I recently got my hair re-dyed. My mother usually insists that I get my haircut at an actual salon, since she thinks that if I bleach and dye my own hair I’ll ruin it (which, mind you, I have never done, despite having bleached it myself repeatedly!). I forgot to bring my book along with me to the drying apparatus, so while my hair was gently warmed, I inspected the snips of mint green hair that had settled on my black apron and ruminated. Hair salons in particular are very good for this type of calm consideration. They have a really lovely ambiance, with hairdressers happily babbling about mundane (but riveting) gossip and some 2000’s track playing quietly in the background, periodically interrupted by the dull roar of a hair dryer. 

I walked into the store with overgrown, faded, green hair that was in dire need of a trim. My stylist asked me how long I had been dying my hair, and I faltered for a moment, realizing that my knee-jerk answer – a couple of years – wasn’t true any more. She looked at me slightly expectantly, and I finally answered – “Six years… since I was a freshman in high school.” I’m a classic case of falling down the slippery slope. I started with dark brown highlights, and the next thing I knew, half of my shirts had blue stains on the collar. I’m actually a little reckless with my hair, all things considered. It’s been bleached three times, I let Athena hack off some curtain bangs during my freshman IAP, and I’m bad at remembering to condition it. After I left home I started letting it air dry (my mother was no longer around to nag me about catching a cold), and it’s usually in a state of disarray, since I often can’t be bothered to brush it. As I fingered the juncture between the cool metal and black leather of my salon chair, it occurred to me that my lack of care for my hair was pretty ironic, since my hair is incredibly precious to me. 

To be honest, my hair has always been a source of pride. Or at least, comfort. I would never have described myself as pretty in middle or high school, but my hair was always thick, pin-straight, and enviably shiny. It was one of the few ways in which I felt like I was able to fulfill the beauty standards of my Arkansan childhood. For the first 14 years of my life, I simply refused to ever wear it up, because I felt like putting it up got rid of the only thing that made me bearable to look at. That sounds a bit melodramatic, but it used to feel true. I actually still have a lot of trouble with this. Every few weeks, I force myself to put it in a ponytail. I’ll stare in the mirror for a moment, realize how dissatisfied I am with my appearance, let out a sigh of disgust, and pull the tie out of my hair. I’m sometimes a minute or two late to class because of these mini-crises. I’m not nearly as self conscious as I used to be – I actually consider myself reasonably conventionally attractive, now – but I just can’t seem to get over the thing with my hair. 

My nervous reflex involves running my hand through my hair, a-la a teenage fuck boy. I’ve repeatedly debated cutting all of my hair off, if only because I know I depend on it too much as an emotional crutch. Whenever I bring up the idea to friends there’s always the same sentiment – you have such nice hair, though, Shorna. It’s an incredibly sweet compliment, but I’m not sure I like needing my hair as much as I do, because I’m deeply aware of how much power my hair has over me.

When I was a junior in high school, I was a bit high strung. That’s… an understatement. I was always very close to crying (although I would’ve rather died than do it in front of someone else) and I had almost no emotional outlet for my ever-growing anxiety about college applications. I was terrified of squandering my potential, burning out too early, being unable to make good on all of the dreams I had chosen for myself. I was so incredibly stressed, all of the time. Halfway through the fall of my junior year, I was sitting at the dining table, reading Campbell’s Biology, when I mindlessly ran my hand through my hair and my fingers ran over a smooth circle of skin on the left side of my head. With a jolt, I realized a quarter-sized patch of hair on my head had just… disappeared.

I was overwhelmed by nausea and rising disbelief. I hadn’t recognized how much my hair mattered to me until it fell out. I felt so exposed, as if I had, in one fell swoop, been robbed of everything that made me effeminate and desirable. My hair was the only pretty thing about me – I couldn’t even depend on that.

It was an awful feeling, but I got over it. I recognized the fact that my hair falling out was my body aching for reprieve from the immense mental pressure I was placing on myself. I tried hard to calm down, if only because I really didn’t want more of it to fall out. It worked, at least a little bit. As my hair slowly grew back, I struggled to divorce my conception of my own beauty from my hair, while simultaneously trying to separate my academic success from my sense of self-worth. I was somewhat successful, but losing my hair was a huge sore spot for more than a year. When I went for my next biannual haircut, the stylist grasped the patch of shorter-than-normal hair and raised an eyebrow, smiling at me. “It fell out. Stress, I guess.” I grimaced, slightly sheepish. Her smile faltered a little. She let out an “ah” and shuffled it back into the rest of my hair. 

My hair has been red, pink, purple, blue, various shades of brown and blonde, and (most recently) green. I kept doing the things I had always done once it fully grew back, cutting and coloring with abandon. Despite the complicated nature of my relationship with it, my hair is important to me, so I think it ought to reflect who I am. It does feel right to look in the mirror to find my hair the color of paint fresh from the tube. I asked my stylist last Saturday to turn the ends a silvery-blue, but she cautioned me – “You have such nice hair, I don’t want to damage it. Let’s do something darker.” I smiled and accepted her proposal of a dark bluish-purple instead. As she wrapped up, running a dollop of gel through my bangs and unbuttoning the cape from my neck, I couldn’t help flushing giddily as her coworker let out an appreciative ‘ooh’ and told me I had ‘model hair’. She was probably exaggerating, but my hair is pretty, and very purple, and probably a lot more important to me than it should be. I don’t have a clean moral. It’s hard to care so much about something that feels both blatantly frivolous and deeply fundamental to your identity. My fingernails will be stained indigo for the next few weeks, so, after every shower, while I attempt to scrub them back to the correct color, I’ll try to remember that I can care about my hair without it affecting my self-worth. We’ll see how that goes.

I still play Smash, though, and I’ll probably try to continue playing chess once in a while, too. And, like, sure, I could make this post about tenacity, or whatever. But I think my suckiness at Smash is interesting because it’s probably not temporary. I’m almost certainly not going to put in the hours required to be good at chess, or learn to play Smash really well, because they’re just not a priority. I hope eventually I’ll be passable at these things, but I don’t mind the fact that I do these things, I’m bad at them, and I probably will be for a while. It’s easy to interpret that as lazy. And maybe it is – I’m not sure that it’s necessarily the most disciplined philosophy. And I won’t deny that progress can sometimes creep up on you. I am now able to squat more than my body weight, despite being pretty weak when I started college, because I just kept going to the gym, kind of thoughtlessly. It wasn’t my whole life, and I often ignored it in favor of PSETs and meetings, but I did it because it was fun and appealing. But I want to emphasize that progress doesn’t have to be the end goal. I think recognizing and accepting that I can be really bad at things was one of the most freeing decisions I’ve ever made.

It wasn’t an easy epiphany to come to. One of the things about MIT is the stunning awareness that you’re surrounded by people that pick things up at lightning speed. I’ll turn my head and realize that my friend has become surprisingly good at parallel algorithms or Hollow Knight in the course of a few weeks. Nowadays, it’s mostly just a source of quiet appreciation, one of those moments when you think to yourself, Dang, my friends are cool.

It didn’t used to feel like that, though. When I was a freshman, many of my friends used to play a game called Tractor, which I believe they learned at competitive math camps (?). I abhor Tractor, with a burning passion. It’s mildly interminable, since in order to successfully win a game you have to get through 14 rounds. It’s played in silence, because you have to remember the number of cards of a certain type that have been placed down, and that requires a lot of concentration (at least on my part).

Everyone knows the quiet shame of being the worst at something in a group of people who don’t have the patience for you. You’re petrified of slipping up, perpetually defending yourself from mild jeering after every mistake, and for some reason it really hurts to feel irredeemably terrible at something, even when that something is as simple as a card game. Somehow being bad at cards feels like an indictment of your intelligence; everyone is looking at you because you’re the dumb one who messed up. Of course, most people probably don’t really care whether you remembered to place down your queen of hearts, but some people are so competitive, it can feel like not being among the best at an arbitrary skill is a personal failure.

The first time I played Tractor, I was introduced to it alongside my friend, who was better at math and had played many more card games than I had. I admitted that I suspected I wouldn’t be as good of a player as he was, so my partner should accept me as a major handicap. Another friend paused, asking why I thought I’d be any worse than him, since we had approximately the same (nonexistent) experience. My fellow newbie laughed, and as I accepted my hand from him, he leaned forward conspiratorially and simply stated “I’m just better than her.”  I felt a soft burning in my nose and realized with a shock that his dig had hurt. It was as if the statement had plunged its hands right into my chest, yanking the insecurity and teary embarrassment of grade-school Shorna straight from my past. I mentally chastised myself – I was too old for this, too grown, too capable to be hurt over a card game. But when I left the room, the tears still came.

Admittedly, I had pretty bad taste in friends when I was a frosh, and I eventually realized that. The hate for card games stuck around, though. A friend and I exchanged practically identical stories about Tractor not too long ago. This past CPW, one of my freshmen was on Next CPW Comm, and suggested a Tractor Event. I reacted almost immediately, pressing that he should host something with wider appeal. A nearby prefrosh lazily cocked his head at me and simply said, “If you don’t like cards, maybe you don’t fit Next House culture” I stared at him, disgust bubbling under the surface. I stayed up for over 30 hours making the 2023 Next House i3 video when the first one fell through. I’m the Vice President of Next, and I put so much work into making the house run and keeping 3E welcoming and clean. I wanted to chew him out, to put him in his place, to call him out on his bullshit. But I was a soon-to-be junior and he was just a kid, so I held my tongue and simply shrugged, noted that “Next House is a heterogenous place”, gave a final suggestion against cards, and left.

I find it hard to overstate how badly I never want to make anyone feel like that. To be clear, I think this is representative of the actions of a few bad apples, not the culture of MIT (or Next) as a whole; most people I’ve met here are helpful, charitable, and compassionate. More importantly, though, I have simply learned that I just want to be able to teach my friends things without making them feel inept.

I like asking my friends to paint with me. It’s stupid – I’ll pull out my portable watercolors, hand them a brush and a cup of water, and let them work. It makes me unreasonably happy. I say this with love in my heart – some people are shockingly bad at painting. I don’t care whether or not it looks good, though, because a person I care about is spending time with me doing a thing I love. I guess the best way I have to express this is actually through a line from Adventure Time. There’s a scene in which Jake, the older brother (who… also happens to be a very elastic dog) assures the main character, Finn, that “sucking at something is the first step to being really good at something”. It’s a little bit silly, but to be honest I think the correct philosophy is just that “sucking at something doesn’t have to suck”.

I spent that hour with Allen groaning over the fact that I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to prevent him from taking my bishop. And Satya has somehow managed to not get exasperated at me despite the numerous hours playing Smash I’ve spent dying, over and over and over again. Having casual relationships with your skills is important – you don’t have to be the best at anything, or even particularly good at many things, to be worthy of grace. So, in too many words, don’t let your fear of sucking at something get in the way of actually sucking at it, because with the right people, sucking at something should never make you feel inadequate, and it should, actually, be a little bit wonderful.

I’m a big fan of Saturdays. I often have a PSET due Friday nights, so Saturdays are my ‘off’ days; I get up around 9, waste a lot of time eating brunch in Next dining, and proceed to mess around in some 3E lounge or other for the rest of the day. Sometimes, I go to the gym in the morning, and affectionately listen to Alison bemoan bicep curls and incline sit ups. A few weekends ago, at 1PM on a Saturday (most holy of days), Leo and Athena were sitting in ML. I don’t remember all that much except a certain feeling of lightness; my next assignment wasn’t due for 2 whole days (!!), so I was in no particular rush to finish anything. The sunlight felt almost generous as it streamed through the large, Charles-facing windows of the lounge. I sidled up to Athena, hoping to engage in some dumbasseryTM, but I soon realized with chagrin that Athena had a spreadsheet open, and was doing something horrifying with Leo. 

‘We’re adding up our hours.’

Needless to say, I walked away with some haste. Leo enjoys being helpful, and sometimes he assists people by having them do an exercise. The instructions are simple: split up all 168 hours of the week based on how you plan to spend them. Athena and Leo have been doing this since our freshman year. It’s a smart idea; the goal is to, very objectively, determine whether or not you’re overcommitted. It’s a responsible idea. 

It also makes my skin crawl. 

There are a few reasons for this. For one, at this point in the semester, I had a growing suspicion that I was chronically overcommitted and needed to do something about it, but I had no particular intention to. I’d picked up a series of extracurriculars in the last semester, and I was slightly annoyed at myself for continuously accepting increasing quantities of responsibility with blatant disregard for myself and my time. I wanted to do all of it, though, so I kept going, continuously pushing down my uneasiness that the barely-afloat ship was going to go down in flames in a depressing way, rather than a spectacular one. Secondly, I strongly dislike the oh-so-prevalent commodification of time at the institute. As a student, time is wealth, time is precious, time is scarce. There’s a constant ticking in the back of my head, a timer until the next deadline. You can never truly let go during the semester. Portioning out exactly 2 hours a day for calorie consumption feels like a willing acceptance of time as an ever-present, prohibitive girdle on my existence. 

Despite everything, though, I realized after some reflection that I was, in fact, fairly curious as to how I actually spend my time, and how that measures up to my expectations. Even though I was worried about being overcommitted, things seemed to be going fairly smoothly, so I wanted to know exactly what was going on. And so, I tracked everything I did for an entire week, blocked into 15 minute intervals. The intention was for it to be an accurate reflection of how I actually spend my time, but I suspect that I was probably more productive this week than normal, because I knew everything I did would be recorded. There’s a spreadsheet linked below with the breakdown!

First, though, it would probably be helpful if I did a quick rundown of everything I’m doing this semester. Like most people, I am taking classes! I’m in 5 this semester; 6.046, 6.033, 18.413, 7.05, and 21M.301. I have things to say about all of them!

6.046: Design and Analysis of Algorithms – I like this class a lot. 6.006 (Introduction to Algorithms) was a bit of a nightmare for me, so I anticipated dreading this experience; shockingly, though, I think I have realized that 6.006 sucked because life generally sucked freshman spring, not because I actually dislike theoretical computer science. The lectures are very engaging, and the process of solving the PSETs is really enjoyable; I appreciate the elegance of algorithmic solutions a lot. 046 making the endorphins go whoosh. 

6.033: Computer Systems Engineering – I strongly dislike this class. It’s just… I spend much more time either baffled or aggressively annoyed in this class than I would like to. When Mihir warned me that the Design Project expectations were unclear, the papers were difficult to wade through, and the 25% participation grade was atrocious, I rolled my eyes, thinking it was a him thing. It was not a him thing. 033 is a CS major requirement, and I am convinced that if I actually were more sincere about it I would care more about computer systems, but oh my GOD this class is annoying.

7.05: General Biochemistry – This is the first biology class I’m taking at MIT! I promised myself I would take it as a treat, and I’ve been having a lot of fun. The first few weeks were a bit slow, but Yaffe is a very adept lecturer, and I think the class will get a lot harder. I will, however, complain about the 1.5 hour lectures at 9:30 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the paper PSETs that must be turned in on Monday mornings. Not cool. 

18.413: Basic Bioinformatic Algorithms – Another algorithms class! This has been… interesting. It’s a new class, so it’s kind of disorganized, but I’ve generally found the textbook and PSET content fairly interesting, plus it’s super relevant to my research interests. I really like algorithms… never thought I’d live to hear the day. 

21M.301: Harmony and Counterpoint I – absolutely baller HASS. This class is a surprising amount of work; we have composition assignments that have been taking me upwards of 5 hours a week (L+Ratio), as well as music theory exercises. Nonetheless, lectures are good, and I feel more musical than I have in a while. I’m back at the piano, and my atrophying pinkies have recovered after a few good weeks of practice. I plan on concentrating in music, and this class has done nothing to dissuade me from it.

I occasionally do other things! Here’s a list of my other commitments:

Next Exec: I’m Vice President of Relations this semester; this is my first time being on Next Exec, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I ran for this position. Perhaps the biggest change is the deluge of email I now deal with. I have a problem with notifications; I physically cannot have unread/unresponded to messages in my texts or email inbox, so the amount of time that I now have to spend making sure things aren’t exploding when I open my gmail is a little embarrassing. We also occasionally meet with the House Team and Heads of House, and we have weekly Next Exec Meetings.

UROP: I have a UROP in the Computational Biology Lab at CSAIL this semester. I’ve been working with a Cornell student who’s in the area for the semester, and I’ve been having a lot of fun! We do the codey-code and actually (?!) enjoy the codey-code. 

Blogging: This is a job! That I have! And I don’t write enough for! Feel free to shame me. I swear I’m trying to do better – I have so many half-written blogs but they’re all cringe and angsty and I’m annoyed. I will drop more posts more often I SWEAR.

Medlinking: idk man people just ask me for bandaids

Next Sing: My dorm’s casual acapella group! I’m leading 2 acts (songs) this semester and singing in 3, but rehearsals hadn’t yet started during this week, so you won’t see much for it on the spreadsheet other than arrangement polishing.

RPM: I’m a Resident Peer Mentor, which means that I generally attempt to be helpful to the freshmen in my wing. I’m supposed to be a go-to for academic, emotional, and social issues and also emergency situations. If this sounds stressful, it kind of is! RPM-ing is really meaningful to me; I hope that I have in some capacity made my freshmen’s experience easier. It’s also kind of hard to balance with the rest of my life, and can sometimes render me very emotionally burnt out.

Some time must also be spent on generally attempting not to die – 2000 calories and 8 hours of sleep? ezmoney (this is a lie this has never been ezmoney). Also I occasionally exercise, or something?

Socializing: I must socialize for extended periods of time (without simultaneously working) at least 2-3 times a week if I want to maintain my sanity. If you notice huge chunks of time labelled ‘fuck around’ time, it just means that on Tuesday night I was so fed up with work that I went down to 2W and did nothing useful until 3 in the morning. 

Therapy: golden hour babieeeee. I love therapy; it’s the one hour in my week I leave free for emotional processing. I’m not sure if I should be like, you know, processing things for at least a few of the 167 hours in between, but emotional compartmentalization is my best friend, until my therapist points out the very obvious reasons I have been feeling like shit and then I feel mildly stupid. :thumbsup:

Now that I have spent far too long explaining everything that I am doing this semester, here is the spreadsheet describing exactly how I spent every day for one week. Here are a few takeaways:

1. I do more work than I thought I did. To be quite frank, I was under the impression that I was a bit of a potato who shirked all of her responsibilities. I mean that (mostly) in jest, but I did have the impression that I was a little bit less studious than I actually am. Including lecture time, I did somewhere between 55-60 of work for the week (depending on what counts), which I think is about as much as I can reasonably expect of myself. 
2. I like, have to lay in bed for some amount of time after classes or I cannot survive. I didn’t realize that this needed to happen for 30-45 minutes every day. 
3. I should stop skipping lectures. I missed two this week despite normally good attendance and I was so disoriented afterwards. Playing catch-up is never very fun.
4. Learning the worm is the best way to spend 1.5 hours ever.
5. I’m probably not overcommitted! Things seem fairly okay, and I feel fine. I also feel a lot more secure in getting my stuff done now that I know I have enough time to do it.

And lastly, that my life is insane. I think, in the process of nicely formatting this spreadsheet, I realized how absolutely surreal my existence is. Baseball by Hippo Campus is one of my favorite songs; I play it often during my walk to class. There’s something very apt about walking across Briggs Field under a bright blue sky as the lyrics “There’s something fiction about the way that reality is going.” blast in your ears.  I go to MIT and I get to do things I love and find meaning in all day long. 

Most people here, I think, live with the ever-present fear that there’s simply not enough time. Getting an education feels like a desperate attempt to outrun the decay of your brain, constantly fleeing the moment at which you lose the ability to see the connections, find the patterns, solve the problems. There’s so little time, so much to know and learn. Time used to be so leaden, with the brutal impassivity of cold marble. It’s so easy to spend everyday working when that’s how you parse things. Do something great, or else your existence will have been futile. Time is the only thing worth anything, in that paradigm. 

My understanding of life has changed; time has unfurled in the wind. I’m trying to spend my time doing the things I love with the people I care about.

It’s perched on top of my bookshelf, at the perfect vantage point to scornfully watch me. It’s a green house, inspired by the one across the street from my parent’s house. I underpainted it pink. It looks bad, and I don’t have the time to fix it. Its color palette is incohesive, the perspective is off, the value contrast is nonexistent. A couple more layers of paint could make it beautiful, but I know I probably won’t be finishing it anytime soon. As much as leaving a painting like that is physically painful, there’s a knot of guilt, pushing down the desire to grab my paint brushes, because I know I probably ought to spend the time doing the supplemental reading for 6.046. I put it on the top shelf to avoid the oil paint rubbing off everywhere; I wonder if, on some level, I also wanted to shame myself for producing ‘bad’ work, and leaving it as such.

As you might’ve assumed, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about making art. 

Painting used to be an integral part of my life. I didn’t own many pairs of jeans that weren’t splattered with color. My mom would to unfailingly chide me when I’d graffiti my own arms on the daily. My first kindergarten show-and-tell was a painting of a sunset, which I recall blending and re-blending until I fell asleep at my desk. 

I still love painting, but my relationship with art is changing. I’m a messy painter, or at least… I used to be. The last time I painted I walked away spotless. A bittersweet feeling settled on my tongue yesterday afternoon, as I thumbed a hole in the last of my familiar, paint-stained pants and finally accepted that I needed to let them go. 

The time to make art is now a luxury. I recently told someone that I ‘paint a lot’, and realized with a start that this simply isn’t true – not anymore. I made 5 large oil paintings over the summer, and have finished almost nothing during my sophomore year. The bottom drawer of my desk is filled with paint. Quinacridone Magenta, Viridian Green, Cerulean. I see the tubes and I want to do something with them, but I can’t. It now feels less like art (of any kind) is omnipresent and more as if it’s a side-job, momentary dawdling as I get sidetracked from my larger (academic) goals.

Somewhat unfortunately, making art requires lengthy, contiguous blocks of time. Almost all of my blog posts are written in one sitting, often 4-5 consecutive hours of thinking, writing, typing, and editing. There’s some sensation akin to anxiety there, as well. I keep painting not really because I have an explicit desire to spend 8 hours staring at a photo of plums, but because it feels natural. It is an activity you start and continue until you’re done. There’s inertia. Somehow, if I go too long without painting, or writing, or anything else, I start feeling antsy, as if the walls are closing in on me. Internally, my creation is often propelled by a feeling of claustrophobia, a sense that if I don’t make something I can’t go on.

Art is a treasure I keep in my back pocket, something fun to think about, even if I don’t always have the time to invest in it. I like teaching people about color theory, about the internal rhythm to paint. There are warm and cool blues, reds, and yellows, and one can use this fact to mix any color they want to. I have nuggets of wisdom, lore about painting. Coffee makes good calligraphy ink, and dries shiny. You’re supposed to wait a few weeks before varnishing an oil painting. One of my favorite thought experiments is to mentally envision how I would paint everything currently in my line of sight.

Art has brought me joy in unexpected and serendipitous ways. Even its frustrations are so satisfying. Painting is an exercise in self-discipline. Your sketch is always attractive; you mentally fill in all the unfinished parts with their ideal realization, which you quickly discover is entirely beyond your skill set. It looks horrible for a couple of hours. More than a couple, actually. It generally looks atrocious until you’re almost done, at which point you’re so feverishly chasing the painting’s completion that it’s hard to appreciate any progress. You feel the entire time as if you’ve become sick of the painting, and are simply waiting to finally throw it across the room, and potentially into the trash can. But there’s a moment, after you’ve paid sufficient penance (in time and tears), that you understand. You see the fruition of your efforts and achieve the sweetness of completion.

Incredibly, despite all of this – my internal reliance on making art, my delight at its existence, my enjoyment of the artistic process – too long without a brush in my hand had made me forget how to be feel happy with my work. Too much thought had gone into it; how long would I need? Was I good enough to pull off the effect I wanted? Would I actually want the piece when it was finished? I created a ball of frustration, culminating in a very sad, slightly pink (but mostly green) house.

I needed to stop intellectualizing. So, to force myself out of it, I did a simple exercise; I sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil, pulled up a few reference images, and started. 5 minutes per face, 5 faces. At the end of half an hour, I was happy. For the first time in months, I had finally achieved the soft internal glow of a ‘successful’ drawing. 

the heads I drew!

They’re not perfect, but the wonderful part was that they didn’t have to be. They look like people, and they’re all charming, in their own ways. The likeness is dubious on a few, but it doesn’t matter. I set my pencil down and I was happy with my work. Imperfect, but still worthwhile. I felt like an artist.

Why am I disappointed? As is often the case, I’m disappointed in myself. It’s a familiar feeling. That sensation when you recognize that you’re stuck. Today is one of those days, when I have far too much work and far too little desire to do it. I put on the largest shirt I could find because I didn’t want to be aware of my corporeal form. I can’t hear very well, for some reason, and I feel like the physical embodiment of burnout. I feel stupid, unmotivated, inarticulate, ugly, and exhausted. I have worked dozens of hours this week, and all I’d really like is a nap.

On days like these, I often fall into the trap of comparing myself to high school Shorna. It’s a very strange relationship I have with her; I’m honestly mildly jealous. I feel like this past instantiation of myself was just… better. High school Shorna knew what she wanted. She didn’t struggle with emotional compartmentalization. She had the capacity to work 13 hours a day, day in, day out. She was passionate about school. She had unending enthusiasm for learning. There were things that she loved.

I feel damaged, now. That same jadedness that I was convinced I could evade has settled deeply into the cracks of my psyche. Everything just sort of… aches.

Where does it hurt?

Primarily, I think I’ve lost my sense of conviction. I don’t consider myself particularly brilliant, but I’ve always thought of myself as exceedingly driven. High school Shorna was ambitious, motivated, and steadfast. Since 7th grade, I had always known exactly what I wanted. I was going to go to MIT, even if it killed me. I was going to live in 3E in Next house, study computational biology and work at the Broad. And, I mean… there was a lot more to it than that. I was going to live in Boston after school, get an MD-PhD at Harvard, be married by 25, have a golden retriever, and live in a blue townhouse, with sunflowers in the windows. 

Which is ridiculous. At this point, I’m not even sure if these are the things I want anymore, much less things I can have. As it turns out, it is very hard to do many of these things, and I worry that I might’ve lost myself somewhere along the way. I’m less convinced of almost everything now – who am I? What do I care about? What do I want out of my future? What is going to make me happy?

Frustratingly, a shocking proportion of my end-of-year identity crisis has been prompted by my classes. I’m in 4 classes this semester, and it’s been miserable. I decided to take 6.004⁠01 Computational Structures , 6.009⁠02 Intro to Programming , and 6.008⁠03 Inference this semester; three difficult lab CS classes. Er, difficult for me at least; I had really minimal experience with coding before college, and I am not great at this skill. The problem isn’t, really, that it doesn’t come naturally; it’s that I just don’t enjoy my classes very much. I just… don’t like coding, and no matter how much I want to be motivated in my classes, I find it hard to care sometimes. 

I’m envious of high school Shorna’s clarity. My college essays were, by and large, love letters to biology. I waxed eloquent, detailing all of the reasons that my heart lay with the study of life, and then I decided to become a computer science major. I’m in this perpetual three-way tug-of-war between math, computer science, and biology, now. Interest isn’t difficult to have, but passion? I know what that feels like, and it’s not something I can manufacture. Not for inference, not for computer architecture, and not for anything else. 

To be quite honest, part of me was fighting a desire to study biology for a while. Some of this stems from living in Next House. I love Next. 3E is a place where I’ve found people I adore and a close-knit community. In between the foam-leaking plushies and the mouse-infested cabinets, I made a home for myself. But Next is so hard, and I often feel so out-of-place, here. When I settled down my freshman fall, I was struck by how utterly alien the landscape was. People slung around words like ‘utility’ and ‘nonzero’ and ‘nonintersecting’ with nonchalance; everyone spoke a different language than I did. Math camps and computing olympiads had drawn people together in ways that seemed totally out of reach. I walked onto campus without any friends from home.⁠04 PLEASE read Ella's excellent blog about this  

I had never written a proof before my freshman spring, and it’s easy to feel outright inept compared to the kids who take 18.701⁠05 Algebra 1 their freshman fall. I walk around feeling as if I have no technical skills, which is also more than a little ridiculous. I knew how to run PCR before the age of 14, I’m a published scientific author, and I’ve done well in multiple difficult classes at MIT. I’m, very realistically, extremely capable. That, unfortunately, doesn’t stop me from feeling as though I’m not. 

This is another point at which the comparison with past Shorna sets in. In high school, people were scared of me. I’ll sometimes relay this fact to my close friends at MIT, and it’s a foolproof way to garner a few giggles. My persona here is so different. On some level, I’ve been able to free myself from the mirage of ‘smart brown kid’ which used to be my defining personality trait. I’m an assertive, extroverted, outspoken, vivacious person. I think many of my high school friends might’ve called me reserved and calm. But there was no doubt that I used to command respect. I find it harder to be quite so self-assured, nowadays. I often end up being the butt of various jokes about my age (I skipped a grade and hang out with a lot of upperclassmen), height (I’m 5’ 3”… which isn’t actually particularly short), and hometown (Bentonville, Arkansas really has that Hallmark Movie ring). These quips are usually good-natured and well-meant, but it can be tiring after a long day, and I sometimes wonder if my friends only keep me around because I’m an entertaining communal punching bag. 

Biology felt like it contributed to those insecurities. Math was a path to glory and respect. Biology was easier, less confusing, more natural, and softer. Doing biology felt like a cop-out, a statement as to the fact that I wasn’t “quite sharp enough” to be good at competitive math. I took 18.100B⁠06 Real Analysis my freshman spring, for all of the wrong reasons. Admittedly, I enjoyed this class immensely (it was by far my favorite class I had taken at MIT), and I discovered that I did actually enjoy math for what it was; a series of puzzles and a new type of abstract thinking. I also took 6.006⁠07 Intro to Algorithms , which I didn’t enjoy in the least. I didn’t take a biology class my freshman spring because it felt like math and CS were more legitimate, more important, more worthwhile. 

In fact, some of the intellectual experiences that I enjoyed most while at MIT have been things that happened in passing. I loved helping my friend with his 7.033⁠08 Evolutionary Biology PSETs last spring. I taught two separate two-hour lectures for Splash; one on Evolutionary Biology and one on Genetics. I spent hours poring over 3D genome organization research literature for my UROP, tapping into enthusiasm I hadn’t felt in months. I walked away from these ‘brushes with biology’ feeling satisfied, which isn’t something I’ve felt in any of my CS classes. 

This isn’t an admission of defeat (no matter how much it feels like it is); I’m going to keep trying to do math and CS, but I’ve realized that, if I’m pursuing genuine enjoyment of my studies, they can’t be my primary route forward. I concluded that 6-3⁠09 Computer Science perhaps isn’t the place for me. I’ve decided to take more biology classes in the spring (looking forward to 7.05⁠10 Biochemistry next semester!) and I’m debating a major change to 6-7.⁠11 Computer Science and Molecular Biology This decision has made me feel freer – I’m not expecting my spring classes to be a teeth-pulling, head-banging experience in which I’m constantly fighting my desire to walk away, which is what I anticipated coming into sophomore fall. I can feel the pressure being relieved. And, no matter how conflicted I feel now, I have faith that I will, eventually, figure it out. My conviction and passion will return, as long as I keep trying.

This piece is just a series of things loosely held together by a vague relation to my identity as a woman. There’s a common theme here, though; it’s pain. I’ve felt violated, angry, spiteful, exhausted, guilty, ashamed. I don’t have anything coherent to say on the topic as a whole. This is a ball of hurt I carry with me, a part of the constant calculus I engage in as I attempt to navigate the world. I wish I had some hope to impart, but my general impression is that growing up is just the process of grappling with the same struggles over and over again, each iteration providing more clarity. I don’t think I’ve done it enough times to yet have wisdom, but I’ve certainly done it. So here, in a collection of vignettes, is a list of thoughts. They’re aimless, agonizing, tiring, burdensome, but they’re also things I’ve chosen to carry with me; they’re part of me, however regrettable that may be.

1     My Existence is Performative

I like telling people that I’m a six-foot-tall man in my head. I’m aware it sounds innocuous and rather ridiculous when issuing from the mouth of a 5’ 3” tall girl, particularly if I exclaim it while standing on some elevated surface (usually a table), but it’s true. Or, perhaps true to an extent. I usually say this jokingly, but the joke only extends to the fact that I want it to merit laughter, not because I mean it insincerely. My thoughts on this are really best explained by the following Margaret Atwood quote: 

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

I feel eyes on me at all times, especially when I’m alone. I am a victim of the societal panopticon; always feeling watched, always experiencing pressure to be a desirable, inexplicable creature whose every emotion and action is beautiful, whose sadness is haunting and perfect. There is a man on my shoulder who judges my every move, who analyzes the lilt of my voice and the curl of my hair. I’ve chosen to be the man because he is inescapable; if my existence is inherently performative, can I wrestle some power away by, at the very least, assuming the role of an audience member in my own life?

Recently, I dictated to my friend exactly the series of steps required to charm South Asian parents. Dress in a nicely pressed salawar, bring sweets, wear enough makeup (but not too much). Walk in with a smile plastered on, and ensure that your voice is drippingly saccharine at all times. Offer to help cook, or clean. Carry the food to the table, and watch your every move. Eat enough, but not too much. Suppress the desire to verbally devour the uncle who spouts misogyny and racism. Casually slide in your academic achievements, but be sure to focus on the correct ‘type’ of achievement; not too technical, or else you might be perceived as unfeminine or conniving. Ask after everyone’s health, and everyone’s children, and parents. Be unproblematic. Be soft-spoken. Be docile. I did this every weekend for the first 17 years of my life.

2.    Spite, and Anger, and all the Rest

The day after I got into MIT, I was walking on air. I was so happy I woke up the next day and laid in bed for 15 minutes, feeling sparkly. I walked into my AP Art History class, and, seeing as I had told my teacher that I was really anxious about decisions, I strolled over to his desk and experienced the following interaction, which felt frankly reality-bending:

“I got into MIT!”

“Ah, nice. I hope the boy you’ll marry got in, too.”

“… sorry?”

I hadn’t really been able to parse what he had said. I genuinely thought I had misheard him, because of the sheer ridiculousness of his response. 

This, I think, encapsulates much of my experience of being a woman in STEM in my rural Arkansas high school. I was the only girl in my AP Calculus BC class, and I was usually one of a handful in my physics classes, which were taught by blatantly inept men. Most of them spent all of their instruction time either spouting conservative idealogy or poorly concealing insecurity about their own professional failures (I had one instructor who spent the duration of our class bemoaning the fact that he had been denied by NASA because he ‘was too old’). 

I scored 100s on almost every exam I had in my AP science and math classes in high school. I cared deeply about the content of these classes; I saw them as preparatory and instrumental to my future success. But I was almost obsessive. I had to set the curves in my classes. I felt that earning those scores made my presence in these classes unimpeachable; I was valedictorian, and no man who was doing worse than me in his classes had any grounds upon which to act as if I was inept. So I did better than everyone. I was bitter, spiteful, and jealous. The boys in my high school were so unworried; they skated through their classes and knew that, with little to no effort, they could have what they wanted. They didn’t have to worry about being perceived as capable; it was practically already a given. I clung to every point, fueled by my ever-brewing anger at the nonchalant teenage boys who surrounded me. I was perpetually seething during my adolescence. 

I think a lot about being an angry, messy woman. I was confrontational and arrogant because I had space to be. I was better than these boys, if only because I cared. This summer, I watched Fleabag, a British comedy that follows a problematic, nymphomaniacal, reckless woman. An inelegant, imperfect, angry woman. The amount of vindication I felt, being able to root for her, was strangely freeing. I wonder if I was truly rooting for myself in high school. 

3.    Love

I can’t think about being in love without feeling violated anymore. I remember standing in front of the mirror of my freshman dorm room, realizing that my chest was covered in sallow welts, half-healed bruises left by my partner. I was bitten, thrown, groped, all without being asked. I remember barely suppressing my trepidation as he, in the first week of our relationship, reached over and began touching me intimately after his roommate had walked into the room. I couldn’t say anything, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. I was struggling to reconcile the feelings of elation and desolation; I had the boy I wanted, and that felt good, but he hurt me almost daily. Beyond being continually verbally degraded, in the words of a friend, “he did whatever he wanted to [me], and even if that sometimes made [me] feel good, it seems like he didn’t really care.”

I really, really wanted him to be happy. To be happy with me, to be a good girlfriend, to satisfy him. So I let him do what he wanted; when he held me down by the neck and forced me to answer questions, I tried my hardest to contain my panic, attempting to keep my breathing even. Mostly I just remember the pressure mounting on my throat. I was so vulnerable, and all I could think was that I wanted it to stop, to pause, to be allowed to breathe. I raked at his fingers, hoping for some respite, but his hand didn’t budge.

I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. He asked for consent an hour after everything had happened, and everything in me rebelled as I simply avoided the question. He had scared me, badly.

He liked making pedophilia jokes.  “How can I get charges for this?” was an idle thought he’d often voice while I lay in various states of undress in his bed. “You’re so little.” “You’re mine.” “I can see the fear in your eyes.” “I’m a six-foot-four man kissing an underage girl. Sounds like a pedophile to me.” I erased as much of this as I could, focusing on how handsome, or charismatic, or funny he was. He wasn’t really any of these things, but I maneuvered my way around it because I wanted him so badly. The fact that these comments filled me with dread was an overreaction. Fear and romance occupy the same spot in my mind, now. I was desirable because I was little, feminine, exploitable. I was his, because I was a girl. He ate me alive, from the inside out.

4.    Ambition 

I did my eighth-grade history project on the Feminine Mystique, a seminal work in Western Second Wave Feminism. Betty Friedan describes the ideal woman, who is able to juggle family life and a career, and achieves the heights of success in both. Friedan’s proposal always felt bitterly divorced from reality. It felt liberating to forsake a personal life, and when I was younger, I often loudly proclaimed that I would never get married or have children.

I have dreams of a little girl, and it feels like a betrayal of my professional sanctity. I worry that I’m failing myself by wanting a family. But I do.

5.    Beauty

The girl in the mirror is just that – clearly a girl. There’s no ambiguity here. I have traditional femininity in spades. I wear a skirt at least once a week, and have a collection of sundresses. Eyeliner, and long hair. Earrings, a pearl necklace perennially on my neck. 

My femininity is inescapable; I hate the curve of my legs, the swell of my hips. I can’t get around them. I look in the mirror and wish I had a sharp jawline and a flat chest. Yet… I curl my hair, apply my makeup, and tie a ribbon in my hair. I look in the mirror, and I don’t change anything.

One of the few memories I still have from my childhood is crying on the edge of the bathtub after having weighed myself. Too heavy, compared to the thin, beautiful white girls in their shimmering cheer outfits. I can’t eat alone in public. Hunger is private; I’ll never learn to swallow my shame. 

6.    Exhaustion and Guilt

I am deeply tired. I have little else to say.

My friend Nathan is aggressively bad at reading maps. Notoriously, infamously, comically bad at it. Not even his phone’s mobile navigation app can save him from his perpetual state of spatial lostness. In his words, “location just isn’t something [his] brain keeps track of”. I find this simultaneously hilarious (sorry, Nathan) and utterly incomprehensible. Sense of place is perhaps the most permanent aspect of how (if you’ll excuse the pun) I navigate memory.⁠12 Also how I navigate campus, unlike some people we know Everything that happens to me is intrinsically linked to metadata about the place where it occurred; I remember the directions to my aunt’s house in Bangladesh, my childhood best friend’s favorite hiding spot from over a decade ago, the painted red and white stripes on the trees beside my grandfather’s grave. 

When I came to MIT, the repertoire of places I carry in my heart more than doubled. The most secluded desk on the fifth floor of Barker, where I went when I needed to work for eight hours straight; the cork walls of its cubicle are covered with Sharpie messages from students; some despairing, others encouraging, and yet more cracking ‘ur mom’ jokes, painting an apt metaphor for the psyche of the average MIT student.⁠13 Plus it has easy access to two electrical outlets The Borderline Tunnel, covered with wonky murals and the home of a trio of beaten-up, well-loved chairs. The bench outside of MIT Medical, positioned directly under the streetlight, where you can sit and watch the moisture in the air fluoresce on a foggy night. The biggest tree on the Courtyard at the end of the infinite. These places fill me with quiet wonder, the sort that floods up your chest with something like fairy dust, an emotion I always feel when I think about MIT. 

I’ve skipped the place I spent the most time during my first year at MIT, though. My old room, number 351, in Next House. It was approximately the same as every other Next House room. Peeling walls covered in softly reflective cream paint, commercial tile floors, a door so blue it almost hurts your eyes. Standard wooden desk and bed. Me and my two roommates were crammed into a room meant to be a double, a situation that positively bred comical scenarios. Athena once brought a cubic foot of used tape back from her Terrascope project. Jennifer is so bad at waking up in the morning that she set alarms every other minute.⁠14 Which miraculously managed to wake up everybody in the room except for her I plastered the walls with frog stickers. It was a messy, chaotic jumble of laughter, silliness, and genuine friendship, a place where I lived with two people I love very much. 

There’s a reason 351 also fills my mouth with salt though: It was the place where I experienced the most all-encompassing despair I’ve ever felt in my entire life. There’s not really an elegant way to introduce this, so I won’t mince words – my mental health was abysmal during my first semester at MIT. That room was where I grappled with this constantly, day-in day-out, during the most unpleasant months of my life, feeling terribly alone. My sadness slipped into despair, which eventually faded into numbness, night bleeding into day, while lay on my floral bedsheets in 351. I stayed in that bed for days at a time during my first IAP, unable to force myself out of bed to eat, staring at the ceiling for hours instead of sleeping. During my first semester at MIT, I slept 4 hours a night and ate a single meal a day. I lost 10 pounds in 2 months, wasting away, as I did everything I could to attempt to keep my thoughts at bay (primarily, sleep and food deprivation). I was trying so hard to hang on to control, and a facade of ‘togetherness’ that I felt unable to communicate how badly I was struggling. Not that my friends didn’t notice (I like to tell myself I was better at hiding it than I was). A friend of mine once mentioned that I seemed like I “had my sh*t together”. He was impressively incorrect in this assertion, but I began to feel that I was good at concealing my mental state, that I was getting away with my little secret. 

I felt incredibly inept. For me, I always felt manic during my worst nights. A single thought, a kernel of self-loathing, that, when I was left alone, would boil over into a spiral of crippling, overbearing feelings of worthlessness. It scared me – it still does, when I think back on it. A fragment of a sentence was all it took. For much of my life, I’ve felt this way to varying degrees, but I always felt insulated by the fact that my ‘togetherness’ was unimpeachable. I was confident, capable, likable, and no one could produce any evidence to the otherwise, even if I never felt like I was any of these things. But things were falling apart, and it didn’t take long for someone to point it out. One night, as I sat in my corner in 351, I was texting that same friend. I mentioned, with forced casualness, that I had slept 4 hours the night before, and would have to avoid sleep until 5 AM to run a late-night wing outing. He asked if I had eaten. I hadn’t. If I had taken my medications. I hadn’t. In a moment of frustration, as I insisted that I was alright, he sent me a single message that has haunted me since. “Your life is always in shambles, Shorna. I eat when I’m hungry, I sleep when I’m tired, I take my medicine because I know I will suffer otherwise. I’m more on top of my PSETs than you are.” I felt a pit of shame drop into my stomach. He had seen right through me. My skin crawled, my throat was ablaze, and there was a single thought on my mind. My life is in shambles. My life is in shambles. My life is in shambles. F*ck. I hate myself. Why am I even here?

…

All of this was around nine months ago. I’ve gotten much, much better. I’m on antidepressants, and I take them regularly. I sleep eight hours a night (sometimes more), and I eat regularly (three times a day!). I’m happy, and productive, and most importantly, stable. I’ve learned the art of being kind to myself, something I’ve struggled with for all 18 years of my life. I feel anchored. I feel safe with myself, in my head. I don’t feel like there are enemies within my own cranium. 

Perhaps the most frustrating thing I grapple with now, though, is the fact that that regulating my mental health is an active process. I have to put in effort to maintain my wellness; I have to force myself to be kind to myself when I’m unable to finish my work fast enough, or I hate the way I look today, or I can’t keep up when my brilliant friends talk about their work. I have to use the things I’ve learned. I have to let myself rest. Being happy is hard and doesn’t come easy. Somedays I reach back into that version of myself, and I still sometimes feel like my life is in shambles. It can be incredibly frustrating when I can’t shake that feeling, but I’ve learned to keep moving. Sometimes I still need to cry for a few hours. I make use of my support system. I guess, at the most basic level, I think I’ve learned to accept that my life can be in shambles. Being a human is difficult, MIT is an acutely challenging place, and having a hard time says nothing about my worth or ability, or whether or not I ‘fit’ here. It is frustratingly hard to believe that with every particle of my being, but it’s true. And I’ve been happy, no matter how much my life was (and is) falling apart. 351 is where my friend Omkar tortured me with incredibly off-tune guitar playing. Where I laid on my grass green carpet with my roommates, listening to Rebecca Sugar’s Time Adventure, as I turned 18. Where I did my 18.100B PSETs (I like real analysis a LOT, ok?) 351 is where, in some strange, twisted, throat-coatingly saccharine way, I truly found paradise.

Ladies and Gentlemen in Outer Space

By Ron Padget

 

Here is my philosophy:

Everything changes (the word “everything”

has just changed as the

word “change” has: it now

means “no change”) so

quickly that it literally surpasses my belief,

charges right past it

like some of the giant

ideas in this area.

I had no beginning and I shall have

no end: the beam of light

stretches out before and behind

and I cook the vegetables

for a few minutes only,

the fewer the better. Butter

and serve. Here is my

philosophy: butter and serve.

Most people I’ve shown think this poem is incomprehensible. It honestly is incomprehensible. But, perhaps the best reason I can give for my love of Ladies and Gentlemen in Outer Space is that, in my mind, this poem is yellow. Warm yellow. It’s the color of an old fluorescent light, like the square of illumination created by a single open window in a darkened apartment complex. The sort of yellow that makes you think of your childhood and white kitchen appliances. This poem is impossible to divorce from its color. I genuinely don’t have the words to explain it, but this poem has such a power to evoke this hyperspecific feeling. Many things are just better expressed in terms of color. Feelings – physical and emotional – and colors are intertwined.

I remember high school as a blur of grey; in one word, I would describe it as controlled. I spent most of my time alone, studying. Not that I didn’t enjoy it – high school was the place where I a) discovered my love of biology, and b) spent time developing a sense of intellectual vivacity. I figured that I wanted to come out of high school an educated citizen of the world, and I devoured every piece of knowledge I could get my hands on. I loved (and love) learning with every fiber of my being. Simultaneously, though, loneliness was a big part of my high school experience. I had a friend group, but I look back and realize how colorless life felt back then.

I like to think about it in terms of feelings. Not emotions – I’m talking about sensations. Boston is really cold. ⁠15 I'm so astute, it's crazy. Cruelly, brutally cold. Every day last winter, I would leave Next House and gasp. I was delighted every single time. I felt awake, shocked, and a little bit more alive. Cold weather makes you feel human, in some strange way. You’re aware of your every extremity, you can feel the warmth of your own breath, the softness of your sweater. The whole experience is intoxicating. The chill is bright, stabbing into your consciousness, a shard of pastel, luminous blue. 

During my freshman fall, I often struggled with a feeling of all-consuming dread. One night, when I was feeling particularly horrible, I went out in the midst of a November thunderstorm. It was raining so hard that it felt as if the ice-cold pellets of water were rocks. I left my jacket unzipped and my hood down. I was chilled to the bone within 30 seconds of walking out the door, but all I could really think about was the searing heat of the tears on my face. You can’t really see your tears in the rain, but you can certainly feel them. After the blossoming grief in my chest had worn off, ⁠16 it’s the orange of a dying ember if you were wondering. Sorrow. I began to focus on the trajectory of the raindrops. The wind was so uncontrollable that I could see the curvature of their paths; they sprayed upwards, coating my eyelashes. They had an almost orchestral movement; I felt like there was a balloon in my lungs, expanding with awe. The rain is violet, a sort of inescapable, shadowy aubergine that fades to lavender and gold.

Nightfall is a true ultramarine, the color of paint squeezed right out of the tube. I like to sit on the rocks near the Charles, crouch down so I’m almost at water level, and run my hand across the surface of the uneven stones. On a windy day, the river is in constant motion, rippling with the reflected shine of the Boston skyline. There’s a soft coolness that settles on the surface of your skin, just enough to numb the tips of your fingers. Boston is a shower of sparkles that perpetually feels as if it ought to fade into nothing, like fireworks. A sea of blue, scattered with bright, concentrated points of pure white, red, and deep yellow.

I’ve had golden afternoons in the summer that make your skin tingle in the suffocating heat. In the summer, it feels as if everything has been covered with a light wash of yellow by noon time. The evening sky is cotton candy pink. I spend most of my commute to class looking up, absorbed by the scintillating green of leaves in the breeze against the clear, autumnal, blue sky.

These were all things I learned during my freshman year of college. I think, in amassing these colors, I was figuring out how to be thoroughly, truly, entirely, achingly alive.

As a freshman, I began to see myself as being defined by this extremely vivid experience of life. Having emotions, and leaning into them, became part of my conception of who Shorna was. She was emotional, because to be honest, even though my freshman fall was incredibly, incredibly miserable, it felt real. Real-er than anything else had, ever. I felt like a human. It was honestly hard to resist; In the course of a few months, I experienced the rosiness of infatuation, the ebony black of depression, the strange, constant flickering between elation and desolation that characterized my first relationship,⁠17 it never, really, got a color the abyssal blue of heartbreak. I felt alive, but also out of control. 

Sophomore fall is different. I’ve experienced a lot more emotions than I had a year ago. Life is quieter, less chaotic, and less painful. There are fewer emotions to be hard, partly because I have a lot more control now. The river is still where I go when I want to feel things, though. I’ll text my friend Nathan at some ungodly hour of the night, and drag him to the same rock by the Charles every time. I’ll fold my legs, plop down next to him, and just… sort of… sit there. And I’ll experience the range of human emotions. Sometimes I say something, and sometimes I don’t. That’s, I guess, the thing about really, genuinely having feelings; they’re incredibly hard to capture. I think they’re like inherent truths that reverberate in your soul. Indisputable, unchangeable, powerful, on their own. Colors are really the best approximation I have for what’s happening because words aren’t enough. Either way… life certainly isn’t grey anymore.

I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to deal with the moving carts for a while (if only because they were gross), but I was soon re-acquainted with them during my move to my permanent room in 3East.⁠22 For context, Next House freshmen room assignment is a full-blown saga. First, you’re given a temporary room in an arbitrary wing in Next. You’re allotted one week to wander around and figure out what wing you like (or if you want to First Year Resident Exhange (FYRE) out of Next) and find a roommate(s). After that, every freshman is given a lottery number, and then the games begin; the lottery for the perfect room is long and messy and occurs late at night and also involves a lot of yelling. I got chewed out (and was really sad about it) during at my freshman lottery, but that’s a story for another time.  This time, though, my triple-mates and I started to exploit the mischief-making possibilities of the various wheeled moving apparatus of Next House. Jen sat down on a tiny wheeled platform⁠23 You know those scooter boards in kindergarten? It was exactly like that, minus the primary colors. and we tied our Orientation Lanyards together into a makeshift rope; regrettably, it wasn’t the most effective method of transit, but it was fun! This sort of shenanigans has become a strangely consistent bit; just last week, I pushed my friend Satya around on a similar board. Eventually, he started saying ‘mush!’ to me like a sled dog, at which point I threatened to push him and his board down the stairs.⁠24 I did not. It was only, like, mildly tempting. Anyways, the point of all of this is to give you some background on the mythical Next House moving carts,⁠25 To be clear, literally nobody but me would refer to these as mythical. They should, though.  because I have a story!

The other day, I wandered out of my friend Alison’s room. I was intending to go to sleep,⁠26 It was 12:30, which was already past my bedtime.  but I ran into Ayyub, who, for undisclosed reasons, was currently in possession of one (1) bright blue moving cart. He asked, in an extremely innocent voice,⁠27 Anybody who knows Ayyub will tell you that my first mistake was being this unsuspecting.  if I’d like a ride to my room.⁠28 APPARENTLY he didn’t actually say “to your room”. He says “the room was completely inferred”  I agreed, laughing a little, and hopped into the cart.⁠29 OK, ‘hopped’ is a very generous term. I’m a couple of inches too short for this to go smoothly, so I sort of got one leg over by jumping, and then, like, stumbled in. It wasn’t very graceful.  My room is maybe 40 feet away⁠30 Um. Just being fully transparent here, I have no conception of the size of a foot. It was on this order of magnitude, probably, but my confidence interval is embarrassingly large. The important point is that it was at most a short stroll away. from Alison’s, but Ayyub stalled in 3E Main Lounge on the way. I popped my head out like a nursery rhyme weasel, saying ‘Hi!’⁠31 Saying ‘Hi!’ is my favorite thing ever. Find me and introduce yourself; you’ll understand. brightly to everyone. When Ayyub proclaimed that human trafficking seemed like a lucrative business model, I grew concerned about when I’d actually be able to get to sleep. To be clear, I’m like, 98.3% sure that he was just talking about moving people around without their consent.

Wait. 

…

At least he wasn’t charging me. 

Somewhat surprisingly, there were only 5 people in 3E ML at this hour, and all of them were busy PSETting, so Ayyub rolled me away pretty quickly. As I had predicted, he sped right past my room. Ayyub sighed deeply when I asked why he hadn’t stopped. “You really should’ve been able to predict this, Shorna.” I buckled down and got ready for a long ride. Knowing Ayyub, I figured I was in for quite the adventure, and I wasn’t disappointed. So, I present to you the places I visited on my not-so-official tour of Next House, in (I think?)⁠32 Ok like, IMO the likelihood that it’s the same cart isn’t insignificant, but I <i>might </i>just be saying that because I think it sounds cool. the same godforsaken moving cart that I first encountered over a year ago:⁠33 Damn. I really decided to sit in that thing. I was really sleepy when I did this, but still.

1. 3W ML: Ayyub – the heathen – decided that the first, best thing to do was barrel into enemy territory at top speed. In Next House, floors are split into East and West wings; the West wings are smaller and suck.⁠34 This is a joke, 3W is great. They have a gigantic Baymax and a functioning sink, which is more than 3E can say.  I popped up and came face-to-face with my old roommate Athena and also Quinn.⁠35 Huge fan of both of their work  I talked to them for a few minutes about the random CDs 3W had acquired during this past year’s wing storage fiasco,⁠36 It was tragic. Murder mystery material. I’ll tell you about it later.  but Ayyub started rolling me away unexpectedly, apparently deciding it was time to keep moving. I shouted goodbye while Ayyub navigated to the elevators. I asked if he would consider taking me back to my room this time. Ayyub just started spinning me around repeatedly to keep me ‘disoriented’. I laughed at him.
2. 5W ML: Ayyub wheeled me into the elevator and randomly chose a floor. We were going up to the 5th floor, a strange, far-off land that I rarely venture into. I hear the freshmen bite up there. Ayyub is the 5W Resident Peer Mentor, but I bet that he wouldn’t know the people in 5W ML (he lives in 2W). Unfortunately for me, Ayyub is good at his job, and we rolled into three freshmen he was already well-acquainted with. I speed-introduced myself, but, as a result of Ayyub’s flightiness, we were soon off to the races again.
3. 5E ML: Next up was 5E, known for its fire karaoke events. 5E ML also has this baller⁠37 Oops. I have been forbidden from using this word by Alison. Sorry! neon sign with the wing name on it. There were a few upperclassmen hanging out and playing Smash, who were also the only ones that seemed even mildly bewildered by my appearing act (and for that, I am eternally grateful).⁠38 I was really hoping for a couple more surprised pikachu faces. As we walked away,⁠39 Read: Ayyub walked away and I.. just sort of sat there.  Ayyub began pontificating about the ‘sort of people’ that, metaphorically, ‘push the carts’ and ‘get pushed in the carts’. He’s not great at metaphors, I think.
4. TFL: This was the last stop on our tour! The TFL (Tastefully Furnished Lounge) is the giant gathering space on the first floor of Next House. All of the Next House student groups use this space – Next Sing has its rehearsals here, Next Act uses it for shows at the end of the semester, and Next Anime uses the TV for showings. Ayyub knew that I probably wouldn’t be in the cart for much longer, so he took the opportunity to show off some maneuvers; there was a lot of spinning and many sudden turns as he wheeled me down the TFL ramp. This was probably the most fun part of the ride, although Ayyub’s purposefully maniacal laughter was admittedly a little hard to stomach. 

Once I finally rolled to a stop, I struggled out of the cart and we walked back to my room. I got into bed at 2 AM. I was admittedly sleepy during my morning lectures the following day, but I think it was well worth it. Don’t tell Ayyub, though.