Kiddie Coaster
I’ve recently found myself with unusually large reservoirs of energy. It’s not a new feeling — I’ve always been a talkative, energetic entity — probably too energetic for my own good, but this form of energy feels different. I feel the means to strive to a larger purpose, the drive to push through the crippling uncertainties and insecurities that plagued me in the past and simply get things done. Usually, I could only call on this energy when I was backed into a corner with deadlines or other external expectations, but now it feels like every step, every word, every one of my actions is imbued with this energy.
Then again, this sometimes feels like a fleeting feeling; I was just in a funk a week ago. I found out my best friend might be leaving the Bay, I felt more and more distance from a new friend, I found myself in an interesting, new, caregiving role with an old friend that felt foreign yet familiar to me, and I got into a funk. The type of funk that led to me laying in bed until noon or 1 PM on Saturday and Sunday. The funk that found me streaming through all of Legends of Tomorrow (super dope show by the way) on Netflix. The funk that required me to talk with close friends to find a sense of what was going on and what I should do. The type of funk that killed my energy.
And then the energy was back. Suddenly, I felt imbued with that persistence and attitude that endears me to some and annoys others. It was a switch. As I found my bearings and dove back into my day-to-day shenanigans by doing background readings for my research, reorganizing and strategizing for Luso Labs and studying for an exam, I found my old self and realized something: I had just gone through an emotional cycle — my first one in around a year.
I was used to going through cycles. They became commonplace in my last 3 years at Columbia — weeks that I felt on top of the world followed by weeks where it seemed like nothing was going right. Find me in a troubled state, and my friends knew to wait just 2 weeks before I was in an elated state. My life felt like a an emotional rollercoaster, and it was very destructive.
But it was the only life that I knew at the time. It helped me find the energy and hone my drive to get through 3 stressful yet productive years of school. While freshmen year felt like a constant party, my last 3 years were definitely not. Instead of finding myself in the familiar comforts of many friends at a party or group dinner on the weekends, I’d be grinding away on a problem set, organizing a new event or initiative for a school club, pushing out new ideas and visions for my research, or doing none of that and just imagining what the future would hold from my newfound dedication to my career. These sessions were solitary — very productive but also very lonely, and as a result, the emotional cycles became a fact of life for this extreme extrovert. They felt intrinsically tied to being extremely efficient and productive by forcing me into isolation to get more work done. It sucked, but it felt like it was needed then, and it honestly played a huge part in getting me to where I am right now.
My last cycle was about a year ago — around the time of graduation. The days leading up to graduation found me on the downswing, worrying how the old and new relationships that I had built at Columbia would persist and imagining alternatives on how I could have spent my 4 years at Morningside Heights. I had made some strong relationships with some amazing people in the past year, and I was worried about the frailty of those friendships when I’d find myself on another coast. On the flip side, some of my old friendships had broken down from attrition due to time, arguments and stupid mistakes, and my mind had spent most of my last semester in college wondering how I could reinforce, or even fix, these relationships. My friends and relationships have always been an instrumental part of my core identity, my energy, and I wanted to carry that energy with me after college because of its familiarity. I was afraid of how I would change at Stanford as a result of losing these core friendships, and I worried about giving those friendships some permanence.
I found myself back at Columbia around six weeks ago. It was my first time on campus in the midst of a school year after I had graduated. Nothing had changed — people were still rushing to class, faces glued to their phones like before, only now these faces weren’t familiar. A new batch of excited, young world-shakers had taken up the roles of the freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors of Columbia University, and now I was the old alum. In one way, this continuum was reassuring in that it was a testament of the permanence of the Columbia lifestyle; in another, it showed that my graduation-era fear of my own impermanence on campus was absolutely correct. I felt in a sense that I had been replaced, but it felt right, and if anything, reassuring. Just as I had moved on to the Stanford life, Columbia and my friends at Columbia had moved on to another cohort of people to assume the positions, roles and responsibilities that my peers had once held. Things were good for all of us.
The same couldn’t be said for all my friendships at Columbia — one of the few things that I had (in hindsight, rightfully) worried about when the ides of graduation were nearing. While I got to catch up with a lot of people (102 30-minute coffee-chats plus other dinners, parties, and chill hang-outs per my trusty Google calendar), I also noticed the people I didn’t get to catch up with — close friends who didn’t respond to my excited request to catch-up or strangely took my invitation as an opportunity to express their frustrations with me. These were my previous fears personified — the abrupt termination of important friendships, and I expected to feel devastated.
I didn’t.
I think that this new, constant source of energy that’s become a core part of myself since I came to Stanford led to this unexpected reaction. Instead of staying hurt and upset over the end of the old friendships, I allowed myself to be sad for some time and then finally shifted back to my equilibrium state of being content yet ambitious while never developing any long-term ill feelings. Instead of being angry that things had ended, I finally found myself just being happy and appreciative that they had happened in the first place and open to these people one day being a part of my life again while yet not expecting them to. I finally felt content — something I definitely could not say I had ever truly been while at Columbia.
I used to be scared of becoming content while at Columbia. To me, the idea of being content meant a loss of drive that is a core part of my self-identity and helped me adapt to the fast-paced lifestyle of Columbia and New York City. But it took me moving clear across the country to fully understand, and more importantly accept, that I wanted and needed to become content in some aspects of my life like my friends while resisting being content in other aspects like my career. (Shoutout to Dan Schlosser for pointing this out at the very beginning of my senior year at Columbia — I’m a slow learner) In this way, I think that I’ve finally found the peace that I’ve been seeking while remaining the same, fast-paced person that I so strongly identify with.
Even with this “revelation,” the emotional cycles haven’t ended. I’m in a new place with new, amazing friends and doing inspiring, challenging research while exploring the intricacies of entrepreneurship and understanding the larger landscape of diagnostic medical devices. It is the dream, but a vestige of my old life at Columbia remains with these cycles. It feels like a reminder of old insecurities, but it also shows me how far I’ve come to building a truly healthy mindset. Luckily, I think the cycles will end soon; after all, it’s taken a year for one to poke its ugly head and its impact was a small fraction of my cycles at Columbia. I’m confident that in a few months, the emotional cycles will just fade away, and these new reservoirs of energy that I draw from the people, passions and priorities of my life will remain.
The rollercoaster has become a kiddie coaster, and I couldn’t be happier.
