2024 IAP, Part II, Feelingz

Part II, Feelingz

Have you ever seen the look on someone’s face right after they’ve been kicked in the gut by Bruce Lee? There’s been a couple times in my life when that was me: “Get in the car! (see: arrest)”, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome onboard flight EK97 from Dubai to Boston.” and the most recent one (drumroll please): “I think to love and to be loved is the greatest thing you can find in life.” You would think the more played out a sentence is, the lighter the blow is going to be. You simple buffoon. Does Bruce Lee’s kicks get less awesome the more he does them?

Now why did this leave me looking like Chuck Norris in Enter the Dragon? ( related: Will concussed) The answer didn’t come easy for me. You see, I’ve been pretty out of touch with my own emotions so even the things like “Why does the Moana soundtrack make me cry?” need “figuring out”.

“Unique”, “One-of-a-kind”, “Unparalleled”, “Outstanding”, etc. Being outside the normal distribution has always been romanticized by human kind. (See: mega loser vs popular kid) Before coming to college, I was the outlier datapoint in my friend groups. Not in a bad way, quite the opposite actually. I was the one people envied, the “cooler” one, the one who had best of all worlds. (See: Narcissism, hair flips). Let’s say society measures our accomplishments on two axis, an individual axis and a social axis, then by scoring just above average on the social axis and relying on the individual axis, I was already way out of distribution back home. I was able to comfortably enjoy the mediocrity of being the average dumb teenager with my friends, living through every teenage cliche in the books.

Here, my closest friend “group” is a group of strong-minded extremely independent self-aware individuals. My relationship with them is unlike anything I’ve ever had in my life, non-judgmental, deep to the bones and a thread separate from la vie quotidian. I am constantly pushed and inspired by them, but this also means that the scale on the individual axis keeps getting bigger and bigger. All the work we are doing, all the concepts , his big talk that gets passed around like a football between us, all this wanting to go big, it’s all extremely important and valuable to me and I know and I recognize that value, but damn its all too serious for a bunch of college students.

I got caught off guard by what Jordan said, because I of all people, used to think that. I used to want, with all I had, to love. To love someone as a partner, to love my friends and to love life. I used to want to end up passed out on a couch not remembering what happened on a Saturday night. I used to want to stay up all night talking boys with my girlfriends. I used to want to have crushes for people and fall for them, stay up all night talking to them. I used to want all the dumb college things. At some point in the past year, they lost value to me. I still did them out of an inner feeling of obligation and guilt, but damn it I want to LIVE them. 

This doesn’t trade off against being ambitious or doing shit but rather the opposite, it gives meaning to it. The feeling of excitement and ecstasy of building, of solving a cool problem in the world, is real and important to me. But so is the feeling of living and experiencing all stages of life. This is me accepting that my feelings are valid and that they need recognition. “Living College” is no longer something I am going to account for in my schedule, it is just something that I am going to do.

I wish it had taken something easier than 40 miles of biking on a mountain(see : Carmel to Monterey), two days of isolation and a mental breakdown for me to realize this, but I do now.