Life is a whirlwind

and I can't slow down.

Life is pretty circular. In some ways it feels like freshman year of high school again, poring over books and trying to soak up as much knowledge as possible. Not really having accomplishments or a direction or knowing exactly what I’m interested in. Success can’t come without blood, sweat, and tears, and I feel like I’ve coasted off of my hard work from 9th-10th grade for the past several years (I was kinda just relying on luck and not really putting in effort to learn skills that I didn’t already have), but now it’s time to put in some raw effort again. External validation from having a place in society due to your accomplishments feels good, but so does the internal validation from knowing that you put every moment of your day to use and worked toward an internal goal of yours, albeit far away. It’s been a while since I was obsessed with a textbook, or trying to learn a completely novel concept, but it feels really good.

For this reason, I’m glad that most people at my college don’t know about my high school accomplishments.

I’m glad that I can start over and just be an ant next to a huge mountain of knowledge like everyone else. I find it kinda sad when people tell me stuff like “you must be able to understand things quickly, because you did olympiads” because the reality is that I don’t. I was always a pretty slow learner compared to other olympiad kids, and topics such as college math that are completely novel to me take me an especially long time to wrap my head around. I’m also a very visual learner, so I have a hard time understanding things without drawing small diagrams/listing stuff out on paper.

* * *

My house (dorm) is the most accepting place I’ve ever been. It's kinda known to be the least judgemental / most accepting house in Caltech. Randomness and spontaneity are embraced rather than the status quo. Instead of trying to conform to society's idea of “perfect”, people either pursue their own ideas of “perfect”, or just don't pursue any such idea at all. There is such a wide variety of people because they’re not pretending to be someone they aren’t. Most people in this house would stand out among a group of average people, but together they blend well together like a rainbow. 

Because of the lack of a standard type of person to be like, I feel unnaturally happier and more self-confident at college, because most of my worries come from fearing that I’m not enough; not being the ideal person that I’m supposed to be. It’s really strange -- after the fall term I was significantly more self-confident than before it, despite not being any better of a person. I simply didn’t worry as much about what others thought of me. Now that I’ve been home for a while and back in regular judgemental society, I no longer have that artificially high self-confidence lmaooo.

On the flip side, this can be dangerous because if one has problems that they don’t realize themselves, they need someone else to point it out for them, which might not be the case in an extremely accepting community.

* * *

I used to daydream a lot in high school (hence all the blog posts about random thoughts), because many of my classes taught the same concept like 3 times, so I only had to pay attention one of the times. However, not anymore because I either try to pay constant attention to follow along with the lecture, or don’t go to lecture at all. It would be nice to have more time to think/write about stuff, but there are so many things higher up on my list of priorities… I’m lowkey busier during college breaks than during the school year in high school. I do want to let my mind wander sometimes though. I fall asleep immediately every night and usually immediately on airplanes, but recently I tried not falling asleep on an airplane (because I had work to do), and it felt great. I think going on daily walks would be nice for that reason. Unfortunately my college campus is too small for daily walks to be a natural requirement for getting around lol.

I think I’ll try to complain less about things in general. A lot of the negative feelings I have eventually subside, and I’m not sure if venting to other people helps resolve them because usually others just echo my internal monologue, and the only real solution is to do something about it myself. I recently heard that narcissism and lack of self-appreciation are linked, and I fear that by talking about myself too much in general, I am kind of a narcissist. I often bring myself up when nobody asked. It is true that I don’t have that much self-appreciation, but I should probably try to have more as it would drastically improve my quality of life. I don’t want to make my problems other peoples’, nor give the impression that my life is more problematic than it actually is. It is pretty good, after all. I love having freedom and not enough time to overthink things.