Carpe Diem?

The quest for a lost personality: now extra long and tangential to supplement my multi month long absence!

Before I get into what I’m trying to say with today’s newsletter, I want to issue an apology. More of an apology to myself than to you, since I doubt your life has truly been worse off without my (supposedly) weekly ramblings, but I’d like to say that I really did try to stick to a schedule until college got in the way.

College… yeah. What a time!

I’ve been thinking about and worrying about and daydreaming about college for years, which shouldn’t be a surprise given how the American high school education system is set up. Everything is about getting in to a “good school”, performing as well as you can academically and with extracurriculars, comparing yourself with everyone around you, consciously or not. So suffice to say it’s been been quite the experience actually being here and seeing what all those years of anxiety led up to.

Every day on campus is just an assertion of one of my core beliefs, that everything ends up the way it should (possibly a later newsletter on this), because if you had told me exactly a year ago that I didn’t get into my top choice college and that I’m actually glad about that?? I would not have believed it. But that’s the truth! And it’s nice to know that even if my life doesn’t look like the way I tried to plan it out, I can still make the best of my situation and I can have fun and use whatever opportunities I’ve been given.

That right there, the idea that you have to make your own experiences (college and otherwise), is something I’ve honestly been struggling with. The biggest change in my life since moving out has been the increase in independence and lack of any sort of schedule outside of my classes. I have so much more free time than I did in high school, and yet, I feel like I’m doing so much less. Part of that is probably because I was insanely overbooked in high school and just did not sleep ever, which is something I’ve been working on in college (getting 6+ hours a night !!!)

But the other big thing is just that increased independence means an increased need to seize the day. What I’ve learned from the past few months is that I really need to take initiative to reach out to people and take advantage of the various events and activities that my school has to offer. I know that that seems super obvious, and it’s something I’ve heard for years, but I haven’t had to start anew like this since freshman year of high school, and honestly, I’ve forgotten how 14 year old me did things. Besides, college and living alone can be very isolating, especially when you’re in a place that’s far from home, with people who grew up in very different environments.

At the beginning of the semester, I was mildly distraught over the idea of making new friends and trying to figure out how to maintain my home friendships and make new friends at school, and then once classes started, keeping the balance between living in the moment and having good planning and time management skills. It felt like I had no control over anything, and no energy to try. I would wake up, go to my classes, go back to my room, do some homework, practice bass, go to band and drama rehearsals, eat, shower, and sleep. And that was about it, every day. Or at least that’s what it felt like it was. Looking back on pictures and my handy notes app bullet points of the things I do every day, I was definitely doing more than that and I was definitely having fun. I was going on walks with friends, exploring new parts of my college town, going out every weekend, having people hang out in my room, going to concerts in the city, etc. So the real question is not how do I maximize my time, instead, how do I slow down and recognize each part of my life?

To be clear, I don’t have an answer to that question, but I will say that after our fall break, when I got to go back to school with a reset in mindset, without having to worry about getting oriented to a completely new place, something was different. The past two weeks have been more productive than the past two months before that combined, and I’ve been putting a lot more energy towards trying to remember who I am.

It’s been little things: putting on my full set of jewelry before going to my classes, changing my nail color, studying in places that are not my room, adding a ridiculous amount of posters to my wall, etc. But it’s these little things that have made the biggest difference for me. It’s these little things that have made me focus on living, instead of just surviving.

I don’t know what the central point of this newsletter is, nor do I know if it is intelligible at all (it’s been a while since I’ve written anything, much less anything anyone can read). But what I think I’m trying to say is that changes in life and in routine, no matter how big or small, can be all consuming. And if you find yourself looking around one day and feeling like you’ve forgotten who you are, or like any sort of personality has been drained out of you, then maybe a period of rest or reset is needed. And after that period? Maybe it’s time to take control of the little things, so that you have some sort of reminder of what you like and what makes you feel good as you go about your day.

Maybe after that the little things will add up, like they have for me, and you’ll feel more like a person again. The process of purposefully choosing to do and wear and interact with things that I know that I like because of who I am, not things that I think other people will like, or things that will make me fit in has been genuinely cathartic. At the same time, I’ve realized I’m just reverting back to the vision for myself that I had in 2020, but it’s quite nice to know that 16 year old me would be really proud of who I am today.

Anyway. As I said earlier, I’m out of practice, so I can’t tell if I’ve actually gotten anywhere with anything I wrote here. It’s also pretty late at night and I want to go to sleep instead of agonizing over word choice and sentence structure, so this is all I have for now! I think I’m going to try to return to a regular writing schedule, but maybe once every 2 weeks instead of once every week because I really just don’t have the ability to commit like that.

Here are some things that I’ve decided are mandatory consumption:

• Midnights by Taylor Swift (I do not care what people say I love this album so dearly it’s like the Reputation, Lover and 1989 love child I’ve been needing)

• Jennifer’s Body (2009)

• The moon. (this isn’t really consumption but everyone should go outside and look at the moon she is so pretty)

• Starboy by The Weekend (the album)

I love you.

Kalina