leaving home, coming home

leaving home, coming home Shuli Approved TM Playlist for this blog post: Taylor Swifts Lover album, but you just alternate between playing Lover and The Archer over and over. If necessary to lighten the mood, finish with one play of Paper Rings. Here is an actual thing I said recently: Ive bought my plane ticket home, but I havent bought my plane ticket home yet. I could get all linguisticy about how meaning is not conveyed just through bare words, but also through context that exists separately in the mind of the speaker and the listener, and miscommunication arises when some part of that context is not shared etc. etc.… But what Id rather talk about is ~my feelings~. (Wow! Writing about your feelings on the internet?! Everyone knows that we bloggers of MIT Admissions would never partake in such an unsavoury activity.) During this busy and exhausting semester, there was not so much time for feelings. I carved out a few hours here and there when it was absolutely necessary to confront something really crucial, and otherwise I just sort of skated by on ignorance. And when the end of the semester came I forgot Id done that, and blithely continued on living as I had been living, until the very end of my very last day on campus, when I sat down on the floor01 listen, its my floor, I know how clean it is, Ill sit on it if I want to to pack. I put on Taylor Swift and by chance the first lyric to the first song went We could leave the Christmas lights up til January This is our place, we make the rules and I oops! Cue me, sobbing haplessly on the floor and simultaneously trying to figure out why. The analogy I came up with is like this: if you have a phone with a bunch of apps, occasionally each app needs to do an update. And if you let the updates pile up, over, say, four months, then you have a lot of updates to do. And if you intend to tap something else and accidentally hit the Update All button, then your phone is gonna crash. Oops. So Ive been using the break to reboot, and do these updates one by one, and also think about why apparently sitting on my floor playing Taylor Swift is my equivalent of hitting update all. And heres what Im thinking: My floor is, well, mine perhaps more than your floor is yours, since I installed mine myself. And although last year I was happy here at MIT, even called it home out loud, it was always with the feeling that things would change: freshman year is different academically; youre still figuring everything out; you have to move02 In EC, freshmen often live in doubles and upperclassmen almost all live in singles. You can stay in the same single for as long as you want, but if youre in a frosh double, you have to vacate it for next years frosh. at the end of the year. And now in sophomore year, I have (hopefully) met/confronted/conquered MIT as it really is, moved into a room I can keep indefinitely if I choose to, and worked to make it my own. Its home. This is our place, we make the rules.  What I didnt notice during the semester is that I no longer, apparently, seem to think of myself as being in Boston when Im at MIT; now, Im just being. And yet when I go home to Toronto I am just being there, too. Like the word home, being is two different words masquerading as one; unlike home, here I cannot define the difference for you, because I dont understand it myself. Like an elementary schooler, haphazardly trying to define a word without using it in the definition, I can only gesture at it and talk around it. When I first came to MIT, I would often pass by a random person in the hallway and mistake them, just momentarily, for a friend or an acquaintance from Toronto. I still do this sometimes, but Ive noticed these past few days Ive been home that now the reverse happens, too, and I see an MIT friend in the face of a Torontonian. I take the subway downtown to meet my high school friends, the same familiar route I used to take to school and back, twice a day for six years. When Im walking somewhere with nothing on my mind, what I always end up thinking about is my feet touching the ground. It doesnt feel like a connection to the earth itself; just to the little scrap of whatever happens to be directly underneath me, so that every time I put a foot down, that piece of tile or carpet or concrete feels like a part of me. Its the same connection and the same feeling on the Toronto subway platform as it is on the path across Killian from building 3 to building 2, but the scrap of ground is entirely different, and so by extension, I am entirely different. And yet I am the same. If you have two places where you are fully yourself, it doesnt have to mean that you have two selves. But it does mean that your one self will feel pretty darn weird. Its not as if Im pulled in two; the weirdness is the lack of pull. Its like… quantum entanglement. Being the same person in two places at exactly the same time, living two lives and vulnerable in twice as many ways. And the feeling is so new. Freshman year, especially in the fall, I struggled a lot with being away from home. I cried in the shower, like, weekly â€" and that wasnt necessarily bad. It was a growing pain. Im not done growing by any means, but I am done with that kind of growth, I think. I probably only cried over leaving home03 we wont talk about all the other things that made me cry :) once or twice this semester, and as with the endings of so many things, I didnt even realize it was happening. Paradoxically, now that Ive noticed its gone, the lack of pain pains me. Its the end of the end of an era; theres nothing left now to hold on to. Help me hold onto you Im turning twenty in this upcoming year. Im turning a lot of things, slowly and sneakily and without my own notice. And I dont really understand whats happening, who Im becoming, what it means to grow and change; I struggle to describe it clearly. All I can do is keep thinking about it, keep working through it, keep living it and trying my best. I was going to end by saying that the only way to gain an understanding of life is to live it, but I think its even more than that: I think that, like a map the size of the territory, the only possible understanding of life is living itself. Post Tagged #shuli gets philosophical listen, it's my floor, I know how clean it is, I'll sit on it if I want to back to text ? In EC, freshmen often live in doubles and upperclassmen almost all live in singles. You can stay in the same single for as long as you want, but if you're in a frosh double, you have to vacate it for next year's frosh. back to text ? we won't talk about all the other things that made me cry :') back to text ?