Senior Year: Start of Winter Quarter (+ End of Fall)

I swear to god that before tonight, I kept thinking I need to update Punderings and then deciding that I didn’t want to/wasn’t ready for whatever reason/that Punderings had outlasted its use as a outlet for my self-reflection. Too much happened near the end of fall quarter (most of it heartwrenchingly personal), and I felt myself changing so quickly that anything I wrote on Punderings would’ve been dishonest—an attempt to smooth over all the ugliness I perceived in the change, and in myself. I’ve finally emerged from what felt like an eleven-week maelstrom, so—

Quick career/academic updates:

• Graduation plans: I’m a 2024 Schwarzman Scholar! I’ll spend next year pursuing a Master’s Degree at Tsinghua University. My thesis will (most likely) trace aesthetic lineages between cultural industries, artist communes, and creator spaces such as Shenzhen’s OCT-Loft and Beijing’s 798 Art District, with the goal of deconstructing how these aesthetics help various Chinese entities embody and envision sociopolitical identities. It’ll be a lofty study—I barely know anything about urban studies, field research in China, etc—but it’s a topic I’ve pursued in my off-time for quite a while. I could go on and on about how the art produced in creator spaces built by private sectors often discursively proceeds political messaging, and about how cities like Shenzhen complicate the colonial-aesthetic-layering/decolonial-aesthetic-deconstruction-reclaimation binary introduced by Western scholars, but mainly I’m just interested in learning and enacting new research methods. I’ve spent the last year unknowingly working in sociology, which leads me to:

• Thesis 1: I’ve gathered all my data (interviews and surveys) for my honors thesis with the IR department. I’m currently unwilling to code or analyze my survey data in any way—both because I detest coding in R, and because I’m afraid that all my data will lead nowhere—but as soon as I work through my five million mental blocks, it’ll be all over for you b******. It was an unpleasant shock to move from writing literature reviews (and poring over theories on memory and identity, which I immensely enjoyed) to the quagmire of the empirical social sciences—especially while I was learning R and lobbying for IRB approval and applying for grants and designing my survey. But I have immensely, immensely enjoyed my interviews: letting my interviewees’ thoughts unspool, hearing what emerges first in response to more open-ended questions, seeing them try to explain their own phenomena. I have interviewed 25 Chinese Americans, and I have never been faced with so many ways to be Chinese American. It’s inspiring to hear people consider and reconsider their own beliefs—quite honestly, that’s what gives me faith in humanity. I’m now questioning my aversion towards the social sciences—at the beginning of winter quarter, while trying to assign value points to each survey question, I swore that I’d stick to the humanities once I finished my thesis. I wonder now whether I should give sociology/anthropology another chance. After all, I’ve been working with advisors from the sociology department, and placing my research in conversation with sociologists—if I could redo my undergraduate experience, I would’ve probably pursued a sociology major. The thing is, I’ve spent so much of my Stanford education learning things that I’d never paused to consider methods or disciplines. I’d always based my academic choices off the things that interested me most (U.S.-China relations, memory, literature), and not the methods or schools of thought that’d bring me closer to the kind of thinker I wish to be and wish to engage with.

• Thesis 2: My book has become the beating heart of my winter quarter. I had immense writer’s block in fall quarter, and I think all my advisors knew it—but were too nice to comment on my lack of progress, and my determination to spend ten weeks revising the same two-hundred pages. But I did spend fall quarter and winter break consuming a lot of media, and winter quarter has seen weeks and weeks of fluid, easy writing. It was terrifying to switch from my editorial mode of writing into a generative one—to drag myself out of the safe, repetitive rut of copyediting, which gave me a lot of comfort in an otherwise unpredictable fall quarter. My advisors have commented on my refusal to produce original material unless I had “big chunks of time”—enough time to write, edit, edit, edit, and edit a substantial scene—and my complementing tendency to consider each draft/length of unused writing a “failure.” So, I’ve been trying to write with more abandon, and to be okay with letting loose ends lie (or introducing new loose ends halfway through a scene, and promising myself I’ll thread it through the previous chapters at some later date). I’ve also become much less protective over my writing, and I’ve been able to laugh about my characters and plot holes and purple prosing with my fellow Honors writers and my advisors. I’d always considered writing to be a deeply personal activity (in contrast to ballet, which could only be done under constant scrutiny and with the knowledge that my body wasn’t truly mine), so I’ve been slowly breaking that down. I love my book very much.

• Summer plans: I will be working with the Chinese Culture Center (CCC) in San Francisco Chinatown. Without giving away too much, I’ll say that my job will have to do with art curation (but not art practice—which is a first for me), researching and reimagining ghosts/rituals/tradition in conversation with other artists in the diaspora, and event organization for Chinatown communities. I’m so excited for this, and I will share more details in spring quarter.

• Ballet: I’ve retired! (And my back has finally stopped hurting, although I harbor no illusions of being completely healed—physically or otherwise.) I spent fall quarter rehearsing and performing as Clara in The Nutcracker, a role that was explicitly denied to me as a little girl on the basis of me being Asian. I threw myself into everything I thought innocence/girlishness/childhood was, and emerged from my performances feeling unbelievably young. It’s still impossible to articulate all the emotions of leaving the stage: the terrible grief of realizing, finally, just how much of my body hadn’t been mine, and the jolt of collision as my body crashed clumsily back into my ownership, aching from its ten-year loan; the shock of remembering studio flashbacks I’d forgotten (all those days going from 4:30 PM to 11 PM without eating, all the toenails I wrenched off my feet and the blood that quite literally saturated my shoes), as if my body were just now allowing itself to process its past and its pain; the resentment at my audience members’ awe, and at the young girls who proclaimed how much they wanted to be like me; the cognitive dissonance of staring at my dance pictures and thinking, that body was someone else’s—that girl isn’t me, or is no longer me. I’ve never pretended to be a professional dancer, or to have had a chance as a professional—and so I’d never anticipated just how final my retirement would feel. There’s something to be said about healing the inner child and giving myself closure, but all that is better unpacked elsewhere (a therapist’s office). Dancing as Clara was one of the most beautiful moments of fall quarter, and something decidedly linear and stable and done-for-myself in a way that nothing else quite was.

  Okay, now this line spacing is off (on Squarespace, never use bullet points before a chunk of text). But I also wanted to write about my more abstract thoughts on life, and about the mundanities from which these abstractions formed.

• Graduation and futures: I often can’t help but feel that I wasted two and a half years of my undergraduate career. I made it a point to not take my academics seriously in freshman year; my defiance of the classroom continued through sophomore year, with online classes and the time difference of living in China; I realized only in junior spring that I wanted to go into academia and could be good at it, if only I sat down and took it seriously. There were many reasons why I was so determined not to pursue academia (or excellence/single-minded pursuit of any kind) as an underclassman/junior. I had come into Stanford believing that I could only be happy when studying Track I dialogue between the U.S. and China, and when I was miserable amidst weapons developers and policymakers, I decided that academia simply wasn’t for me. It was a relief of some sort, to not throw myself at the first field of study that would’ve offered me validation. I’d unknowingly associated excellence/single-minded pursuit with the trauma that had been my childhood and secondary education. I spent years accepting the truth that I’d gone to college a year early because I simply couldn’t stay at home any longer—that the only way I knew how to survive and escape was via academic excellence—and I no longer wanted to be someone who survived and escaped. I wanted to prove to myself that there was more to me than the frameworks that Stanford offered—and yet I craved the validation that I was no longer receiving, and which I could briefly grasp if I stayed in the orbit of the IR department. It was this dissonance that suspended me in a weird sort of not-overachiever-but-definitely-wants-to-be-but-also-most-definitely-doesn’t-want-to-be state of being for 2.5 years, and I only broke through it at Oxford, when I realized the joy in studying what I truly wanted to study, in being given free rein over both syllabus and method. I tend to frame my first years of college as a “waste,” or as a regret (I could’ve spent those years writing and publishing a paper, or at least attending my lectures)—but I can truly say that I am going into academia with clarity and certainty.

• Resistance (to everything): Fall quarter was as turbulent (romantic drama, platonic drama, familial drama, grad school decisions, eviction notices, mental unraveling) as winter quarter was mundane (spending most of my time in a classroom and doing decidedly boring work, after a year of deciding my own schedule/avoiding busy work; smoothing over all my relationships)—and yet I met both periods of my life with resistance. I did not want the changes of fall quarter, even if those changes were good. I did not want to be dragged into the mind-numbing stability of winter quarter, even if I’d longed for it in the fall. I simply didn’t want any change I could not control, even though I’d always prided myself on thriving in unpredictability. But I’ve slowly begun to understand that no change is as existentially catastrophic as it seems, although each change is in itself existential. While in a questionable state of mind at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I realized that we are all just tide pools: we harbor ecosystems that are constantly in flux, and we are both subsumed by and resistant to the open sea. The sea brings strange things into our lives, and takes things in strange and sorrowful ways, too. Through it all, there is growth, often bizarre and invisible.

• Value, innovation, and spirituality: I’m taking many graduation requirements this quarter, and one of them is an economics course on social change and technology in society. There’s a huge emphasis on innovation and disruption in the syllabus, and an assumption that innovation is an act that inherently adds a “new axis of value” (my own visualization; bear with me) as opposed to adding standardized units to/increasing the efficiency of producing units for previous axes. A lot of this mindset goes against my political beliefs—but also my more spiritual ones. Must value itself be generated and ascribed value by humans? Is “value” something that is fundamentally missing from people and society? I find myself questioning this more and more as I step into academia, especially as I pursue studies that deconstruct the premises upon which certain schools of thought/disciplines were constructed, but which are not free from the methods of these schools of thought/disciplines. All of my work carries as much personal urgency as it does political/social urgency—how is this value translated into the production of knowledge within academia, or distorted by it? (No complete thoughts here—I’ve only just begun to question.)

• Invention, inheritance, and identity: Over the last few weeks, a great source of my grief and wonder was in realizing how much I must invent for myself—and, conversely, how much can come from within me. It started at a very personal level, when I realized my capacity for kindness and forgiveness, even when such behaviors had never been taught to me. Then came Lunar New Year, and I organized a celebration with recipes and rituals I learned off the Internet, one which brought together many who felt distanced from their own communities, homes, and traditions. In many ways, diasporic and otherwise, I’ve always seen myself somewhat orphaned, and I’ve always been inclined to grieve what I hadn’t inherited. This is why I find comfort in unprecedented and undisciplined art. Many scholars of “interdisciplinary arts” consider the interdisciplinary an orphaned thing: a deconstruction of or entity wholly separate from traditions and disciplines. But recently, I’ve been reading the work of Fabiola Naguib, who argues that interdisciplinariness is a thing with lineage and precedence—that interdisciplinary art inherits or is connected to the methods and practices of multiple schools, and is the heir to the time-long practice of interdisciplinariness itself. Tradition is often an imagined thing, anyways. It’s a marvel to recognize your own boundlessness, the potential to imagine and create even without any reason or precedence.

Anyways, that’s all! Going back to coding now. :)) See you again in three or four months, I don’t know.

Junior Year: Winter Quarter Updates

Just when I think I’ve seen a fast quarter (fall), winter quarter comes and blows everything out of the water. It’s insane—five weeks have passed in the blink of an eye, and while nothing dramatic has happened during that time, I’ve made a lot of small revelations about myself and the way I move through the world. Overall, I’ve realized that my growth isn’t and won’t be something that I can fit into a neat storyline. It really feels like I can do anything with the time I have left in college and beyond, and this realization genuinely used to scare me.

Some brief updates!

• My classes: Transitional Justice, Asia-Pacific Transition, Health and Healthcare in East Asia, and Current Issues in Southeast Asia. This is a very social-sciency quarter for me, although my studies are beginning to fall into place for an honors thesis. My thesis will most likely focus on diaspora Chinese and how they interact with national narratives (especially those about victimization)—an issue that is very near and dear to me, and which brings together my two majors.

• I’ve started a new job with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center! We’re investigating talent flow and migration across China (I’m in charge of editing and researching for book chapters), and it’s been a nice break from the Track I research I did in sophomore year.

• Writing has been going well! I’ve always struggled with writing/getting over creative blocks while at Stanford, but an unexpected plus side to four virtual weeks of schooling was the time and headspace to get back into a writing routine. I’ve maintained this routine thus far, and I’m aiming to finish a novel draft by the end of March. I’ve also been challenging myself to complete shorter literary pieces for my classes, mainly by responding “creatively” to readings.

• Although I won’t be performing with CBC in the spring, I’ve been choreographing and setting a few pieces for our Sleeping Beauty. I’ve performed a few times for Stanford Chinese Dance, including twice for Lunar New Year celebrations (our most recent performance was outdoors on a stage with smushed cabbages…yay), and we’re learning a piece based on The Untamed for our winter show! I’ve also been taking ballet class again, after half a year without structured training. I’d almost forgotten how good it felt to warm up in an empty studio.

• I’ve given my last hurrah as president of FACES, and I’m in the process of passing the mantle to the next leadership board!

• My social life has become a lot milder. I haven’t attended a single party since fall quarter, instead opting for weekly Attack on Titan watch parties with a few of my friends, late-night mahjong rounds, dumpling-making, poetry nights, and the occasional thrifting outing. I’ve returned to my high school schedule of waking up and sleeping early, and I’ve started putting more energy into one-on-one friendships.

• I’ve also learned—in a revolutionary turn of events—how I deserve to be treated in romantic and sexual relationships. I’ve learned that kindness isn’t predicated on a relationship—that being in a relationship won’t make anyone more compassionate or selfless than they already are—but that kindness is simply something that some people have in greater quantities than others. Having such kindness given so freely to me was a highlight of my quarter thus far, and I’ll definitely write more about my changing perspectives on relationships in another post.

• A realization upon which the above realizations and changes were predicated: over winter break, I hosted one of my best friends. Through many late-night talks, I realized that a lot of my behavior in fall quarter was informed by my desire to “fall apart.” I thought this “falling apart” was the natural opposite of—and therefore the solution to—how I felt I’d been controlled by various people before fall quarter. Now, however, I’ve realized that the opposite to control is compassion.

• I’ve accompanied my roommate, a triple black belt in kendo (Japanese swordfighting) and a former Team USA member, to her kendo practices, where I learned to hold a sword for the first time. I’ve also started weekly judo and jiu jitsu classes. It’s been a long process of bruising myself against mats and learning how to hit people without apologizing, made doubly difficult by how weak I am (I never had much reason to work on my arms, and the muscles in my upper body and legs are trained for a very, very specific sport/art form). I’ve always fantasized about learning martial arts, and learning how to be a total beginner has been a really fun experience. (It should also be noted that I learn things really slowly, so I had all my ego smacked out of me within the first class.)

• On an unrelated note, seeing my friends in their athletic environments—seeing one of my best friends swim competitively, and seeing my roommate in a sparring match—was truly very beautiful. I know that I and a lot of my friends tend to compartmentalize our athletic selves from our “other” selves (I’ve grown to the extent that I just don’t think about ballet unless I’m in the studio), especially in college. While I don’t want to be cliche and say that I’ve learned so much about my friends just by witnessing their competitiveness or athleticism, I do think that a lot of my previous understandings of people either click together or are further complicated by seeing them in their sport. My roommate—the sweetest person I know (and decidedly non-confrontational)—is always the more aggressive one in a sparring match. Contrarily, I’ve heard my best friend talk so much about swimming and how it’s affected her life and upbringing, and I think I can understand why after glimpsing the environment around the pool and the way she navigates her sport.

• As I’m going abroad in the spring, I really only have five weeks left on campus and in Ng House. This dorm means so much to me—over the last two quarters, I made my room into my own space, held a Cantopop party in the basement (which ended up being extremely tame as we watched Ip Man and played mahjong), hosted FACES meetings in the conference rooms and lounge, cooked and baked with more people than I can count, and came back late to the rooms and hospitality of so many friends. In freshman year, I kept trying to look outwards for comfort—I never truly saw my dorm as a home base. Now, I can think of nowhere more comforting than my beanbag beneath my lofted bed, and my view over Casper Quad. I’ll miss the beauty and camaraderie of Ng House more than anything else on campus, and I’m thankful for my newfound ability to make space for myself.

Not to sound cheesier than usual, but I find it very cool that the smallness of life can contain so many wonderful moments. Here’s to many more small moments in winter quarter and beyond!

A Letter to my Freshman Year

“Because [the dualistic mind is] unaccustomed to it, we don’t see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu.

Mu means “no thing”…[pointing] outside the process of dualistic discrimination…. ‘Unask the question’ is what it says. Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu was asked whether a dog had a Buddha nature he said ‘Mu,’ meaning that if he answered either way he was answering incorrectly. The Buddha nature cannot be captured by yes-or-no questions….

[Science] grows by its mu answers more than by its yes or no answers. Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis. Mu says the answer is beyond the hypothesis. Mu is the phenomenon that inspires scientific inquiry in the first place! There’s nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. It’s just that our culture has warped us to make low value judgement of it.”

- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

So what was my freshman year? Was it good? It wasn’t an Instagram brimming with bright edited friend groups and red solo cups. It wasn’t a resume studded with departmental writing awards and a 4.0 GPA. It wasn’t a smug understanding of the “western canon” (thanks SLE) or a “cultural awakening” after my first Chinese class. I didn’t come out of it with a boyfriend, a new job, or a snazzy friendship with a professor.

I didn’t even have a chance encounter - one of those big moments all college kids talk about, where they stumble upon a class or club or professor who changes their life - that I’d so eagerly anticipated. I’d let myself explore for the first time in years, only to find myself in the same shoes that had carried me through high school - albeit a little more exhausted after weeks of Stanford Jump Rope (quit), PHYSICS 30: Renewable Energy (dropped), Stanford Students in Space: The Band (quit), two failed auditions in new dance styles, and 1 AM Thursday parties. Somewhere along the way, I was no longer exploring. I was lost.

You see, I’d wanted a sense of purpose to come along and sweep me off my feet. I’d come out of high school feeling like a jigsaw made of three different puzzles: things fit awkwardly (I mean, they still fit), there were gaps I could not explain, and even the pieces from the same puzzles weren’t that pretty.

Yet my identity didn’t change in college - I was still writing, still dancing (primarily ballet), and still in love with the humanities. But in the first few weeks of fall quarter, I realized that I didn’t want to be that person anymore - accepting that old identity felt like a resignation. Was this everything to me? Had I already found what I wanted to do with my life? Wasn’t college a last hurrah - one last chance to refind and remake myself before I settled down? Did I really love writing and dance, or was I just resorting to the familiar?

But I seemed to be thwarting my own attempts at change. I realized, to my dismay, that I still didn’t want to read Aristotle (stop categorizing things, for goodness’ sake - also, you’re racist and misogynistic!) and Socrates (so hypocritical). I still couldn’t bring myself to put in the extra work for that A+, even for classes I loved. I still gravitated towards the solitude of a dance studio, even when my friends asked me multiple times to watch a movie with them.

But why? I put myself under fire in fall quarter. No part of my identity went unexamined as I fought for that new sense of purpose, for an answer to a question I hardly knew. As much as I hated to admit it, everything I’d done in high school - even the poetry competitions and backbreaking hours at the studio - was inseparable from the framework of college admissions. Now that I was in college, what was left?

What came out of my questioning was an unbridled resentment. Why had I suffered so much at Interlake when so many of new friends had emerged from the afterglow of a happy senior year? Why was I unable to interact with anyone in my new dance teams - despite their obvious kindness - without self-deprecation and jealousy? Why couldn’t I talk with anyone without first assuming the worst of their intentions? The longer I examined myself, the angrier I became - an anger that had very little to do with Stanford, but everything to do with what came before. I was angry towards ballet teachers who had glorified my suffering, towards a public education system that had destroyed my love for learning, towards a teen writing world that had reduced the art of literature to resume packing and homogeneous angst.

Oh my god, Ana, I told myself. Stop it! You’re overthinking. You just want a scapegoat now that you’ve lost control. Every freshman is confused and lost. Everyone’s in an existential crisis. At times, I was so happy: I could lose myself in the bliss of my fall SLE section; I performed in my first urban dance pieces to a roaring audience; I built a fort of cardboard delivery boxes with my roommate; I found dozens of resources for my novel; I laughed myself half to death during my Chinese skit. But always shadowing such unparalleled - childish, even - happiness was a deep, angry confusion. I wasn’t changing - I wasn’t becoming better. Eventually, I realized the question behind my resentment: what did I want from myself?

Fall quarter gave me a simple answer - I wanted happiness in my own happiness. Happiness as an end in itself, not as a guilty pleasure or a distraction from some overarching goal. And when I returned home for winter break, I realized with a jolt that I had changed. Sixteen-year-old Ana could’ve never imagined calling out a professor, throwing herself into the center of a dance circle, or teaching her dorm how to wear winged eyeliner and style ripped jeans. Sixteen-year-old Ana was nowhere near as fearless, honest, and kind as seventeen-year-old Ana had become.

Was seventeen-year-old Ana happier than her younger self? Yes is the simple answer. Mu is the honest one. At the end of ten weeks of self-scrutiny, I’d emerged with more confidence in myself than ever - I had relearned my love for dance. I’d grown as a writer and thinker. And I realized that I should’ve had more faith in myself, that my reasons for writing and dancing extended far beyond college admissions. I was lucky, not resigned. All my doubt had reinforced - rather than destroyed - my love for what I’d pursued in high school.

At the same time, my resentment quieted into sadness. I mourned on behalf of my younger self. Do everything differently, I wanted to tell her. Go to a different high school, join that club you thought wouldn’t look good on college apps, find a new ballet studio. You’ll be happy - you will turn out so much better than I have. Had I done things differently - had I learned to be happy earlier - would I have found that freshman fall of VSCO adventures and 2 AM escapades? The freshman year I’d promised to myself when I left Interlake?

But Ana, I now wondered, would that have made you happy?

This time, the simple and honest answers were the same: no. Even in high school, I was happiest when writing and running It’s Real, when dedicating myself to a purpose beyond college applications. I’d always known what’d made me happy - I’d just never learned to trust that happiness.

With this realization in hand, winter quarter become the best two months of my life.

Some nights, as I hurtled past the Quad on my bike, I felt ready to explode with joy: here was the freshman year I’d wanted. I looked forward to each of my twenty-one units. I stayed up until 2 AM with my roommate, complaining about professors and boys beneath the glow of our fairy lights. I jumped into Lake Tahoe with my dorm, shrieking with joy at the midnight cold. I sunbathed with my friends on the Quad in February, giggling at the tourists who shot us scandalized looks. I debated the ethics of warfare with Scott Sagan, I asked Chang-rae Lee about his novels, and I spent hours studying the alternate interpretations of the Dao de tzing. I chugged orange juice with CBC and [redacted] with CO. Biking into Palo Alto became a Saturday tradition, and I finally stopped losing so miserably at Mario Kart. I went full out on what made me happy and gave minimal effort to what didn’t. Despite the frenzy of winter quarter, I felt strangely - wonderfully - peaceful. I found happiness tucked in the little things: the frigid sunrises, the green smoothies and runny eggs at FloMo breakfast, the brief study sessions in Gates Building, the swoop of riding downhill from my dorm. Now, scrolling through my camera roll, I realize just how many of these moments were never captured.

Perhaps most importantly, I learned to trust my writing. For the first time in years, my seven-year-old aspiration (“I wanna be a writer!”) felt tangible - I finally had the resources and community for my novel. But before winter quarter, I couldn’t stop viewing writing as a side hustle, a soft alternative to the more mainstream careers of law or academia.

One of my friends soon ended that apprehension. “I don’t get what you’re saying,” he’d said, when I’d launched into my career-related rant. “I don’t get what’s stopping you. Why don’t you just…like…be a writer?”

Huh, I realized, after a moment of stunned silence, he’s right. After that, I wrote with one less reservation.

But winter quarter wasn’t all smooth sailing. My courseload caught up to me halfway through the quarter, and for a few weeks (and quite a few breakdowns), I raced to catch up to myself. Week 9 came as a hard-won victory - I finally climbed back onto the high that had marked the beginning of winter quarter. Spring quarter was looking up: I became a Vice President for FACES, I was rehearsing one of my dream roles for CBC (the performance would’ve been two days before my eighteenth birthday), I wrote one of my most memey papers yet for SLE, I received an internship with the Borgen Project, I finished the third draft of my novel, I was about to begin research with the IR department, and, above all, I was happy.

So, when coronavirus ended my freshman year early, I came home in tears.

Even now, I’m not sure whether I’ve fully processed the loss. But I felt so cheated - things had finally fallen into place. This was hardly the freshman year sixteen-year-old Ana had so eagerly anticipated, hardly the freshman year she’d worked so hard towards. I wouldn’t turn eighteen among some of my new best friends. I wouldn’t perform for CBC or CO. I wouldn’t even pack up my own dorm decorations.

The loss hurt symbolically, too. Just yesterday, I watched Stanford’s newest Instagram video: a compilation of the Class of 2024 reacting to their acceptances. And I felt so hollow. Sad, even. This time last year, I’d been so charged with happiness, with the possibility of a new beginning. Now, I’ve realized that there are only a few moments as exhilarating as a college acceptance. Freshman year, for me, was supposed to extend that exhilaration: a last chance to savor all the possibilities of a new start, to discard all my previous obligations. It was supposed to be the ultimate payoff for all the blood and tears that came before. It was supposed to mark an end. But an end to what?

I can’t answer that question. But, assuming that there has been an ending, I think I know where it lies. My freshman has ended up where all things seem to end up: with myself.

Do you remember the jigsaw I talked about? The metaphor I made about myself? That jigsaw feels tidier, now - the picture hasn’t really changed, but the edges are more defined. I’ve learned to understand the gaps, if not how to fix them. I’ve let go of some of the jankier pieces. And those three different puzzles don’t seem so discordant anymore.

So was my freshman year good?

Mu, I would say. It was just another year - peculiar and startling and heartbreaking and beautiful. It was a year that brought me closer to myself than I’d ever thought possible.