About Me — Lina Cepeda

Constantly going through existential crises and failures.

Hi! I’m Lina and I’m a second-year graduate student studying design and emerging technology.

In the Beginning (where else would we start?)
My parents like to do this thing where they tell people that at the beginning of my life, it took my mother three days of labor to bring me into the world. I came out silent, off-putting, and was the firstborn daughter in a family full of boys. My father named me after himself, slapped me on the back, and said that my coming into this world was one of the most s̶t̶r̶e̶s̶s̶f̶u̶l̶ amazing moments of his life.

And that, I suppose, is how my parents would sum me up: stubborn, persistent, and pretty dang amazing. (That last part is mandatory because, they’re, ya know, my parents).

I was born and spent part of my childhood in the Philippines. My father was a surgeon and my mother raised me with her wit and ferocity. I grew up with two brothers, plopped down into the middle between the two. Growing up, I considered them my bookends — two vastly different forces holding me in place. My older brother, Raphael, taught me silent contemplation while my younger brother, Martin, showed me how to fight with words and fists. When I was 8 years old, my parents woke me up one day before the sun rose, ushered my brothers and me on a plane, and told us we were going on “vacation.”

That vacation became the rest of my life.

The Beginning of the Middle
Adjusting to life in America was difficult. Growing up, I was painfully anxious and shy, desperate to understand the culture that I had been thrown into. I devoured history and popular culture and general knowledge through books and movies in order to better mold myself into an “American.” Movies like Back to the Future taught me about 1980s slang, books like Twilight showed me teenage fandom culture (don’t judge, ok), and I practiced how to pronounce words so that my accent became nothing more than a memory of a boy making fun of how I said “tree” and “three” in middle school.

My parents pushed my brothers (there were now three of them, unfortunately) and me to do the best we could in school but I was middling in Math and Science, average in everything else, and really only wanted to read and daydream most of the time. When I graduated from my small-town-next-to-cow-fields-high school, I flew across the country to attend Syracuse University without having traveled further east than Arizona before.

College was strange. I was a first-generation woman of color attending a PWI that had frat boys running around on campus wearing Vineyard Vines and boat shoes. But, over the next four years, I tried everything. I joined clubs, studied abroad, pledged a sorority (dropped out after three semesters), and even ended up making some of the best memories I have.

Snippets
In the summer between Sophomore and Junior year, I spent 6 months in Ghana researching child labor laws and working with child trafficking victims. I interned with the New York State Assembly, acting as some sort of unpaid analyst researching GMOs and minimum wage increase laws. I worked with refugees and asylum seekers for a summer with the International Rescue Committee right when Trump enacted the Muslim ban. I mentored underprivileged children in the Syracuse School District for three years. I studied abroad in Hong Kong and researched international terrorism. And I was accepted into the Peace Corps.

I say all of the above because I’m a planner. As a child, I made lists every day. And within those lists were my goals. And those goals were my life. Everything in my life was happening according to plan. Or so I thought…

Failure
I graduated from college, the first in my family to attend in the United States. I had planned to start my placement in the Peace Corps when I decided to do a complete 180. I no longer knew what I wanted to do in life and I no longer had any desire to follow my list of goals. I was confused and I was failing. In the midst of my memories and accomplishments at Syracuse, I experienced incredibly crippling bouts of depression and anxiety, failed classes, and started on a path of continuous self-doubt that still exists to this day. I no longer knew who I was or what I wanted to do. So what did I do?

(This is where a movie montage would come in and shows me meeting a rich man, falling in love, and living happily ever after.

Unfortunately, life’s not a movie but if there’s any takers out there, I’m single!)

Like any stereotypical post-grad millennial, I ran away from my problems and chose escapism instead. #noragrets (okay, maybe some)

Still Failing!
I ended up in New York, New York, the home of Carrie Bradshaw, Vito Corleone, and pizza rat. I had never really visited the Big Apple and I ended up living in a matchbox room with 4 other roommates while cockroaches scuttled by me at night. I got a job as an assistant, barely paid my bills, and tried to be an adult. In the process of failing, I tried a lot of things. I started a podcast, watched movies in the theatre every week, went to concerts, and started learning design. I was living. And I eventually realized two things: 1) life is hard. 2) I was always going to fail.

One day, in the midst of picking up 6 dozen bagels for my company’s breakfast, I heard a voice in my head. “There is no success without failure.” It’s something my father’s always told me. And I remember rolling my eyes right then and there at Brooklyn Bagel.

But later that night, I got home and made a list.

The first one in years.

And it was a list of everything I wanted to do. I called it “Lina’s Failures.” Because you see, as I said in the beginning, I’m pretty dang stubborn. And I like to take life pretty head-on. And one of the things that had become my biggest fear over the course of my life was the fear of failing. And I realized that for me, there’s never going to be a time when I overcome that. I am always going to be afraid of failure. But I needed to become comfortable with that fear.

Still the Beginning…
When the pandemic hit, I decided to apply to grad school (it’s on my list!). It was my first foray into strategic failure. To my great surprise, I was accepted. In August 2020, I packed my bags and headed to Chicago (I had never been to Chicago…do you sense a pattern here??). Since then, I’ve failed. A lot. But also have learned a lot. And succeeded some.

So here I am, a 25-year-old millennial (soon to be 26 but please don’t remind me because I think I’ll throw up), still trying to figure life out and still living through failure. My name’s Lina. I like design, storytelling through tech, reading fantasy books, traveling, and Peruvian food.

It’s nice to meet you.