I’d give a lot in return for a bit of mindfulness. I have given a lot, actually. Among my charitable donations are probably my eyesight, my youthful glow, my media literacy, my attention span, my willingness to endure; it doesn’t matter, what’s gone is gone.

I get into these phases where I can’t separate limb from phone. My orifices begin to breathe my duvet in and out, while I—like a hog roast—incessantly rotate. The most disturbance the room encounters is a swing of my phone charger around my head so it doesn’t choke me out, although in these phases I can’t say I even really notice. I’m obviously mostly exaggerating (mostly), but it feels really real and really scary. Fortunately that’s not what this article is about. It’s mostly about the threat of finding myself (again), but by my own definition of it, rather than hungry, yuppie, single-use compilations.

I can’t wholeheartedly denounce the aforementioned TikTok aesthetes, I’d have to not be a consumer of it in any capacity to do that, and god knows that’s not true. So: there are undeniable benefits born from their culture. Fundamentally, influencers are only touching up the optics of an existing lifestyle, and romanticization is not inherently bad. It can be motivating, it can be exciting: turning the otherwise mundane, beautiful is fun as fuck. It’s just that there’s this intrinsic paradox in filming and profiting off that implied offline, patchouli-scented, lavender-smoking character, presumably with their strawberry-flavored IV-drips in.

IDK, I’m not really here to criticize influencer culture (as much as I could and might want to sometimes), I think it’s just that, at some point between my first foot into high school, and like… the pandemic. Obviously. I couldn’t find a version of myself standing unfettered beyond the metaverse.

Recently there’s been this amplified focus on spirituality. My connection to the g-word (God, not Gay), or whatever higher power may reside near my ceiling fan, or the universe… et cetera. I need to know what I believe, and I don’t want to be told. Most days, I wake up to a realist, disappointed. I’d like to be more whimsical. I’d like to believe I’m more whimsical. I fear that my whimsy might be more Shondaland than it is… I actually don’t have an example of an authentically spiritual universe in the cinematic/digital format.

The point is that I’m more of a naturalist than I intended on being. I’m not necessarily pragmatic, I’m an elite procrastinator with little drive for the success that might be expected of my personality type. I guess my iteration of realism just isn’t willing to entertain the open hands of hope.

I know money matters. I don’t want it to. I know financial literacy, stability, and career rank matter. I don’t want them to. I know that competition in this reality is essential, and innate. I hate it, but I know these things to be true. My copout is that my parents exist, and my second-gen Indian-American genes exist. Nurture or nature? I was battered into this mindset by the self-evident fear that I would not live up to anything that was expected of me1.

Anyway, with all that being said, I’m trying to understand—I’m trying to research the dustiest corners of my mind to see if the two can coexist. Can I believe in my energy, in the power of my breath to carry me, and still face the sharpened corners of my hyper-rationalism? Can I want for big, corporate (synonymous for evil) success, and maintain my more-than-fascination with my faith in a higher power? Do I have a faith in a higher power?

I’m finding as I write this that the highest the power gets is me. I was gonna say I am my own god but thats a bridge too far2. I believe deeply that my breath carries an energy incomparable to any external device of manifestation. I believe in chakras, in the power of performed music, and that my body has an inborn rhythm that constitutes or maybe supersedes that simple term, “music”.

Sometimes I think I know myself better than I think, beyond the self-criticism that I tout as self-awareness. There are static parts amidst all the forcing change and determination to grow.

I’m moving mountains but only in small circles.

This article was meant to be about getting offline in pursuit of actually connecting with oneself instead of getting offline because some millions-clubber made it look pretty. But I always come back to writing about these little journeys because I’m 22 and all I think about is me. I might actually be okay with that on this pass.

Thank you for reading.

I’m not sure he liked me much. His confidence felt like x-ray vision. He saw my mimicry for what it was. I’d acquiesce at everything general, frown when it was time to frown. I had my own mind, but it never felt like pushing through any barriers. It feels strongly about most things, it always has a side to stand on; but private dissension is so much more palatable than an outsiders disappointment.

Anyway, I don’t often meet people so themselves. Empowered and encouraged in their beliefs, and not deterred at the opportunity to discuss with hecklers. I’m certainly not one of them, but when I encounter them, it’s the purest form of awe. Akin to… youth bible camp. I’ve been informed of cry night—it feels like that. No opinion can perforate the skin of someone who knows themselves. I dream of that stability. I’m aiming for it.

But the harder I try, the more ground I lose. Literally, it feels like glass tiles are falling from beneath my feet into an abyss of dead dead dead certainty. I beg don’t disagree with me because I’ll question everything I know.

In high school I was—and now I’m sure I am—the puckered husk of metamorphosis. Most good days I watch myself in every passing window with fatherly curiosity—my fathers fatherly curiosity, if that wasn’t already clear. In all the reflections this urban landscape has to offer, I am monitoring the woman I’m endlessly putting on, and the woman I am digging through wormholes to identify, as if they are cheek to shadowed cheek.

It’s not something I want to voice. I’ve been informed that practicing affirmations will certainly change your perception of yourself, just try.

and I did for a while. I do still. I remind myself to be brave, I smile at strangers, I try and take criticism on the chin, but it's always a bridge too far because I only want to know myself. I want to see myself from the outside, uninfluenced by my personal fascination with incontestable self-awareness. I guess in my mind, the closest I can get to that is everyone else. How they see me is inaccessible by my projections of self, and so that must be the rawest, realest version… right? Still no, I put whatever face satisfies on. I’ve been trying to dilute it, pick what’s real from all of my prototypes, but how does the process of elimination begin? If for 10 years, I have been getting dressed in the dark.

My insecurity, my fear of being seen is truly a violent weapon. I want it gone but I am afraid of how little there will be left. I know what my beliefs are, but I don’t know my passions, I certainly don’t know my voice. I speak to impress and please, and I’m absolutely terrified of the woman beyond that.

I’m told no one really knows themselves, and that everyone feels this way; but I seem to be the only one voicing any of it. My frustrations and fears and setbacks and disappointments seem so palpable. I want to be someone I recognize and I want that recognition to be warm.

I’m working on this by listening to podcasts, expanding my worldliness, shedding my philistinism. Reminding myself of my castle and my axioms of truth. Putting time into my body—only partially for the sake of desirability, but primarily so I can spend time with my vast capability. I want to talk to myself more, I want to confide here more. Maybe graduating will allow it all to take form. It’s infinite time to invest in myself.

I’m excited for tomorrow.

Songs:

1. New Media - Slow Pulp

2. I Been Young - George Clanton

3. Tailwhip - Men I Trust

4. Heartbreak Warfare - John Mayer

5. Só - Hareton Salvanini

Misc. Media

1. Gnoosic.com - for music discovery

2. Music-map.com - for music discovery

3. Every Noise at Once - for music discovery

4. Compurhythm CR-8000 drum machine (lol)

Sensations

1. Nostalgia

   1. I’ve been looking at all the twinkle-light wrapped trees and all the shoppers and their enormous, stuffed paper bags, and their likely-cramping wrists and thinking of home. The Mall of America during the holidays is so specific. There’s a smell in the air of desperation for sales and queue-conquering but simultaneously an unbridled, childlike joy. And the christmas trees, and the memory of the tuscan starbucks and the tuscan panera. I miss it

2. Skylines

   1. I’m graduating this Spring, and so often I find myself detaching from my reality, and deserting my autonomy for naive despair. Looking up has helped me—for some reason—see my freedom, and the really cool city I live in, and how much of my life I have ownership over, for the first time but likely also for the last time. I’m completely alone and it’s such a thrill. I get to see movies all the time, and I get to eat whatever I want, and spend my money however I want (within my means of course but who cares). I don’t know. It’s not deep or anything but I’m pretty lucky and this city is beautiful when you look at it on your own!

3. 60 degree autumn

   1. Nothing to think about too hard here. I’m just really enjoying walking around in my cableknits and jeans. There’s a light breeze and a good amount of sun and of course, heartwarming—and thus body-warming—holiday cheer.

Food

1. Thanksgiving

   1. I spend most of my evenings basking in the doctored glow of a bad 2000s teen drama while scrolling on Pinterest—occasionally TikTok—looking for thanksgiving recipes. I’ve been head chef for the holidays at home for 2 years, going on 3 now. It’s my greatest accomplishment and my greatest pleasure. I love to cook, but more than that I love to cook for more than my hungry mouth. and I love dinner parties. and I love complex, unheard of flavor combinations like sage and shallot and orange. So I’ve been making my Thanksgiving menu. It’s atypical because my family of immigrants resents the typical thanksgiving menu and I also live in fear of The Turkey but it’s so fucking fun to host and cook and taste test and have clouds of APF settle on your cheeks and nose.

2. My Menu So Far

   1. Drinks

      1. Is it too early for eggnog??

      2. A dry white, and a spicy red? Maybe a mulled wine…

   2. Apps.

      1. Pecorino & pine kale salad

      2. Fresh bread and garlic-infused dipping oil

      3. Stuffed olives

   3. Main

      1. Turkey (blahhhhhh)

      2. Orange-glazed spiral ham

   4. Sides

      1. Corn pudding soufflé

      2. Sausage and sage Stuffing

      3. Green bean Semi-casserole with mushroom au poivre & frizzled leaks

      4. Gochujang glazed carrots on lemon ricotta whip

      5. Sage & Brown butter mashed potatoes + mushroom gravy

      6. Cranberry sauce with orange zest

      7. Cheddar biscuits

      8. Gruyere baked mac

   5. Dessert!!!

      1. Maple pecan bourbon sweet potatoes

      2. Banana Pie + graham cracker crust

3. Friendsgiving — A decidely smaller celebration, not of the holiday, but of the two seconds I get to spend home with my best friends

   1. Drinks

      1. Spiced apple palomas

      2. eggnog tini (pray with me here)

   2. Starters

      1. Charcuterie board (no nuts, we are allergy friendly)

      2. Apple & Cheddar galette

   3. mains

      1. Probably wingstop chicken tenders tbh

   4. Dessert

      1. Banana cream pie bitch.

      2. or chocolate chip cookies in the event that the pie isn’t allergy friendly.

Anyway that’s all I’ve got folks. I’ve been at the Newbury Trident for so long now. My ass is numb, my mouth is dry, I paid $30 for a latte and a sandwich and I’m feeling ashamed but full of holiday cheer. If only this cough would go away. I hope the black friday sales are good this year.

It Is Cyclical, Missing You; Lily Talmers

Today I write to you from the humble concrete steps of the Christian Science Center courtyard. A tender breeze graces the air and my knees, crisp from the ebbs of summer left in the sky. It’s currently cloudless, but I know there’s a storm passing through. My throat is hoarse and there’s a wayward piece of string dancing against the ridge of my tongue but my arms are the perfect temperature and I have finally donned a favorite item of mine: green cable knit sweater.

Flashes of red pass beneath my eyelids on the courtyard and between them are glimpses of a man I used to know, and then a girl.

Outside the Steriti Memorial Rink in the North End of Boston, my socks are soaked. I’m dancing on the balls of my feet and the equally wet seams of my blue jeans singe the skin of my ankles relentlessly. In my minds eye, I look the worst I ever have. In my own eyes, I’m hypnotized by a mustache; and a blue hand with neatly clipped nails in a fist around a useless umbrella. I’m restless, the thread in my mouth—ever the ballerina— is wound tight in my throat but I speak nonetheless. I ask for an impression, my eye line is drawn up and then shot—as if with a fucking bazooka— back down. I’m mostly nervous, berating myself with the same question I always have,

Do I want this?

At the time no, yes. No. Absolutely.

He performs, flawlessly, an Owen Wilson. This version of which appears nightly in my dreams. He waits a beat, and then two, then a third. Within which I have been reduced to the likes of the rain pummeling the ground. Then I cast my glance upwards one more time and I am met with a kiss.

I am immediately humiliated, mortified, elated, lost.

Weeks pass, with my Wednesday’s spent watching movies, and laughing, and awkwardly maneuvering around my presence in his bedroom. And then I go home. At first in his car. At first fretting with the door handle of his 2002 black Honda Civic; awaiting a kiss to seal the night within me. It comes and it doesn’t, I never know. Shortly thereafter I return in the backs of cars, now with my headphones on.

Angelina; Pinegrove

This burns at my ears, I try endlessly to decipher our roles in each others lives. Then I never see him again, and my chest aches at the loss. I leave him with an unpaid debt—only on my end.

In the summer before a goodbye text from Thailand—one which in retrospect, never actually came—I charred the skin of my neck in a hot car against a hotter seatbelt. The car broke down, so did I. Then in the grass a foot away, my thighs hiccuped against a swarm of thoroughly fattened mosquitos. Four nights a week, only for two weeks… maybe three, would I drive myself there on bitter, bristling roads that would just barely miss the deadline to swallow me whole.

In the grass next to the car alongside the fireflies and the mosquitos, and the alkaline tears embracing my cheeks, a single tattoo on a pallid forearm curls against my chest. It’s dark, with wide and jagged brush strokes. Then two short legs, clad in pilled, black sweats circle me. Another hand moves straying hair from my face then pushes my spine to its warm chest. A sharp chin comes to meet the place my shoulder and neck collide. I am rocked forward and back as I cry, and as if in confessional, I scrub myself clean with admission. Finally I am swallowed so whole that conjuring an image of escape stirs pain in my breath. The mechanics are all wrong. It feels good though. It feels like being realized. An overdue actualization that bounces and flashes between our eyes. Love is conceded and it dances slowly, sinfully between us.

Friends come. The car engine is jumped. My heart finally slows but he is still there: somehow solemn and somehow laughing. A year later, he has come and gone and come again, he is still the kindest boy I’ve ever met.

I spin a stuttered pavane alongside all my memories of all my favorite people. One that I may perform until my dying breathe because I’m not sure anyone has ever departed from me without a piece of me. My hand always begins heavy and unhappy. Burdened with a sense of newness, and a concern for previous emotional possessions. As the weight distends, so do I, world-weary as ever. But it quickly disperses after that, and I am left aching and floundering.

Drinking Age; Cameron Winter

Thank you for reading:)

Anyway, I’m taking a different approach. I initially really loved the voice in my first post. I left it alone for a couple days post-release so I could come back to it with fresh eyes and really pick it apart; through this process, I found myself convulsing- nay, writhing on the floor in agony. I may be the most insufferable substacker, twitter-user, social-media-haver ever recorded (as is everyone else and I need to take ambien or something and fucking relax but I won’t).

I unpublished that first post and am now attempting to speak from the heart. I have no real desire to post reviews, and criticisms, and analyses as much as I love to write them. I think that’s pressure (what I actually think is that I’m thinking too hard about it). I don’t want to manipulate an outlet into a chore. I will use my Substack as more of a diary. I want to get good at comfortability with self-expression when there’s no desirable outcome in sight. I will try not to be heady and pretentious because I don’t have that ability and when I feign it, it’s born out of insecurity. I will talk about my day, and how frustrated I am with the weather, and how my sense of self has changed, and how I am 21 and my 20’s are already ripping me limb from limb.

On that note, I am a couple days from when I began writing this post. Since then I have spiraled into a deep dark pit of despair. During this descent I have lashed out at my friends, had a covert crisis about my living situation, and publicly sobbed and sniffled at the cafe 1 minute from my current apartment. I’m doing that last one right now actually.

Life has been very kind to me over the past several months, and I am happier than I have been in a long time so I’m attempting to reduce the amount of self-chastising I do. Today it is not working and so I have been instructed to let it come and wash over me and then inevitably pass. I love and hate feeling bad feelings. As many other people do, I enjoy wallowing- maybe enjoy isn’t the right word- I do envelope myself in it if only for the sense of comfort it brings. Again, today I am supposed to Let It.

I have an accounting quiz on Wednesday, a performance of an American lullaby tomorrow (Tuesday), and my midterms begin next week. I am good with school, I go to class and submit my homework on time but it endlessly frustrates me that my education doesn’t wait for me. I understand all of my professors' collective rejection of mental health. It’s easy to fake and near impossible to have empathy for a “personal matter”. I’m not sure how to explain that my head hurts all the time because my sinuses ache because there is always a tear in my eye. I struggle equally trying to share my body’s physical limitations- most of the time I’m not sure they’re real myself. I am racked with guilt at my inability to overcome. I stay up till 4 or 5 most nights trying to write something just barely satisfactory. I feel like I am constantly clearing cobwebs from my mind. I feel behind and stupid and slow. Then I feel anxious. Then I fall further behind. I am a snake eating its own tail. That metaphor would be better suited if I served as the primary example of it.

I listened to The Army, The Navy a lot today and over the weekend. They make me miss my car, and lying in my room in the dark, and abusing my cart and stifling coughs because I share a wall with my mom, who doesn’t sleep with my dad anymore. He sleeps in my brother's room when I’m home, and my room when I’m gone. Life feels impossible when I get like this. My dad is bitter and angry and meditative. He doesn’t hold my hand anymore and it feels clunky and mechanical to hug him now. My mother I can hold but she’s infantile and I am not myself near her. It’s hard to talk to either of them. I haven’t touched my brother since I was 7, he is even more mechanical and a nightmare to know. This is very honest. I love my family so much that my childhood feels like some choreographed Green Goblin subplot.

I had dinner with my friends last night. A dental nightmare kind of. The company was grounding and I had a Thai Tea Spritz, the smell of which brought me immense comfort. We lamented and giggled and it was really nice.

I watched a lot of movies.

• 50 First Dates, Flow, Final Destination, We’re All Going to The World’s Fair at Benji’s

• Blackkklansman at Katie’s

• The Monkey at Coolidge Corner

I started watching Veep, I finished watching Big Little Lies. Both great choices for me

I didn’t listen to any full projects other than The Army, The Navy’s Fruit for Flies. My next pick is their sophomore release, Sugar for Bugs.

I know that all the lessons I want to learn and make permanent come with time, the ones I wanted last year have surfaced this year. I can’t force anything upon myself before its set time. I just want to know myself. This is vulnerable, thankfully only half of it will be read. I am grateful to have a place to speak and share. That’s all I have this week.

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