out with lanterns

looking for myself

June 19, 2025

i want to think that at some point in the past, i was more competent, more quick-witted and intelligent than whatever became of my mind, this mush of thoughts and expired feelings. my professors, my career counselors, my library staff members i visited a few days ago described my confidence dip as a "post-grad crisis" and while i believe this language to accurately sum up the slump i'm in, it is a combination of crises and routine anxieties that makes this more than just a post-graduation event.

i re-read some of my entries when i was studying abroad in spring 2024. my recollection, generally, is as follows: "yeah, study abroad was cool but my program sucked and i hated so many of the people i wound up working with, but i had a great time solo traveling and seeing all the amazing sights on my own." that was not how it went. there were days i was so deeply depressed, like that third day i spent alone in Vienna, when all i could do was mope in my hotel room and call my friend and cry about how lonely and tired i was. i'd forgotten about the intensity of my listlessness; i'd wrapped my film set in Prague and ate ramen while languishing from how dissatisfying the entire production felt. and yet, because my mind plays tricks on me, not only do i 1. want to go back to Europe by myself again (granted, a different program with different people) and 2. feel like it was such an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where i grew so much as a person. technically, it's a true statement. optimistic, but that's my ultimate reflection on an experience that was at times, so deeply shitty.

the optimistic interpretation of this finding is that i am in a trench just like the one from study abroad, and when i eventually, hopefully, emerge from this, i would look back and feel so grateful (?) this all happened.

i don't like that i do this, but i map my current state with my love life. (i refuse to get into this because it's an unproductive rumination on past and present events.) but even during study abroad, when i was supposedly the freest spirit that i could be, i felt my mind drifting to bits and pieces and memories of people i took an interest in. it didn't go anywhere at the time because i had never been in a relationship at that point, but, uh, yeah. why am i like this? i really can't fathom being the type of person who's unbothered by the notion of romance because the appeal of love is too strong.

a friend sent me the works of a writer who describes himself as "i am a museum of everyone i've ever loved" (something along those lines, i'm sure it's on the Internet) and said it reminded her of me. (a very thoughtful gesture indeed.) i thought about the metaphor of a human as a museum and even though i resonate with the romantic/Romantic connotations of such a comparison, i think of museums as spectacles, precisely curated. if i were a museum, i'd be a messy one. i'd be my room if my room were somehow preserved in a museum; i consist of clutters and collages and disorganized piles of notebooks.

of course there's always the question of what type of love (is it healthy?) i'm striving for, and that question seems to help a little.

interviews used to go so smoothly because i was so sure of who i was and what i wanted to do. not anymore. i feel myself tripping over my own identity; as if someone turned off the wifi in my head and all my progress had been lost, and how i have to recover whatever i had going on in a quasi-polished reconstruction.

tl;dr. maybe i'm constantly in a state of mental crises and this is just a seriously heightened version of the anxious slew that is my life due to the lack of purpose and structure of my days at the moment. otherwise i'm doing fine; i'm just trying to find myself first before i try to find others.