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This is how to make the best matcha latte. Swipe. Come study with me for four hours straight. Swipe. Follow along for a day in the life of a… Swipe.
In early spring, advertisements for dating apps start appearing everywhere. They promise efficiency. Compatibility percentages. Personality models. They reassure you that somewhere inside a black-box algorithm, someone has already calculated who could love you best.
While brainstorming for my first Voices article this semester, I found myself rereading the pieces I wrote when college was still new enough to feel like something from a movie. One line from the first article I ever wrote stopped me: “I entered college believing in my ability to create and reinvent myself.”
Let me take you back to November 28th, 2025. It is 23:15 and to a group of friends, I text:
There’s a sort of ineffable magic in my hometown.
A little over two months ago, I turned twenty. Candles with beaming numbers had flared at me as their glossy pools of wax spilled over from the seismic shake of cake-bearing arms. I watched my mother’s eyes flicker closed as her voice took on the familiar cadence of a birthday tune.
For the longest time, the snow wouldn't melt, and we were all slipping around on ice-encrusted mounds of it. Half the sidewalks remained unshoveled for weeks, and the other half were mosaics of different colors of ice melt. There wasn’t a whole lot to do since any amount of time spent outside felt treacherous and unpleasant, so I took to spending as much of my time as I could inside.
Last weekend, I was convinced (read: dragged) to go out by a high school friend who was in town. So I left the comfort of my stuffed-animal-filled bed and put aside my sacred 9 p.m. bedtime to go out on the town and relive my undergraduate days for one night only.
In the midst of the crowded Rec Center, there is one place that contrasts the noise of running treadmills, shoes squeaking on the court and weights clanging together: the pool. To find it, you must head downstairs, past the weight rooms, where you will find a narrow hallway that will lead you to it. As you enter, the scent of chlorine will greet you instantly, as if you’ve walked through a portal to another world. You’ll hear the sound of water dancing, an ambience so different from the rest of the rec.
Feb. 17, 2026, marks three years to the day that I got into Hopkins, and this anniversary has me thinking so much about the things that’ve stayed the same. In the process, I’ve discovered that I have trouble letting go.
All of this has happened before. Right now, I am drinking a 16 oz. Watermelon Celsius because CharMar ran out of Blue Crush. I am writing another article about riding a train slightly less than a year after the first because my mind ran out of other ideas. This article will be less interesting because I did not venture outside Union Station this time in Chicago, and instead of reading books to spark cognitive shifts I watched Wicked. And Dear Evan Hansen. And Criminal Minds. Call this a sequel, the type that’s worse than the first. At least this time, no one called me Jack Harlow — only something worse. You be the judge.
Chinese New Year is coming up, so I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with my culture. This will be the third year where I haven’t celebrated it because I won’t be home with my family to do so. It is especially frustrating when I think back to how I sat around at home on the 25th of December, spending the day doing my very best to become one with the couch because there wasn’t anything worth celebrating on that day for my family, and yet that is the day we all had off.
When I was in my junior year of high school, my AP Calculus teacher played a video for us the day before winter break. It was a TED Talk by Tim Urban, the popular blogger behind “Wait But Why,” who delved into the mind of a procrastinator: featuring the Instant Gratification Monkey (the one who replaces the Rational Decision Maker in our mind and takes us on quests such as doomscrolling when there’s an impending deadline, eliciting a mix of anxiety and unearned gratification) and the Panic Monster (who eventually takes the wheel from the Instant Gratification Monkey when a deadline comes too close, leading us to pull all-nighters to save ourselves from the consequence of an unfinished task).
The sound of a blender at seven in the morning is usually the herald of a New Year’s Resolution. It’s the sound of frozen blueberries, spinach, protein powder and milk being pulverized into some slush; the kind of health smoothie that promises a fresh start with a healthier body and mind.
We were stranded in North Carolina after a delayed flight caused us to miss our layover. I was sitting on a metal chair stolen from a nearby Starbucks. There was a numbing pain in my arm, suggesting to me it had been a mistake to use it as a pillow. Drowsily, I attempted to focus on the fan of cards in my hand and the voice of a friend as he tried to explain the rules to a game we were too sleep deprived to understand properly. Nevertheless, we huddled around the deck of cards, shuffling and dealing until the rising sun signaled us to go catch the next flight. Somehow, the chaos of travel had shrunk into the small space between us, captured and organized by fifty two pieces of paper.
When I was twelve, I wrote a children’s book called What’s In My Lunchbox? for my sixth-grade English class, which detailed the origins of a B.L.T. sandwich, an apple juice box and a bag of potato chips. As I put together drawings of a little ant crawling his way through the genesis of my lunch, I learned that Mott’s apple juice is bottled in my home state of New York, that the potato chip factories often throw away entire truckloads of potatoes if too many are found to be blemished and that the crispy bacon in my sandwich was produced in a massive industrialized farming facility run almost entirely by an underpaid migrant workforce. My book was celebrated with many prestigious literary awards (check pluses, gold stars...). I became a vegetarian shortly afterwards.
Nanjing, China. I thought I would eventually write this. It’s just too emotional for me. It’s hard to put into words, which is funny, because you’re also where my words began.
To me, my memory of March 2018 sounds like the sizzling of my mother’s cooking in the room over, my fingers rested upon the calloused wooden table as I sat down, waiting after setting up the table. March of 2018 smells like the wildflowers and fresh soil beneath my feet after playing freeze tag at the park. I remember the feeling of the breeze on my skin and the metallic monkey bars in my hands.
My signature “early riser” alarm probes the depths of my subconscious, infiltrating my dreams with an irritant tap, softly encouraging a labored rise off the Twin XL and onto my feet. Yawning, I scratch my sleep-deprived eyes before opening my phone to what is always a text from my dad:
Letters Without Limits, founded by students at Hopkins and Brown University, connects volunteers with palliative care and hospice patients to co-create “Legacy Letters.” These letters capture memories, values and lessons that patients wish to share, preserving stories that might otherwise be lost. By honoring these voices and preserving legacies, Letters Without Limits hopes to affirm the central role of humanism in medicine, reminding us that every patient is more than their illness and that their voices deserve to be heard. As you read these powerful Legacy Letters, we invite you to pause, reflect and recognize the beauty in every life.