sarah kay once said something along the lines of: every time i am writing i wish i was out living. every time i am living i wish i was in writing.
my initial takeaway was that living a full life was at odds with reflecting on my interiority. to my surprise, the year that i’ve lived the most fully is also the year i’ve written the most. i now understand that i need to live a life worth writing about, and write in a way that makes life worth living. there’s a synergy to cultivate between consumption and creation, and with each year i’m approximating an equilibrium.
perhaps that’s what equilibrium really means - not a static state of perfect balance, but the dynamic dance between opposing forces: writing & living, solitude & connection. between the safety of orbit and the allure of undiscovered stars. the richest life exists not at the poles, but in the messy middle - where the push and pull creates its own kind of stability. in 2024 i learned balance doesn’t come from staying still - it comes from the rhythm of constant flux.
all my life i’ve felt trapped in a frame, and this is the first year i’ve stepped out of it. but freedom from constraints brings its own vertigo - without walls, reality stretches into white emptiness. and so i learned to build my own anchors: self-truths and theories about the world to act as my compass. from the lens of these schema, these are the patterns i’ve traced to make sense of the past year.
relational density (n): the measure of how tightly woven our social bonds become through overlapping connections - shared interests, mutual friends, accumulated experiences.
i spent the first few months floating in la, shanghai, sf: temporary cities that never felt like home. feeling like an astronaut jettisoned into space, i noted in a journal entry. i’d jolt awake with dreams of vertigo - phantom falls in mystic mid-air. 2023 felt like a series of temporary galaxies: semester to semester, internship to internship, country to country. each one collapsing once its season ended.
february marked my first day in the city. before landing in jfk, i reread sarah kay: “february grips new york city by the throat & squeezes. i found myself floating in space, dizzy from watching millions of strangers spin around me. work was a month away, the arrival of my peers even further. i kicked off my search for “third places” - social spaces that could act as gravitational centers. the strength and weakness of living in nyc lies in its transience - it is so easy to enter the orbit of strangers, and so easy to drift away.
what keeps us together when the universe is ever-expanding, driving distance between me and you? in june, doodling network diagrams on paper, i arrived at a theory of relational density: bonds strengthen when they’re reinforced by multiple points of connection. whether it’s mutual friends or shared interests, these overlapping ties create a social density strong enough for its own gravitational field. invisible but essential, these intersection points defined our new social universe.
i continually map out constellations, dynamic networks that pulse with collective imagination.
creative inertia (n): the tendency for artistic momentum to stay in motion, transferring from person to person, medium to medium.
the biggest driver of my writing habit isn’t discipline or deadlines - it’s the creative current underpinning my friendships. sam explains the textures she wants to incorporate in oil painting. in a crammed smoothie shop i chat with bahar on song-writing and production. this very yearly reflection is inspired by justin’s writing rituals.
creativity follows its own laws of thermodynamics: it cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. a painting sparks words, words spark photographs, photographs inspire short films. i used to worry about being a jack of all trades, master of none. but i’ve come to consider these different mediums as prisms, each one refracting the same light from a different angle. universal notions of love, nostalgia, guilt - they travel through each medium, picking up new frequencies, revealing different dimensions of experience.
this year, i’ve learned to cultivate this creative inertia intentionally. writing clubs became common constants. photo walks with friends turned into regular rituals. on a blistering december day, friends and friends of friends risked finger-frost bite to take photos down brooklyn bridge. we posed for one another, ran ahead of the group to snap candids, and nudged each other when we saw interesting strangers to photograph.
moments like this remind me: creativity amplifies when it resonates between people. each collaborative moment fuels our collective momentum. ultimately, creative inertia isn’t just about keeping your own practice in motion. it’s about contributing to a larger ecosystem of inspiration and exchange, where every piece of art is both an outcome and a beginning.
critical mass (n.): the threshold at which ideas accumulate so much potential - from planning, perfectionism, and possibility - that they can either collapse under their own weight or launch into reality.
i’ve built up a lot of potential energy this year. at the same time, there’s still many state changes left unrealized. to reference the first theory - like friendships, ideas have density, as well. many of my pieces arose from spare notes accumulating in my obsidian vault, visual connections forming with each hyperlink and backlink, mimicking neurons connecting in a network.
it’s in my notes where ideas come to life and die. grand plans for a photo exhibit and zine wither in my notion. momentum for creating a writing community is halted. gigabytes of bloated mp4s clog up my memory drive. along a creative pipeline, there are many moments an idea dies.
what’s holding these projects back? is it time, energy, perfectionism, or fear?
in physics, once an object reaches critical mass, it must either transform or collapse. the same is true for ideas. overthinking is a penrose staircase: you think you’re ascending when you’re actually trapped in a loop. there are dreams nested within my dreams. perhaps they’ve simply accumulated too much weight to achieve escape velocity.
this is a theory in progress. this year is about finding the right mass for ideas: heavy enough to matter, light enough to fly.
“what then shall we choose? weight or lightness?”
State of ResolveÂ
new year’s resolutions imply a fixed goal, a rigid plan to success. consider this: resolution stems from the latin word resolvere, which means “to loosen or let go.”
i want to resolve in both senses of the word: bring light into focus and release tension. ambition without direction is just anxiety - potential energy with nowhere to go. 2025 is all about finding the right vectors for this energy and transforming restless motion into purposeful momentum.
2025 demands a life so dense with meaning it cannot contain itself, sticky-persimmon sweetness oozing past its container. a life which begets not biography but memoir - beauty from the hidden moments rather than the accomplishments. i struggle, often, to describe my substack but perhaps this is it: an aspirational memoir, a study into the dynamics of becoming.
for the best media i’ve consumed in 2024, see 2024 Digital Digest. for random data points, see 2024 Wrapped - Data Points!