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 ❤
19til29 