Personal Development

A Return to the Writing Sphere

Hello 👋🏾 This is Orna Again

While I am writing this, it is currently the day before my senior year of high school. It’s been a year and 3 months since I last posted on here, not for a lack of writing.

I have countless unfinished drafts written here, constantly edited and tailored to perfection and then abandoned because … they were not perfect enough. Sometimes, I try to tailor my own thoughts to this idea that I should be giving value to the reader — which is not a bad idea itself.

However, in efforts of giving value to the reader, I stopped attempting to give value to myself.

For seven months of 2021, I was not in a very good place. I’m not sure what it was — perhaps isolation fatigue, perhaps depressive episodes — I just could not get up from my bed and function normally. There were days that I’d just resort to different levels of escapism — between robotically switching between shows I never enjoyed or consuming poorly written romance books in an effort to feel something other than disgust with myself and fatigue. I just could not clean my room, or get up and function properly with my family. I needed a break from the constant overload of information and forcing myself to be at my #1 most productive self constantly.

Then, my school started in-person — after a year and half of being virtual due to the pandemic. After a year, I saw my best friends again and could interact like a normal person. The counterpoint is that with more of a rigorous schedule forced by school and extracurriculars such as teaching competitive math to underclassmen, our school Science Bowl and Science Olympiad teams, and our Chamber Orchestra, I would stay out from 6 am to 6 pm and come back home exhausted. I barely had any downtime, and there was times where I just could not start homework for a day until it was 10 or 11 PM because I’d always take a nap after coming home.

My biological clock got super messed up, and I would start coming home and just crashing. I would skip meals on certain days just trying to catch up. I started losing control once again. The discipline I was put into for school felt like an all-consuming cycle. Through this, I started ignoring the very things I used to invest so much of my time exploring: Seeker intellectual videos, certain scientific nonfiction, creating protein structures on PyMol, and experimenting with computer vision programs and datasets on Spyder or CoLab. It felt as if everyone else was getting better, whether it was going to conferences, doing their own research, working in prestigious internships or jobs, or creating their own passion projects.

I just felt…stagnant. If you could embody my feelings during this period of my life, it could be this Taylor Swift song (thank you, Siya, I listen to this song like 5x a day). My life felt like it was working towards exams and resume building, but what happened to the Orna-building?

That wasn’t to say that there was no Orna-building during that time. I became (1) fluent-ish in French, (2) played insane professional Chamber Orchestra pieces, (3) presented posters on Random Forest-based machine learning for laryngeal cancer diagnosis (and won) in 3 competitions❗, (4) taught freshmen competitive math and (4) started working at a lab focused on autophagy research in C. elegans. However, these actions are all meticulously planned and fall into a category of achieving with discipline. I have to always have a certain plan for these.

What I did miss during the school year was randomly being able to present to people on various topics, working on hackathons, spontaneous walks and writing articles. I missed the feeling of control over my whole schedule, because whenever I had time, I felt tired.

This summer proved the perfect opportunity towards a refreshing break. For the first time in 4 years, I could finally visit my family in Kolkata, India again. Becoming essentially a babysitter to my cousins was not initially what I had in my summer plans, but going to a place where:

• I was surrounded by family and people who spoke my native language
• I was surrounded by children who would literally pummel me and hug me and play with me :)
• I was surrounded by people who would sit down and talk about anything and everything over cha in the morning and afternoon
• I was surrounded with people who would go on morning 3 hour walks to the lake discussing anything and everything
• I was surrounded with people who would go to the open air markets with me and just absorb the ambience
• I was surrounded by people who ho would with me go on spontaneous trips with me to the mall

~ that was refreshing.

TLDR: The best thing I did for myself that summer was give myself a break.

A resolution I had on my last day in Kolkata was to start writing again. As someone who hadn’t done art again in years, I started going to my cousin’s art classes and picked up water-coloring again. Spending 3 hours a day just focusing on the distribution of color and water on a piece of paper, with a brush, is one of the most enjoyable actions ever. That is also what I feel about my writing.

While I do have to focus on working and resume-building to a degree, I resolve to not worry too much about my balance or disciplines anymore, and focus more on my own actions and taking control of my happiness this year. Writing is my venture to start pouring my words out for everyone to see, but it’s also largely personal. I hope that by writing a few hundred words a day (at the very least) and focusing on done>perfect in terms of certain pieces, I can both grow as a writer and communicate to an audience. While this is discipline focused (and a counterpoint to my article), I hope to tackle a variety of topics while writing on here.

In a few months, I will revisit this article and try to reflect on what I did in the time between. As of now, I have a few unfinished drafts to publish.

Farewell 👋🏾