I’m on my way home now, and the feelings are complicated. I still want to write about ephemerality, though it feels almost overly talked about. I’m a little sad, probably because the vacation is ending. Or maybe because I may never return to that little island.

Places can feel strangely similar to people that way. You encounter each other for a while, and then one day you leave without knowing whether you’ll ever meet again. Goodbyes are always hard, especially when you know there’s a chance this one is the last.

I think what’s actually hitting me is the quiet realization of: this is it.

I’m not consciously thinking about it all the time. It feels more like something my brain is processing somewhere underneath everything else. The trip is ending. There isn’t really anything left to do, anything I could have done differently, or some better version of it still waiting for me. This was the trip. And somehow, that sentence feels heavier than I expected.

I’m not devastated. I’m tired. I want to go home. Part of me is completely ready for this to be over. And yet there’s still this strange resistance underneath it all, like I want to hold the moment still for just a little longer before it becomes something I can only refer to in the past tense.

Maybe that’s why the feeling is so hard to name. I don’t necessarily want to stay longer. I don’t think another day, another beach, another photo would make it more complete. I just haven’t fully processed the fact that there is no more later left inside this trip.

This is it.

Not in a tragic way. Not even in a particularly sad way. Just in that very final way that makes something feel suddenly fragile the moment it starts becoming a memory.

As cliché as it sounds, I guess the end of one journey really is the beginning of another. Tan lines will disappear. Souvenirs might get lost. I’ll probably forget the exact shade of blue from a particular morning. But I think I’ll remember that I wanted to remember.

A few years ago, I thought remembering meant preserving every detail. It turns out I can’t. Nobody really can. I don’t remember the exact temperature of the sun from back then, but I remember the girl who was trying so hard not to forget it. I remember her anxiety about the moment slipping away while she was still inside it. Somehow, I think I kept that promise.

Maybe this trip will become the same kind of memory. I won’t be able to recreate the warmth of the sun on my skin, the salty taste on my tongue, or that particular blankness in my head. But I’ll remember that they were there.

And what did I actually learn from this trip? Honestly, not much. I didn’t come up with any profound ideas like I thought I would. There was no moment of enlightenment over coffee by the Mediterranean. I’m almost a little upset that I’m not returning home with something “useful,” as if a month away should have produced some kind of intellectual return on investment.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’m allowed to do something without extracting a lesson from it. Maybe I can travel just because I wanted to travel. Swim because I wanted to swim. Sit under the sun because it felt nice.

I used to think staying in the present meant noticing everything intensely enough that I would remember it forever. I also thought meaningful moments were supposed to stir up some enormous emotion — happiness, sadness, awe, anything strong enough to prove that I was really there. But maybe being present sometimes feels like absolutely nothing.

Maybe it’s staring at shiny water with a blank brain. Maybe I don’t need to be overwhelmed with happiness or devastated by sadness to know that I’m alive. Maybe just being there was enough.

Maybe part of what hurts about coming home is that I’m not just leaving a place behind. I’m leaving behind a version of myself that only really existed there. The version of me who woke up without school pressing on her, who sat under the sun with a blank brain, who had nowhere particularly urgent to be. She’s still me, obviously. But I can’t inhabit her in quite the same way anymore. Maybe that’s why coming home feels a little like loss, even when I wanted to come home.

Anyway. Back to reality. School starts in a few days. Absolutely not ready. My body is still grieving the vacation while my brain is already panicking about the amount of work waiting for me. Time to grind, I guess.

Hope you are doing well! And happy (or not) first day of school 🥴

Love,

Lin ❤

我现在在回家的路上，心情有点复杂。我还是很想写“无常”这件事，只是这个主题好像已经被说得太多了。我有一点难过，可能是因为假期快结束了。也可能只是因为，我或许再也不会回到那个小岛。

有时候，地方和人很像。你们偶然相遇，相处一阵子，然后某一天你离开，却不知道以后还会不会再见。告别总是很难，尤其是在你知道，这一次可能就是最后一次的时候。

我想，真正击中我的，其实是一个很安静的念头：就到这里了。

我并不是一直有意识地想着这件事。更像是我的大脑在某个更深的地方，悄悄消化这个事实：这趟旅行要结束了。已经没有什么还没做的事，也没有什么“如果当时怎样就会更好”的可能，更没有一个更完美的版本还在后面等着我。这就是这趟旅行了。不知道为什么，这句话比我想象中更沉。

我没有难过到崩溃。我只是累了，也想回家。我的一部分已经完全准备好让这趟旅行结束。可与此同时，心里又有一点说不上来的抗拒，好像在它彻底变成过去之前，我还想让这一刻多停留一会儿。

也许这就是为什么这种感觉这么难命名。我并不是真的想再多待几天。我也不觉得多一天、多一个海滩、多拍一张照片，就会让这趟旅行变得更完整。我只是还没有完全接受：这趟旅程里，已经没有“以后再说”了。

就到这里了。

不是悲剧性的。甚至也不算特别悲伤。只是当一件事开始变成回忆时，那种终结感会突然让它显得很脆弱。

虽然听起来很俗套，但一段旅程的结束，大概真的也是下一段旅程的开始。晒痕会慢慢褪掉，纪念品可能会弄丢，我大概也会忘记某个清晨海水究竟是哪一种蓝。但我想，我会记得——我曾经那么想记住这一切。

几年前，我以为“记住”就是把一个瞬间的所有细节都完整保存下来。后来才发现，我做不到。其实谁也做不到。我已经不记得当时太阳落在皮肤上的具体温度了，可我还记得那个拼命想把它记住的女孩。我记得她害怕这一刻在自己还身处其中时，就已经开始流逝的那种焦虑。某种意义上，我想，我还是兑现了当时的承诺。

也许这趟旅行以后也会变成这样的记忆。我不会再真正重现太阳晒在皮肤上的温度，舌尖上咸咸的海水味，或者脑子里那种特别的空白。但我会记得，它们曾经存在过。

所以，这趟旅行到底教会了我什么？说实话，好像也没什么。我没有像自己原本想象的那样想出什么深刻的道理，也没有坐在地中海边喝着咖啡，突然迎来某个顿悟时刻。我甚至有一点不甘心，觉得自己回家时居然没有带回什么“有用”的东西——仿佛离开一个月，就理应获得某种精神层面的投资回报。但也许，这反而就是重点。

也许我可以做一件事，而不必非要从中提炼出什么人生道理。也许旅行可以只是因为我想去旅行，游泳只是因为我想游泳，坐在太阳底下，也只是因为那一刻很舒服。

以前我总觉得，活在当下，就是要把每一个细节都感受得足够强烈，强烈到以后永远不会忘记。我也总觉得，真正有意义的时刻，应该激起某种巨大的情绪——快乐、悲伤、震撼，随便什么都好，只要足够强烈，强烈到可以证明：我真的在这里。可也许，有时候，活在当下的感觉就是——什么都没有。也许只是盯着闪闪发光的海面，脑子里一片空白。也许我不需要极度快乐，也不需要极度悲伤，才能证明自己正在活着。也许，仅仅在那里，就已经足够了。

也许，回家之所以让人有点难受，是因为我离开的不只是一个地方。我也把一个只在那段旅程里存在过的自己留在了那里。那个早上醒来不用立刻被学校和任务压住的我，那个可以坐在太阳底下发着呆、脑子里什么都不想的我，那个没有什么非做不可、也没有哪里非去不可的我。当然，她还是我。只是现在的我，已经没办法再以完全相同的方式活成她了。也许这就是为什么，哪怕我明明也想回家，真正回来以后，心里还是会有一点像失去了什么。

好了，回归现实。学校过几天就要开学了。我完全没有准备好。我的身体还在为假期结束而哀悼，我的大脑却已经开始为接下来堆成山的事情焦虑。行吧，该卷了。

希望你一切都好！也祝你开学快乐（或者不快乐）🥴

祝好，

小黄同学 ❤

TL;DR: around 5min read. I perceived myself being perceived. Shit got philosophical lol.

For most of the trip, I had been surprisingly carefree about what I posted. I chose photos because I liked them. I wrote stupid captions because they made me laugh. I wasn’t completely unaware of being perceived, I don’t think I ever am, but the audience had become blurry enough to stay in the background. Then, at some point, one particular pair of eyes entered my consciousness.

Nothing really happened. There was no conversation, no dramatic encounter, nothing that should have changed the way I was experiencing my trip. But somehow, simply becoming aware that this person might be watching was enough. Almost immediately, I could feel my attention rearranging itself.

Somewhere in the back of my mind appeared a tiny new consideration: I know this person might see this.

That tiny shift got me thinking about audiences in general. I started this blog because I wanted somewhere to rant. That was pretty much it. I never sat down and imagined a target audience or wondered who exactly I was writing for (well, maybe it ain’t so true…). I just had a loud brain and needed somewhere for all the noise to go. And yet, every time I write something I know I might publish, there is an audience somewhere in the room.

Not an actual audience. Most people are far too busy living their own lives to spend much time thinking about mine. I know that because I’m exactly the same. I scroll past other people’s posts. I forget what they were wearing. I read something, think about it for a few minutes, and return to whatever little plotline I’m currently occupied with.

Still, the possibility of being seen changes something.

I notice it in the smallest decisions. A sentence gets rewritten because I imagine how it might sound to someone else. A photo suddenly looks different once I remember that other people will see it. A joke becomes slightly more deliberate. None of this feels particularly dishonest. Most of the time, I’m still posting whatever the hell I want. But somewhere in the background sits this potential audience, quietly participating in decisions they will probably never know they influenced. And that was the strange part: the audience didn’t even have to be watching.

I think that’s what I had misunderstood. I’m not really micromanaging other people’s perception of me. How could I? I have no idea what they’re thinking. What I’m actually micromanaging is my imagination of their perception.

Once I noticed that, the little changes became almost embarrassingly easy to catch. I would wonder whether I looked good in a photo I had liked perfectly well five minutes ago. I’d think a little harder about the caption. I’d become slightly more interested in appearing interesting. Nothing dramatic enough to turn me into another person—just these tiny shifts in attention, as if another version of myself had quietly stepped behind my shoulder and started making suggestions.

That used to make me wonder whether I was being fake. Now I’m not sure performance and authenticity are opposites at all.

Maybe there is no version of me completely untouched by an audience. Even this blog, the place I created specifically to dump the mess inside my head, is public. If I wanted absolutely no one to see these thoughts, I could keep a journal. I do that too. A journal asks nothing from the outside world. It takes whatever my brain needs to throw away and keeps it for me. A blog feels different. It’s almost like a section of my journal that I’ve decided can leave the house.

Maybe authenticity, then, isn’t the absence of performance. Maybe it’s retaining authorship while performing. I don’t need to stop noticing the audience. I don’t even think I want to. I just want to notice when their imagined gaze enters the room, when a photo I loved becomes a photo I start questioning, when something I wanted to say becomes something I think someone else might want to hear.

The performance itself may not be the problem. Maybe I just want to know when I’m no longer the one holding the pen.

But there’s something slightly dishonest about pretending I’d rather write without an audience. I wouldn’t.

A friend texted me after reading my last essay. She had actually read it, not skimmed the first paragraph, not clicked the link and disappeared, but read it. I could tell from what she said. I was embarrassingly happy. Surprised as hell, too. The essay was kind of long, and in today’s TikTok era, eight minutes somehow feels like a serious commitment.

I was proud of my eight-minute work. But somehow, I was even prouder of the girl who sat down, read the whole thing, and then came back to tell me about Ludwig Wittgenstein.

And that made me wonder: if I write only because my brain needs somewhere to go, why did being carefully read make me so happy?

Maybe because writing and being read satisfy two different needs. Writing gives my thoughts somewhere to go. Being read tells me they landed somewhere.

I think that’s what I’m looking for when I publish something: not necessarily attention, but resonance.

If all I needed was somewhere to dump the waste accumulating in my head, I already have a journal. Journaling is private disposal. It doesn’t need to be understood. Half the time, it barely needs to make sense. My blog overlaps with that, but it isn’t quite the same. It’s more like a section of my journal that I’ve decided can leave the house. Once it leaves, I want there to be at least the possibility that someone might find it.

Maybe nobody reads a particular essay today. Maybe five people do. Maybe someone reads it carefully enough to send me Wittgenstein afterwards. Maybe the person it eventually reaches is thirty-five-year-old me, stumbling across the thoughts of someone she vaguely remembers being.

I don’t need a crowd. But I think I need the possibility of resonance.

That’s the end for today’s content. I have to say though, Europe is a FINE place for writing. Highly recommend. Thank you for making it this far, you have no idea how grateful I am.

Love,

Lin ❤

TL;DR: 8-minute read. I wanted to write something deep. Instead, I got tanned, motion sick, existentially bored, and somehow ended up questioning my entire identity. Europe has been fun though (I’m still here, so there’s a decent chance more rambling is on the way). Thanks to GPT for helping me untangle my brain.

Oh well, it’s been a long, long time since I last blogged. So, hello again. How have you been? I’m doing well, thanks for asking. It’s been… almost nine months. Oops.

A lot has happened since then. I turned twenty-five a couple of months ago. I survived my second year of medical school. Survived is probably the right word. Looking from the outside, progressing from second year to third year sounds like the most ordinary thing in the world. It wasn’t. It was two years of constantly wondering whether I belonged here, followed by somehow ending up here anyway. It was a bigger deal than any transcript could ever capture, so yes, I’m proud of myself. Oh, and I kind of stopped playing hockey for a while because, well… med school happened. (Also because putting on all that gear is a workout on its own.) Definitely need to get back to it ASAP.

I’m writing this somewhere in Europe. The Mediterranean had been one of those dreams I’d quietly carried around for years. I imagined impossibly blue water, slow mornings by the sea, ferries between little islands, and finally jumping into that famous blue. Reality, as it turns out, came with water that was cold af, motion sickness, sunscreen in my eyes, and the occasional boredom that somehow sneaks into every beautiful place once the coffee is gone. None of those things were what stayed with me the most. Instead, they quietly woke up something else, an urge to write.

It’s strange. I’ve had this urge to write for days now. Not journal. Not document where I went or what I ate. Write. The urge felt almost physical, like wanting to scratch somewhere I couldn’t quite reach.

So I started collecting hotel notepads for my “big essay.” Every hotel seemed to have one sitting beside the phone, and every time I spotted it, I thought, this is it. This is where the essay begins. It never did. The pages filled with things like “good pasta,” “turquoise water,” and “boat at 11.” Perfectly accurate. Completely unsatisfying.

Every night, I went to bed just a little disappointed. Not because the days weren’t beautiful, but because I knew I wasn’t trying to write a travel journal. I wasn’t trying to describe where I’d been. I was trying to give shape to something I couldn’t even identify.

I didn’t want to describe the color of the sea. I wanted to describe the feeling I couldn’t name. Then, somewhere over turquoise water, a word quietly appeared.

Identity.

No outline. No argument. Just a word that somehow felt right before it made any sense. I immediately opened Notion and confidently typed: Let’s talk about identity. Then I frowned.

I tried anyway. Several paragraphs later, I had managed to produce something that sounded much more philosophical than true. I left the page open. Maybe I’d come back to it. Maybe I wouldn’t. For the next few days, nothing happened. At least, nothing that looked like writing.

Looking back, I think I was waiting for the essay to arrive. Instead, boredom arrived first. I always imagined boredom as doing nothing. Turns out it isn’t nothing at all. It’s surprisingly physical. My body kept negotiating with the mattress as if the right position might somehow produce a different emotion. I didn’t want my phone. I didn’t want to play video games. I didn’t even want entertainment. I just wanted the feeling to stop. It was one of the strangest sensations I’ve ever noticed.

The funny thing is, writing wasn’t anywhere on my mind while I was lying there. I had spent the first half of the trip wondering why I couldn’t write. It turns out I had the timing backwards. Writing doesn’t happen during the moment. It happens afterwards. The structure arrived only after the boredom had already passed. Maybe writing isn’t the experience itself. It’s what happens after experience has had enough time to settle into language.

Before this trip, I imagined I’d spend long mornings by the sea thinking about life. Somehow, I pictured myself becoming philosophical simply because I finally had the time. Reality turned out to be much less romantic. My mind wasn’t full of ideas. It was empty. Not peaceful empty. Just… empty. I wasn’t reflecting. I wasn’t discovering profound truths over coffee. Most of the time, I was simply existing. And somehow, existing turned out to be much harder than thinking. At first, I thought I was wasting the silence. Now I wonder if I misunderstood what silence was supposed to do.

Once the boredom had passed, and once the words finally started coming back, I realized something else had quietly returned with them. It was only afterwards that I started wondering whether identity had ever really left the room. Was identity really what I wanted to write about? Or did it simply sound philosophical enough to trick me into believing I had something meaningful to say?

I’ve always been suspicious of words that arrive too confidently. Every time I think I’ve finally found the right one, it slowly stops fitting. Before this trip, I was convinced I wanted to write about ephemerality. Then that feeling quietly disappeared. Or maybe it transformed into something else before I had the chance to recognize it.

Maybe that’s why labels suddenly felt so important. During the semester, I rarely question who I am. Medical student. Researcher. Gym girl. Daughter. My days quietly answer that question for me. On a cruise ship, most of those answers disappeared. I wasn’t reading papers. I wasn’t lifting weights. I wasn’t sitting in classrooms. Even “writer” felt ridiculous because I couldn’t write. One by one, the labels quietly stepped outside. I kept expecting to find someone underneath them. Instead, I found silence.

It wasn’t the first time I’d met this feeling. During my gap year, when I was trying to decide whether to go into medicine, I spent months searching for the version of myself that everyone talks about. The one you’re supposedly meant to discover once you strip away expectations. I never found anything. I found uncertainty. I found too much space. Eventually, I chose medicine. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I chose it because I loved it enough — or because I couldn’t bear the nothingness any longer.

That decision has followed me ever since. People often ask why medicine. The older I get, the less confident I become in my answer. Sometimes I say curiosity. Sometimes I say science. Sometimes I say I wanted to help people. Lately, another answer has been quietly bothering me. I don’t really know who I am outside of it. For the longest time, I thought my life had already chosen its direction. STEM. Medicine. Research. Data. Papers. I couldn’t imagine myself writing novels. I couldn’t sit through history books. The humanities felt like someone else’s home.

Maybe that’s why this trip surprised me so much. Instead of reading papers, I found myself obsessing over essays. It occurred to me that maybe this entire time I wasn’t searching for a topic. I was searching for a language capable of carrying the feeling. Whenever this writing itch appears, I become oddly sad that I can’t paint. I imagine painters carrying around feelings that can simply become colors. I carry around words instead.

I’ve complained about the limitations of language for years. Every feeling becomes smaller the moment it turns into a sentence. Every sentence is already a translation. By the time they reach the page, they’ve already become something else.

Then again… Maybe painters look at their canvases and wish they could write. Maybe every medium feels inadequate from the inside. Maybe identity was only the first word that knocked on the door. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be another word entirely. The only thing that has remained constant is the urge itself — the desire to take something I can’t quite hold and leave it somewhere outside myself. Maybe that’s all writing has ever been. Not explaining. Not concluding. Not even understanding. Just sitting with something long enough that it slowly becomes words. And maybe that’s enough.

I started this trip looking for an essay. I thought it would be about identity. Instead, it turned out to be about the strange silence that appears when identity has nothing obvious to attach itself to. Maybe labels aren’t just limitations. Maybe they are landmarks. They are not there to tell us who we are forever, just enough to keep us oriented while we continue becoming. Looking back, maybe the essay had already begun on those hotel notepads. They never contained the right words. They simply proved I had already started looking.

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations — you’ve officially survived my rambling. Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful day!

With tons of love,

Lin ❤