What 2024 taught me :p

Right now I’m sipping hot chai in a red sweater, with Peter Cat Recording Co. playing on my dad’s speakers, sitting cross-legged in my empty house, wondering how to start this piece. But consider it an unstructured letter of sorts (to myself and to you), a wrap-up of totally random things I’m thinking about at the end of this year and want to remember for the next one. I hope you love it, and thank you so much for sticking around. 

There’s a very famous quote from The Office which goes, “I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.” People are always talking about how time moves too fast, like sand between your fingers. But I believe you have the choice to pause moments as you’re in them, to feel memories being made, to hold time in your palm and will it to stop if only for a second. Every time you’re having a really good time, remember to sink into the feeling of the moment - close your eyes, look around at your friends, drown into their laughter, look out the window at the setting sun, smile to yourself, and just hit pause. Remember to feel the joy in your bones, even if it is fleeting, even if it is small.

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No matter how much you try, you can’t define love. You can’t measure it, you can’t quantify it, you can’t pin it down beneath your knees and get it to tell you the truth about itself. You can’t hold it hostage, you can’t force it. You can only feel it.  And then to define it, after all, would be to reduce it. 

But don’t ever for a second believe you don’t deserve it. Don’t make yourself too small and love too large. It can fit in the palm of your hands if you want it to. 

It is inevitable, of course, that you will make mistakes. That your idea of love will change from time to time; you will love love and you will hate love. And that, even when it's right and even when it's wrong, it will ache and sting, that naked tenderness, that vulnerability of leaving your heart exposed. But let it hurt; that is how you know it is love.

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Whether you like it or not, you will be thrown into change. Like one of your best friends will move away and you’ll go to a new college and have to start over from scratch. And for a while no one will feel like home anymore. You will feel the beginning of that quiet sinking feeling of really, actually growing older, and it will be terrifying. Everything will feel so unfamiliar for so long, and you won’t know who you are at all, and you will feel yourself change too. 

So somehow, you’ll have to carve comfort out of this very unfamiliarity. Like the early morning walk to college with your headphones on and the sun hitting your face, like the daily cup of kadak chai, without fail, from the canteen as you read a novel for ten minutes before class, like finding a spot in the college and making it yours.

If you cannot at first love something new, you will have to resort to romanticizing it. 

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You don’t have to run nonstop and tire yourself out to get to where you want to be. Don’t teeter at the edge of burnout just to feel the thrill of being constantly productive. That’s a skewed version of success. You don’t have to keep your hands full and your legs constantly moving and force your brain and your body to do more for you than it can afford to. You can pause, breathe, take the longer way on purpose. 

As one of my best friends once told me, and has referenced this metaphor every time the “I’m not good enough, I’m not doing enough” feeling comes back to me (Dhanesh, I love you, thank you):

“You’re always racing ahead of the people around you. You can relax a little once, it’s fine. Don’t have to push through the slow f*ckers in front of you. There’s no train to catch. You’re literally and metaphorically always rushing. And you’re rushing to get on a train that isn’t going to leave.”

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Don’t try too hard to grow up before your time (listen to Vienna by Billy Joel). Feel young for as long as you can, stretch out this feeling, the weightlessness of being 18. Don’t mistake yourself for being too important; it is a blessing to be no one still. 

To be obnoxious with your best friends in a grocery store somewhere and get kicked out, to be in the backseat of your friend’s car singing a song into the night, to pick yellow daisies and put them behind their ears, to rest your head in her lap with the sea stretched out beneath you. You are small, impossibly small, all of you, and that is precisely the beauty of it. So be unabashedly ridiculous, silly, reckless, loud. Be young while you still can.