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It takes roughly 40 minutes to get from Homewood Campus to the medical campus. Those are 40 minutes spent crowded among strangers as you sit through rush hour traffic, but they’re also 40 minutes of freedom. 40 minutes where it would be incredibly inconvenient to pull a laptop out and start doing homework, so your only responsibility is to hang onto a railing and try not to fall.
Dear my freshman-year self,
There was a window nook in my bedroom growing up, a cold ledge about a meter wide. I filled it with pillows and a throw blanket. For months in high school, I’d wake up early just to sit there before school, reading by lamplight for a dim hour, then watching the sun leak into the sky with my forehead against the glass. I’d play music, quiet enough not to wake anybody. I’d listen to the building’s pipes and watch the street lamps blink off. Sometimes, I’d make myself a cup of tea.
Once you arrive at the 9 a.m. class you have to fight your inner demons to not skip again, you might look around the lecture hall and notice girls who look totally dolled up. They wear cute outfits, full faces of makeup and seem ready to kick start their day like the “girlbosses” seen on TikTok. You might think to yourself, “How do these people love life this much?” to the point where they sacrifice maybe an hour of extra sleep time just so they look good for a college lecture.
I found my New Year’s resolution not at 12 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, but rather at around 6 p.m. on New Year’s Day. I was back in New Jersey with my two closest friends at the time, in a final goodbye hangout before we all reconvened in the summer. Both were leaving for school the morning of Jan. 2, one to New York and the other to Montreal. It was spontaneous, so naturally, we had no idea where we were going or what we were doing. We decided to make the cold and windblown trek to the cast-iron tables near Lillipies Bakery in the Princeton Shopping Center, where we sat under the glow of one of the closed storefronts and started talking about the new year.
Growing up, the History Channel was my family’s absolute favorite thing to watch on TV. My grandparents’ version of an ideal Sunday night wasn't spent watching football: it was reruns of Decoding the Past. While I was always a bit disgruntled having to watch shows about cults and Armageddon, the History Channel gave me one of my favorite childhood fixation eras: Extreme Collectors.
A few months ago, I began drafting an Admissions blog post about the beginning of my freshman year. I wrote about leaving home and finding a new one with my roommates in AMR III. I wrote about joining clubs and trying new activities. I wrote about walks around campus and dinners at Nolan’s… and then I stopped writing. I realized I was discussing shared experiences. As freshmen, we have all faced unprecedented obstacles, explored Hopkins and relentlessly searched to find our place. The novelty and excitement have become commonplace — you don’t need me to remind you about the homesickness and elation of your first night here or the memories you’ve made exploring the Inner Harbor.
I’m sitting in a tiny restaurant on a side street in Venice. It is late for lunch, nearly 3:30 p.m., and the restaurant is empty. The chipped brick walls curve up into the cracked white ceiling and the creamy tablecloths have little flowers printed on them. I order pasta alle vongole, or pasta with clams.
It seems as if every time I write, all I can think about is aging. As 2024 begins, I am on the cusp of my 21st year. This milestone comes with its own set of hassles, yet 20 is a big year for most. For some, it’s the first time they are living away from home; for many, it’s a moment of self-discovery and finding their identity; and for most, it’s the start of accumulating existential dread for what’s to come (kidding, kinda).
My grandfather has been asking me to write his biography for years. A tome, he said. Something hundreds of thousands of words long to capture his every struggle and triumph. I brushed it off as a joke, and though he would laugh along, there was always a somber undertone to his request. He wanted to be heard. He wanted to be remembered and seen and celebrated.
This Thanksgiving was full of gratitude, coziness and nostalgia for me because I spent it revisiting a family I got to know back in 2019 and haven’t seen since: the Gatniks, the family that hosted me when I flew to the U.S. for the first time in my life back in ninth grade as part of an exchange trip.
About a month into summer break after my freshman year of college, I went to the mall with a couple of friends. At the end of the day, my father picked me up on his way home from work, and I showed him the dress I had gotten on sale. Five months after that, I wore that dress to his funeral. As the first anniversary of his death approaches, I wanted to write a small reflection of some of the things I’ve learned in the time he has been gone.
When I was flying to Baltimore for the first time, back in August, I promised myself I wouldn’t let being an international student prevent me from joining social circles. I’ve indeed kept my promise by finding a way of fitting in, and I managed to embrace my Turkish identity while doing so.
I’m 15 years old, and I’m sitting in my eye doctor’s office, learning how to put contact lenses into my eyes for the very first time. I’m practicing, yet I’m failing. My kind, patient eye practitioner says, “give it a drink” every time I fail, in reference to me soaking the contact lens with contact solution in order to make the process easier for my dry eyes. I chuckle. With every failure, I’m met with this same piece of advice. I try once more to place the lens into my eye, and once again, I fail. “Don’t worry, these things take time,” he says.
Since the moment my fingers touched the 88 black and white keys for the first time, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the piano. While the joy that the piano brings to me always outweighs the frustration, it is those challenging moments that have made me grow as a musician and person and enabled me to love the instrument more and more.
I took my first Amtrak last Thursday. Or rather, not my first Amtrak — my second one, if we’re really counting — but the first one I ever took by myself. It was the first time I set an alarm extra early to make sure everything was packed, the first time I obsessively checked TransLoc as I hunched over my Bird in Hand breakfast, tracking the JHMI, triple checking that it stops outside Barnes & Noble.
I wake up to the gentle sound of rain outside. Movie posters and postcards from my recent travels litter the walls and a soft, gray light escapes through my curtains and into my room.
I’m a very anxious person. I worry about future finances, the weather tomorrow, my talent as a writer, how much people will like me — and of course, the possibility that the world will end by the time I’m 28.
Going into this summer, I knew it wouldn’t be about writing, but I told myself it would be — as if saying it could make it true. Honestly, I had hardly written in the winter and spring of 2023. At first, it was because I was busy adjusting to my life in a foreign country. As winter faded into spring, it was because I was grieving the loss of my cousin to leukemia. I had wanted to write about Paris, but I instead found myself blaming Paris for my misery, though it was merely the setting. I had this big idea about how I could write an incredible poem in my cousin’s honor, but I couldn’t do it. I still want to write that poem, but I still haven’t found the right words.
The other day, I watched myself age by scrolling through my camera roll. Picture by picture, video by video, I saw change and growth in ways I hadn’t expected. It spurred a little reflection.