emails to self by Fatima A. '25

what a strange feeling it is to be in your last semester at MIT. there is so much i still wish to accomplish, so many classes i never got to take, so many clubs i was never a part of, so many parts of campus i still have not seen and will probably never see.

life lacks closure like always and recently, i find myself trying and then failing to make sense of this remarkable experience and everything that came with it. i know i have more school ahead of me, but it just will not be the same. although on one hand, i am really excited to spend a lot of time on some relatively narrow area of research, i will also miss the opportunities i have had to explore a lot of different things. i will miss being able to go out to observatories and take writing classes and all these weird strange things that i have collected in the last couple of years. now that i am approaching the end of my time here, i finally feel like i am beginning to get the hang of how to be at MIT, how to make the most of the resources here, how to be someone how can let this place change their life. it leaves me yearning for a do-over, a second chance at the past four years. this is probably not an isolated feeling, and probably why some people go to graduate school; it is not a second chance at being at MIT, but it’s the next best⁠01 by some definition of best thing, i suppose.

more than anything else, i am terrified of saying goodbye to my friends. though, a lot of my friends have already graduated, there was solace in having this one place where everyone could return to. over the last year, graduated friends spread in many places across the US, have returned, and of course, it is not the same, but it was still so nice to see people occasionally. soon, essentially all of us will be spread in different places, with no one place to call home, and that is slightly terrifying.

over the last couple of years, i had committed a large part of myself to other people around me. i wanted to learn what it means to be a person who thinks and feels and has the urge to create something. what does it mean to create something, what does it mean to live a life, and what does it mean to say that you have done so well? these are all questions that defined my path. i am not sure if i have gathered any answers but i have collected a lot of unique stories and experiences and regrets, which all coagulate into some semblance of thoughts.

i had so much hope for myself and the world as a freshman and sophomore and regrettably, the past two years were very effective in erasing most of it. to some extent, there is the perhaps naive discovery that every step you take is in defiance to a system that is built to oppose you rather than support you. on the other hand, i keep learning just how little i could do to cause the change that i hope to see around me. part of it is simply just that my skill set is not that of someone who can make direct change. 

i think i have made some things that, if not to anyone else, meant something to me. the work of discovery shall carry on, but i can easily say that i have challenged myself in more ways than i would have expected to and i have changed in more ways than i would have expected to.

i grew up with this strange tradition of the long goodbye, lingering near the door, to delay the parting, coming up with new words and stories to tell. there is such sweetness in this, asking so plainly for a little more time. my 4W friends also share this opinion, i assume, because we also tend to deliver the long goodbye every time someone leaves. walking to the door, or the memorial drive side of next (waving at random cars until you get the right one), or to kendall, or sometimes to the airport. 

i am trying to prepare myself for the abrupt goodbye, where one day, we will all get up and leave. yes, we will be in touch, but it will not be the same. something something the joy of living in the same place as your friends. i am greedy to share my life with these people, not just stories from my life. then, there might come a day where we stop talking to each other completely. and for this, no goodbye can be long enough. there is little solace in words. that there is a life to live without the people i discovered my life with—is a heavy feeling. 

as much as i wish for the goodbye to be prolonged, a goodbye that lasts a lifetime, we keep moving onwards, and closer and closer to this checkpoint that will inevitably bring about departures. i feel hopeful and miserable, excited and nervous, very happy and extremely sad, disassociating and overthinking, all at the same time.

in a very eternal-sunshine-of-a-spotless-mind-coded way, i do now think that we will still continue to do the thing, because we are humans. even with the knowledge that we might end up hating each other or drifting apart or losing each other in any form, we will jump back up and repeat it all over again. we will continue to love and care and get our hearts broken and then prepare ourselves for the same old business. it is good to know that hurt is never a strong enough inhibitor for humans, that heartbreak only fuels the want to create something, the want to create a life. so carefully and meticulously. the next couple of years are scary to look forward to, and there will likely be lots of sadness and heartbreak, but it only comes because of the beauty of the life and the people i have found here. the hope, then, is only to keep some shadows of this beauty in memories, in occasional meetups and calls, and to keep going headfirst into the next new thing.

during the fall, i made a mailing list, mostly as a joke, called [friend]iscringe, but i started to use it as a place to send semi-regular life updates. i am not sure there is much to be gained from reading these, but it was fun for me to read them again last week, so here i am presenting some pieces of my life this year. enjoy!

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