March 29, 2020

​

When I started writing this, I didn’t know what I wanted to accomplish. With great potential, it felt, comes great responsibility, and the opportunity to delve into a semester-long writing project was good, maybe too good to be true… I’ve spent the semester trying to think of the perfect project to culminate college, to make something cool, show what I have learned and what not. I spent the first few months going back and forth, thinking about different potential projects I could do and feeling like each idea was just as dissatisfying as the rest, jumping and flitting between different ideas and reading different inspiration material and probably filling my brain and confusing myself more. What is here now is a reflection of all of those ideas, as if the first (a novel, by the way) started as a small snowball at the top of a hill and has chaotically ricocheted further down the mountain, losing small pieces of ice along the way but mostly growing bigger, changing to something unrecognizable but not lost.

 

One of the first aspects of my personality that emerged was how much I talked. I started talking soon after my first birthday and pretty much never much stopped after that. I guess I’ve always just had a lot to say. I think a lot too, my thoughts often scattered, frantic-feeling, anxiety-ridden (“racing thoughts”). It’s honestly exhausting, thinking so much. And I think I’ve always been compelled to speak because I’m so overwhelmed by so many thoughts. As I’ve grown older, more self-aware, more anxious about who I am as a person, I’ve thought endlessly about what might be my pinnacle character trait. I talk a lot, but often feel misunderstood. Often after I speak, I wish I hadn’t. I wish I could control the compulsions to share even just the small fraction of thoughts that pass through from my mind through my esophagus and take form, out into the ears of people who I fear don’t really care, who are overwhelmed by all that I have to say or, even worse, underwhelmed by the significance of what I’m saying. My biggest problem with articulating myself, I think, is the disorganization, or rather the decisions of organization. I never know how to organize my projects, my writing, my life, my thoughts. These small decisions often give me overwhelming anxiety—heart-racing, throat-closing, tear-inducing. 

 

Over spring break, my mom asked me if I saw the article she had forwarded me via email (I actually had no recollection of said email. I thought about it likely lying deserted in my deleted folder, unread). “It was about over talkers and how to deal with them, and it said that a lot of people who are over talkers either have anxiety or ADHD,” she laughed, because I have both. “My little over talker,” she squeezed me into a hug.

 

Writing, too, has always been an outlet. The difficulty that I find in choosing words and speaking them aloud is dulled by switching to written word. I am able to think more, choose the words that I want to come out far more carefully. I can cross out or erase words I’ve written, delete words I’ve typed, and try again, rewording and refining and adding and trimming until the words are ones I hope I will not regret. Growing up, I loved writing, and was always told I was a good writer. While I’m typically self-doubting and my instincts internally scream to deny and downplay my ability, I do know that deep down, writing is one of my greatest skills. Fittingly so, I think—it is very “me” to be particularly gifted in areas that seem undervalued, accessory, selectively appreciated, and of course, as my parents have warned me many times, not lucrative.

 

I wrote this piece randomly, almost journalistically, hoping I would eventually write something that sparked a real idea, for something to magically appear on the paper with the form, urgency, and plan I so often lack. I started trying out to reconcile very theoretical concepts of life and death, but the universe is weird sometimes. 

 

I turned 21 on December 21st, 2019. I returned from a trip with friends to LA on the 23rd, weighed down by the somber news that my grandfather was in the hospital. The weeks that followed ensued in a blur of linoleum tiles and nurses named X and Y and Z and taking the elevator to the eighth floor and walking to room 27-B and the mile walk to and from home to Mount Sinai West hospital, hospital to home, and back again, from the failing liver and failing kidney and failing everythings until finally we were just waiting, hoping for no pain, holding a hand even though it couldn’t hold back.

 

After my grandfather’s death, I went back to school a week late, feeling like I had changed more in the last three weeks than perhaps ever, feeling like I had turned 21 and adulthood had knocked on my door and I had opened it, left with no other choice but to let it in. I returned to campus ready to embrace the inherent happiness that being at school, being with my friends gives me, bolstered by the melancholy excitement of the final semester of school. We wrote bucket lists — the restaurants and bars we had to go to, the meals we had to cook, the shows we had to watch, the books we all had to read, the people we had to see while they were still our friends and not “friends from college.” 

 

As I sit here writing this, I’m struck by how this somehow, weirdly, feels like one of the most normal days in a while. My whole house is at a point where we’re adjusted enough to life to be like …. Well, we do have homework to do. It’s Sunday, and we’re all just sitting on the couch doing homework as we’ve always done. And it's interesting and disorienting in a way but also kind of pleasant and relaxing in another way that we’re all just sitting here on our computers doing work in the midst of a global pandemic. Here I am, writing, still reconciling, in the time of corona.