Self-permanence (meta note on writing)

It’s happening — I’m finally getting around to that New Year’s resolution of starting to write. Just six or so months late, but still proud of myself for actually starting to do it so late in the year. I feel like for other things, it’s like, if by six months in you haven’t started to do it, there’s no hope for that thing actually happening bud. But here I am!

I thought I’d start with a meta note on my thoughts on writing itself and what my goals are. Some of the first goals that come to mind are recovering my writing skills (which definitely last peaked during college app season), sharing my experiences and anything that could be helpful for others, and learning more about myself and finding my voice.

One of the major goals I’ve considered, though, is recording my thoughts, perspectives, and opinions so that I can save them. Each piece is a snapshot of any abstract collection of fleeting, ephemeral ideas in my mind, pinned down and transformed into components that can be dissected and scrutinized for the rest of eternity. Not assuming that these pieces will be especially valuable for anyone for the rest of time — unless humans from the future want to analyze the effects of a year of quarantine on human beings and look into the causes for my sometimes degenerate, existential thoughts (oof).

In terms of the value I personally gain from recording my mind at some point in time, it’s a way to solidify my view of the world and myself and remember it later on. Instead of querying the entire rusty database of my mind every time I need to find something, I create a new, more concise table of items, accessed efficiently through recency bias (a cache of some sort). Even more, I parse it beforehand as I write the table, making this write-heavy, not read-heavy. Useful in cases such as scary interview questions (what has been your biggest challenge? type), deep 2 am conversations, and making life/daily decisions.

Since the last time I built a major table like this, however, I’ve had to deal with noticeable negative effects. The last major table: a 60 page google doc of all the essays I wrote during 2018–2019 for summer program, college, and scholarship applications. For about two years, I constantly fetched the essays on how I was obsessed with origami as a kid, tackled gender inequality in my seventh-grade engineering class, or discovered my passion for global entrepreneurship through Model UN. Sometimes I would go in and update the essays just to make sure the tenses were correct, but they would mostly remain intact from their birth. Not only did I fetch them for applications, but also in every other use case (conversations, decisions, etc.). If I ever had a dilemma about which movie to watch, no biggie! Cue the essay about how I’m obsessed with horror movies because they challenge me.

Best case scenario, all these essays are based on experiences/events in my life and so they remain a valid source of truth over time, but in this case there would still be the reflection component, and my thoughts on my past experiences should have definitely changed over time. Worst case scenario, these essays are based on everything that I think and am at each moment, and so the entirety of Daniela remained stagnant, in a way, for that entire period of time. Consistent, anchored, and closed off to change.

diagram of my mind data management (e.g. college essay bank was part of the datatable and cached)

So, why did I encounter massive data staleness? And, why was I basing myself on this essay bank when I could have just allowed myself to change, without staying true to the words I put down on a google doc at some point in time?

1. Human bias towards narratives. I crafted a narrative for myself that was as compelling and beautiful as I could make it while still staying true to myself. In Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, he explains how humans consistently choose compelling narratives over statistics or random events/ideas that aren’t linked in any way. My mind, therefore, kept gravitating towards that narrative, keeping it intact so as to not ruin the magic. Even more, this romanticized version of myself was the one I preferred to show to society, so it made sense to work to preserve it. Not to mention the looming subconscious fear that life is meaningless and everything is random, so I seek meaning in my life through the narratives I’ve constructed for who I am and how I got here. A narrative a day keeps the nihilism away?
2. Superficial friendships and conversations. Freshman me went absolutely crazy in meeting new people, widening my network, and vibing along to MIT’s work hard play hard culture. But the number of conversations I had with people about reflecting on experiences, feelings or thoughts? Can probably count them on one hand. Same goes for deep relationships with people, a lot of which I failed to nurture. Connecting and empathizing with people on a deeper level is critical for reconstructing our perspective on ourselves and the world.
3. Privilege. I recognize fully that my privilege allows me to hold my views of myself and the world mostly static and unchallenged. I’m lucky to live in the safety bubble of my family, university, and financial stability, which minimizes turbulence in life that could force a deep rewrite of my internal software. Basically, I have the privilege to do rewrites whenever I choose to.
4. Lack of time to reflect, revise, and rewrite (figuratively or physically). Entering college, I continued going full-speed and never slowed down from my ambitious high schooler state. I was constantly filling my mind space with work, social interaction, or just noise — podcasts, music, or social media. There was no quiet. No RA’s in my mind to enforce quiet hours. Some reasons being 1. Toxic productivity and need for constant intellectual activities. 2. Fear of being alone with my thoughts (shoutout to my homies imposter syndrome, massive jumps to conclusions, unresolved anxieties, etc.!) 3. Shower thoughts aren’t an option. Shower singing takes priority (I’m maintaining this as the only respectable reason.) So, I’m stuck with no time to actually check in with myself and see how I can update my database based on new experiences, personal growth, and thoughts/ideas.
5. And, laziness. So much work went into those essays that I deemed inefficient to repeat. a. A lot of work that should be unnecessary, but was needed in the context of application essays because I was catering to the college application process (we live in a society!): poring over essays to make sure I liked the narrative I had built for myself, showing them to different people for feedback, tweaking them to fit slightly different application questions. b. And, work that is still needed during rewrites: thinking about information I’ve consumed from experiences/external sources (books, conversations, etc.), analyzing my feelings, opinions, and internal drives, and parsing all of this into human language and digestible chunks. Related to the problem of lack of time, my lack of motivation to reconstruct the ideas I hold about myself and the world holds me back.

Thankfully, I have had chances to do rewrites, especially more this past gap year. The catalysts have been:

• Meaningful relationships with people. People who I’ve experienced life deeply with. Throughout my co-living groups and deep 1 on 1 friendships, I have felt what other people feel in certain situations, vicariously experienced different things, and placed myself fully in the shoes of others. This sounds abstract, but it comes down to tangible moments such as hearing a friend talk about their passion project, or maybe crying with someone because of a tragedy. Deep, empathy-filled relationships with people have sparked deep reflections that get to the core of my soul and the world.
• Podcasts and books that I find interesting. Key: that I find interesting. Boring class material or content has never deeply moved me. However, the right things will resonate with me, and challenge my pre-existing ideas or create new ones. This past year, I’ve ignored content or noise that doesn’t call my attention, and immersed myself in that which does. I’m not saying content which I find interesting is the only one that matters for anyone, because there’s tons of content that can resonate with others, but that’s the content that matters the most to me personally. It tends to be the content that relates to the ideas I voice and come back to the most because I find them interesting already. Interesting content for me could also include new topics I haven’t considered before but that pique my curiosity. Even though I find it important to still learn about different things and stay generally updated and informed, I’m okay with leaving that knowledge at a superficial level, and choose to deep-dive into just the cool stuff. Big support for quitting that book that makes you fall asleep instantly.
• New experiences outside of my comfort zone. I’ve pushed myself to live in new places, meet new people, and do difficult things, such as diving into working on a startup. For my existing ideas, it’s kind of like domain switching. My previous notions are now tested in a completely new context, and that can force rewrites if they result to be inaccurate or missing parts. Beyond my pre-existing notions, everything else I learn has the potential to be something new I store about myself or the world.
• Most importantly, isolated reflection time. This is the requirement for all of the above catalysts to act and actually do a back-end update. I’ve spent time walking, riding transport, or just living, with no noise. The main contributors to this have been deleting social media apps (okay and maybe just re-installing Instagram and TikTok ever so often) and being okay with putting away the earbuds. I’ve also dived into conversations with people where we build reflections from the ground up together. A lot of this has come out of being a 20-year-old and feeling more comfortable with having deep / cheesy adult conversations, and not feeling like I have to be quirky and talk in memes and Gen Z language all the time (RIP #cool, relatable teen).

I still have to do this more, though, and I hope writing can help me accomplish more frequent, deeper rewrites of my thoughts, opinions, and ideas. I want to write more about the experiences, books, and people I learn from, so that I retain more of everything, and don’t just remember a few random things.

When I currently read a book, for example, it’s fully fresh in my mind for a bit, and the ideas/opinions that I retain are the random ones I choose to mention in conversation shortly after (a form of synthesizing and reflecting). In the long term, I only really remember the ones I chose to bring up in conversation, and I become a broken record repeating a few arbitrary ideas. Even though there might have been other interesting ideas that affected me subconsciously, I’m not able to remember those, and I don’t end up surfacing those in conversations or decisions. I want to be able to remember more ideas, not just the ones that related to an arbitrary conversation topic. By writing about the books I read, I’ll process and save more cool stuff to my hard drive for further use.

To break down the examples I’ve mentioned, there are different types of things in my head. Some that are more conscious, and others that are more subconscious. Some that are passenger, and others that run deep and are part of my long-term self. There are separate issues with different types. (Disclaimer: not based on science, just the way I see things.)

• Conscious, passenger stuff — even though we may think something, it might not affect our saved / cached version of ourselves since it’s fleeting and zips away before we can retain and synthesize it through writing / talking about it. For example, I can think thoughts about books I’ve recently read. Putting them into conversation saves them. If they’re not saved, they might still stay in my subconscious somewhere and affect it without me knowing, for some unknown amount of time. (Conscious, long-term stuff doesn’t make sense; there’s not one thought I’m constantly consciously thinking unless I have a song stuck in my head for a long, long time.)
• Subconscious, passenger / long-term stuff — we don’t even recognize these unless we look deep inside ourselves and identify them through thorough reflection. The only way we know if they’re passenger or long-term is by frequent reflection and comparison.

I have one final point to dive into about the latter type: subconscious instincts, biases, drives etc. It’s easy to think that these stay constant when we’re not thinking conscious thoughts that prompt us to change them. For example, we would tend to assume that our favorite ice cream hasn’t changed unless a very clear thought surfaces, “hey! I’m especially enjoying vanilla ice cream now! I think it’s my favorite,” or “wow! I instinctively reached towards the vanilla flavor! It’s probably my favorite.” So, we think that we don’t need to check in and revise our favorite ice cream flavor, because we’re waiting for a clear signal to change it. Especially when we crowd our mind with modern-world noise and distractions, we leave no room for these spontaneous realizations. (Societal collapse incoming?)

I was trying to find a word for the problem I’m describing, but I wasn’t able to, so I came up with my own word:

Self-permanence: similar to object-permanence (the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be sensed), self-permanence is the notion that our subconscious self remains generally constant and static unless we consciously think about our self.

However, this is a flawed notion to hold, because in reality, we change all the time, even when we’re not reflecting on who we are and what we think. We aren’t objects, we are organic and complex. We experience millions of fleeting thoughts and feelings all the time which represent changes and growth as we live life. When we peek behind the curtains and check for who we are and what we think, we will most likely see a different version from what we saw before.

It’s hard to wrap our minds around the fact that we’re constantly changing in a continuous, non-discrete way, with a lot of randomness involved. We usually describe our growth and change more as a very clear step function based on inflection points (representing impactful experiences or exposure). This makes us think it’s okay to seldom intentionally reflect, because any change in ourselves should be obvious or clear to us without thinking about it too much, right?

After I wrote my college essays, I assumed I could keep that version of myself. The version who loves to code all day, despite societal stereotypes about Latinas. The version who is obsessed with arepas, horror movies, and breaking down complex problems into parts. This makes sense in a narrative and coincides with the highs and lows I’ve been through. However, there are a lot more subconscious subtleties in my character that I might have not captured, and many fleeting thoughts and feelings that were significant, but I just didn’t capture them. That was just the self I captured at that moment in time. Even more, I definitely could have formed a more up-to-date version of myself in the time following that phase, but I relied on stale data. It’s important to do deep reflections often so that we record these ebbs and flows, process them, save them, and maintain ourselves up to date with our true selves. And, the way we analyze our internal self also changes, so reflecting often can account for these changes as well.

My goal is to write enough so that my reflections can approach the level of continuity of change that I experience. This piece is turning out to be way too long (I still have so much to say!), but I hope to write short, and often. I also want my notes to be recognized as snapshots of who I am at the time, but not a representation of who I am long-term. I’m okay with updating my perspectives, ideas, and opinions frequently, as long as I stay true to my core values that I have asserted are constant because of their repeated validation throughout different reflections. I’ll be rewriting and re-caching the database of my mind often, not to go with the flow or align with society (or college admissions), but to make decisions and voice ideas that are most in line with who I am at each moment in time.