About me, in layers

A deconstruction of who I am, who I’m not, what I’m missing, and what I have that other people don’t.

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I’ve been struggling to write the past three weeks. Part of it has just been work being hectic; part of it has been me being uanble to find the right motivation and ideas to write about.

Here’s a sampling of some of the drafts that are sitting in my _posts folder:

• Why I’m blogging in the first place
• Dealing with writer’s block, where my writer’s block is probably coming from as someone working in this “cultural exchange” role, and why I haven’t written anything in the past weeks¹
• Thoughts on optimism, pessimism, and happiness as an engineer and an atypical Fulbrighter

Instead of writing the past three weeks, I played through and finished Dave the Diver, tried and failed to catch up on sleep, and tortured the Discord Activity bots in poker for much longer than I think anyone has ever tortured the Discord Activity bots in poker. It was fun while it lasted, but the gnawing feeling of listlessness has returned.

So I want to catch up with the writing, and I think it’s time for another long, reflective piece. I started writing this about two weeks ago, and the story ended up accumulating all these reflections on myself. It’s a very wishy-washy piece; if I were to describe it in one sentence, it’s an attempt to decompose me into layers.

Suggested music: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - The Ancient Vessel

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It was dictated early on what kind of person I would be. Family, classmates, and authority figures all appraised me early on as “the smart kid” who was going to do vaguely great things. I’m not sure why exactly I received that praise? I finished my homework, I answered the teacher’s questions, and I generally avoided angering the wrong people, and I don’t see how any of that made me more special than a little stuck-up kid.

For the record, in most cases I think it’s unwise to ascribe any kind of destiny to someone under the age of 13. Even if you have Terrence Tao² levels of talent in something, who’s to say that that something is what you actually want to do? In the US, there’s plenty of geniuses who want to be more than just geniuses, but never get a chance to try and be anyone else. I’ve seen a lot of them go off the rails once they leave for college and no longer have directions for their lives.

Young me might’ve had a problem with all this, or he might’ve blindly sucked it all up; I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter anymore - the cards were dealt, the hand was played, and even if I think the players made some bad moves, it wouldn’t be productive now to go back and find my childhood self. I’m free, and I can go where I please.

High school was when I started to become more interesting as a person. Well, let me rephrase that - it was when other people started to think I was more than just grades and test scores³. I was part of cross country, track, and a few different bands. It didn’t feel like anything special at the start of ninth grade, but as time passed I began to feel markedly different from other people “like me” in my year. Unlike those people, I didn’t talk or think much about academics or my future plans, and when my classmates got stressed over grades or deadlines, I simply didn’t get what they were upset about. It wasn’t that I was smarter; I was smart, but many of my peers were taking more advanced courses and doing more things than me. The sports and music weren’t the difference makers by themselves, either; plenty of my other book-smart friends were also participating in sports and arts in their free time. I think the difference might’ve been the emotional investment? I cared about my extracurriculars more than my schoolwork, and I think that led to a healthier balance of stress and a healthier outlook on what mattered in life.

It’s weird to write that, because I can’t tell you much of what happened anymore. If I try, small moments return here and there: the cadence of the drums as we marched to the field, the soreness in my throat from cheering the varsity squad at meets⁴, sleep rushing in like floodwater at the end of each day. I slept at 9pm or 10pm every night back then, and here I am, 2:38 in the morning, still typing…Little things mattered more back then, and it was more important to live each day to the fullest rather than work towards some grand monumental achievement. It was different from now.

Some of the angriest moments of my life came from college application season, when those book-smart friends burned midnight oil to try and get into HYPSM⁵. I remember having a spat over applications because I told some of them that they were overdoing it, and one of them said “Shut up, you’re going through the same thing!” and I wanted to scream back “No, I am not you!” - but it wouldn’t come out. In the moment, I couldn’t say anything. No, I wanted to say, you’ve never been at a track meet, you’ve never seen me run, you don’t know that side of me; you don’t get to say who I am. But I was cowed by the notion that someone could say that, could tell me to my face who I was. In retrospect I was being incredibly unfair, because part of me was them - I was also applying to those schools, and I was also anxious to leave this stupid, stifling, apathetic place for greener, more prestigious pastures.

I believe I partially had the right to be outraged, though, because I wasn’t them, or at least I wasn’t the people I saw in them. Even if I was also stressing out over applications and investing my self-esteem into meaningless prestige points, I knew, without being able to vocalize the knowing, that those other parts of my life - the running and the music and the me that didn’t fit nicely into 650 words on the Common App - meant more than whatever big-name institution took me in. It did hurt to “just”⁶ attend Michigan like everyone else, particularly those friends with whom I eventually developed so much animosity; but the day I read my rejection letters, the people who put a smile on my face were my friends at after-school track practice, joking and goofing around with me like nothing that really mattered ever changed.

I don’t think much of high school anymore, and the memories that do come up are the negative ones. In spite of that, I’d say a lot of who I am today traces back to the friends, teachers, and coaches who gave me experiences outside of textbooks and tests, who let me be more than just the kid in the school library that most of everyone else saw. In short, the lesson I learned in high school was that I am far more than what people see of me.

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Back then, I made no attempt to compromise who I was with what others thought I should be. For better or worse, this eventually stopped working, and I had to learn how to maintain desired appearances.

Attending an American university can teach you a lot of things. One of my lessons was that sometimes, you shouldn’t be yourself. Sometimes the right thing to do is to change your actions, values, and opinions (or at least appear to change your actions, values, and opinions) to adapt to everyone else. Others I think will disagree and say that everyone should live the way they want, but if the goal is to make a positive, meaningful impact on the world, then you have to compromise on your ideals and make space for those of others.

To me, friends are people around whom I don’t have to compromise. This is a small snippet of how silly and genuine we can be together:

No, I did not add the caption myself, and no, I’m not going to explain.

On the other hand, I’ve learned to put up a front around new people, something a little more “normal”. In particular, I’ve mastered wearing a mask to work.

Of course I can’t be as silly and nonsensical as I want in my professional life. Really, though, it was the relentless, single-minded, solitary approach that had to go. It was no longer a valid solution to isolate myself with an assignment and figure it out. Really, it was never truly effective, but lower standards and sheer force of will made it work when I was younger. Not in college, and not after college for that matter. In the real world, if you want to do anything meaningful, you have to cooperate with other people.

I don’t like every moment at work⁷. I think in most American professional settings, you are expected to be smiley and optimistic all the time. Everything is going great! We are going to succeed! I love what I do! So on and so forth. But if we were honest all the time and everyone focused on every little problem, nothing would get done. I think being human means caring about other people’s problems, so if everyone is talking about their problems, then we’d all be focused on fixing things and not on real, genuine steps forward.

Still, smiling for too long is tiresome. I want a job where I won’t be afraid to frown and point out problems; I think I would do well.

Superficial positivity aside, I invest a lot into my professional life, more than I think most people do. I get why people don’t: money isn’t everything, career progression isn’t everything, “achieving” things isn’t everything. You can pour your heart and soul into your job for 25 years and get cut from the company over the span of a day⁸. More fundamentally, you have meaning beyond the things you do or the things you make.

Still, I cannot imagine living my life without working on something. This is how I’ve always seen it: if I do not have something that I’m working towards, then I will stagnate and begin to live the same day over and over again. I will be alive and have no reason to be alive. When it’s time for me to die, I’ll look back and start panicking over how I completely wasted decades of my time, and I will cry out in grief over a life unlived as I am taken away. I’m well aware that people go kicking and screaming because they’ve spent too much time working or they’ve been working on the “wrong” things; what I mean here is that I do not see the possibility of a full life that doesn’t involve deeply caring about my work.

I was a solitary child, and I think my isolation cemented this opinion early on. I didn’t belong in groups of children laughing and playing; I was the kid who shied away and tried to find a book to read instead. It never made sense to me. They had family, community, affection…what did I have? Pieces of a family, pieces of a heritage, pieces of love that never coalesced in the same way. It’s not that learning about history and literature and science and technology were an “escape” from all that; they felt like the only way forward. This felt true even when I started finding community in high school and college.

I’ve burned out and changed academic and career goals multiple times. I wanted to major in English; countless arguments meant I entered Michigan undeclared. I was in Michigan’s clarinet studio for one semester, then dropped out because I was so intimidated by my peers and the work it would take to go professional. I started a computer science degree to study machine learning, and three years in I’d become so exhausted that I had no choice but to stop chasing publications⁹ and attending reading groups. I’m not wearing rose-tinted glasses; doing genuinely meaningful things is hard, and I realize I may not be the right person for the things I want to do.

But I’m writing again, and I’m going to teach machine learning at my school, and this weekend when I go to see my Fulbright friends, I’m going to bring my guitar and sing for them. And even if I collapse again from failure and exhaustion, I’m going to get up and pour more time¹⁰, sweat, and tears into the things I want to do, because otherwise I fear I’ll become that old man weeping over his wasted life.

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It’s hard to ever answer “who are you?”, but I think that’s what the past few weeks of writer’s block have been leading up to. Let me give you my best guess.

A stranger would see a 5’11”¹¹ male human with glasses and long, curly black hair. Chances are it’ll be laughing, smiling, or looking annoyed at some non-tangible thing. Activity-wise, it is most often on a laptop, reading or watching or playing something online. It checks its phone for messages, and once in a blue moon it takes out a guitar and plays and sings for an hour. It sleeps erratically, but frequently - 8 hours or more on most nights.

Just like with anyone, spend a few more days with me and you’ll see a little more. I talk fast and don’t filter what I say, which manifests in bluntness and a dark sense of humor. I’m not very serious in everyday conversation, and according to some friends, I come off as unfazed by anything. I have no problem saying what’s on my mind, especially if it’s something completely irrational like how quickly you would die if all the blood in your body instantly froze. Many of my closest friends are the type who join in on the nonsense.

It takes further time and effort to understand my patterns. I can maintain a very friendly and upbeat exterior, but I’m not as warm on the inside¹². I don’t think I’m a genuinely unfriendly or mean person, but I don’t believe it’s sincere to act loving towards every stranger you meet. I’ve gone on at length about this elsewhere, but I try my best to be intentional about my relationships. Shallow connections make me feel lonely; deep connections keep me afloat across the Atlantic.

I am mild and cool - borderline apathetic, even - until I decide that something needs to happen, and then I flare up with startling force and energy. At least, it seems to startle people who have only seen me be calm and collected. Several projects, conflicts, and miraculous¹³ insights have risen from these moments where I lunge forward.

I like it when people challenge my ideas and preconceptions; I don’t like it when people challenge me as a person. If someone dislikes my ideas - or my behavior or specific actions I’ve taken, because those fundamentally stem from ideas - that is interesting, and I want to engage in conversation with that person to learn what can be improved. If someone simply dislikes me for who I am and won’t renege on that, what am I supposed to do? I dislike people too, but I don’t make a big deal out of it. If there’s no room for compromise, I simply discard them and move on.

Right now, the most important thing in my life is one of two things: either my loved ones and the relationships I nurture with them, or the constant cycle of learning and growing. I think it flips back and forth depending how I’m feeling at the moment. It can never be completely about other people because I’ve learned to be solitary, but it can never be entirely anything else either, because I do care and I would be nothing without the people in my life who support me.

At my core is independence. I would characterize it as…well, do you know how cast iron is strong and heavy, but brittle? That is, it tends to break rather than bend? For me, it’s the same.

Owing to my weak family ties, I consider my own self to have been my main source of support. When I look back on my short 22 years, I see a vessel on the waves without an anchor, without a radio, without a savior except myself. Did I have absolutely no support at all? No, but I don’t think I¹⁴ was ever anyone’s priority number 1 or 2 or 3, 5, 8, 13…maybe 21. I just don’t think I ever mattered enough to anyone to be worth saving. To be fair, I was deeply resistant to affection and did a poor job of reaching out to people. I probably needed therapy in middle school or high school, but I didn’t start until I began my master’s degree.

Does it hurt? I ask myself that sometimes. I think it hurts in the way any kind of old heartache hurts: sometimes you remember and your chest stutters, briefly. But those occasional stutters don’t prevent you from getting up anymore. If you have goals and dreams and you are more than the things that happened to you, I don’t believe anything is insurmountable.

Between the lines, I play clarinet and guitar, and I sing. Even though I never majored or minored in English, I now write essays in my free time. I took drawing lessons for about eight years and can still create reasonable pen-and-paper sketches on the fly. I speak German, Chinese, and I can pronounce Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz¹⁵ correctly enough to impress my Polish students. I can tell you about random smatterings of history from the fall of the Roman Empire on to the present day¹⁶. Some nights when I’m trying to sleep, I think about what will happen during the last days of my life, where I’ll go, what I’ll see, who I’ll say goodbye to. Sometimes I drift off in peace; sometimes I lay awake and sob fearfully.

But I don’t feel like any of these things are me. I’m not a musician, I’m not a writer, I’m not an artist, I’m not a linguist, I’m not a historian, I’m not a thanatophobe. Simultaneously I am a little bit of all of these things because if I wasn’t, then how could any of those things I said be true? But you probably wouldn’t guess any of these things from the 5’11” male with glasses and curly black hair, and because others won’t guess them and won’t see them, I feel like those parts of me don’t exist. Often, I can’t remember who I am.

At some point, I stop being layers and start being fragments. Deep below, I am fractures, a view from a kaleidoscope, threads of all different colors running amok, never joined. Does it matter? Do you care? All you need is the interface on the surface, the consumnate engineer, always problem-solving, always geared towards the next project, always placidly stilling what stirs inside.

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Recently, I’ve started letting the more difficult layers show. This blog, this space dedicated to catching the things that swim through my head, is a big part of why I have the ability to do that now. The public aspect of the blog does matter, and I do share it with people I care about, and I want to know what they think about me and my thoughts. I am human, so I will always have that weakness. What matters more, though, is that I finally have somewhere where the goal is to find and accept myself.

When I talk in particular about my family history and my heritage and how I don’t feel like I belong to anyone, people are often taken aback. My unconscious reaction is usually smirking condescension. What is so special? What is so shocking? I forget sometimes how different my mask looks and how little I usually say.

It’s hard to stop thinking that everyone else is spoiled. It feels like everyone else in my life has always had some form of emotional anchor, someone they can call at any moment for help. I suppose those of us without something aren’t meant to make it far? One school of thought says that because humans are social animals that derive strength in numbers, asocial humans are failures and should fail to amount to anything¹⁷. Anyone who actually thinks this should not be taken seriously, because we don’t live under the same conditions that our ancestors evolved from. Still, that voice butts in every now and then and tells me that my destiny is to be away from everyone, rot away like a fallen tree in the wasteland.

Yet I grow. And if I can grow, I believe they could too, if they went through the same thing.

So how can they choose to live with so much affection? Doesn’t it start to stifle you? Suffocate you? When their friends move away or their boss fires them or their parents die, what will they do? I’m not insane enough to think that relationships are completely about dependency and wholly detrimental to the self, but it’s hard not to look at everyone in their clouds and ask, Do you know who you are without everyone else?

It could be envy, too - maybe I am jealous of what I think everyone else has? But what would it mean to envy someone for something you’ve never had, something you don’t understand? Can the moon envy the stars? Can the bottom-dwelling barreleye envy the condors soaring atop the Andes? I’m not saying I was never loved; I’m saying I never had the same kind of constant, guaranteed emotional security. In the past I was jealous of people with that security, but now I realize I don’t know what it actually means or what it really does for you. I am jealous of stories I’ve told myself about others’ love and affection; I have no idea what that depth of love and affection actually feels like.

Sometimes I want to be someone else, but I know I am not someone else. I cannot wish I were a statue of marble; I must carve myself out of whatever inferior material I am made of. The choice is between wishes - and in wishing, stagnation - or the chisel and hammer.

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I have this dream. One day, I will figure out why life is so hard for everyone. I’ll find the machine that isn’t working, disassemble it, stay up through the night adjusting the gears and scraping off the rust and polishing every part to a shine. The rest of the world will wake up the next morning and realize that the bad things in life are gone, and the engineer will be nowhere to be seen. I will be snow melted into the grass.

This is how I’d like to save the world: quick, quiet, without fanfare. Wouldn’t it be a beautiful way to spend your time?

I don’t want the credit. The credit is always given to the thing I appear to be, not the thing I am, and every time people love the outside, it makes me feel more unloved beneath the mask.

I want to help everyone. Do I belong with them? The path I see forward winds through the valley and stays in the valley, far below the clouds. If I do not know how to treat and care for love and affection, then I do not deserve it. Not yet.

Sometimes I wonder if I would be better staying here. I will wait in the place I have always been, and when the people tumble out of their clouds of love and comfort and safety, I will stand, reach for their hand, and gently whisper “Let us go then, you and I”. Would they let me guide them? Would I be of use? Or would they flick their eyes towards me once, and then away? I feel that I have to hope I can help, because if I cannot help them there, then how could I help anyone anywhere?

Even if it is correct to be this caretaker of lovelessness and solitude and all my other never-hads, then what should I do for myself in the meantime?

The immediate answer that comes to me is that it does not matter. I do not matter. To everything that matters, I am not the things contained in the walls, I am the walls, the watch towers, the keep, the proud stone gate that remains obstinately shut. Yet if that was the truth, how could I ever let anyone see what lies inside? How could I ever talk about me? Is this more weakness, or am I wrong?

Voices clamor in my head, and the loudest demand that I shoulder the weight by myself. I must not falter. I must not hurt the people around me; I must not open the gate.

A fragment hidden deep inside wants someone to hold me, look me in the eyes, and say, “You can hurt me”.

Which one should I answer?

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To the thing in the mirror:

Despite it all, I love you.

1. Originally this just said one week. Heh. ↩

2. Math prodigy and current professor at UCLA. To give you an idea, he won bronze, silver, and gold in the International Mathematical Olympiad at the ages of 11, 12, and 13 respectively, and he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the age of 16. And he’s a Fulbrighter! He won a scholarship for the US-Australia program to study at Princeton. If you look at his blog, he seems like a decent human being too, which is always nice. ↩

3. Did I ever think I was just grades and test scores? I don’t think so. I was good at those things, but I don’t think I consciously cared about them until later in high school. Heck, maybe not until college, because college was much more challenging and I felt like good grades actually meant something. ↩

4. If you’re curious, I was only ever JV. Here’s the other weird thing: I wasn’t good at my sport. I think I ran into (no pun intended) a lot of mental blocks that I never overcame. I was good enough at music to be admitted to SMTD at Michigan, but I wasn’t one of the best in Michigan or anything like that. I guess that was another thing that’s stuck around, being able to care about something without necessarily being at the top in that something. ↩

5. Common online term among people interested in the college application: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT. There’s a lot of people who get into this online echo chamber asking which colleges are the best, how do they guarantee themselves a place, “chance me”, so on and so forth. From my brief experience with those communities, it gets toxic, and I feel bad thinking about high school students who basically reside in those echo chambers for their whole childhood. ↩

6. I want to be clear: this is spoiled brat lunacy. Michigan is an extremely good school. ↩

7. This is generally speaking and not necessarily specific to my Fulbright grant, although I certainly wouldn’t say I enjoy every moment of my Fulbright grant either. If I ever start enjoying every moment of something, please inspect my bloodstream for illicit substances. ↩

8. This year, at least 6,000 jobs were lost in my target sector, the gaming industry. See https://www.gamesindustry.biz/over-6000-games-industry-jobs-lost-in-2023-so-far. Uncited figures I see on LinkedIn say upwards of 10,000. ↩

9. I still cringe thinking about how short I fell of my goals here. Part of it was that I was terrible at asking for help and admitting that I knew less than I wanted to. Machine learning as a research field is extremely competitive, and the people who are experts don’t have a lot of spare time, so there’s also an argument that they should make the field more welcoming. At the end of the day, though, I think it was a lesson for me far more than it was a lesson for the experts in the field. ↩

10. This phrase feels better to me if you replace “blood” with “time”. Nowadays you don’t sacrifice your blood, you sacrifice the time you have left as a conscious entity wandering planet Earth. ↩

11. For readers using metric system, this is approximately 180 cm. ↩

12. Supposedly this is standard in the Pacific Northwest. If that’s true, it’s yet another reason that Seattle is my dream city for my 20s - but more on that later. ↩

13. Well, “miraculous” to someone below the age of 25. I like to think I’m reasonably mature, but don’t think I’ve landed on any genuinely exceptional life lessons so far. ↩

14. An important caveat to make here: I see a significant difference between “real” me and the person that other people see me as. I’m sure “Kevin” was someone’s priority number 1 or 2 at some point, but I don’t think that “Kevin” bore much resemblance to me. ↩

15. https://yt.artemislena.eu/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U if you’re not in the know. ↩

16. I’m not that interested in ancient Greek or Egyptian history like a lot of amateur historians are. I guess at some point it’s too far away for me to care? Plus, I’d be more interested in learning about other parts of the world that aren’t central to a western narrative of history - I’ve become more and more suspicious of this narrative over time. ↩

17. You also shouldn’t take this too seriously because I haven’t looked deep enough into the science here; this is my vague understanding. I took a lot of this from Kurzgesagt’s video on loneliness: https://invidious.private.coffee/watch?v=n3Xv_g3g-mA ↩