was it worth it?

I used the same words as before, relied on the same silly excuses, and stuck to the same topics of conversation that I used a couple of years ago when I was younger and reckless. As usual, I blushed in our dialogue, and felt embarrassed; for some reason, I always feel shy about using the harsh words I normally use in everyday speech with you. Why, I don’t know, just as I don’t know why this hasn’t changed over the years.

We have long been living separate lives far apart, but a thread of something pure and untainted has remained between us over time. I don’t feel grown-up and tired when I talk to you; it’s as if I’m slipping back into the summer of ’22, and as if my worries and cares are gone again. But now, reflecting on our conversation, my head is filled with different questions. Why do I act like a kid when we talk? What do you think of me now? If/when we meet, will we connect the same way as before? Was our connection so easy for me because I simply didn’t know myself or the world? Will I look at you with different eyes after all I’ve gone through? Or maybe everything has stayed the same, and we can easily chat about our past and future again? How will you react to my changes and worldview? How have you changed, what’s going on in your thoughts, what do you feel as you enter a new stage in your life, and what do you think about the life path I’ve chosen?

What I fear most is that we will meet and you will see me as an adult, beautiful and healthy, a successful young woman who has achieved her goals and set new ones, and you will realize that all this cost me a broken heart. Broken not just from your absence, but also from the absence of family, from total and consuming loneliness in a foreign country, from strange people who have spit on my soul, from endless burnouts. I’m afraid that if you see this, then it will become an undeniable fact that I will have to come to terms with. And then the real question arises: was it all worth it?

pc https://i.pinimg.com/564x/60/6a/3c/606a3c6730faf147f640916bd9ab8c7c.jpg

What?


This might be the most serious blog post I’ve ever written. There are a few things in my life that I always pay attention to. I notice a person’s hair when I’m talking to them, I observe the nature/architecture around me, but what has always caught my attention the most are the circular patterns of life.

Minute by minute, hour by hour, day turns into night and night into day, months follow one another, spring always becomes summer, and so on. Just as in the natural cycles, our lives are filled with them. New life will inevitably find death, setting the wheel of Samsara in motion again, just as dawn always turns to dusk. Even in the behavior of my body, I see these patterns. As a woman, I cannot overlook the circular patterns of my body. I find circles in my mental behavior as well. I carefully track my tendencies and have come to the conclusion that I constantly go through cycles of healing and self-destruction. These patterns are ridiculously obvious. I tear myself down, dropping to the lowest point, then find salvation in this darkness, and then I start again, licking my wounds and healing. I’m currently in a phase of recovery; it took me a long time to get out of a depressive phase, but I’ve clearly traced this pattern. Similarly, in terms of movement and travel, I see these patterns. Periods of stagnation are replaced by times of frantic movement when I’m too busy to wash up before bed and fall asleep from exhaustion.

All these coincidences are funny and seemingly insignificant on their own, but when they come together and form a circular picture, repeating previous patterns, it becomes interesting. Finding circular patterns in anything is one of my biggest life fascinations, and every time I discover a new one, I become more convinced of my theory that everything in this life is cyclical.

pc https://i.pinimg.com/564x/5c/16/68/5c16685136ac0858b023d89800f092e5.jpg

PSAT

The PSAT was so stressful as I have mentioned before I am not a good test taker and the format of the PSAT scares me. The questions start off the same and depending on if you get them correct they either get easier or harder. There are two sections math and reading, the reading is first and the math follows after that. I was doing fine during the reading section I got a little bored and sometimes just picked random answers because I didn’t want to read anymore. The math section was so hard and my questions started getting so easy I knew I was cooked. I recently got my score back and keep in mind the test is graded out of 1600 and I got a 1000 so goodnight. Each of the sections are graded out of 760 on my English I got a 540 which is ok. On math just like I predicted I got cooked and got a 460. Genuinely terrified to take the Sat and I hope I go to a test-optional school because my scores are so bad it’s not even funny.

PC:”Student School” by Tamarcus Brown/ CC0 1.0

I can’t do anymore school work

All school year, doing my school work has been a difficult task for me to complete, but I always got my work in on time. Over the past month of school, I have become so delusional and I tell myself that I will do my homework all night, but once I’m tired, I tell myself that peace and self-care matter much more than doing my work. I still end up going to bed late every night because I tell myself that I will just do my homework later in the night. All of these assignments are catching up to me as the school year ends and I’m honestly just ready to end the school year now. Some of my teachers haven’t put my assignments into the gradebook so I don’t even know how much work I’m missing and it’s terrifying. I want to end the school year with good years but I am having so much trouble with getting myself to care about school. All I want is for it to be summer so I can sleep all day and not have to worry about my schoolwork constantly.

School Books” by Krzysztof%20Puszczy%u0144ski/ CC0 1.0

Camping

I went on a camping trip and the whole experience was very upsetting. It was my first backpacking trip and my trip was supposed to be from Wednesday to Friday. We left Wednesday morning and made it to the beginning of the trail. I assumed the hike to the campsite would take about an hour and a half. Twenty minutes into the walk, my shoes were completely wet because we had to walk through four rivers with our heavy backpacks. Then, I face-planted two times in two minutes, so I was already injured and filthy. It was boiling and I was losing circulation in my arms because of my bag’s weight. There were so many bugs and I got so many bites. After about five hours, we finally made it to our campsite. It was still so hot and I was exhausted. The next day, we had a little breakfast and then went on a quick walk to a river. We stayed there basically all day and once we came back to our campsite we noticed that there was a forest fire smell. Twenty minutes later, the teachers on our camping trip told us that we had to leave because there was a fire. Quickly, all of us had to pack up our stuff and we left the campsite by 5:30. We were terrified that we weren’t going to leave the trail until 10:30 because it took us five hours to the day before. We walked fast and made it by 7:30. Once I got back to my dorm room, I was exhausted and so drained. My body had bruises, mosquito bites, and cuts. This camping trip was an extremely draining experience and I’m so glad that it’s over.

Tent Camping” by Ben Duchac/ CC0 1.0

to be human

A question is as old as time

What does it mean to be Human?

How can a question look so simple but be so difficult to answer? To be human, of course, is to be a part of a certain species, the homo sapiens, and to be a part of the genus homo, then the family Hominidae and so on and so on. But this doesn’t quite answer the question people have been looking for, and frankly, I won’t be able to give you an answer in this blog, but I will give you my best guess.

But still, we are left with the question of what it means to be human. Is it because we, as a human race, have consciousness and can develop thoughts that not only allow us to think about what’s happening now but project our thoughts into both the future and the past? Is it the ability to think of things that haven’t even happened or will ever happen? Is that it? Is it the creative minds of us humans that make us who we are? If that’s the case, then what about A.I., which has an equal ability to make up new scenarios and imagine things that don’t exist? Well, I guess we have the living part going for us, but still, it doesn’t quite work cause what happens when a gorilla gains the ability to think(Ishmael reference)? Then, we have lost the thing that makes us who we are.

One theory I liked was that as humans evolved, we lost some functions that other animals have in order to gain language. (This was seen in many tests with chimps, who have very fast reflexes and high-functioning short-term memory compared to us slow humans.) However, in return for giving up some of the basic survival functions, we gain the ability to speak and have language.

So why did we develop language? It was to share.

We developed language to share information. We shared information on the best places to get food, hunting tactics to use, the least dangerous place to stay for the night, and more. We share in order to survive, and that is what makes us human. While this is a nice way of thinking about it, once I thought for a little while more, I remembered that Homo sapiens aren’t the only species that share and work together to survive. If this was the requirement for being human, things like ants would be right there alongside us.

So, after watching a few YouTube videos on the idea, one stuck out to me that I liked the most. This idea was

“the thing that makes us human is the acknowledgment of being human”

this is not a direct quote, but I still have the idea, so I’m putting it in quotes. Essentially, the only thing that makes us human is acknowledging others’ humanity and your own. I believe that this is the truest answer I have come across, or at least the one I agree with most. If you recognize yourself as a human, that is what makes you human. However, throughout history and today, people are seen as lesser. whether it be in slavery throughout the history of the world or it is if your friend got a lower score than you did on a test, we all view others as lower. We all view ourselves as human; no matter how you put it, we are all people.

pc: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81b6cm9adtL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

46

Usually, I try to write about something worthwhile, about my thoughts, feelings, or events that happened to me, and which would be interesting to share. But today is not that day, today, I want to talk about all sorts of nonsense that has been on my mind lately.

46 days. After precise calculations, I realized that I have exactly 46 days left to go to school. It seems like this number should be much larger, but definitely not in my case. I am the most vivid case of senioritis you can find on planet Earth. Immediately after receiving the acceptance letter from the university I wanted, unexpectedly even to myself, I just stopped worrying about what happens at school. I am absolutely calm about not doing homework, and it doesn’t bother me much. I won’t lie, I never really liked the process of studying in an American school, and the only reason why I truly strived and learned subjects was my admission to the university; now that the goal is achieved, the motivation is completely gone. In my case, trying to find opportunities to reduce my days spent in school buildings, I discovered that some camps take away as much as 5 days! I signed up for many, which significantly reduced my time spent at school this semester. I am glad that I have very little time left until the end of school. I won’t lie, I will be the happiest person on graduation day, during the ceremony I will definitely be crying, but not out of sadness but from overwhelming happiness.

The second thing I wanted to talk about is my sleep. Lately, I’ve been having terrible problems with sleep. I wake up every hour at night, and if I’m unlucky enough to start thinking about something that bothers me, then I can’t sleep for a couple of hours simply because I can’t stop thinking. It bothers me, but I can’t do anything about it.

pc: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b4/1a/31/b41a319f9761af679eb450755ec3bb16.jpg

Toon blast

Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green blocks are all you need.

The rules are simple. Match two or more of the same color to complete the given task. Some call it an off-brand candy crush, and some call it the world’s greatest game. It is simple, but the simplicity of the game makes it fun.

About 4 years ago, my 8th-grade self made a decision that affected my life more than I could ever imagine.

As many in my generation go through, I bought many mobile games in my day, going from one form of short entertainment to another whenever I got bored. While this was an extremely unhealthy childhood, that’s not what this blog is about.

As another day passed, I got another ad on one of my many mobile games. Just as normal, I await for the x to appear in the top corner of the ad when I end up clicking on the ad on accident, causing the app store to open; the game that appeared was Toon Blast.

At first glance, I thought it was nothing more than an off-brand Candy Crunch, yet I decided to give it a try. So off I went, playing a new game like many times before. However, as I played more and more, I found myself spending much of my time on the game.

Eventually, time went on as I cleared level after level, reaching far into the 2, 3, 4, and even 5 thousand levels.

As I look at those thousands of levels cleared, the only thought I tend to have is if I have wasted part of my life on something inconsequential.

Probably so.

pc: https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/gtbXJIRh-y3vS3885bqy-4y8noqfzFym7Ep47eoZuZs_6wd5lc4L0_sWp66lMmD7Olw

Change

It’s that time of year again when school is coming to a close. For some, this is something to celebrate as summer is just around the corner with no school work weighing them down, no test to spend all night studying, and more time to focus on all the hobbies they have been missing out on.

For those people feeling this way, the change is small.

Some, however, are starting to feel a new kind of weight befall them as the days slowly start to count down. As each lunchtime passes and each period goes by, the looming sense of an end to an era is starting to form around their minds. Some parts of them wish that they could spend just a few more moments in this fleeting time of their lives surrounded by friends and memories, while the other part is ready to move on. As time continues, these two parts pull on each other, causing more and more emotions to come forth as time passes.

For these people, the change is big.

There is no cure for change, but without change, there is no growth; without growth, there is no future. Change isn’t something to be stopped because it’s what makes you, and one day, you will return to those places of your past and appreciate all that’s brought you change.

but I still remember.

I still remember our car rides and all the songs we’d sing. I still remember our ice cream trips. I remember our spot and walks on the beach. I still remember our humor and how angry it would make Mom. I still remember our basketball practices, and you coming to every game. I still remember looking for you at church and running up to you to give you peace when you came. I also remember the brunches and donuts we would have after. I still remember you showing off your bike pictures, and the videos of you calling out my uncle at the top of the mountain. I still remember going to my tias house and how much they loved seeing you. I still remember how happy you made everyone when we went to Mexico. I remember how happy you made anyone you met. I still remember how much you cared and how heavily you loved. I still remember how much you ate and how much you loved it. I still remember how nervous you’d get when we’d go swimming, and how you wouldn’t let me go in the deep end in case anything happened. I still remember how you couldn’t swim. I still remember teaching you, and even when you were scared you still cracked jokes. I still remember your stories of ovs at night. I still remember your voice, I have all your voice messages saved. I still listen to them. I still cry every time. I still remember your smile and your laugh.

I still remember you. te amo

tu hija

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PC: me