An Open Letter

Since I did well academically most of my life, that’s become the norm for me. However, taking certain special-topics classes for ML, which I plan to specialize in, I’ve gotten my ass beat. The reason success is a bad thing here is I’m not used to coming across something I don’t know if I can do. When faced with that soft barrier, I want to immediately stop. But the important thing is I prove to myself that I am capable of doing these things, as otherwise I will avoid this for the rest of my life.

I Find No Peace

-Sir Thomas Wyatt

I find no peace, and all my war is done.

I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.

I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;

And nought I have, and all the world I season.

That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison

And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise—

Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,

And yet of death it giveth me occasion.

Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.

I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.

I love another, and thus I hate myself.

I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;

Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,

And my delight is causer of this strife.

Pretty fitting this poem shows up now, another instance of divine intervention I guess. This poem to me is another evidence to be filed away about shared struggle, one that persists through time. For me the poem is about contradiction, on how things happen completely irrationally, at least at first glance. How natural it is for humans to violently waver in stance back and forth, for me most commonly realized in the simultaneous desire for human connection, and to be left alone. How easy it is to want the easy soft parts of interaction, but without the consequence or cost.

Isn’t it silly how we want things we don’t want? What curious creatures we are.

Honestly I fully understand that this is delusional to say, but I honestly can’t shake the feeling that there is some higher power planning events in my life for me. A lot of events happen exactly when I need them, at almost comedic timing. A lot of times it’s almost like someone calls my bluff, and gives me what I ask for only for me to learn that I was wrong from it. Ultimately this may just be confirmation bias, but it is almost reassuring to believe that there is a reason for everything.

Sometimes when outside I get struck by a sense of grandiosity; how amazing it is that I get to live in a time where I can hear another person from a different time and place speak into my ear while I go 20 miles with just the brush of my finger on a remote control, and skate through bright sunny skies. The grass is green, the buildings are intricate, and there are so many different things to look at and enjoy. The same way someone romanticizes being in the 1800s laying in an open grass field, I am so in love with the life I have the chance to live.

Short post because I want to sleep: I was playing Overwatch with a random group of people, and one person kept making up all these lies, and continually doubled down on it. I think it was fairly obvious they were a pathological liar, but ultimately I just felt pity to some extent. I think having that as some coping mechanism must make life really hard, so what else is there to do but to extend compassion?

I think the most I can do is hope that some years down the line when they think of me they miss me

I remember this morning when waking up I was thinking about what to write today: I settled on the idea of hoping god gives you harder battles. I remember thinking that if you get the worst case scenarios for things that scare you, then you have nothing left to be afraid of. While I don’t fully disagree with it, I did somewhat mentally neglect how hard it can be.

I was in a call with a close friend, when he mentioned something about a comment he left on a video I uploaded. I had posted a video to TikTok of me playing a song I liked and softly singing along to it, and debated whether or not to make it public or not. I decided in the spirit of this blog to make it public, and to push myself out of my comfort zone. For context, I used to do choir for ~4(?) years, and had sang a LOT as a child, but ever since my voice changed I stopped singing as much. Recently I’ve been doing it more, and I’ve really enjoyed it but have been very self conscious about it. I want to push myself to cover songs I normally really like playing and singing and at least uploading them somewhere for myself, and so this was a baby step.

When I went to check the comment, it said “I would encourage you to continue because your voice is good but I would be lying”, and someone else had also liked the comment. I’m not going to lie, it really did crush me. I admit it wasn’t my greatest singing, but after being in an incredibly vulnerable place, and receiving no positive reinforcement, having a close friend say this devastated me.

I guess this was my “harder battle”, but I honestly don’t want to upload or continue playing/singing music, at least publicly. I think I will force myself at least one or two times more to continue, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel like shit about it.

Seeing a large blog post, a super talented guitar player, or a well established student in a research lab are incredibly daunting things. Seeing someone do something you want to get into at a level way above your head is pretty discouraging, especially on something you need to be doing. But at the end of the day, everyone started off the same way you are now. The important part is starting, no matter how small.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Who knows why I’m posting so much right now, maybe just to wipe out last night’s remnants. But I wanted to at least briefly mention why I chose :59 as the favicon for this website.

People thought flight was completely impossible, until December 17, 1903 when the wright brothers took to the air for 59 seconds. Something so violently impossible was proven wrong in less than a minute. There are two big ideas for me here:

The power 59 seconds holds: enough time to enter a new age for humanity, and to do the unthinkable. What can I do with 59 seconds? I may not be able to shape humanity every time, but I can at least angle my course a little better with that time.

And second, how many minutes pass by me. If 59 seconds was all it took to break the impossible, I sure as hell don’t want to waste that time doing something I’m not proud of. Of course I’m not going to be able to achieve greatness every time, but that isn’t a valid reason for me to not strive for it.

“No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This wasn’t some random loner, but a social German poet who was surrounded by friends on his deathbed. If someone this established still feels this way, it’s only natural to feel this way in our own lives. I know I talked about this before, but in this post I want to talk about one solution to this.

If you think about people as vectors, it puts things in perspective for me. If one dimension represents how much they like dogs, another represents their willingness to change, etc. we end up with an incredibly high dimensional vector. Now given a new person, even though they aren’t completely random from each other, how likely is it that 70%+ of the dimensions are within some tolerance?

The point I’m getting at is it’s incredibly unrealistic to think that you can meet someone that is that much of a match to you, solely due to how little people you get the chance to meet. However, the cool thing of being in this time in society is we have access to generations of information at our fingertips. Who cares if Todd from class doesn’t share your view on an ideal life, since turns out some ancient Chinese poet has just the poem for you! Maybe friends don’t understand struggles you go through, a potential new favorite artist may have encapsulated their pain in a song that makes you feel less alone. You can think about it as either sad, or as empowering: but you aren’t alone as long as you have access to all the work of humanity. I guarantee you someone out there has felt the same things you’ve felt, and documented it in some beautiful way for a person like you to discover.