Hi Annette, hope I can still contribute some writings to this platform. The TF section in my Onenote is filled with unfinished stories and thoughts, and for a while after school started, I was anxious to complete and share them. But today I decided to start posting the unfinished, the unpolished, the incoherent as well, just in the way they came to me. Life is incoherent, and is not meant to be coherent in the first place, after all.

I was eating snacks and watching a TED talk after today’s climbing session. It was one of those poignant and insightful talks that everybody needs. I’ve been having a difficult time these past few weeks. All my symptoms just came back to me, and I found myself crying a lot. “The more you believe that you can buy/consume your way out of anxiety and depression,” said the speaker. I smirked. It was such a truism that was impossible to really believe in and practice within the consumerist culture. Then it hit me that I am perfectly capable of having a simple, happy life, and solving problems through other means, like I did in the mountains in Mongolia. I finally realized that part of the reason why I was so happy in the mountains was that I got to know, for the first time, that I was capable of being perfectly and unconditionally happy. I am not a naturally unhappy person, and I need to know that and stop blaming myself for being unhappy.