I found writing to be extremely cathartic in times of stress. I struggled a lot with my classes, especially in my first year. It's a story told by many UW students: where once they excelled academically in high school, they were suddenly met with a different challenge altogether at university. The sound of a Canvas notification still gives me war flashbacks, and a Pavlovian stress response seemingly starts to automatically form. A failing test felt like the end of the world.

In my stress, I found writing to be a solace to myself, even if our relationship was fraught at times. At one point, I had to take a break because I felt like I was writing for someone else to read it, and not for myself, which was changing the way I was expressing my thoughts and in turn, how I began to think them. Even when not intending to show anyone else, I thought about who might read my diary when I died and analyze it for some undergraduate historical thesis paper. While I still have not come up with a suitable answer myself, I now reserve (what I feel is) the best writing for myself and leave the unpolished here, in all its messiness in spirit of writing for the sake of writing. I keep an unpublished Substack blog for my personal thoughts, so I thought I might as well post some screenshots. I'm aware that it kind of sounds pretentious this way (to assume that someone would even think to read that much into it), but I guess I hope you perceive me as a person actively trying to work on reducing how much they are worried about being perceived (the irony).