it was like going to sleep in a metal box and waking up halfway across the world. like the cold twilight between duvet and hallucination, like closing your eyes under a cellar spider, like you’re underwater, like you’re in a snow globe—but perfectly, perfectly still
the world is upside down, and all the glitter is in the sky beneath your feet
january
i’ve been overdue for a blog. my last update was on autumn, but a month has already passed since the spring equinox. i’ve found it difficult to write anything at all these past few months, let alone this past winter. because this winter began with going somewhere far, far away from here
i went home in december, and i stayed until the end of january. even now, those memories feel so lucid. i’m a ghost on a campus i still want to call home. i walk down X street with you and it’s so easy to breathe it all in—the color of the sky, the whispering of the city, the wind flowing gently past. our words, like water. don’t let me go, but it’s stuck at my throat. don’t let me wake up tomorrow without you. as if i could hold the ocean with my bare hands
it’s april on the other side of the atlantic, and i’m finally awake. i hope you’re sound asleep. i’m not done writing about us yet, but i promise i will be soon
february
around the beginning of february, it snowed. it was my first snow here, my home an hour away from berlin, flat and open and endlessly white in every direction. it was truly, unbearably beautiful—the slumbering trees ripe with frost, the air as crisp as glass and still water. what i’ll remember the most is how quiet it was. how the snow muffled everything—the cars, my cough, the snow crumbling cold and soft under my sneakers. how a tree could fall and all i would hear is its whisper—
are you really happy?
*
around the beginning of february, i wrote the following in my journal:
i’ve been thinking about how there are different kinds of happiness. the happiness i’ve been fortunate enough to experience last month—that safety, that homecoming, that love that permeated my soul until it became the air i breathed—i think i will never experience it here. of course i feel the ramifications of the rug being pulled from right under me: i feel it deep in my chest, like i can’t breathe correctly. but i hope that the void that it leaves behind will allow me to feel the other kinds of happiness more clearly. a friend hopping into the discord voice call, a foamy heart on my coffee, the soft warm glow of street lamps on my way home, and the way it lights up this street
i know that a world empty of you will never be full, because the most beautiful version of my world is just you. that’s how i know i love you
and that’s all i wrote, in february
*
around the beginning of february, i was notified that i’d been selected as a finalist for the hertz fellowship. i felt woefully inadequate; the previous year i had applied almost as a joke, and while i took the possibility of becoming a finalist more seriously this year, up until this point i had never really entertained the idea of actually becoming a hertz fellow
there’s a lot i have to unpack about my academic insecurity. after receiving the notification, i spent about a week feeling hopeless, along with everything else i was feeling at the time, and then the next two weeks pushing myself to study everything possible in preparation for the interview. each day was an exercise in squeezing myself into someone more. more curious, more confident, more like L, even, whom i thought i could never be when i was nineteen. and somewhere along the way there was no more room for the hollowness i felt from leaving home
i think one of my most defining traits is my propensity to mold myself, and somehow i am constantly surprised at this fact. many of my problems—imposter syndrome included—stem from not being able to make sense of the dynamic range of my personality and interests and abilities. in february, i felt that i could be identical in curiosity and technical intensity to that untouchable academic image i used to dream of, an image i know i was able to show during the interview. but let the cognitive dissonance build up enough and i’ll feel swollen, ready to burst at any moment into a thousand pathetic little pieces
i know that the shadows of these insecurities are never truly gone. but what took me a while to realize is that i’m not sure that i even like the academic weapon i had flattened myself into. even after the interview, i found myself unable to decompress. there was no room in my mind for anything else; threads of ideas and unresolved problems dogged my life and my dreams until i couldn’t eat or sleep or make my bed in the morning. and the kicker is that it all felt like it didn’t even matter, because i didn’t feel anything. for weeks i felt nothing except this desire to keep working, that there was an answer that i was looking for that would eclipse everything else in my life. there is curiosity and genuine excitement for science, but what if it takes the form of a drumbeat, a metronome, an inexorable hum of go go go that becomes the rhythm of you? even if that’s not really you? they say love what you do—and i do, i really do—but sparks are discrete, and work demands continuity. so what then?
march
i recently came across this advice column about the Point, i.e. The Point of Being Alive At All. i don’t really like most of the advice—to me the psychoanalysis is reaching way too far—but i found OP’s question itself very compelling. it’s one of the clearest descriptions i’ve seen of what my depression feels like when it’s here
I thought once I stopped asking my art to support me… once I got on medication, started paying more attention to my mental and physical health, I thought I might be able to get back to being someone who could occupy myself for hours making things. Even if I’m not outwardly or even financially “successful” in my career, at least I could enjoy the act of making again.
But the truth is, over the past several years, the Voice has been there, it has always been there… no matter how many things in my life have gone “right” (or not), no matter how many beautiful things there are in my life worth celebrating and appreciating. And lately the Voice has gotten so loud and all-consuming that it’s the only thing I can hear. I no longer appreciate the woods, the ocean, the plants I’m growing in my backyard, the friendships, the relationships, and least of all any creative pursuits.
They say showing up is half the battle, but what do you do once you show up? What if you don’t feel inspired by anything you’re doing? What if making marks on the page, shaping ideas into words feels so meaningless and empty? I don’t mean that these things are meaningless to the world, but meaningless to myself?
when i was a teenager, my depression came crashing in waves. it was crushing and existential; it took the form of a violent flood, and once the floodgates were open there was nothing i could do but swirl inside my own self-hatred. in between were periods of dull, numb calm, like the storm had been emptied out from the inside. and i would hear a different kind of Voice—i’m so bored. i’m so, so tired. i want to go to sleep and never wake up
as of this year, i no longer experience these storms. so evidently, i’ve made a lot of progress on solving my problems. but i worry that much of my progress is inflated because i’ve learned to decouple my depression from my functionality. instead of anime and video games, i can escape, now, into things i’ll be extrinsically rewarded for. sometimes i think i might be just as numb as i was back then
if there’s one thing about the advice i agree with, it’s that numbness is always a shield against something terrifying. for weeks and weeks i felt nothing. i was focused, functional, productive; i wasn’t particularly joyous, but i wasn’t unhappy, either. and there wasn’t much to feel joy about, anyway, when my favorite people were halfway across the world
*
but you knew there was something wrong. the headaches, the late period, that ache that gnawed at your heart a few minutes at a time, in your sleep, your meals, your commute. the necessities you wish would just disappear. for weeks and weeks you feel nothing. you’re at the tattoo parlor and it’s just scratching the surface. you want it to be real. you want it to burn. there it is, your brainchild carved into flesh. there it is, a black hole tearing your wings apart
(you always fly too close to the sun—but you know that already)
but there’s nothing you can do. if you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. until it’s a lovely friday afternoon with your lovely colleagues at the biergarten, and you feel nothing. i’ve always thought they were lighthouses, billions of lighthouses, stuck at the far end of the sky1, and you’re finally seeing them for what feels like the first time
and just like that, the ice cracks. that laughter, bubbling up like soda. you’re a million miles away. you can’t recall the last time you felt happy
*
i think i did a lot in march. i travelled to frankfurt and waited in line for seven hours to see my favorite girl group. i stayed in a hostel for the first time. i had a dunkin boston cream donut for the first time. i saw a cactus at a botanical garden and i thought of home. i saw alan walker with my friends and it was great. i finally got the tattoo i’d been thinking of getting for a year. i saw the eiffel tower at dusk light up to thunderous applause. and i saw, amongst a sea of tourists, van gogh’s starry night over the rhône—
—and all of a sudden you’re nineteen and you’re sitting on the esplanade on a beautiful spring night, gazing back at your starry new home, and you think to yourself that you’re finally alive
i don’t know how to describe march, but maybe it was something like going to sleep in a metal box and waking up without the sky. even though i felt and wrote so little, all of the things i experienced in march weren’t for nothing. they were windows—glimpses of something important i was forgetting. my tattoo is for the black hole research i’ve been doing for the past few years, but also for interstellar, the first movie i fell in love with. and the butterflies are Morpho menelaus, a species i saw in a botanical garden in frankfurt this march. from above, they’re canonical, brilliant, iridescent blue—but from below, they’re dark, twelve-eyed, almost moth-like. there was something so beautiful about them that i couldn’t put my finger on at the time
i need to remember this: that the void i’m so afraid of isn’t anything i haven’t faced before. i need to remember the promise i made myself on a warm spring night years ago—that one day i would learn how to love being alive
*
if you’re reading this: good morning, and happy april! i love you more than you know
<3