Understanding Oneself, AKA a Day in the Life of my Subconscious

There’s a reason why people do “special” things such as going on vacation, watching movies, running math competitions, etc. aside from personal pleasure. It’s because taking a step back from the tiny sliver of the world that you’re constantly zoomed in on can lead to realizations, for example that you’re very lucky to have X thing or that you should change Y thing that you’re doing. You take a step back and think: what even is my role in society anymore?

I was a Caltech Math Meet (CMM) organizer yesterday, and honestly I can’t really believe that CMM actually happened. It seems so surreal, like maybe it was all a dream. It’s so different being an organizer vs. being a contestant; instead of bending over a paper with your mind racing as fast as possible, you’re standing peacefully at the front of a room, scanning for raised hands and letting your mind take a break. When I was a contestant before, I’d occasionally long to switch places with the organizers for just a few seconds to give my mind a break -- I saw in them an image of solace -- but now I am that image, and it all feels wrong. It feels like I’m not trying hard enough, like my mind is not thinking fast enough, and like I’m never going to be as good as I was in 10th-11th grade. Like I’m never going to be loved as much as I was in 10th-11th grade.

I’m trying my best, but my best is not enough. No matter what I do, CMM contestants and their parents are going to think that Caltech is some little preschool on the wrong side of the country, where MIT rejects go. They’re going to pity me for not getting the MIT experience, not making big money from quant internships, and being one of the few people keeping this competition afloat. I have flashbacks to previous CMM’s, and all the younger contestants are still there, but the difference is that I’m the only one left from my grade. It’s the weirdest feeling ever, like you were once surrounded by a ton of people but they all evaporated.

I sacrifice social life for studying, and yet I’m not smart enough to interact properly with the “smart people”. I can take N Caltech math classes, but there will be high schoolers whose enthusiasm for higher math is enough to drive them deep into books and subjects that they’ll swim in all day long, absorbing far more than me. In the end, a lot of it is driven by enthusiasm. You can surround yourself with however much material you want, but how much of it you’ll actually absorb is dependent upon how porous you allow your skin to be.

And poof, all the CMM contestants are gone, and I’m at Red Door Cafe surrounded by Caltech students just like it always was, as if the past two days never even happened. It clicks so awkwardly with the rest of my college experience -- math olympiads and Caltech are like night and day; I’ll explain more about this later. I’m even more confused and unsure about my role in society than before it all happened, because now I’m asking myself the questions of why math contests even exist; why high schoolers even choose to grind math olympiads; which I never asked myself before. The more I surround myself with math research fanatics, the less relevant olympiads seem to be. And now I understand why so few Caltech students want to be involved in CMM, and why I was by far the most enthusiastic about it among them this year. As time goes on, I will inevitably follow that trajectory too.

At night I go to sleep, and all of my thoughts and perceptions mix together to extract some very pure patterns, almost like how math theorems are derived from patterns. In my dreams, my mind presents to me these pure threads in the form of scenarios: people or situations presented like metaphors, which my subconscious then interacts with. For example, the specifics are too private to write out, but my dream 2 days ago involved me entering an underground dungeon with some of my worst fears, and someone I know morphing into a different form and my subconscious then reacting to them. Only when I awoke did I realize that these were actually some of my worst fears, and how exactly I perceive that particular person, but now it all clicks together and makes perfect sense, as if there were so many arrows pointing to it before but I hadn’t yet followed them and pinpointed the conclusion. This was not my mind’s doing, but my subconscious’s. I slowly understand myself through dreams.