I kept shockingly good journal entries during my first week of university. Journaling has long been something I care about. A way to record moments in life that are otherwise hard to capture.

Do you remember our photos together?

Tonight I made the fraught decision to reread some of those early university journal entries and I could feel the flood of emotions rushing back to me. That was a good time in my life in many ways, and in many ways it wasn't. Moving to a new place can change you. My father likes to say the best way to quit smoking is to go somewhere new; somewhere your old habits and ways of thinking lose their ground. Moving somewhere new gives you an opportunity to change, but I'd be a fool to think that alone was enough. Your old ways of thinking will follow you wherever you go; the onus is still on you to choose for yourself how you want to be.

What really stands out to me is not the kinds of things I was feeling in those few weeks I was journaling prolifically, but just how much I was feeling. Feelings I can still feel, if I'm willing to put myself back into my old metaphorical shoes. So many feelings, in contrast to what I'm feeling today. I don't think I could describe so many notable things that have happened to me in the last few months as would have happened to me in just a few days in late 2021.

I want those feelings. Not any of those particular feelings, but rather the experiential richness and depth of being somewhere totally new and unfamiliar.

Staring down the business end of another two years of an undergraduate degree in computer science I think it makes sense I'm getting a bit tired of how things always are. Long time readers of njms.ca will notice I've been writing about this feeling a lot recently:

Losing my interiority
I live my life between moments in time
Girlrotting

I think after a few weeks the "experiential richness and depth of being somewhere totally new and unfamiliar" would get pretty exhausting, but I don't think you need to go somewhere totally new and unfamiliar to get a bit of that feeling. I think a bit of that feeling would still be worthwhile. I have so many memories of my first week of university. I have not as many, but still quite a few memories from the first month or two I spent writing every day. I even wrote about this a year ago:

I was happier when I was on Gemini

Because… I guess… I was throwing myself into something new and unfamiliar, even if just a bit, even if just for under an hour a day. It was something.

On a related note, someone¹ sent me an email about my last article with some thoughts on dealing with burnout. Their suggestion was to throw yourself into the good things, to "burn out" over the things you care about. When you feel tired all the time it's easy to feel like you're too tired even to do what you love. I think burnout also meaningfully impacts your ability to do the things you love, but surely the path to a better life involves doing at least a little bit of what makes your life worth living.

Also while digging through old journals, I came across a piece of wisdom I got from some annoying life coach in high school.² They said that if you can't get out of it, you should get into it. Make it something worth doing. This is obviously kind of cope but there's a bit of truth in it, maybe. To live your life with a level of intentionality that shows you care, if not for others than at least for yourself.

Footnotes

¹ … who hasn't given me explicit permission to mention them by name
² This person also got me weirdly into the idea of building a social credit system based on grade point average. Maybe that's a story for another day…

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