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It's my second night back in New York, after more than three months at Edyfi in Salt Lake City. What's changed?

Immediate, surface level things: I've realized how small and cramped our apartment is. Our fridge is tiny compared to Joseph's double-door ones, our bathroom similarly so, and the massive bedroom allocated to me still has no place for me to put my belongings or even move about. It's good to be somewhere that feels lived-in, sure, but this place is just filled to saturation with life, making it hard for me to live my own.

I've realized, too, that work environments should not just be pretty and sunny. Staring at a blank wall is usually much better for work than gazing out the window at a beautiful mountainous view. I fought for access to the three massive windows in the living room of this apartment, but now I'm actually unhappy with the small window my desk is newly placed in front of, and will probably move my desk against one wall or another in due time.

I've gotten much better at cooking, and just as vitally, grocery shopping! Having to manage my own money -- if liberally, not paying particular mind to the hundreds of dollars that I dumped overboard each month -- was a new and fruitful experience. I grew into being fully vegan, finding meat and dairy substitutes even better than the original things (impossible meat, field roast sausage, and tofu/cashew/nutritional yeast alfredo rule).

I got back into running a bit, too! Saurav's energy carried me along as we pushed for speed and distance PRs. I'm nowhere near my past form, but a 21 minute 5K and 6:50 mile is frankly better than I was expecting. Hiking never got intensive, but with Will, Gabriel, Silen, and others, I was able to see some gorgeous local views.

I completed more of my indoctrination into tech, getting a true sense of the ludicrous amount of money being tossed around in salaries and funding. Thanks to Saurav I learned about PostgreSQL, and eventually $lookup in MongoDB that has been a life-saver. Crypto and NFTs, especially Sigil towards the end of the season, taught me the sheer power of hype. Launching my own startup taught me the power of publicity, the necessity of distribution, the possibility of fundraising, the impossibility of hiring, the need for boundless energy and grit, and so much more that I had only read about previously. I understand now what it means to "chew glass and stare into the abyss," and how the overwhelming majority of startups fail not because of incompetence or error, but simply lack of sustained commitment and effort.

At the same time, I finally understood capitalism as a societal structure rather than something to simply meme about and attack emptily. With a reading club that shrank, and then grew, and then shrank to nothing again, I stuffed my brain with the first four chapters of Lenin's What Is To Be Done?, then the first of The State and Revolution. In a different reading club, I briefly familiarized myself with settler colonialism and afropessimism. In late-night conversations with Rikard, Silen, Alex, and others, and in TKS sessions, I fleshed out what radical leftism actually meant to me, and the framework of "best knowledge graphs" to justify my belief in what I chose to believe in.

My perspective on college shifted, or at least deepened, hugely. Nobody at the house was from a traditionally super-elite college; only Daniel had been really close, with Ben and Will a little behind. There are tons of interesting people outside of, as Slate Star Codex puts it, the "Cathedral" of traditional institutions, but I also found that the environments within the Cathedral are irreplicable elsewhere. To be outside of the Cathedral is not to be lesser, but certainly to be farther from the traditional main sources of power and esteem. Tech is the new source of power and esteem, and many I know within the Cathedral reach out and grasp for it. With a platform in tech, I tried to reach the other way, back into the Cathedral, bashing out three applications in half-secrecy at the beginning of January. I found completely unexpected success, at the very end of March stumbling into a doorway back to the path I was on, the sunny and relaxed campus of Pomona and the Claremont Consortium.

I struggled with what seemed like a demotion, especially when, days later, the doors to the more central seats of the Cathedral slammed shut in my face once more, while opening for so many others I've worked with. Digging deeper down, though, I find that I'm not worried. I set off on my gap year searching for a sense of direction, a sense of self. Regarding the former, I've only broadened rather than narrowed my search. Regarding the latter, I'm similarly far from a goal, but I have a much better sense of how to proceed. I had faith in my ability to make things happen, and my hunches proved correct as my big mouth got me leadership positions, my thinking and writing got me doting mentors, and my passion projects got me jobs and an office in downtown New York. TKS Community Talks and Updately reaffirmed to me the power of local activation (remembering similar experiences with The Phillipian and ACSA), while overcommitting and dropping leadership positions taught me to prioritize. TKS taught me that the world is a malleable network of human beings rather than a link of rigid portals for applications and resumes, which was again my hunch before, now made concrete, while failing in the XPRIZE challenge and burning out, for absolutely real for the first time, taught me how fragile my spirit really is without stability or nourishment.

It's crazy to think how far I've come in the last year. I've long maintained that I don't think I've changed as a person in my life so far, and a re-read of a journal entry I wrote on Ivy Day last year, where I first laid down my plans and hopes for this gap year, confirms this. The sentiments are nearly the same then as they are now. But so many small things have changed that seem almost to make up for the consistency of overall direction.

Last April, there was a CaMD panel on anti-Asian racism. I was so proud to be on the panel at that time! Now, I'm embarrased to even watch the recording of the panel back. I knew of all the pauses, the clumsy wording, the shitty Zoom lighting then, but now there's no saving grace or pride to allow me to overlook it. I still don't think I would do particularly well on such a panel today, but I would understand more of the ideas I referenced, or understand my lack of understanding about them, a huge amount of progress over the passively curious ignorance then. I've taken to learning on my own, at least a little bit: Descartes, Humes, and as mentioned earlier Lenin have all found spots in my blog.

By May, I had joined Stem4Free, The Incandescent Review, and Summer of Shipping. I had just applied to TKS on Terry's suggestion, and met Shifra and the first few people I would talk to in tech (Phil Liao, Kat Huang, Surya, that Georgia Tech aspiring fintech PM from Future Careers I forgot the name of). I was terrified of Twitter then, but now it's my most-used social platform, with all of the aforementioned names solidly in my network along with hundreds of others.

I wrote a journal entry in late June, glowing at my fellow IR critical writers' admiration of my writing and...sense of humor? One person in the call would even develop a crush on me, I found out months later. I had long been a socially awkward kid: not speaking English growing up and having weird beahviors on top of that, a loner in my lower year at Andover and only hitting a sort of stride at the end of upper year and the half of senior year that I got at Andover; successfully becoming a part of Incand was a big deal to me. Now, compare my shitty Andover dorm experiences with Edyfi: moving into a house full of total strangers with little directly in common, and not just getting by but feeling a sense of belonging wash over me. I've come a long, long way in overcoming this setback from my upraising.

It hasn't been all pretty. A relationship I thought had ended on good terms retroactively turned into a horrible breakup, its painful repercussions compounding on existing emotional instabilities. A groupchat and one friend in particular showed me what supporting others actually looks and feels like, and things were looking better until college decisions threw the whole thing back on what I haven't tested but assume to be terribly thin ice. A second relationship that lasted for one week made me realize that I can't summon feelings for whoever I want, no matter how much it makes sense to and I want to, and that thinking otherwise gives me the power to really, really hurt someone else. The thought of being loved for who I am by someone I love became increasingly inconceivable as my desperate, directionless mind tore down the pillars of my ego night after night, threatening to erode foundational structures that had never before seen the light of day.

There's self-hatred and guilt and joy and love, capitalistic destruction of all sense of purpose and humanistic rebuilding of small moments of meaning. Time continues to chug onwards, dragging the heart through its range of feeling along with it, creating one of the most arresting of these emotions (nostalgia) by its very passage. Life is at once tiny and huge, repulsively ugly and stunningly beautiful. Can we ask for any less?

There is far more to the past three months, and the past year, than I could ever write down, but this will have to do for now. The path forwards will be an extension of the path leading here so far: trusting my own instincts, throwing myself at things half-visible at best. As before, I remain hopeful and determined, and there is little more one can ask for in youth. I'm grateful for those around me, and all the circumstances that allow me to be where I am right now. Here's to what comes next.