Thinking about things

This wasn't supposed to be a political post. I began writing this draft years ago, reflecting on what it means to be a young woman stepping into a new decade. Four years later, it feels like I've learned so much about gender and womanhood, yet I am no closer to finding my answers than when I started.

The 2024 U.S. election results have resurfaced these reflections. Since I know very little about how politics in America work, I thought about school elections instead.

During the COVID pandemic lockdowns, I penned an essay to apologize to Taylor Swift.

The essay recounted my journey as a former “Swiftie.” In high school, I sang “Fifteen” to console my best friend after a breakup. I would lose myself in Taylor Swift’s songs on my MP3 player, whether in the car or while washing dishes. However, upon entering college, I began to view my love for her music as juvenile. I openly criticized her songs, claiming they perpetuated traditional beliefs about heterosexual relationships and power dynamics. My critiques mirrored the sentiments of those who derided anything popular among young teenage girls—an ironic stance that ignored how I was then still in my teenage years.

What I couldn’t ignore was despite my conscious decision to stop listening to her music, I couldn’t stop talking about her because even if I did, the world didn't. I couldn’t escape her pervasive presence.

Our book collection recently got damaged by a water leak from one of our ceilings, which ironically, was being fixed while we're renovating our house. My sister and I spent the first night in a frenzy of cleaning and drying our room, and trying to salvage the pages of our books. We didn't sleep much that night and woke up early the next morning, painstakingly blowdrying each page (we find out later that this was not the best remedy for wet books.)

This all started during the pandemic.

The “pandemic.”

They say that when you repeat a word enough times, it loses its meaning. It becomes a string of sounds no different from gibberish, breaking meaning into simple vibrations. What was once an ominous description of a virus that claimed the lives of over 3 million people has now become, at least to me, a distant yet distinct memory of shared confusion and the newness of a strange reality.

We were introduced to this virus as nCoV, or the novel coronavirus—a name given to coronaviruses that had never before been identified in humans.

Everything about it was novel. We didn’t know how to respond. Our bodies were clueless, and our minds, just like our bodies, were confused and in a state of panic. There were no vaccines for the virus and no antidotes for our confusion.

But we tried to concoct something that might work.

I started consuming a lot of information from different places, sometimes, all at once. I can be watching a movie while scrolling through Instagram or reading an article while listening to a podcast. I even take my phone with me in the bathroom and scroll through Tiktok until my legs go numb and they'd be imprinted with red circles from where my elbow sat. I don't start showering until I have the perfect playlist cued up or have MacGyvered makeshift phone holders out of toothpaste tubes and soap dispensers so I can casually rewatch Modern Family for the nth time.