the rollercoaster called college

Growing up, I loved roller coasters. I loved the wind in my hair, the moment right before you rush down to the ground, the chorus of screams around me. I thought I was a roller coaster junkie. I could name every single type of loop. I could tell you all about the D-Funk rides. But at the core of it all, I just loved the adrenaline. But that was until I went to college, where I experienced a different kind of roller coaster. An emotional one. Without knowing it, the first 18 years of your life all accumulate to preparing you for college. Every interest you pick up, every sport you try, every extracurricular attempt to become competitive in, it's all to put in your resume or to try get recruited for. The keyword is become competitive. To be competitive, you have to be determined, and to be determined, you have to be consistent. I unfortunately did not grow up being a very consistent child. Ballet, 4 years. Gymnastics, 2 years. Piano, 4 years and a lot of trauma. I suppose my longest-standing hobby was rugby, which I played for, for 9 years, but I didn't properly capitalize on that and try to get recruited for it. I also wasn't the best student, and I was kind of messing around while applying for college. I applied to 10 colleges, got rejected from my dream one and 7 others. I only got into my non-targets that I wouldn't even consider going, and this took such a beating on my ego. I think this was the first time I ever experienced such massive failure. I tried to blame everything but myself, and I felt so bitter watching my friends parade around with their decorated hats while I couldn't help and feel self-hatred. I enrolled in one of my non-targets anyway, and I ended up having a really good summer. That summer, I kind of learned that maybe it's not so bad being ordinary. Je me noie dans la vague de ton regard amoureux. Je ne veux que ton air divagant sur ma peau. Une fleur, une femme dans ton cœur, oh mais ouvre-moi jusqu'à ce que les roses fanent, que nos âmes sombrent dans les limbes profondes. Going on my Euro trip, I got to talk to so many different people, and that made me realize that the environment I grew up in wasn't the norm, and maybe it's not so bad living a simpler, less competitive life. I then made it to UCSB. Life was easy, life was good. I went to parties by the beach and spent my days lounging in the sun. But going into it, I knew I had to get out. I joined orgs, I played a sport, I was part of the housing committee, just to get rejected by USC again. But I did get into this little school in the middle of nowhere Pittsburgh called Carnegie Mellon University. We miss you, Eunice! Jo bidong! Moving here It was rough. I moved from one end of the pendulum to the other. US's number one party school to the number one most depressed school. And I was really, really, really lonely. People already made their friends in freshman year, and I was just an outsider. I just wanted an out. I've never felt this garbage in my life. Another Friday, another night in. I swear I'm not a loner, like I do like hanging out with people, but there really is nothing to do here, and I guess the most entertainment I can have is in my room. Hold on, I'm hungry. In the second semester, that all changed. I put in the effort to joining social orgs, and it paid off. I found friends, and I found a community. When I first moved to the US, I thought these social orgs were weird, especially the cultural ones, the Asian ones. When your school is predominantly Asian, why do you need an Asian American club? But I started to learn that it's not about race and it's about being around people who act and think like you. I was lucky enough to grow up in a society where I was a majority, so I never had this yearning to join a community because everyone around me was family. I think what irked me was how explicit communities were in college. But I had to remind myself that the feeling of belonging was survival for most of our evolutionary history. Being cast out literally means death, so it does run deeper than that. Got out of the airport and we got on the wrong train, so now we're in the middle of nowhere and we're lost and we're cold and we're hungry. It's not that bad. My dad's not impressed. My favorite part of being in school is when I'm not in school. I love that 22 out of 52 weeks is yours. That's about 5 months of holiday. 5 months of playing a role-playing game which is your life. A life still sheltered by parents, a life where you don't have to pay your own way, one where you can take a week off per semester with no external stressors at all, and one where you're expected to do something like an internship but still have enough time and sanity to live your own life. This was especially apparent in my sophomore summer. And the biggest lesson I got from that summer is to find joy in anything. Especially the journey. And my journey did take a big shift in junior year. Junior year was peaceful. I went through a breakup, which gave me a lot of time to work on myself, and that I did. I started making more videos, spending time with my friends, had a lot of fun moving into my first ever apartment, and I was looking for my summer internship. Then I stumbled onto the one thing that changed my entire trajectory. With just one LinkedIn reach out and one overnight grind session to make a launch video, I found myself at a startup, one that had a lot of traction and eyes from the Gen Z world. I thought it was so cool that I got to skip classes and fly across the country to go to different campuses to meet people, but I started missing the things that mattered to me the most: my friends' birthday parties, my group projects. I even faded a date 2 hours before it was supposed to happen. The speed that I was thrown into all of this was debilitating, and even though I was meeting people every day, I couldn't help but feel alone. It's funny how you feel the most alone when you're surrounded by the most people. People came up to me all the time to compliment me for my work or to connect, but I couldn't help but feel a hollow absence inside. The absence for care, the absence for a relationship that isn't transactional. But at the same time, I couldn't help but feel that maybe I've outgrown some of my old friends. They don't get what I'm doing. This is a story we tend to tell ourselves when we're doing a major identity shift and everything on the outside just feels so small in comparison. Especially in the startup world, it has a way of making you feel that if someone's not building or operating something as large as yours, they are just not at your level. But this is just not true, this is the culture. But you have to realize friendships aren't contingent on the facts of if they "get it," but it's actually about their presence and having a listening ear. Even though they might not be able to give you pointed advice of what exactly you're doing, they're just there for you. Over the summer, while I was drowning in my work and sorrows, I still had my friends from school and home to lean back on. A lot of crazy things did happen that summer, which I'm not going to dive into, but it did end up with me making the decision of graduating early and doing a weird situation for my final semester. Something I quite like about SFO is that it's actually really close to the city. Like, I'm the type of person that shows up to the boarding gate 10 minutes before it closes. So the ride is only 20 minutes, which gives me a lot of time to not be at the airport. It's also pretty fast, so it's nice. I'm not gonna lie, I'm feeling so discombobulated right now. I'm rushing to catch the bus, but I left my student ID back in ESSA. So I might not even be able to get on the bus and I'll have to walk to class. But I'm so damn tired. I don't know what to do. This is such a long day. I have a quiz after this, but I didn't even study for the quiz because I wasn't at the lecture where they talked about the quiz. So like, ugh, this is really tiring. After the quiz, I also have to go to a group project meeting, and I told them I would take on most of the work. Since I wasn't around for the first semester, like first part of the semester, but I have no clue what's going on, so I'm just really, really cooked right now. I'm so cooked. I haven't done chemistry in 6 years and my quiz is in 20 minutes, but I just used ChatGPT to summarize the slides that we're supposed to be tested on, and I'm just gonna try to cram something. We're in the lab right now. We are removing— I think we're removing fat from chocolate. Right here we have our chocolate which went through a centrifugal force, so it spun really fast and it separated the chocolate from the fat. But why are we right back where we started but nothing else in our hands? Because you're not looking. Work either. All right, we're going to go. It work. I'm just packing away the last of it, a bunch of ex's clothes that I don't need anymore. Weird phases I went through, like I don't really know what I was thinking when I bought this green suit jacket. I just like clothes I just would not be able to wear as a fully functioning adult, which is kind of unfortunate. This was cute, but I don't see myself ever wearing it again. For free! Ah, we're currently at Pamela's, which is a Pittsburgh classic. We woke up at 10 and it's like almost 12 and we're still waiting on our food. That's how good it is. Cakes here are insane. And okay, I keep edging us, and I think it's finally coming. Mmm, it's so cinnamony. I love it. Here we have the cheesecake. It's not too sweet, which is good. I really like it. Bottom is so good. We're making matcha tiramisu for our Friendsgiving. Yay! It's almost 12 and I'm about to head to bed. I don't know how I feel. I feel like this feels incredibly underwhelming. I've never been the type to be in tears when the end of the year is coming. Like, even in primary school, middle school, high school, while all my friends were sobbing, I always watched from the side because I always— I like to look ahead. I like to know, and I like to know that there's just something better ahead of me, and I think that's true. And I don't know, I'm excited. Everyone's excited for me. I'm excited for myself. There's only really up from here. This is my last night here. I think it's as I pack up my room, it's finally hitting me that this is it. The past semester was completely unreal. Like, I mean, I knew it was already basically over, but I still got to come back. But I'm less so scared about moving into the next chapter of adulthood. In fact, I'm quite optimistic for it. I'm very excited about what I do, and I'm very excited about all the things that I can do. But I think what I'm scared the most about is closing the chapter. So like, this is like an official marker that like I'm no longer in childhood, I guess, even though I guess that officially ended a while ago, but oh my god, packing's been such a pain. Oh my god. And that was it. I was done with school. Not having to do homework was a blessing because I finally got to concentrate on my main quest. But what I think I was missing was the idea of school, the idea of just being able to lounge in my room with no responsibilities whatsoever, going over to my friend's place which is right next door, and also talking to these random characters that I wouldn't really consider friends but I would be able to have a nice long conversation with if I ever bumped into them. It's officially been 1 month since graduation, and although I've acclimated to post-grad life for the last 6 months, I can announce that I am the healthiest I've ever been in my entire life. I have so much more consistency in my diet, my workouts, my sleep. I am the healthiest I've ever been. I'm at a state where I can pig out for 1 night and not feel fat, and I feel beautiful again after being kind of chopped for 8 months after this most stressful summer of my life. But the only doubt that keeps plaguing me is, what's next? Without a big milestone like graduating college, what keeps me going? What keeps me going is my family, whose voices warm me from across the world, my friends, whose laughter cheer me up during the darkest of times, and a work mission that keeps me believing that the world is changing for good. At the end of the day, I have to remind myself that I've graduated from the kiddie rides and moved on to the roller coaster, which is adulthood.