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Yeah, yeah, here we go. We’re all perfectionists aren’t we? How cliché of me. Probably true. Probably also not true.

I’m 22 years old, currently on my third college degree, just finished my 17th year of school, and I’ve never gotten a B. You could lick the countertops in my apartment and not get sick. Every piece of media that I post has been meticulously calculated, cropped, edited until I deem it worthy (and it really should not be that serious). I’m the friend that makes every dinner reservation and plans trips way too intensely. I can’t function without a to-do list.

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Perfectionism is a spectrum. Many behaviors and attitudes fall somewhere along it, and different situations demand different degrees of it. Sometimes a “type A” person is exactly what’s called for, other times this is the most annoying individual to be around.

I, unfortunately, suffer from a terrible case of perfectionism. Always have, likely always will. Perfectionism has infiltrated every part of my life and quite literally everything I care about. I have learned to cope with it over the years, and it has become a friend of sorts, one that I carry around with me everywhere I go. Sometimes I push the little rascal down deeper, sometimes I allow him to breach the surface. Regardless of if it’s noticeable to others, his voice is always filling my head.

Adulthood has forced me to face the music. With finite time and dwindling willpower, I have become a professional at prioritizing what actually matters to me. I cannot spend as much precious energy on as many things as I would like to. Most of the time I figure out how to do it anyways.

Over the years, I have learned that I have an absolute inability to do anything halfway. I must be extremely picky about what I commit myself to because I know that it will be getting one hundred percent of me. The little perfectionist in my head will not allow anything else (note: let’s roll with this metaphor, it helps me to avoid some of the blame). Under no circumstances can I fly under the radar with average effort, whether that’s my education, a job, a relationship, sports, leadership, you name it. I will find out how to be the best that I can at it.

Sounds exhausting right?

This inclination goes hand-in-hand with my perfectionism. The habits are definitely related, although I’m not sure which came first… I think it’s a “chicken or the egg” type of thing. Regardless, as I have started to navigate adulthood, I’ve been thinking about these things a lot. Trying to find your purpose in life involves acquiring more agency than I’ve ever had, and being able to juggle everything I’m passionate about is crucial to being a functioning human being.

A real writer is someone for whom writing is a terrible ordeal. That is because he knows, deep down, with an awful clarity, that there are limitless ways to fill a page with words, and that he will never, ever, do it perfectly. On some level, that knowledge haunts him all the time. He will always be juggling words in his head, trying to get them closer to a tantalizing, unreachable ideal.

It’s a torment you can’t escape. It will reach you even into the comfort of a drunken sleep, and it will shake you awake, and send you, heart pumping, to an empty piece of paper.

If you have that, you can be a good writer. Congratulations, I guess.

Gene Weingarten, The Fiddler in the Subway

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So I’ve started writing more, as you’ve noticed. I write a lot for school, and it’s probably what I will be doing for the rest of my life (you know… as long as AI doesn’t replace my job). I have of course noticed how my perfectionistic tendencies have penetrated into my writing habits. I read everything over and over, constantly trying to figure out how I can say something better. How I can tell a better story. How I can make my words more cohesive.

I love writing because it allows me to control the narrative. I know how I’m being perceived when I write, and talking doesn’t offer me this same luxury. I’m terrible at communicating my feelings because I focus too much on getting the words right. I can’t think and talk at the same time, but writing allows me to pull my thoughts out of my head, read and evaluate them, realize they don’t seem aligned with how I’m actually feeling, and then make revisions. Rinse and repeat (a bunch of times).

I’ve waken up in the middle of the night with an idea that won’t leave my brain, forcing me to get my phone out and type it in my notes app. I’ve spent hours staring at the ceiling trying to come up with a better way to put my thoughts into words. Weingarten says it best: “It’s a torment you can’t escape.”

Yes, these ideas seem writing-specific, but it translates. Almost everything we do in life aims to get closer and closer to a “tantalizing, unreachable ideal.” How much of our desires to chase our dreams are impeded by this pursuit? This ideal lives in the forefront in our brains despite the fact that it, quite literally, does not exist.

The confidence you are looking for will not arrive until you begin. You don’t need to find confidence to pursue what you really love. You just have to be willing to start. Then you will also need to be willing to stop. (Overworking is not aspirational, it’s an escape mechanism.)

What nobody tells you is that passion and obsession are entryways to one another. You will walk a fine line every day.

Brianna West

This quote by Briana West has completely changed my perspective on how I allow perfectionism to control my life. As much as I care about controlling the narrative, I’ve realized that obsessing over reaching an ideal that doesn’t exist is, in actuality, relinquishing control. It’s allowing perfectionism to dictate my actions and hold me back from my potential. It’s an erosion of confidence in my ability to reach a perfect version of something that only exists in my head.

“You don’t need to find confidence to pursue what you really love. You just have to be willing to start. Then you will also need to be willing to stop.” I live by this now. I have learned to quiet the little perfectionist in my head enough to find the will to begin. And then when he starts heckling me too loudly, I’m not afraid to stop. Experience has shown me that passion and obsession bleed into each other all too seamlessly.

Perfectionism is the kind of “ism” that will find you, no matter what you’re doing, no matter where you flee to escape it. Keeping that part of you in check is key to remaining true to your passions. Love and hate are two sides of the same coin, and the coin easily flips when you push yourself past your boundaries.

I don’t have much more to say here because honestly this is something I’m still navigating. Instead of striving for perfection, I’m just trying to be good (thanks Steinbeck).

Perfectionism is internal oppression.

Gloria Steinem

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I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"

How many of all the things they have done since then have been their attempts to achieve something important, something grand, something worth getting to Heaven late for? Almost everything.

Fredrik Backman, The Winners

I’ve been on a Fredrik Backman kick lately, if you couldn’t tell from my recent posts. I just finished my fifth book by him, and each one changes my perspective a little more than the last. The context to this quote is really important to fully grasp it. One of the main couples in the book lost their son when he was really young, and it altered the course of their lives. They would never be the same, but they learn to cope with the all-consuming grief, and they figure out how to go on.

Backman describes the subsequent pursuit of their goals and dreams (in which they are extremely successful, by the way) as an effort to do something “worth getting to Heaven late for.” That’s beautiful. I can’t stop thinking about it.

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All my life, I’ve been going around waiting for something. All my life, in fact, I’ve felt as if… as if I were waiting in a railway station. And I’ve always felt as if… as if the living I’ve done so far hasn’t actually been real life but a long wait for it… a long wait for something real.

Andrei Tarkovsky, “The Sacrifice”

Sometimes it all feels like a waiting game, except you’re not even really sure what you’re waiting for. Maybe it’s waiting for the right opportunity, for the right person to show up and change things, for it all to click into place and give you some clarity on what should be your next move.

I have fallen victim to thinking this way, especially when it comes to feeling fulfilled or satisfied. I’ve always been a high achiever, and of course this comes with always having a goal that I’m chasing. Having something to work toward is what gives me purpose, it helps me to not dwell on the past and instead focus on what I can control for the future. Once I get there, maybe I’ll be able to breathe, maybe I’ll be content.

Although I’m always working toward something, this is still a waiting game mindset. This type of waiting isn’t literal, it doesn’t mean you’re being lazy and hoping that everything you want will fall in your lap. Waiting is also being satisfied in your misery, disregarding your unhappiness because you think that it’ll be worth it when you make it through to the other side. Waiting also encompasses putting your head down and grinding to the point that you forget you’re human, that you’re put on this earth to experience.

I think your 20s are especially susceptible to thinking this way. It feels like we’re supposed to be figuring it out, to at least be sure of the direction that you’re going in. But having tunnel vision for a certain goal or outcome inhibits you from appreciating your current circumstances. It’s still waiting — waiting for life to feel worth living, for you to feel like you know what you’re doing, for a sense of fulfillment that seemingly only comes with accomplishment.

Having this perspective obscures the view of everything around you right now. I’m not saying to ignore your goals, but finding a way to quiet down the part of you that is always striving towards something is essential to being where your feet are. The amount of good things in your life depends on your ability to notice them. There’s a lot of good there, probably more than you think.

Life can be worth living now, and fulfillment and clarity are not dependent upon whatever your idea of success is. You can’t appreciate what is right in front of you if you’re always looking forwards, backwards, or even upwards.

In the silence, Leni wondered if one person could ever really save another, or if it was the kind of thing you had to do for yourself.

Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

Hate to say it, but no one is coming to save you. No one is going to show up, pick you up, and set you down on the right track heading towards where you’re meant to be. It’s just not going to happen. So waiting around for that is counterproductive; it will never improve your circumstances. You are the only one with the power to shape your satisfaction, and your power is a lot stronger than you think.

For me, I struggle with navigating what feels like seemingly conflicting narratives. How do I stay present while also setting myself up for success in the future? How do I feel content in who I am now while also not letting go of the pursuit of who I want to be? How do I let someone in entirely while also not losing sight of my sense of self? Is it possible for me to do all of these at once? And do them successfully?

Mary Oliver’s unforgettable question: “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is something I am always thinking about. We really only get one, which is horrifying but also encouraging. It’s like “oh no, it’s all up to me… but wait, that also means it’s all up to me.” If that makes sense. Only having one chance at all of this is scary but also comforting because it means that getting a do-over is simply impossible. You can only keep it moving.

I used to find it frustrating that when it comes to the universe you can’t change what has already happened. But right now, this fact starts to feel kind of reassuring as it shows there’s no point endlessly contemplating tactics for sorting it all out because you couldn’t fix it even if you tried.

Annie Lord, Notes on Heartbreak

Life doesn’t go on, it starts again, everything is possible once more. Anything can happen, all the best and all the most beautiful and all the biggest adventures in the world.

Fredrik Backman, The Winners

Yes, you only get one wild and precious life. But also, everything is possible once more. Backman highlights the fact that the different paths available to us are endless. If you take the wrong one at first, there are always more options branching off of the current road you’re on. The beauty is that you can always start again, so no choice can ever really be objectively wrong. At least not a type of wrong that you can’t come back from. Your life is completely up to you.

Mary Oliver poses the question “doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” right before asking what we plan to do with our life. This was on purpose, and can’t be ignored. Everything dies, but everything also lives. Keep in mind that it isn’t all about achieving as you’re on the hunt for whatever it is you think you’re meant to do. Flip the waiting mindset to a “now or never” one.

Stroll through the fields and kneel down in the grass. Create something you’re proud of. Take a minute to stop and appreciate everything you have done and who you are now. Find something worth getting to heaven late for, but don’t forget that when you get there, it won’t only be about what you accomplished. You should have a lifetime worth of stories and experiences to tell about, too.

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If the ignorant could be happy there’d be no reason for anyone to struggle to become wise. Nature has decreed that the ignorant can never be happy, and in their lack of knowledge is the secret of their own misfortunes.

Manly P. Hall

If you show you’re capable, you get even more to do, that’s the curse of being a smart girl.

Fredrik Backman, The Winners

I’ve been thinking about writing this one for a while. I just finished up my first year of my PhD in Criminology and am now of course keenly aware that AI is everywhere and in everything. You can’t even Google anything anymore without it spitting back out an “AI overview” that gives you the answer you were planning on finding for yourself. The undergraduate students that I TA for are hell-bent on using it to write their papers for them. The redundant, emotionless writing style is inescapable — the unnecessary em dash, the same recurring words, the comma-separated sentence-ending subordinate clause. I even see Instagram captions so obviously written with AI that sometimes I have to set my phone down.

But what sparked me to write about this topic is actually a conversation that I had with my dad last week. He’s been in education since 1988, almost 40 years now, and he has taught generations of young readers and writers. Right now he’s teaching freshman English, a key year because it builds a foundation of necessary writing skills to be used for the rest of his students’ academic careers. Despite this, he has to have them write in class or else they’ll go home and just have AI do it for them.

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My dad asked his students about their writing process, and one of them mentioned how they use a Thesaurus to help them with their word choices. Totally valid, by the way. When I’m writing and trying to come up with a word that I can’t think of, or simply trying to diversify my language, I often quickly type “____ synonyms” into the search bar. So let the record show, I’m not hating on this choice. But, at the same time, because of my own vocabulary that I’ve built over the years and a commitment to my writing style, I know which word to choose from the options it gives me.

But anyways, the student said they do this so that they can “sound more intelligent” in their writing. And my dad paused, looked at them, and said back: “But would you rather sound intelligent, or be intelligent?” Mic-drop moment (so he says).

I laughed at the dinner table, had to stroke his ego a little bit of course. But I haven’t been able to get this question out of my head this week. Because he’s right — and this question is something we need to tackle right now, not only in education but in society as a whole.

The requirements for my PhD program include a full research paper to be written in the summer after your first year. You get to choose your own topic, but it serves the purpose of demonstrating that you learned something from the two semesters of research methods and statistics. It’s meant to show that you are now adequately equipped with the tools you need to be a good researcher.

In the meeting for the paper last week, we got a long “talking to” about AI use. The committee chair told us that he knows we probably are not the ones that he needs worry about, but he hopes that we are getting this degree not simply to acquire those special three letters after our name — but to actually become an expert.

I know I’m very much a nerd, and most people are not planning on getting their doctorate degree, but I think this sentiment stands for everyone. It feels like education has become a sort of side quest to simply check a box of what people think is expected of them rather than to truly learn. I mean, students turn in papers to me that they obviously have copied the prompt, pasted it into chatGPT, copied the response it gives, and turned it in without even reading it back. At least if you’re going to use AI to write your papers, maybe read it so you can learn something from it (sigh).

So you’re right dad, I think many people are more focused on sounding intelligent than being intelligent. If everyone is aiming to achieve that goal, then we will eventually get to the point where no one can actually discern what is or isn’t intelligent. Or even what is or isn’t correct. You’d have to put it in AI first to get an explanation of what it means. And then we have lost all hope.

We have to figure out how to resuscitate the yearning for knowledge. Wisdom begins in wonder.

I know, I know. I sound kind of insufferable. But hear me out. I unfortunately have a sort-of “doomsday” outlook on life, but recently it has all started to seriously feel like a Black Mirror episode.

Because if you look at it logically, every time you ask AI a question, it pulls from everything already available on the internet to answer. It’s not like AI can just “make up” magically correct answers. Artificial intelligence is quite literally built on top of human knowledge, and the only reason that it is able to give us the answers we want is because of the work of countless, intelligent humans that did the work for us years ago. And are currently doing the work for us now.

Now, I’m not saying that AI is not an effective tool. It can help increase efficiency for sure, is valuable for catching mistakes, and can overall be a good resource (sometimes). My point is that if we become increasingly reliant on it and disregard our own ability to learn the old-fashioned way, we will lose our one superpower that we have worked too hard to obtain. Knowledge.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

Socrates

And then people like Socrates will quite literally roll over in their grave. Come on, we can’t have that. Without Aristotle, Galileo, Thomas Edison, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and so many more, we would quite literally be nothing. Or I guess not nothing… probably just idiots.

So how do we keep this superpower under our control?

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All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.

Roald Dahl, Matilda

Many of us grew up on Matilda, and this quote perfectly sums up the entire point I am trying to make here. The answer is to read like your life depends on it — because it kind of does (the “life” of humanity, at least). Read everything you can get your hands on, and then get your hands on more, and read that too. Rinse and repeat.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.

Malorie Blackman

Reading is not only key to being intelligent, it also makes you a better person. Reading builds empathy by transforming you into the world of someone else — it gifts you a perspective that you likely would have never been exposed to. It allows you to literally put yourself in someone’s shoes, and it teaches you how to understand experiences that may otherwise be unrelatable. It allows you to check your privilege and understand where people are coming from, something that is all-too-difficult because we are so focused on ourselves.

I sometimes find myself seeing the characters in the books I’ve read as real people (I’m not crazy, I promise). Occasionally, I feel like I can speak on a topic because I’ve read an autobiography of someone who went through the same thing. Or I can give advice on something that one of my favorite characters lived through and handled with grace.

I know things that I should never know from my own life experiences. I have built wisdom on my own. And am still building it, of course. “I know that I know nothing.” We have to find a defense against all of this or risk losing what our predecessors have worked so hard to establish for us. I’ll get off my soap box. But please, read. Even if it’s boring. And write. Even if it sucks.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity.

C.S. Lewis

I once read somewhere that everything is always about love, and when it’s not, it’s about the absence of it. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Now I’m always looking for where love is doing its thing while also trying to figure out where the absence of it is reaping its consequences.

Love is either the guiding principle or the missing piece.

Humans are fundamentally social creatures, and there is an innate component of our very beings that is in constant pursuit of experiencing and sustaining love. That doesn’t always have to be romantic love, it can just be connecting to another person on a level below the surface. We’re hard-wired for love, and trying to deny that is almost certainly a waste of time.

Love is a universal language. Everyone has experienced it and/or the lack of it, which oftentimes actually allows us to love each other more. Sometimes it feels like the root of every problem, but comfortingly, this would also make it the solution to everything.

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Love infiltrates every aspect of our lives. It lives in the way you used to chase around that kid on the elementary school playground to prove you were fast enough to win them over. The absence of it floats around the room like a pesky ghost when you’re home for the holidays and your aunt asks if you’re seeing anyone. It runs around under the table bumping into legs at dinner with a group of friends you haven’t seen in a while. Its nonattendance is felt when you sit in the fifth row at a wedding, trying to figure out how other people succeed at something that you just can’t seem to get right. It’s heavy in the air while you’re dancing at a concert that you had been dying to go to because the artist makes you feel seen. Its scarcity is apparent when you turn on the news and immediately feel disheartened when you witness what the world has come to.

The presence of it makes you feel like the luckiest person alive. Now you finally understand what everyone is talking about in all those songs, you know? The absence of it convinces you there has to be something wrong with you. No one else seems to struggle so badly with these things, do they?

It’s underneath everything. We are all more alike than we know.

“The one who’s in love always wins. It doesn’t matter if you get your heart broken, you’re living. When you’re feeling, you’re alive. The sun doesn’t care whether the grass appreciates its rays, right? It just keeps on shining. That’s you.”

Ethan Hawke

I’m sure most of us have heard Ethan Hawke get on this randomly introspective soap box at the 2026 Oscars. Kind of caught me off guard when it was sandwiched in between an array of mindless interviews on the red carpet. Ever since, I’ve seen countless edits to it all over my social feeds. It’s a simple concept but so well-articulated and so relatable to everyone (hence love as the universal language).

We have all felt these feelings, but we often feel so alone in them. I think this quote hits home for so many of us because it’s comforting to transform something that at one point felt like it was ruining your life into something that makes you a “winner.” A winner of what, you might ask? Not really sure.

This idea got me thinking about the arbitrary concept of winning and losing. Love is almost always a competition, even when it should really be the antithesis of one. We see it as a push and pull, a buy and sell, a give and take that we have to keep track of. If that’s the case, we can just retrain our brains to believe that the one in love is always the winner in the end. If your love is feeling unrequited, this “win” seems invaluable. At least you won something. Right?

Wrong. You need a different perspective. “The one in love always wins” is still true, but not when love itself is seen as the competition.

I think that we often think of love as this big, untouchable, taboo-like concept. It’s like, we only define love as the intense phenomenon that occurs when you look at someone and your pupils dilate. When oxytocin and dopamine flood your system and convince you that someone is meant to be in your life forever. When you can’t stop thinking about what someone is doing or how they’re feeling or what you mean to them. When you start to see someone as an extension of yourself.

Shrinking love down to solely encompass this very real but also very rare feeling is only serving the purpose of making it feel transactional and calculating. In this case, love will feel like something to achieve rather than something to experience. It’ll be something you’re always trying to accomplish, disregarding the consequences of whatever it may take to reach it.

Instead, we need to frame experiencing love as winning the game of life. Everything is always about love or the absence of it. To love is an act of resistance. An act of relinquishing control. An act of being terrified of showing your heart to someone but giving in anyways. It’s allowing your human nature to run the show. It’s recognizing the true gift that love is — one that doesn’t ask for anything in return, not one that is insistent on keeping score. It’s a gift to experience love even in its smallest forms.

Love is a reminder that we are human, a reminder that we are alive. When you see it that way, it’s something to celebrate, not something to fear. And somewhere along the way, maybe the all-encompassing, soul-shattering version of it will eventually turn up. But you know what, you’ll be okay if it doesn’t. At least you know you’re alive.

To live in this world,
you must be able to do three things:
      to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
      your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
      to let it go.
Mary Oliver

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I survived year one!

I now have an abundance of knowledge packed in my brain (or something like that), but I have also learned a lot about how to be “successful” at human-ing. The metric of success is up for debate.

After this year, I feel like I have a good grip on how to be a better person, researcher, and most of all, how not to go insane in the face of an overwhelming workload. So I’m going to share some of that, hoping that it could be of use to anyone who is navigating expectations, pressure, and time management in the pursuit of achieving a dream (academia-related or not). This is gonna be a long one.

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1) Go outside

The unfortunate news is that people are right when they say going outside makes you feel better. I’ve known this probably ever since I started my master’s degree a couple years ago, but this year it really hit home for me. My walks are an integral part of my daily routine, but I was intentional about the timing of them this year. After I finish my work for the day, I always decompress with a walk outside if the weather allows it. Our brains are not made to never get a break, so I made sure to take care of my brain in the same way it takes care of me. Being exposed to natural sunlight and nature significantly increases dopamine and serotonin, and combining that with exercise is key in regulating your brain. I prioritized paying attention to the timing of going outside throughout this year, and I think it made a huge difference in my stress levels.

2) Keep your space sacred

This one was huge for me. This year, I tried to keep anything “work-related” out of my apartment. Yes, this resulted in many many trips to coffee shops (RIP my bank account) and my office at school, but I think this was key in staying as low-stress as possible when I’m at home. My brain is very susceptible to classical conditioning (thank you Pavlov). If I’m frequently stressed in my own space, then I notice that I start to associate that space with stress — which is really bad because then the one place that is supposed to be my safe haven no longer feels like one. After this year, I would go as far to say as having an optimal work-life balance depends on not letting work invade your personal space. If I absolutely had to do work at home, under no circumstance did I ever do it in my bedroom.

3) Structure, structure, structure

Just keep showing up! Having a routine is key for me and, I believe, most high-functioning humans. This is probably a remnant from my college volleyball days, but I seriously cannot operate if I don’t have a relatively consistent schedule for myself. It was definitely an adjustment in that my routine is now self-imposed, but forcing myself to adhere to it has done wonders for my productivity and my brain. I treated my school this year as a classic five day a week full-time job, and this really helped me to be able to still prioritize other things that I like to do. I usually operated on the 8am-3pm work schedule, and then could use my evenings for workouts, reading, music, catching up with loved ones, and anything creative. I learned that my school brain effectively clocks out at about 3pm and that I am most productive in the early mornings. Whatever works for you, figure it out and stick to it. Having clear daily expectations for myself allowed me to still be a human being and not let graduate school take over my entire life.

4) Be realistic

This one I very much had to learn the hard way. I have this “you can do anything, but not everything” poster up in my room to serve as a constant reminder to myself because I tend to forget. I am a to-do list connoisseur, but I very quickly had to get real with myself about how I make them. I now have to make sure that I do a revision around lunchtime in which I move anything that I cannot realistically get done to another day. My graduate program is tricky because although I am in full-time classes right now, I’m also working on my own research projects that I also have to (and want to) prioritize. Although I wish I could do everything, I’ve also had to be realistic about my time and realize that I am, unfortunately, not a robot. Burnout is real and a very slippery slope, so making sure that I don’t overwork myself has become a priority.

5) Find a creative outlet

Surprise! You’re currently reading my creative outlet (thanks). But in reality, I realized how important this is. I read a quote that says “In a world addicted to fast dopamine, creative work is the antidote.” I think we as humans are created to create, and it looks different for everyone, but we all have something valuable to share with the world. I am still figuring mine out of course, but writing for Substack has been very fulfilling so far. Even if no one reads it, I still enjoy creating art and focusing my energy on something that feels worthwhile. So I’d encourage you to find your niche, whether that’s writing, music, reading, drawing, painting, baking, crafting, or literally anything else. Spending your time creating something that you’re proud of is so important right now in a world where so many things can be done for you with the click of a button. Sigh.

“I feel that this is them eroding away your autonomy. It’s like they want to get to you before you can even form your own ideas and visions. They just want your life to be big bright buttons and bright colors, and you don’t have to try to accomplish something. They’ll just give it to you. It’s a way to keep you stupid right? You don’t have to sit through hours learning how to paint… that’s the human experience. It’s committed time, dedication, desire, discipline. What is this gross elimination of suffering?”

Noel Miller

6) Get off your phone

Yeah, couldn’t leave this one out. This year I got a brick for my phone, and it seriously revolutionized my life (I know… that sounds so sad). I don’t think we realize how addicted we are to our phones and social media. Apps are literally made with the purpose of keeping you scrolling on them, and most of them unknowingly train your brain with fast dopamine hits. I find myself gravitating towards my phone to stay in the loop with the people I care about, especially because I live alone and away from my family and many of my friends. My phone is often where I find a lot of my human connection. But I realized how backwards that is and how harmful it was to my mood and my productivity.

So, I started “bricking” my phone in the mornings when I leave the house to get my work done, and then I can’t “unbrick” it until I get home and can physically tap my phone to the device. When your phone is in brick mode, it locks you out of the apps of your choice. This allowed me to be a lot more intentional with my time and disrupt my habits of opening my phone and immediately pressing social media apps to see what’s going on. Highly recommend, I talk about this to everyone. I keep my phone bricked for days at a time when I’m feeling especially stressed or anxious, and it has been a game changer. Social media has its perks, but it definitely is not always a constructive use of time.

7) Everything is connected

A little bit more school-specific here, but this is something really cool that I realized this year. A lot of the people in my criminal justice program come from different backgrounds with different knowledge bases, and the discussions in my classes made me realize how valuable it is that we each bring our own perspective to the table. I got my undergraduate degree in psychology, and I was able to make so many meaningful connections between things that I have learned in the past and the current topics in my classes. I can also use my experience of where and how I grew up to inform many conversations about race. I can add in what I know about my parents’ experiences as lifelong educators. I can use my experience in college sports to understand some organizational structures.

Essentially, I made the basic realization that everyone and everything is connected, and everything can be used to inform everything else. Ignoring this reality neglects a wide range of insight that is needed to understand the full context of most things in life, but especially for topics like criminology and sociology, which are inherently messy. Integrating knowledge from other fields and areas is vital to achieving growth and moving our theoretical frameworks along.

8) Be grateful

This year made me realize how privileged I am to be able to consume knowledge at such an advanced level. We have all heard the cliché that “knowledge is power,” and I feel like I now have a real grasp on what this means. I have finally gotten to the point where I think I am approaching expert-level knowledge in my field, which is crazy. Everyone always talks about imposter syndrome, and although this will likely be something I’ll always struggle with, I am now pretty confident in my ability to articulate and understand these concepts.

In an Uber ride from the Atlanta airport a couple months ago, my driver asked me about what I am studying in graduate school. After I told her, she asked me the relatively straightforward but also insanely complicated question: “Why do people commit crime?” I went into a detailed response and talked for about 20 minutes, and realized that — wow, I actually do know what I’m talking about. But she probably doesn’t care, and I need to shut up. After I finished explaining what I thought, she told me something that I think will stick with me forever, to the point that I wrote it down word for word in my notes app. “You already have your PhD, you just have to finish it up at school because that’s how the world is set up. God already gave you your gift, girl.” I teared up, of course. It was at a time that I honestly really needed to hear it. So yeah, knowledge is a powerful gift. It feels like a superpower, almost, and one that I’m extremely grateful for.

9) Options stay open

This was also a really big one for me this year. I learned to not put myself in a box when it comes to quite literally anything in life. I like to think of myself as a relatively well-rounded person, and I have a lot of interests that may be competing at times. I love music, learning, writing, reading, sports, and so many other things that sometimes it can get overwhelming. At school, every class that I take sparks a new research interest that I want to dive into. The books that I read keep me up at night thinking about how the author wrote them and what else I could learn about the topic. I love playing guitar and discovering new music and writing my own songs when I have something to say. And obviously I have now become kind of obsessive about writing at least one article on here a week to get out anything that has been on my mind.

I’ve made it a priority not to tell myself no when it comes to something that interests me and may fill my cup. Yes, time is finite, but I don’t have to turn away from something just because it feels like it would be adding another ball into the juggling rotation (note: I can’t juggle. Just a good metaphor I think). Sometimes I have to put a few balls down to pick others up, but I always come back to them. I say yes to everything that I can, but I adjust my routine and schedule accordingly. This relates back to the “I can do anything, but not everything” point.

10) Remember why you started

Alright, we made it to the last one! I think remembering why you started is important for everything we do in life. For the most part, you never start on a journey “just because.” Even if it feels that way now, at one point you had a legitimate reason for deciding that this was something you wanted to pursue. It’s not always easy, but when I start to feel overwhelmed, I try to transform myself back into the headspace I was in when I decided to begin whatever it is I’m stressed about.

When I decided to go to graduate school, I wanted to change the world. I know this is another cliché phrase, but I think many people don’t realize how easy it is to change the world. I believe that the world is relatively easy to change because the criteria is inherently arbitrary. Positively impacting even one person on a small scale could have a generational impact (more on this later, I’m planning on writing an article about this). Never underestimate yourself and what you can do. And never forget your original reason for doing it.

Thanks for reading!

Just a reminder — it’s cool to be nerdy about the things you care about.

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I am my own guardian angel, and I can use that knowledge when I’m struggling now and remember that somewhere there is a version of me that has survived this and is watching me with love and pride and joy in her heart.

Unknown

I finished my journal last week. I’ve been writing in it since August 2024, and now it’s April 2026. Although it seems kind of silly, I was really emotional closing it. There were so many versions of me that existed within those pages.

I know her, but she doesn’t know me.

Which is really weird. It’s been making me think about this quote that inspired me to start using a future-oriented framing a while ago. I read it once and now any time I am feeling anything unpleasant I immediately think about my future self and how she will one day see me in the moment I am in now.

At one point, I wrote “I hope my future self is reading this and looking back with love at me. I want to ask her: will it ever make sense? Will I ever get over it?” Case in point.

Now that I have finished the journal, that hits kinda deep. Because I did figure it out. And it does make sense now. And I did get over it. Most of all, I am looking back at her with love in my heart. At the time I remember writing it and feeling a little dumb, like I was shooting a flare gun up into the sky and hoping that I’d see it one day.

I wish I could write a letter back to her promising it’ll all work out, but of course that’s impossible. Sorry girl.

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Sometimes, we don’t know because we can’t know. The very fact of us knowing would disrupt the timing of what is unfolding. The very fact of us knowing would prevent us from learning the lessons that are here for us today.

And those lessons? They aren’t a due we have to pay or a purgatory we are being stuck in, they are the building blocks of the character of the person who is opening up to this next level of their existence. What’s here for you right now contains within it the wisdom and the growth needed to unlock the next phase.

I hope that will inspire you to keep your heart open to wonder, to mystery, to the infinite unknown through which everything beautiful and important will emerge.

I hope you will break loudly, fail toward what matters, let yourself know deep love even if it means you could lose it. There is no merit in holding back, nothing gained but a life half lived.

Brianna West

So now, as the version of myself that can assure the past version of me that it gets better, that she figures it out, that it’ll all make sense one day, I want to tell her to be patient.

My dad loves to hit me with the “patience, grasshopper.” Especially in moments that I don’t want to hear it. Which is pretty much always. Unfortunately, though, I do think that patience is the key.

As much as I wish it weren’t true, time really is the healer of all things. It gifts perspective and clarity that can’t be found anywhere else. For now, you must simply trust that it’ll all work out. That’s all you can do until you are given the tools that only time can teach you.

So in this way, you are your own guardian angel. You are able to use the classic “patience, grasshopper” on yourself. Because at one time you were patient (even if it was against your will), and you figured it out then, and you’ll figure it out again.

As I start my new journal, I wonder about how many versions of me will exist in this one too. I wonder how many times I’ll be so frustrated that I don’t have the answers or understand my emotions in that exact moment. I wonder how many times it’ll feel like the world is ending on a random Tuesday and I will try to put it into words.

Despite knowing that it’s all a part of the process, I know I will still feel that frustration. It’s inevitable.

I guess this is just my sales pitch to start journaling. Because there is no better way to have confidence that you will figure it out than reading entries from a version of you that believed you never would. It’s really rewarding to tell yourself “I told you so.”

Seen over time, every change is so slow that it’s barely visible when it’s happening.

Fredrick Backman, Us Against You

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If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck.
He's also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then
       keep on going.

Imagine how the lily (who may also be a part of God)
       would sing to you if it could sing, if
            you would pause to hear it.
And how are you so certain anyway that it doesn't sing?

If God exists he isn't just churches and mathematics.
He's the forest, He's the desert.
He's the ice caps, that are dying.
He's the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.

He's van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert
       Motherwell.
He's the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing
       their weapons.
He's every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician,
       the poet.
And if this is true, isn't it something very important?

Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and 
       each of you too, or at least
             of his intention and his hope.
Which is a delight beyond measure.
I don't know how you get to suspect such an idea.
       I only know that the river kept singing.
It wasn't a persuasion, it was all the river's own
       constant joy
which was better by far than a lecture, which was
       comfortable, exciting, unforgettable

Mary Oliver

I see him in the trees, mostly. A lot of people think this is weird, but this is the first place that I felt true divine intervention. Every stressful moment of my life has fallen away by going outside and looking at the trees. Highly recommend it, they have a lot to say. They’ve seen a lot and withstood a lot.

The trees never rush the process. They are a symbol of knowledge as a result of experience. There’s a lot of wisdom to be found within yourself when you recognize this.

But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.

Jeremiah 17:7-8

God finds you where you are. This I’m sure of. He speaks to us in ways that he knows we’ll hear him.

He’s in the way my chest warms up when I see my sister after it’s been a while. He’s in the feeling I get when I drive home with the windows down on a summer day. He’s in the harmonies and melodies in the songs I listen to. He’s in the bowl of fruit my dad makes for me every time I go home. He’s in my mom’s hugs just when I need them the most. He’s in the way I feel after I finish a hard workout, knowing that I’m capable of anything. He’s in the books I read and the poetry I write.

He’s also in the way I feel when it seems like I can never get anything right. He’s in the grief and the heartache. He’s in the frustration when I’m running late and I hit traffic. He’s in the loneliness I feel when I’m staring up at my bedroom ceiling late at night. He’s in the real world events that make me sick with sadness for things that don’t seem to make any sense.

He’s in everything all at once.

If we see him in the good, we must also see him in the bad. I don’t think that means we’re attributing God to these things, it’s just recognizing his presence underneath it all.

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“That God that my mom thinks she serves — he’s so much smaller than who I think the real one is. The real one — to me, he’s everywhere, in everything. And sure, maybe he speaks through the Bible. But also maybe he speaks through Narnia, and Harry Potter despite J. K. Rowling lately, and the trees, and science, and the stars, and black holes and the ocean and the way the sky looks sometimes, and you can feel it in your chest.”

“I think he’s good.” I shrug. “And I think he loves everyone, and he wants everyone to be okay, and I think almost everyone who is, like, earnestly seeking God — people aren’t seeking that out of ego; they’re looking for the meaning of life and they’re looking beyond themselves for it — and I mean, I don’t know anything, except that I think God is the kind of guy who when someone dies, he’ll sit there and sift through every heartfelt thought, every drunken prayer, every desperate plea for help, every Mumford & Sons song that you’ve sung to look for a hint of a confession that you believe in him.”

Jessa Hastings, The Conditions of Will

Please know that I’m not claiming to know anything or have any of the answers here (answers that we’re all so desperately seeking). I’m still trying to figure it all out too.

I just know where I see and hear God and how I view him. Sometimes I feel close to him when I go to church, but other times I feel closer to him when I’m by myself in my apartment. Or when I go on a walk and let the sun hit my face.

Sometimes I feel the closest to him when I’m with other people. I think that love is the biggest manifestation of God that we can find. That includes feeling love from others but also letting yourself love to the fullest extent. To love is an act of resistance.

But I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things.

Vincent van Gogh

…and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

1 Corinthians 13:2

I just think it’s important not to shrink God down to fit any sort of preconception or idea. That’s a waste of time and energy, in my opinion. I don’t think we are made to understand God. We are made to try our best to understand ourselves and our place in the world. Our place “in the family of things,” if you will.

Most of all I think we’re called to do our best. I make choices knowing that I’m in control of the effort I can put in, and God is in control of the outcome. Every good outcome and every bad outcome. Trying to understand him just ends up causing unnecessary confusion for me. So I stick to seeing him and appreciating his presence in all things. And most of all, loving.

(This is all what works for me. Do what works best for you. And don’t take my advice unless you want to. We are allowed to feel differently about things, that’s the beauty of life!)

“I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-living thing around me. Life is God. My life is tied to yours, and to everyone’s on this planet. How does that not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us the comfort that we are not alone?”

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

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Small, slight, unimportant Joan. Just one person of five billion, on a small planet orbiting a small star, in a humble galaxy, one of billions of galaxies. Joan is so insignificant, and yet look what God had given her. Look at all that God had given her. Look at what no one will ever be able to take away.

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“The thing that changed for me looking back at Earth was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty of the Earth, but how much blackness there was around it.”

Christina Koch, NASA

A picture from the Artemis II that is worth a thousand words. A million even. First of all, perfectly photographed (the braid, ugh). Second, I saw someone on Instagram say “a daughter looking at her mother.” So yeah, that. And I just couldn’t stop thinking about how Christina Koch felt in that moment, and how she is probably feeling right now.

The “overview effect” is a term coined by Frank White in his 1987 book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. White denotes the cognitive shift that astronauts experience when they travel to space and look back at Earth. Once they see the Earth from an outside perspective, it’s like everything clicks into place.

This has happened to almost every astronaut that leaves Earth’s atmosphere. Once they get up there and look back down, they are gifted with an immense appreciation for everything that feels so small and inconsequential in our daily lives but actually means everything. Especially when they view it all against the backdrop of the vastness of the eternal abyss. It’s undoubtedly a tremendously stark contrast. Death and life.

Koch’s quote is a spot on response to another one from Taylor Jenkins Reid: “Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.”

White suggests that the perspective shift gained from space travel is key to human evolution, and he thinks that it’s the gateway to dealing with global topics like politics, conflict, religion, and environmentalism.

But do we need to leave the Earth to integrate this perspective into our daily lives?

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I read Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid a couple months ago (extremely transformative book by the way), and the book hits on a lot of these themes. The main character, Joan, is one of the first female astronauts with NASA. She has spent her whole life being obsessed with outer space and dreaming of leaving Earth, but as soon as she does, she never wants to leave again.

Achieving her dreams and abandoning the safety and comfort of Earth showed her how lucky we are to have a planet perfectly suitable for life. How lucky she is to love and be loved by others. How lucky she is to experience everything, good and bad, that life has to offer.

“Listen to me," Joan said. "I was circling two hundred miles above the Earth, and all I wanted was to get home and see you. Do you understand that? Do you understand that I don't care how big or small this world is, that you are the center of mine? Do you understand that, to someone, you are everything that matters on this entire planet?”

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

Now, I am the first person to say “we live on a floating rock!”

I use it as a coping mechanism for embarrassment, as justification for doing something that I’m terrified of, as encouragement when things aren’t going my way, as consolation when I’m sad.

And I’m just wondering how real that silly phrase must feel when, like the astronauts on the Artemis II, you’re flying 250,000 miles above said floating rock.

So I guess my point is that I don’t really have one yet. But I think that there’s one in there somewhere. And seeing as most of us are completely fine with never leaving the safety of Earth’s gravitational field, I’m wondering how we can experience our own overview effects. Because if Frank White is right and this could solve the problems of the human race, then we better get going. Because we do indeed have a lot of those right now.

I’m thinking about how I can replicate the feeling of the overview effect in my own life. It needs to go a step further than “we live on a floating rock.” That we do, but that’s kind of the whole point. It’s our floating rock. A floating rock that we are so exceptionally lucky to call home. One that offers us a breadth of experiences that contain so much love, joy, happiness, and fulfillment. Yeah sure, there’s sorrow, grief, and heartbreak in there too. But how lucky are we to be able to feel all of these things? The alternative is just endless blackness.

We can run to the ends of the Earth and still not feel whole because what we were looking for was a reinvention of the way we see, what we perceive, and how we feel.

Brianna West

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The world produces waves. Surf or drown. You decide.

Virgil Abloh

Life is a constant effort to manage the waves.

We try to figure out how to navigate them, but for the most part, waves are created by things well beyond our control. And there is a very real gap between us knowing this and actually accepting it for what it is.

Sometimes it’s high tide, sometimes it’s low tide, sometimes the waters are completely still. Sometimes, despite the stillness, a tsunami is on the way.

Accordingly, sometimes you have to figure out how to shred, sometimes you’re on a boogie board, and sometimes all you need is a kayak and a paddle.

(I know, I’m so annoying about metaphors.)

How do you know if you’re drowning?

When I was younger I used to be really intense about swimming underwater at our neighborhood rec center. I spent almost every day of my summers there. My favorite thing to do was first take in all of the chaos of the pool — the kids screaming, siblings drowning each other, lifeguards yelling “Stop running!” Once I got a good grip on the mayhem, I would plunge myself underwater and see how long I could stay there.

I distinctly remember going up and down in the pool, letting the chaos hit my brain and then instantly silencing it as I slipped underwater. I would wear my goggles and weave through the people, relinquishing in the quiet and loving how easy it was to make all the sounds go away.

To this day, I still really only know how to swim underwater. I simply did not want to learn to swim in a way that I could still hear the insanity of the community pool on a hot summer day.

Now I wasn’t trying to drown, but I think this is kind of like how we approach life sometimes. We figure out what it takes to quiet it all down, how to lose the madness that won’t stop filling our ears. And then we stay there because it’s comfortable and peaceful. Even if we’re losing oxygen and there’s no way to survive down there.

When terrible things happen, most people become waves, but some people become rocks. Waves are tossed back and forth when the wind comes, but the rocks just take a beating, immovable, waiting for the storm to blow over.

Fredrik Backman, Us Against You

Plunging yourself underwater and “waiting for the storm to blow over” is simple — it’s drowning. It’s making a conscious effort to escape opportunities to learn and grow. Even though I felt powerful in my ability to make it all go away, I was also escaping what is quite literally real life.

So drowning could look like a lot of things. It’s ignoring what you know would be best for you. It’s adopting coping mechanisms that aren’t really addressing the root causes of your problems. It’s staying in your comfort zone because you’re too afraid to face the uncertainty of chaos. It’s ignoring the voice in your head that’s telling you that you’re destined for more.

How do you learn to surf?

You can be the master of your fate, and you can be the captain of your soul. But you have to realize that life is coming from you, not at you. And that takes time.

Timothee Chalamet

Classic Timmy dropping a random deep and insightful quote. The first part of this comes from the final lines of William Ernest Henley’s poem “Inviticus.” He writes, “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.”

I often forget how much power we have in shaping our circumstances. Yes, many things in the waves are beyond our control, but what can you control? You.

You can control your perspective, your approach, your methods. You can change your path, your beliefs, your relationships. You can always just wake up one day and decide to make a choice that will alter the course of your life. Literally no one is holding you back from that.

Another metaphor incoming. I went skiing for the first time back in January. Terrifying. And I was extremely terrible at it. Like probably as bad as you’re imagining, but double that. Maybe even triple. The worst part of it all was that while I was freaking out going down the bunny slopes, there were literal toddlers, decked out in their little snowsuits, passing me and clearly having the time of their lives.

The difference here is they knew no fear — very unlike me, a 22 year old girl who is afraid of more things than she should be. Now, I probably will not be going skiing again at least for a little while, but regardless, skiing taught me that perspective is key. The toddlers were incapable of being afraid of something that they did not know could hurt them. Unfortunately, as you get older, you find out that pretty much everything in life can hurt you (and often does). But that’s neither here nor there.

So I think that surfing is seeing the waves, acknowledging them, knowing they can very well drown you, and standing up on the board anyways. You’ll never learn to surf if you keep abandoning your goals because they feel far away. If you let yourself compromise on what matters to you just because it feels comfortable. If you lose sight of what you want out of life because it feels like too much work.

Sometimes you can only surf once you’ve already drowned for a little bit. Once you know the safety of staying underwater, you can better recognize the chaos above it for what it is. This is where hindsight as the best teacher comes in. We’re all much wiser looking back. Oxygen feels a lot better once you’ve been deprived of it.

If you can’t stand up on the board right now, just find a way to just stay above the water. Grab a paddle and set off in the direction that you’re trying to go. Eventually, the courage will find you. It always does.

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“I guess that’s how people go on, without knowing how.”

Sharon Olds, Known to be Left

Everywhere you look these days, there’s someone claiming to be an expert on something. Someone with a podcast microphone giving advice on how to save your marriage, or how to re-invent your life. How to unlock the key to happiness, how to stop being so addicted to your phones. How to deal with conflict, how to live for you.

But does anyone really know what they’re talking about? How are we supposed to know who to listen to?

This is a thought that permeates my brain often, because admittedly, I may be more stubborn than most. Of course I ask my friends and family for advice, and of course I value their input. But I am often wondering how we know what we know, and if anyone actually knows anything at all.

When it comes to life and how to navigate it, I don’t think there’s an objectively “right” way to deal with most things (note: most here is key). If that were the case, we would be ignoring the vital context that shapes what might be the right choice in one circumstance but not another. There’s a whole life full of experiences behind every decision.

So at the same time, I think it’s important to recognize that most people are just making it up. Because that’s really all we can do.

I’m going to use an example that may seem a little egregious, but I think it applies.

Right now I’m reading a book for school called How Doctors Think. In the book, the author interviews one of the leading pediatric cardiologists, James Lock. Pediatric cardiology is one of the most difficult disciplines in medicine because for many situations they encounter, an example has not been set for them to follow. Congenital heart abnormalities are so diverse that physicians have to proceed with uncertainty, and often.

“Epistemology, the nature of knowing, is key in my field. What we know is based on only a modest level of understanding. If you carry that truth around with you, you are instantaneously ready to challenge what you think you know the minute you see anything that suggests it might not be right.

“Most of what we do in pediatric cardiology, we make up. In fact, a fraction of what is routinely done today in my specialty, I made up,” Lock said with a grin. That is because children often have such unique problems with their hearts that there is little precedent.

But, Lock continued, “you simply have to do something. The big problem is that most people assume that once it’s made up, it’s actually real.”

“You not only need to know what people know, but how they know it. You have to regularly question everything and everyone.”

Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think

I’m not saying that we, as in you and me, should go try making up stuff in pediatric cardiology. In fact, I’m not even trying to make any claims about medicine or science in general. Because that stuff is a little different (this I feel qualified to speak on). Although some of it is “made up,” as Lock said, it is also informed by a wide background of proven or empirically backed scientific knowledge that contribute to pivotal decisions. Made up, but well-informed. And when scientists and have questions, they can test their hypotheses in ways that reduce bias and maximize generalizability. You know, the scientific method and all that.

Instead, I’m talking about listening to the girl you saw on Instagram reels that said you need to check your boyfriend’s phone because he’s probably cheating on you. To the gym bro on youtube who claims your masculinity is dying and this is how you need to reassert it. To the mom on TikTok who insists that because she disciplined her child with a certain strategy and it worked, you need to address yours in the same way.

We can’t use the scientific method to prove the best way to raise a child into a high-functioning human being. Or the best way to get over a breakup. Or how to know if you should leave a certain job and start a new one. And so on and so on. We could try, but unfortunately, life is not that simple. Every person is different, and every human being has a lifetime of experiences that is all their own. That means you are unrepeatable, and there’s joy in that.

So here’s the comparison — the unique heart problems that cardiac pediatric surgeons encounter with each patient are just like your heart. There is not a precedent to look to for what you have been through. Sure, other people faced similar situations and can help guide you in the choices you need to make. But no one has the exact same set of experiences that you do.

Everything that happens in your life has built on top of each other, forming a watercolor painting that is now inextricable. The colors have already set into the paper, impossible to disentangle from one another. Other people can see the final product, but only you know what colors you used and how they worked to seamlessly blend together.

So what I’m saying is think. I feel like we have lost some of our own human agency, and we have forgotten what it feels like to actually make a decision for ourselves when it comes to our own individual lives. And remember — you’re making it up. We all are.

Despite what you think about the depth of your relationship with your best friend, or your partner of however many years, or even your parents and siblings, the only person that knows you 100% better than anyone else is you. The only person who has access to every single thought that runs through your brain is you. Only you know how your experiences have shaped your perspective, how you will react in certain situations, what might be best for you.

My mom likes to say that “parenting doesn’t come with a how-to manual.” Sure, parenting books exist, but what makes someone an expert in that kind of stuff? Yes, likely a PhD in developmental psychology or the sort. That comes with years and years of schooling. And they do indeed know what they are talking about. But unless an expert has been given an in-depth account of everything that has ever happened to you (note: listen to your therapist), don’t just take what you see in a video and regard it as fact. What works for someone else might not work for you.

We’re always standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. And those who seem like they might have it figured out more than us. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t trust the input of people who are more experienced than us, but we can’t stop questioning.

And we can’t quiet the voice in our head that may be telling us the answers that we’re always so desperately searching for in other people’s advice.

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