11:11

A freshman in college and a pulsing white light.

I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach sometimes. It travels up my throat and lands right behind my eyes. It’s a sort of nostalgia that I think I’m too young to experience. It’s rooted in that naive, looking-toward-the-future, overwhelmed but somehow all-knowing feeling. It comes in waves. 

Somebody asked me recently if I call my dorm room home. If, at the end of the night, I say “okay see you guys later, I’m gonna head home” or something like that. I hadn’t thought about it before but my answer was no. I catch myself and say “head back” or “go to my room.” Not because I don’t like it here, I do. But this place is not my home. Maybe it will be someday but right now, my home is far away with all the people I love frozen in time. I’m going to go back and it will be different, I know. Part of me never wants to go back so that I can keep this beautiful, perfect picture of my life intact. I want to keep that part of me whole and untouched. Time just doesn’t work that way though. I don’t know what I expected to happen when I left for school. We all have new lives now. I have new friends, new clothes, new experiences, new slang. And I can’t wait to bring it all home and share it with the people at my core, and for them to share their everything new with me.

It is a sad thing though. And a scary thought. I always said when I was getting ready to leave and mentally preparing myself to embark upon this new odyssey that everything works out how it’s supposed to and everyone ends up where they are supposed to be. I still think that’s true, but I think it’s also just a comforting thought. The future is so terrifying to imagine. It’s a fun thought exercise to envision myself years from now in my 20s or 30s and think about what I might be up to. But realistically, if I think about what my life will look like in the next year I get scared shitless. It’s too big a concept to wrap my head around. The fact that my life is now here, on what amounts to another planet. And the fact that my beautiful, perfect, untouchable life is gone. 

But now I get to create something new. I get to add another layer to this picture that I’m making of my life. New images of new friends and new memories. The glue keeping the many versions of myself intact will last, and help these new pieces stick. Whatever it looks like will still be me, just a new rendering, evolving over time.

I chose the hardest route. My mom admitted this to me while talking me off the proverbial ledge during my first few weeks here. She meant it encouragingly, as if to show me what I’m made of. It’s interesting to think about. I’m not sure if she’s right though. It would’ve been hard anywhere I went. Even in New York, the place she uses as the benchmark for what would be my ultimate college cop-out—the place I already know pretty well where I would only hang out with people from LA—I probably would’ve gotten at least a little homesick from time to time. It’s in my nature.

The first time I went away from home for a prolonged amount of time, on my own, was when I went to Farm Camp. I’d say that I wish I could take it back, but really, I don’t. I was so sheltered before that experience. We had barely come out of Covid and I was a mousy almost-14-year-old who teared up at the thought of flying without her parents from Northern California back to Southern California. Needless to say, I did not have a good time. I didn’t like the people, I went with my best friend at the time who ditched me immediately. I spent two weeks in undying dread and despair. I spent my days walking around, hanging out with the farm animals, and reading in my bunk. I wrote postcards to my parents threatening to drop dead if they did not come and get me as soon as possible. But somehow, despite the odds, I made it to the end physically unscathed, if a bit emotionally disturbed. It was the first time I’d been left to truly fend for myself. To be frank, I didn’t do so hot. In fact I sort of gave up immediately. I vowed defiantly never to go back to sleepaway camp. I didn’t really learn anything from the experience except that I needed to drop the friend I went with, who left me in the dust as soon as we got there. Although looking at it now, did I really expect her to hold my hand for two weeks when she could’ve actually gotten something out of the experience? I might have been a bit unfair. Water under the bridge now, I suppose, but I digress.

The next time I ventured away from my comfortable Los Angeles sanctuary alone was the summer of 2023, spending a month in New York. Three weeks at a precollege program and one in Alphabet City with my family-friends Coco and Erica. This went a bit better. In the two years since Farm Camp I’d grown up in a lot of ways, though I still had far to go. I had a haircut that actually suited me and taste that I’d developed on my own, I’d been on a date, gotten a job, I was turning into my own person. And I thought I had hit my peak. My godmother, Jyllian, dropped me off. I was trying to be stoic, like I did this kind of thing all the time. I cracked when we got into my dorm for the program, turning away from her and willing my tear ducts to suck the prickle behind my eyes back in. I was too proud to be scared. I still have yet to fully learn that lesson. Of course Jyllian clocked me immediately, ripping open a floodgate that had been poorly nailed shut. I spent the first four days of that program crying. I loved my classes and made some cool friends, but I just couldn’t shake this feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was supposed to be back at home, in my bed with my dog, ignoring my mom shouting something from upstairs but taking comfort in knowing she was there. 

Then suddenly something clicked. I don’t remember the moment exactly but a day went by where I didn’t think about home at all. I was too wrapped up in where I was to think about my family miles away. And thank god because then my world opened up. I was able to create meaningful connections with my friends rather than just pass the days with them. I was able to make art in my classes that I was proud of, and interested in. I was able to devote myself to my immediate, to the present. By the time the program ended and I was preparing to take my belongings down to the lower east side, I hadn’t shed a tear over the thought of home in weeks. Rather, my friends and I cried at the thought of not seeing each other every day anymore. I spent the next week in the city wandering around and finding cool shit, just getting to know this new environment. 

On the plane home from that month in New York I remember writing something similar to this in my notes app, though a bit more stream-of-consciousness. I wrote about who I was at the time. How I felt like I was different after that month. More independent, more in tune with myself, “more realized”. I felt like I was opened up. I remember that feeling, like I could carve a line down the center of my chest to my stomach and this bright, glowing white light would spill out of me, thick. Taking my body as the desire to make something beautiful poured out of me, unbearably. 

This manifested itself when I got home in a motivation to take charge of my life in a new way. I ended this journal entry of sorts by declaring, “So this is me committing to myself that I will make something happen when I get back home and I will work on keeping myself moving forward not back.” I don’t remember the rest of that summer too well, but I hope I kept my word. 

I still feel this urge today. It’s a continuous buzzing in my chest. I find it too overwhelming to make sense of it most times. There are too many things I want to do that I can’t pick one and get started. I didn’t feel that way for a while when I first got to university. Recently it’s made its way back though, which I love. It’s very grounding, guiding. It’s comforting knowing that something inside of me is alive with purpose. It tells me that I have direction, I have a force behind me pushing me towards the next thing. 

I lost the feeling when I first got here I think because my body was so out of sync with itself. I’d been having a great time but hadn’t clicked into place because of this wall I had put up that was stopping me. The same wall that I hit when I stepped into my three-week dorm, and the same wall that makes me balk at the thought of calling Edinburgh home. I felt something click a couple weeks ago, however. Up until this point I had been living in a somewhat problem-oriented place. “I like it here but” so to speak, as I constantly found something to remind me that Edinburgh is not Los Angeles, is not my home. Until I was leaving my last class on an ordinary, long day. Funnily enough, the date was 11/11 which might be insignificant in reality, but, to me, is the cherry on top to what felt like a cosmic moment, or a wish coming true. It was 4pm and the sun was already sinking beneath the horizon, something I had taken great pleasure in complaining about at every opportunity since the time change. It was also freezing, another weapon in my armory to fight against the urge to settle here. As I was walking toward the bus, headphones in my ears and shuffling my Liked Songs, something came over me and I kept walking past the stop. I walked the forty minutes back to my neighborhood and, rather than going back to my room where I would flop on my bed and fight sleep as I watched some mindnumbing sitcom, I kept wandering for an extra hour. With my hands tucked into my pockets and the sky a deep blue above me, already dark but lit up by the streetlights, I let my mind empty out from under me like a trap door. I found something really lovely in the cold, dark evening and that same white light in my chest began to pulse again. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. 

I traveled to Glasgow to see Lorde perform a week-ish later. She gave this long speech in the middle of the show about growing up in Auckland and missing the dark winters of her childhood. She reminded us in the audience that “this is the poetry”. Finding ways to tend your fire, to create within whatever dark corner of the world you find yourself in. It’s really stuck with me, quite frankly. This might sound esoteric or naive but I felt like it was the universe sending me a sign. Confirming that I’m not imagining this feeling. Reminding me that I’ve ended up where I’m meant to be, like I thought I would, and to trust that I will find meaning where I am with what I have in front of me. Quite a cryptic way to put it perhaps, but it feels solid to me. Like no matter what the next year looks like, or the year after that, I won’t get stuck. I might’ve picked the hardest route but maybe that’s the big final push I needed. Maybe that’s what’s going to propel me in the right direction, keep me moving forward not back. 

Over the period of time I’ve spent writing this I’ve been to London and Glasgow and back. While in London, I felt like my friend that I was staying with and I could do with an hour apart after spending two straight days together, so I went for a walk around her neighborhood. While out, another friend texted me asking how my trip was going. I sent her a voice memo back saying essentially “the trip’s been so fun but I’m excited to come home tomorrow”. My friend called me out before I realized I’d said anything, saying ”aw you calling edinburgh home is so cute”. I was a bit taken aback at myself. Trivial as it may sound, I’ll probably remember that moment as one of the most important of my life. I took it as evidence that I’ve found the same devotion to my immediate as before, that I’ve allowed myself to settle, whether I realized it or not. It’s a beautiful thing, really. As much as I’m still grieving the picture of my life before, I’m also feeding this desire to burst out of it and granting myself the privilege of becoming a fully-fledged person. You know the deeply played out cocoon-butterfly analogy. I can’t really reflect more on this evolution yet, as I’m still in the middle of it. All I can say is that I trust it. And that I feel so lucky to be where I am. And that I’m committing myself to nurturing this pulsing light. To living my life beautifully. To letting it take over my body and turn me towards the sky.