letter to my 2023 self by Janet G. '27

I write two letters to myself at the end of every year. ⁠01 the keen-eyed will also observe that this is supposed to be a letter from 2024 janet and it is currently 2025. i'd firstly like to say that i ACTUALLY started it in 2024 and wrote most of it then; but then i had to work on a bunch of stuff and got distracted so now this is when it's out... let's just pretend i live in PST: Procrastination Standard Time (utc -69) and call it a day I write one to my future self who has experienced the upcoming year, and I write a response letter to my past self. I post the response letters publicly, and this year since I no longer have Instagram I thought I’d post it here

Dear 2023 Janet,

I’m responding to you from Toronto. That’s right — you’ll be relieved to hear that I’m actually travelling now, in contrast to last year’s misfortune. That’s a story that ends in two crutches, a sprained ankle, and a photo of us being shopping-carted to our 5.111 final.

haylea b. ’27 pushing me to our 5.111 final, with our TA looking very confused. not sure if the entertainment was worth me being stuck immobile for 2 weeks, but i digress

I took advantage of our mobility this year: Nicole ⁠02 a friend who studies law at Cambridge! visited me from Cambridge, and we wandered around Boston and somehow managed to not freeze to death.⁠03 shoutout to LA Burdick's hot choc which was soo warm We took the wrong train but arrived in New York after some adventure, and now I’m in Toronto enjoying the exchange rate and the best hotpot I’ve ever had.

this was SO YUMMY peak food experience. it’s souper hotpot in toronto!

You wrote in your reflection last year that you grew a lot. You were an unrooted seedling who let the Pacific winds carry you over the oceans, through Auckland and Christchurch and Wellington and San Francisco, and plant you in Boston.⁠04 albeit unceremoniously, considering that you landed with just your backpack and your luggage was all caught up in horrible delays You went on so many adventures,⁠05 conversations under the star-studded skies of New Hampshire, 'how to rizz' presentations run with multiple co-hosts and presented in lecture halls, and serenading each other in deserted stadiums, to name a few lived a crazy year, and relished the freedom that adulthood brought you.

from a hike in the berkeley hills

hanging out in a cosy cabin in new hampshire

watching sunsets at cal state east bay with sophie l. '27

new hampshire on a rainy fall day

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It was a lot of fun and serendipity and fast-paced-ness and wild stories we’ll tell for years to come. What you didn’t say in the letter was that you were tired. Everyone was right: pushing a ‘Senior Summer’⁠06 I put quotation marks because I had already graduated and did a semester at Auckland by then – I'd experienced university in some form, so I wasn't fully in the high school mindset? Not sure though and PNR semester to the utmost was an experience you did not regret. Still, it was a bit too much. You told me that you wanted to change.

Taking root and settling down is hard. There are little habits and New Year’s Resolutions you can promise yourself, but reality moves beyond happy-Instagram-snapshot-endings. We received a herb-growing kit as a Secret Santa gift last year. You wrote that you could take your experiences growing this cilantro and apply it to care for yourself in the same way, with water, nutrition, and sunlight. But after the new year, half of the herbs didn’t sprout, and the other half eventually died due to your disheartened lack of care. Life mirrors art: during IAP, ⁠07 independent activities period, MIT's unique January break you regressed into terrible sleeping habits and questionable food consumption methods and mentally withered one way or another.

Spring was still hard. Your workload came to a head and ultimately you made the tough choice to drop a club that you really, really cared about. Even before then, you had already dropped the ball twice and disappointed your friends. You’d told me that you wanted to be more academic and rigorous, and failing your first midterm of the semester felt like a slap in the face. You began questioning whether you belonged at this school. I know, I know — you had thought yourself too good to get imposter syndrome, because didn’t you work hard enough to achieve enough in high school to feel like you belonged here? — but only a lucky few have never doubted their place here, and you’re not special. 

Not being special is okay. You grinded out evenings in the Stud⁠08 one of our main study centers like everyone else, and got an A in that class despite the first midterm. You spent your summer doing research, and you had a great time doing the same thing as all your friends: cooking together, hanging out at libraries, and complaining about your lack of research progress. You learned that you can live more slowly.

pretty sunsets

some food we made! yummier than it looks probably. very chaotic

food attempt two (with friends <3

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Moving slowly means seeing everything in higher resolution. The tails of shooting stars are just streetlights you’re speeding past; biology research was not the noble, groundbreaking adventure you hoped it would be. It’s still worth it, because you still learned a lot both about the practice and yourself. Culturing cells taught you a lot about patience and precision: two weeks may feel like a scary number, but really that’s just the time it takes to thaw another set of cells for new experiments. Changing cell media was one of the most stressful things we ever did, but boy was it satisfying when I saw that my cells are stretched out and lounging in the culture media. There is something noble, groundbreaking, and adventurous about the practice of research. It just might not come in the form that you imagined.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the occasional whimsy. You explored Stanford with friends and learned that the higher you go, the better the view gets. You flew to Pittsburgh on two weeks’ notice to see Nicole, ⁠09 a different nicole who studies at CMU! to talk about perfumes and make bao buns. You went to London and Oxford with Claire ⁠10 a friend who studies at MIT with me :P for a camp, and we had so much fun meeting some of the coolest people ever and eating delicious food. The intensity of experience was similar to last summer, but the density was much more manageable, and you left feeling rejuvenated and content. You found a better balance.

london! pc claire w. ’27

Balance doesn’t mean complete equilibrium. Systems at complete equilibrium have zero energy; in biological terms, they’re dead. Sometimes you’ve got to let things take over your life. HackMIT is the best example of this, and we’ve written about that before. You’ve given your all to more things beyond Hack, and even if some things don’t work out — frankly, most of them didn’t — it’s okay because you learned and you loved and you lived.

I’m a sophomore now. We turned twenty in a surprise-but-not-really party, surrounded by many of the people we love most. You’ll be relieved to hear how a summer away doesn’t really change things. Your friends still remember, and all the little details of love manifest themselves in unexpected ways — the ice cream flavour they (try to) buy for you,⁠11 the kiwi ice cream shop ran out of hokey pokey and they gave me australian ice cream instead, much to my friends' entertainment the chef’s knife he heard you raving about, a drawing of the bird you told her was your favorite.⁠12 the kererū is a CHONKY UNIT and I love them even if they're stupid and get drunk on the berries they eat and fall off the trees. adorable little idiots I like to think that I channel their energy sometimes Still, entering a new decade of my life hasn’t flipped a switch of maturity. I’m still fumbling along and making mistakes that I occasionally regret.

featuring the card maggie l. '27 drew me :)

my friends at the surprise party <3

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I’m also now on the blogs! We applied again and got in. Yes, sometimes if you try again you can get lucky, and applying again was one of the best decisions I made this year. I love the community (yay <3), and I’m honestly glad that we had time to live some life at MIT without putting all of it online, so it all worked out.

Don’t worry, I still remember all the things you wanted to tell the 2022 Janet who obsessively browsed the blogs every other day as a coping mechanism. I’ve attached it below.

Dear 2022 Janet, 

I know that life sucks right now. You’re still tweaking out over the fact that none of your essays feel fully finished and you’re currently hyperfixating on even the punctuation you’re using because you’re worried that the AOs will think you’re stupid or annoying or whatever else. 

It does get better. You will get into the school that you were afraid to admit was your dream. You thought for the longest time that MIT was the one school that was impossible, so you didn’t even decide to apply until the last week of December. You’ve since learned the lesson of giving things a shot anyway, and it paid off. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows — in fact, most of the time the weather is sus and you’re miserable and tired — but you could not imagine a better community to grow in. 

But hey — even if you hadn’t gotten in, things would’ve been okay. The worst moments in your life always occurred the last day before big tests. At this point everything is largely out of your control, but you still have to sprint in those last moments, to try and shift the probability a little more in your favour. The moment you submit those applications, everything will be over, and for the first time in your life you will have closed a significant chapter. 

Uncertainty is scary. You don’t know the future self writing to you, and you’re worried that none of it will work out. That’s out of your hands; trust that the person you’ll become is strong enough to turn around and tell you that you’ll be okay, and she will become that person for you. All you need to do is to push through these last few days and try your best.

Tomorrow your family will ask you to visit a mountain with them. You will hesitate because you feel like you should look over your application one more time and pray that you will get into the schools that you want. You will make the right choice and go with them, because you need to breathe and remember that there is more to life than essays. There are also the winding roads of the New Zealand countryside, the Pōhutukawa in full summer bloom, and the winds turning the windmills in the distance. One day these winds will blow you over the Pacific, to places thousands of miles away, where your family has still never been but supported you to go regardless. In the meantime you will sit shotgun as your dad complains about the poor design decisions of the road, and you will doze off in the lull of the drive. 

spot the windmills in the background (the dimmed colour is because i took this photo through the car window)

We have not been back since. It doesn’t matter, because even if we do visit, we will see the house as a stranger. 2022 Janet, I want you to go to sleep now — it’s 2am when you finish your letter — and wake up tomorrow, and take in as much of the December summer as possible. I want you to grumble a little less when the parentals knock on your door in the morning; I want you to tell them that yes, really, the outing was fun. You were fine with the drive being so long — in fact, you wished it would last a little longer. 

The heart is a sticky thing. Telling yourself that “home is where the heart is” doesn’t always feel helpful; there’s a home in New Zealand, in MIT, in all the friends who you have come to love. It means that you are always simultaneously at home and homesick. I know that a sense of belonging felt impossible when you had to move through so many places so quickly, when it felt like you barely had a chance to take root in one place before moving on. Feeling stuck trying to hold onto so many things at once is not fun.

Seriously, though — it’ll be okay! In 2024, you will learn to savour life. You will take long walks by the river, letting your roots gradually stretch out and capture those cities in your memory. We can hold onto many things beyond cities too: the cacophony of an off-key birthday chorus, the conversations that you marinate on for days, the trace of their face in the moonlight. These moments will stay with you as you live on, and the journey forward will be a little less daunting. 

Love,

2024 Janet