The first half of 2018 and the second half of 2018 feel lifetimes apart. I couldn’t imagine that January and December were of the same year if it wasn’t for this recap. For the first time in a long time, I’m no longer a student. With that previous identity stripped from me, I need to figure out who I am and what I want to do next. That’s what the second half of 2018 was all about, but I still haven’t quite figured it out yet. Perhaps one day I’ll share the cycle of emotions and identity crises I’ve gone through in the last few months, but right now it makes me anxious to sort through that Past when I’m trying to figure out the Future and not break down in the Now. And so, all I can do is focus on the light…

My favourite posts were all published during the second half of the year, post-grad. I suppose that it’s because I’ve had a lot more time to think, resulting in more posts that I’m proud of. Or perhaps I’m simply in a different headspace now than I was before, so the newer posts resonate more deeply with me.

You’d think that as you got older, you’d know more, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I feel like I actually know less. If you think about it again, it’s not that crazy a notion; the more you learn, the more you realise there is to learn. Your simplistic preconceptions become tangled in complicated nuance. It would be naive to think you could possibly know everything about anything. But rather than let this be a disheartening challenge to overcome, let this gift be an opportunity to embrace.

I missed a day of Blogmas for the first time. I even prepped one post before flying off for the holidays to give myself a little leeway, but when I arrived home, I was simply too tired, and then I spent the whole next day at a hair salon, away from my laptop. Besides that, the internet situation in China is proving to be more difficult than I anticipated. I always seem to underestimate how slow the internet can truly be. It’s mostly that my house has especially bad connection, but the internet in China overall is still pretty slow. So even though I said that being in China wouldn’t affect the content I produce, it might and it has.

I will forever associate museums with The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: “Yet the museum always felt like a holiday; and once we were inside with the glad roar of tourists all around us, I felt strangely insulated from whatever else the day might hold in store.” Within these walls, everything is still. You can hear your own shoes clacking against the floor. You drift between rooms and each one has something new. Yet you don’t feel crowded. You feel like you can breathe in this large open space. You walk at your own pace. There’s no such thing as too slow or too fast.

I recently read an article in Mind This Magazine by Ilya Yefremov that referenced Nobel-laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s TED Talk, in which he talked about how the mind is divided into the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self,” where the experiencing self “perceives the world in the immediacy of the moment” and the remembering self “reflects on the moments that have passed and constructs a narrative which serves as the basis for our memories.” Yefremov adopts this framework and asks, “Is it not almost better to focus on the more lasting world – the world of the remembering self – a world which we can affect?”

I found her advocation for the remembering self striking, because the common argument in the modern day seems to be for the experiencing self. We always hear “be more present.” And for good reason. We spend a lot of time behind our screens, and even when we’re out experiencing things, we feel this urge to document everything, whether for social media or otherwise, so we pull out a screen and snap some shots.

But perhaps the experiencing self and the remembering self don’t need to be at odds with each other. Yes, be present. But that doesn’t mean we need to devalue the remembering self in order to do so. In fact, the remembering self is what this virtual space is all about. It’s why I started blogging. And so, even though it’s March, I am writing this for my remembering self. When I look back on it, perhaps at the end of 2018, it won’t matter that I posted in March rather than January, but it will matter that I posted at all.