When I started my substack back in 2022, I thought I'd use it as a kind of blog. Turns out I wasn't very good at blogging. Everything I wrote would turn into an essay, instead. I would start with a theme and end up with something that was either profound or insufferably preachy. And the few pieces I wrote that were closer to blog posts were too vulnerable. Substack is an artsy place. And a very public place. I have subscribers there, actual subscribers who get emails everytime I put something out. And then there is my journal (diary, it's a diary, I just feel like it's lame to call it a diary). I put everything in my journal, technically. Song lyrics and snippets of my stories and every spiral I have from 7 am to 10 pm. It's kind of useless to document the things you would in a blog in my journal, because by the time I go to look for it, it'll be buried underneath five pages of me tweaking about my mother's future and how my hair probably looks greasy and the future of the surveillance state. But this is different. A little blog on my little neocities, where I can put down everything I've been thinking about lately. Cool. It's weird. Even now as I am writing this blog post, all I am thinking about is how I wish I'd started earlier so I could have documented all these past versions of myself. Specifically who I've been since starting my internship, in May of 2025. I think I've gotten a lot happier since then. Not because of the internship, of course. I've just gotten super into things I wouldn't have thought I'd be into, and I've allowed myself to once again become obsessive about the things that I was obssesed with once. That has opened my eyes quite a bit. To allow myself to read obsessively and watch movies obsessively and listen to good music and scribble random lyrics in my journal that will probably never become a song. To go down youtube and reddit rabbitholes, to learn about things I wouldn't have even thought about a year ago. Allowing myself to do things just for fun has made me a person again. When I finished the third year of my computer science degree, I was a shell of a person. I don't know how I dragged myself through those three years, to be honest. The first one was okay. The next two feel like a blur now, like even if I tried I couldn't pick out one distinctive memory. Is that what it feels like to be rotting from the inside out? Wake up. Hit lychee ice or spearmint flavoured vape. Drive to campus with Doechii or something depressing playing. Wearing an outfit that you hate because you never have time to shop, or to think about what you want when you do. Sit and try to do work. Fail to. Go to class and pretend, try to find it in you to pretend, just a little, that you care at all about any of this. That you don't hate it all. Not computers. Computers are cool. But maybe what we're doing with them today isn't. Open the news. ChatGPT; Anthropic; Google; Meta; AI; Virtual Reality; the boys never make eye contact when they speak to you, though some of them will look at your tits. And you know you're smarter than a lot of them but they make sure never to let you feel it. And everyone around you seems okay with it all, seems like they are cool with the culture that you feel like you are suffocating under. And they seem like they want so badly to go work for one of the big companies that is killing the earth and destroying literacy rates across the continent, and you can't reconcile that, though everybody else can, so maybe you're just insane. Anyway. I was miserable. Not so much anymore. I still have bad days but a lot more tools to help. And a life I can actually look forward to, now that I have finally accepted that trying to fit into the mold of Comp sci just wasn't working for me. Not sure what I'll do. But I do know that I could read and write all day every day and never get tired of it. And storytelling gives me the same adrenaline rush as getting a new tattoo. And I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed, if I just play my cards right I could do this day and night and never get tired of it and every dream I've ever had would come true. And I want that more than anything. And I am willing to work for it. Today I was on instagram. I haven't been on social media as much lately (don't count youtube, I am addicted to youtube). Now, when I go on tiktok I see almost exclusively edits and when I go on instagram I see new music. Today I found this artis: torr. I really like their music. Have been listening to it all day. Currently looping "15000000 easy". My favourite genre for the last few months has been rock, though in the last week or two I've been getting into rap a little bit and I guess torr is technically cyber??? Actually I'm not sure what you'd even call that genre, so don't quote me on that. It's kind of a funny story how I got into rock. I've always been listening to rock artists, but kind of in a scattered way. I thought a lot of rock I listened to was pop because it wasn't classic rock. Though I did recognize that I fuck hardest with music that has a loud drumbeat and crazy instrumentals and some belting. So a few months ago - like October I think - I develop a crush on this coworker of mine. And around the same time, I take up smoking and get back on tiktok for a while. And somehow this results in me becoming obsessed with the rock girl aesthetic, except a very mild, modified version of the rock girl aesthetic. So I start playing with my makeup a bit, which is not really a thing that I do ever. I don't enjoy doing my makeup that much and I rarely play with it, but I did then. And as my crush on this coworker develops, I am all of a sudden obsessed with being this cool hardcore type girl, so I try some thicker liner on my waterline. And it's around this time I start exploring rock a little bit. And I start wearing my graphic tees to work, which I really would've done earlier if I wasn't worried about a dress code. And then my crush on the coworker goes away, and I get rid of tiktok again, but the funny thing is that all the stuff I got obsessed with as a result of the crush and the tiktok have already grown on me now. I like rock music, more every day. I love my new eyeliner. I wear the graphic tees all the time. And I feel more like me again. The reason this is stupid is because the guy I had a thing for was totally lame and not at all rock. Like, legit not at all. Drake fan. But somehow getting temporarily obsessed with him (and losing my mind. I legit lost my fucking mind for a couple of months.) made me more me again. Anyway. Not sure if I believe in meant to be, but that did feel pretty cool. I learned how to play Linger by the Cranberries on my guitar the other day. I dropped $250 on a guitar and then realized that I really, really want to learn how to play the drums. Maybe I'll just learn without a drum set and then go to my local library to practice. I've also been crazy into learning about internet privacy lately. Which has also prompted me to learn more about how the internet works - something I definitely already learned in one of my courses but have also definitely forgotten (I probably never retained the information in the first place). So far, most of my learning has consisted of just consolidating all the info I find on reddit and youtube in my journal. I do plan to take action on it. Usually how I approach hobbies like this is to spent a lot of time passively learning and then work in sporadic bursts. The sporadic bursts will probably come quick this time. Of course everybody knows they have no privacy anymore, but now that facial recognition software is becoming commonplace in America and organizations like ICE can use it to track down anyone, there's something concrete they can do with that data. I always used to say that I had nothing to hide. But now they can find me anywhere; I'd like to be able to hide myself, at least. I watched Fleabag recently. Holy fuck. That was fucking amazing. Truly one of the best shows I've ever watched. The more short shows I watch, the more I come to believe that the best stories are the ones where everything excessive is cut out. Of course, long drawn out multi-season TV soaps have their own merit, but from a storytelling perspective, being able to trim all the fat and create something where every scene moves plot / theme / arc forward and packs some kind of punch is incredibly difficult. And the payoff is amazing. Heated Rivalry did the same thing exceptionally well. I actually noticed a lot of similar strengths. Of course, the dialogue in Fleabag was worlds above the dialogue in Heated Rivalry. I felt the show was very strong overall. Amazing acting, genuinely exceptional cinematography and editing, great plotline, beautiful soundtrack, super interesting characters who were (for me, at least) really easy to root for. But the dialogue had its moments where it just felt silly. Watching Fleabag is also what finally got me working on an old project again. I have been trying to write the same book for two (going on three?) years. Technically, I started a different book with the same characters when I was 15, which was seven years ago. I scratched that idea at 19 or 20 and started a new idea with the same characters, because I was too attached to them to leave them behind. It's kind of ironic, because now every single character who I brought over has changed completely. Little tweaks over the years that eventually added up to somebody entirely new. Ship of Thesseus type shit. For years, my protagonist just felt weird to me. Like I liked them in theory, but I couldn't get them down on paper right. It always felt like something was wrong with them. But Fleabag is such a masterclass in character writing that it cured that issue for me. Lately I've been getting into political essayists more, as well. I have always been a Bell Hooks fan - not every idea of hers, but her writing as a whole. I watched an Arundhati Roy interview today and fell in love with her too, though I have yet to read any of her novels. I'd really like to read her newest one: "Mother Mary Comes to Me". I've been thinking a lot about what I'd like to do with my future lately. I think the scary part is, now that I've accepted that I am going to chase my dreams, I realize just how many dreams there are, just how many vaguely aligned things light me on absolute fire. I'd like to be a published fiction author, of course. I'd also like to be a screenwriter, and a director / producer for something I write. (All of it, if I'm being honest. I'm totally anal about my writing. Shoot me.) And, to tie back to my earlier mention of my substack, I think I've been unwittingly writing political essays for a while. Probably since my first one. Not the strongest ones. I mean, at 17, I didn't even realize what I was doing was writing political essays. I used to describe them, to myself, as emotional takes on traditionally intellectual topics. Anyway, I think I could be good at that. I've always really, really enjoyed writing those. And I have a lot to say, I think. And, of course, I would absolutely fucking LOVE to be in a band. I am not the strongest singer. Not strong at all, to be honest. But I am a pretty strong lyricist (for a total amateur) and I love music. And I don't know yet if I'd be a guitarist or a drummer but it's funny, how I feel younger now at 22 than I did at 19. My whole life is ahead of me. It's just starting. I am going to do all these cool things and be all these cool things and devote my life to being creative and passionate and writing as much as I possibly can and telling amazing stories and singing amazing songs, and it's all going to start now. I'm turning 22 in 8 days. I'm technically 21 right now. But anyway, point stands. I feel like my life is just starting.