field notes on 23

on writing yourself into being

how to begin

you are told, to be young is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection. you are told, adolescence is a delicious last gasp of rightful selfishness and cluelessness.

you were told the day you were born, it was a rare 72 degree day in early march, that your mom entered the hospital with a bright yellow jacket and left wearing a t-shirt. completely changed.

diego baez, inheritance

these days, the winter darkness stings a bit deeper in february, the type of bone-chill that clutches in the gaps of stillness. lucky that it’s a short month.

the light is most golden just before the shadows fall.¹ in moments of blinding light, there is no limit to what shape your shadows will take.

this past year, you have been indulging your curiosity and hunger. go to all the restaurants, read all the books, listen to every type of music. you satiate your appetite, but a hunger still remains. as some may say, it’s "a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience... the future experience, the state of perfectly cultivated being, that awaits you at the end of the search."

you still feel amorphous, ashapely, yet-to-be-formed. requests to describe who you are still leave you speechless. you need to read one more book, write one more piece, see one more museum before you feel like you are ready. how can you begin?²

when you were eleven you appropriately read Sandra Cisneros' piece, Eleven:

"What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two and one. Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one."

ever since then these words have wormed their way deep into your psyche. every year they resurface right before you accumulate the next layer of age.

when you were eighteen you dramatically proclaimed, in your squeaky lil voice, my childhood is dead, and i have killed her! to no one in particular. at age thirteen you cared so much, so brittle and sensitive, embarrassed in your pre-teen sort of way when your mom surprised you in class with cake. somehow in adolescence you always felt a bright spotlight shone at you when all you wanted to do was disappear.

you who were obsessed with coming-of-age, yet simultaneously in a rush to grow up, wrestling with an unspoken timer, teetering in between the fulcrum and edge of life's seesaw. if your life were 24 hours you constantly mistook the sunrise for sunset.

in this penumbra of youth, how do you know where the shadow begins and where it ends?

autopsy

i write myself into being. i write towards a life sentence.

writing is an act of identity making—every word a clavicle, every sentence an organ. no wonder we call it a body of work.

To write is to attempt the revelation of this elusive, multifaceted self, yet its total revelation is a chimerical impossibility. It is impossible to convey all the truth of all our experience. -zadie smith

i have never felt more like myself than when i write, as messy and as raw as the first pass is. it is some part frustrating, some part fascinating that no matter the detail i put into my words, it can never fully capture the reality of my experience; rather it transmutes it into something more entirely. identity transcends one-dimensional media - it can’t be captured on an instagram feed, nor a twitter thread, nor a resume - and writing is the best way to unite the interiority of my thoughts with the public image i project.

this substack, this strange lil writing habit i've cultivated since eleven and brought into public purview at twenty-two - each piece serves as chronicle of my becoming. each essay is a mirror and a chisel, reflecting and shaping my identity simultaneously.

at the edge of february i went to the beach on a rare sunny day. we took the N down to coney island, unprepared for the desolate and empty boardwalk that would greet us. the last time i've been here was when i was sixteen, first summer taking pictures, bulky nikon in hand as i took over-posed portraits of people to achieve some brandon woelfel aesthetic.

staring at the ocean, the new friend i made had commented that the foggy ship in the distance reminded them of the word for fear of the ocean. thalassophobia.

is there a word for fear of the sky? once an ex had visited me in new york and commented, bitterly, that he couldn't see the sky here. sometimes i wonder if he saw cages when i see mountains to climb.

i see empty canvas, punctured only by the birds who fly through, punching pits into nothingness. li young lee once said - look at the birds: even flying is borne out of nothing. it's this prospect of flight that terrifies yet excites me, an icarian task where the sheer weight of my aspirations drill my feet back into my ground.

there's a very human draw towards looking up into the sky, idolizing shooting stars and the like. at 23 i feel this tension - i yearn for roots but i crave wings.

it’s silly to fixate on ageing. i know today, this day, i am the youngest i ever will be. this tension is something to lean into rather than avoid.

with every year, i’ll inch closer to the futures unfolding like tesseracts on my timeline. there is some cosmic connection between my younger selves and my future selves, where the thirteen-year old feels the pain of the thirty-year old and vice versa.

return to self

last year’s birthday, i had just moved to the city. a new city, a new life, an empty canvas to fill with friends and activities. for my birthday this year, i invited friends, both old and new, to a home cafe i set up in my friend's apartment. the week before i designed menus and made stickers and batch-whisked matcha and hojicha.

in the bright light on sunday afternoon, the living room filled up with all my favorite humans. people from different parts of my life, chatting about friendships, their favorite childhood meals, inviting each other to runs, to concerts, to photowalks.

the past year i’ve been constantly analyzing and observing how to make a good friend in the city. what’s in common across my friends? last june i drew venn diagrams and divided them based on how we met: through college/work, through activities, or through writing. on a "find the guest" bingo card there are some obvious shared traits - fellow foodies, fellow fujifilm-ers.

i can overthink this as much as i please. but there are some intangibles i picked up on during the event. it’s the way michelle made cookie batter the night before and came early to blow up balloons after i showed her my pinterest board. shirling making a flower-adorned cake of my dreams, and walking 40 minutes in the cold to bring it. rishi and bahar coming right on time, kristie and jenny bringing flowers. it's justin immediately saying yes when i asked to host at his apartment, and how he started quietly cleaning up the finished cake plates and drink cups. how mahesh submitted a favorite memory of our’s all the way from london, and how aditya forgave me when i put salami on his designated vegetarian cutting board.

i'd pin my friends as all generous, but that word falls flat in its triteness. perhaps it’s that they share a generosity of their time. time is precious commodity, time is capped compared to money, and the way you allocate it reflects your own values.

around the end bahar went up to me and commented how lovely it was that everyone was so easy to get along with and that it’s really a reflection of who’s in my life. another observation she’s made - that despite the different backgrounds of everyone, they shared a very common view of who i was.

identity coherence is something i care deeply about. i’ve written myself into being. but i shape my identity not in isolation, but in tandem with my friends, within this warm community. they say you are the sum of your five closest friends - by surrounding myself with people who i admire and i care about, i am defining who i am and who i want to become. gatherings like this are a reminder that i am not a sum of my resume but rather a sum of my community.

I’ve often referred to this newsletter as a means for curating a lovely group of people in my ‘digital living room’. This goes the same for any communal endeavor, where the people you allow into your space and onto your wavelength have a very real and important role in the output of your practice, be it inspiration or influence.
-thieves recognize thieves,

rish vee

my lil nook on substack is a beautiful way to attract those who share the values i care about: generosity, earnestness, and curiosity. in that sun-drenched apartment, surrounded by friends, i feel ready to begin.

i want to be kind, i want to be earnest, i want to be good and true. humans—with all their contradictions—both frustrate and delight me. it is from a deep love for them that i continue to write, continue to seek new sparks, and continue to fold friends together into the comfort of my³ living room.

1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/10/advanced-placement

2. www.personalcanon.com/p/how-to-begin?

3. technically justin’s