Lately I’ve been finding myself irritable towards my family and constantly overwhelmed. I thought of myself as a chronic procrastinator, to the point where I put off a simple “how are you” text for weeks, pay my student loans too late, or put out my venmo requests months later, a bit too late to suddenly remind my friend that they owe me money for a coffee I fronted 2 months ago. But I don’t know when this changed from a behavior to a part of my identity, because there was a time when I wasn’t like this.
10th Grade
I was assigned a problem set for my calculus homework. It was due next week, so I had a plan. Finish the first page of my calculus homework today. The next page tomorrow. I will finish my chemistry problem set in parallel, and work on my english, history, and elective courses after. I always finished my homework with time to spare, and I remember feeling the ecstasy of finishing things early.
It’s fuzzy now. I don’t quite remember that feeling itself, the feeling that drove me to work, but I remember feeling it.
Covid
Senior year of high school. A chance to rebuild myself, and I did, although not fully. It was a time of overwhelming uncertainty, and it was a time I let myself go, and I never felt as if I recovered fully since.
Freshman year of college
Adult life became freedom, and freedom meant a loss of direction, but also a fear of admitting it. I got into an amazing engineering program so it didn’t make sense to give that all up for a new passion I found–writing and storytelling. I found beauty in words, and I wrote a poem; for the first time, I wanted to.
There in the courtroom, she met her son’s eyes
In his final breath of freedom, and in that moment
Her mind flipped through the chapters of her life like a sentence to death.
She remembers his eyes, like those of a little deer--sparkling and staring
at her, with wide eyes, as she holds him for the first time.
And the way he pranced around the meadow with a big smile,
An innocent smile that makes mothers believe that their child can change the world,
And as the little deer grew up and left the comfort of his mothers breasts,
She remembers, remembers it all.
But now those memories turn sour, love betrays her.
She is the only one in the room who grieves,
The feeling of guilt seeps through every corner of her own blood,
She, just one man, bares the sorrow of her son and her ancestors,
And like the old tale of Atlas, she is
condemed to holding the weight of the world.
I remember alchemy. Some concoction of alphabets sounded more beautiful than others, to no metric other than my own. It felt as if I engraved my intuition onto something, and the sense of direction it gave me felt nice. I don’t quite remember the feeling, but I remember feeling it.
I was always a poser, trying on different outfits, different hairstyles, hoping that one would finally fit onto my skin. This was a period of posing. Of reading obsessively, from Virginia Woolf to Emily Dickinson to Kazuo Ishiguro. I loved the poetry of songwriters, from Lorde to Lauryn Hill to Elliott Smith. I loved chasing this archetype. I wanted to be that character that reads and writes; I remember in high school secretly judging the football bros (for us it was the waterpolo bros because we had no football team) and goth girls and the student government ensemble. All the while I was the nerd. I was in the science bowl team, doing engineering projects and playing games.
But there was always a disconnect between this outfit and myself, although I did like playing games. It fit just enough to fit in. But this new outfit was one I wanted to tailor. I wanted to make sure the seams fit comfortably around my chest but perfectly enough around the shoulders. The pants had to perfect my silhouette. For the first time, I fell in love with my becoming.
But becoming comes with fear. And fear came in the form of stability. No one every makes enough money as a creative. My identity never made sense when it came at the sacrifice of thousands of people’s dreams, a dream that they would kill to make it to the college of engineering at my school.
So I stayed.
Graduation
In the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Santa Cruz, California, there exists a circular tank. It is filled with fish that go round and round. The closest way to describe the next three years was to be a fish in that tank, all the while knowing that there exists an ocean. I only ended up here because the other fish pushed all around me. It’s as if entropy brought me here, and I never put up a fight.
If that period of freshman year college never happened, what would my life have been like? If I did decide to give it all up, would my life be different now? Sometimes I wish I never questioned my trajectory.
People don’t talk enough about the physical conditions of not chasing after your becoming. I feel like I have brain fog everyday. My jawline isn’t as sharp as it used to be, but my weight is the same. My skin doesn’t glow the same, and my hair is rusty. Maybe it’s age, but I’m 22. Is it normal to notice my skin melting at 22?
Maybe the reason why I procrastinate is because my body remembers dreaming. It remembers the fear out of excitement and itch for creation. And I know there was a time when it wasn’t like this, when I didn’t fear this fear, or run away from this itch. I don’t quite remember the feeling, but I remember that I felt differently.
New York
For months after my graduation, I started having heart palpitations. And I recently went on a trip to New York city where these heart palpitations magically stopped.
I slept 4 hours a day. I walked over 20,000 steps everyday and got lost in the subway. I gave a dollar to a homeless person and got catcalled for the first time. I sat on the stairs in front of the MET, where hundreds of other people sat. It felt like living. I got a bagel and ate it on someone’s apartment staircase. It smelled like people. I felt restless, and it wasn’t out of anxiety.
There is something really special in the energy of New York. It finds a way to whisper to your heart and bring out your desires into its brick walls and piss-ridden streets. It brought out my hopes and dreams and dared me to catch it. It projects visions of myself onto the thousands of people that walk past me. It taunts me with a life of incredible highs but awful lows, something that injects emotion into my slow downward spiral towards indifference.
I started having heart palpitations again. The first one started 30 minutes before I boarded the plane back to LAX. Maybe my body knew it was going away from the feeling of it all.
Here I am, at the precipice of two different choices, and the truth became abundantly clear. I hate being frozen in fear. I hate the person I’m becoming here. The love I have for my family is slowly rotting into a heave of annoyance. I think I see the pattern of it all. I see how bitter people become bitter. I see how people become the worst version of themselves, because I’m on that path right now. It may not be something I know, but it’s something I feel. I don’t want to become that person waiting for me in LA. I want to be that person waiting for me in New York. And in order to have that—
I have to get moving.